From Dover Heights to a sad place

 


As I get older, and spend more time in magnificent harsh and empty landscapes, I am less and less tolerant of our urban environment.  So it comes as no surprise to me that this was not one of my most enjoyable walks, lined as it is on one side for much of the way with houses and apartments, testament to the ugly triumph of wealth over aesthetics.

 

 

A bungalow/castle?  What were they thinking?

                             



 

But these are as nothing compared with the ugliness of a 1960s Harry Seidler apartment building; breathtaking in its incompatibility with the soaring cliffs and thundering ocean.  I don't understand brutalist architecture.  I understand the lure of brutal landscapes, and even of brutal weather, but not this.  At least it's white.
     






This walk commences at Dover Heights Reserve, at the end of Lancaster Rd.  On a weekday at least, parking is easy.  The reserve is an uneven strip of grass separating the houses bordering it from the cliff edge; insurance no doubt against a cliff fall taking millions of dollars of real estate into the sea.  You arrive there by walking through a gate in a rather charming, if dilapidated, white picket fence, then descending a set of wooden stairs.  If you're bothered by stairs that aren't closed in, you might have some trouble here. 

At the end of the reserve, it's back through another iteration of the picket fence, a brief walk through suburban streets, then back onto the clifftop at the southern edge of Diamond Bay, descending more wooden stairs next to that Seidler building.  In these times of great concern for community safety, the entire cliff edge is fenced, but there is evidence of earlier attempts to hold the masses back from a lemming-like leap over the edge.  I particularly liked the daring of this gateway to a small rock platform, with the swirling sea below. 

Diamond Bay is in fact a V-shape, and according to the sign, no-one knows why it's called Diamond Bay.  There are various theories, most of which have been refuted.  It's a small gash in the unstable cliff, lined with ferns and tinkling waterfalls.  It's very pretty from above, and worth looking down to the shoreline below.  Probably this was my favourite moment of the walk.  There is an apartment block built across the apex of the V, right up to the cliff.  The end apartments must be dark and damp, but being able to reach out to the ferns from your balcony probably goes some way towards recompense for the mould.

 
 
 

After skirting Diamond Bay, you stick to the clifftop from there on.  It's an attractive but largely manicured walk from here, with mown grass, seats, and plenty of dog walkers.  Just north of Diamond Bay is Christison Park, a suburban football field which has to be distracting for the spectators, if not the players as well.  Stand at its verge and look west all the way to the Bridge; turn 180 degrees to look out to the Pacific Ocean.

Then comes a bit of history.  The Dunbar, a clipper carrying passengers and goods from England, arrived off the Heads on a stormy night in August 1857.  She failed to make it through into the Harbour, and instead foundered on the cliffs just south of the Gap.  Of the 122 crew and passengers, only one survived.  James Johnson, a crewman, managed to swim to a rock shelf, from whence he was rescued.  This shipwreck, and another soon after, led to the construction of the first lighthouse on South Head.

If you're thinking of a picnic lunch at some point, I advise you to stop around this area.  Once you get near to the Gap, the tourist hordes are in evidence even on a weekday, selfie sticks in hand, ridiculous pouting poses oblivious to the tragic reason the Gap is so well known.  Of course, if you really want to throw yourself off a cliff in Sydney, you don't have to go to the Gap to do it.  But the Gap is inextricably linked to tragedy and suffering, and for those in despair, it must beckon. 

 

 

And for Trevor Coombs, just after his 41st birthday earlier this year, it did.

 

Enormous resources have been put into protecting those like Trevor who come to the Gap to end their lives.  I found a report of a study from the University of Melbourne that found that increasing the likelihood of someone intervening, by the presence of fences, signs, crisis phones and such measures, can reduce the suicide rate in areas including the Gap by 90%. 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-23/blocking-means-of-suicide-at-'hotspots'-reduces-deaths-by-90pc/6796702 

 

The Gap, on the sunniest of days, is a sad place for me, lightened only by the memorial to Don Ritchie, a legendary figure in the dark history of the Gap.  From his loungeroom, Don could see people scaling the fence to stand at the cliff edge.  He would go down, talk to them, invite them home for a cup of tea...  It is thought that his simple interventions of kindness saved hundreds of lives over the fifty years he reached out to those in need.

So, trying in vain to shake off the pervasive gloom of this place, I headed down the hill to Watson's Bay, to feel sand between my toes, have my picnic lunch and a cup of coffee.  The crowds increased.  I sat on the seawall and undid the plastic wrap around my lunch.  The seagulls descended.  They are feral, not helped by the tourist who thought it highly amusing to throw them an entire serve of chips, one chip at a time, whilst standing right next to me, as her husband photographed the screaming heckling fighting flock of birds.  I hurriedly ate my lunch, waving the seagulls away, put my shoes back on, and retreated to find a cup of coffee.  This can be had on the ferry wharf.

I headed back the way I came, with the Gap walking with me back to the car and home.

 

The thirteenth day of the rest of my life

The day started badly.  My car had been recalled to have a problem with the seatbelt locking mechanism corrected.  With much planning ahead, I had booked it in to the local dealer, to begin and end the day there, with Walk #21 in the middle.  The first step to go awry was finding the service department.  Google had helpfully told me the dealer's address, on one side of Paramatta Rd.  Sadly, the service department is on the other side, and getting your car to the other side of Paramatta Rd at peak hour is not for the faint-hearted.

Consequently, I was later leaving the dealer than I had expected, and I still had two buses to catch to my starting point.  As I approached the first bus stop, a bus with my number on it pulled away.  I consulted the timetable, and realised that it was not the bus I had planned to take anyway, but the earlier one, spectacularly late.  So I settled in to wait for my bus, unconcerned by a short delay.  I should at that point have realised that, when one bus is 16 minutes late, the next one is unlikely to be unaffected by the same delays.  A pleasant if somewhat tedious wait in the sunshine on Great North Road ensued.  My bus, true to form, was similarly late, and they only run every half hour.  So of course I then missed my connecting bus, in a repeat of the scenario where it pulled away as I was almost at the bus stop, followed by another major delay in the arrival of the next bus.  All of which meant that it took me almost ninety minutes to travel from Haberfield to the other side of the Gladesville Bridge at Hunters Hill.  In hindsight, I could have walked that return trip instead and saved my Hunters Hill walk and bus fares for another day.

But finally I arrived at the start of the walk, at the top of Alexandra St in Hunters Hill.  The walk is designed to be one way, ending at the wharf at the bottom of the peninsula, but I had elected to do the return trip, so about 10 kms all up.  Make no mistake, this is at heart a very urban walk, with some lovely waterside parks and a bit of very famous bush thrown in.  The Joubert brothers, after whom a street is named, built, in the second half of the 1800s, many of the beautiful sandstone mansions that grace Hunters Hill today.  There is a Heritage Trail, with 40 plaques to be read, if you're a history buff.  For myself, I would have just loved to see inside some of those gorgeous dwellings.  I sneaked a couple of photos through a gate and down a driveway, the latter astonishing in its Italianate pretension.

But back to the walk itself.  The Book recommended the stained glass in All Saints Anglican Church as being some of the finest in the country, so I was eager to look inside.  But the doors were firmly closed against an unbeliever such as I so I walked on.  And there, around the corner, was the true ecclesiastical delight of the St Peter Chanel Catholic Church.  Only in the high end of town do you get your church blessed by the patron saint of haute couture.  I sniffed the air for the telltale scent, but there was only mown grass to be had.  The sunlight haloed over the rooftop confirmed I was indeed in exclusive company. 

 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works..."  Matthew 5:16








 

On the way, I had skirted the grounds of Passy House, built by the ubiquitous Jouberts for the French consul in the mid-1800s.  Coming back, I took a quick photo, through the gate, of the ornamental pond that graces its front driveway.  I now know that I was photographing the residence of Eddie Obeid.  I needn't have worried that he would be home.  I understand he's currently gracing the courtroom of our NSW Supreme Court on a small matter of Misconduct in Public Office (alleged, of course).  Poor Eddie, he lost a big conifer branch in the weekend storms, leading to the closure of the laneway down the side

Passy

of his house.  I ducked under the tape, after a quick assessment that the rest of the tree looked unlikely to fall at that moment.

 

Leaving the Obeids to ponder the future of their lifestyle, I headed on down the hill, all the while considering that I would be coming up again later.  A set of stone steps leads to the delightful Mornington Reserve, with beautiful views over the Lane Cove River, sparkling in the sun.  Despite my public transport woes, it was still too early for lunch, although it would be a lovely north-facing spot for a picnic.  It's very secluded, with the only entries being fairly inconspicuous and steep laneways at either end.  Being there gives you an opportunity to see some of these magnificent mansions from the rear, and they are spectacular.  A bit of a security nightmare though I would have thought, a thought clearly shared by a small but very persistently loud dog that sounded the alarm of my presence.  Ignoring it and the attached resident, I paused for a while to drink in the view before moving on. 

The last house you see before heading out of Mornington Reserve revels in this marvellous rotunda.  Because it can.  I think there were three gardeners all working there when I went past.  It's not enough just to have money to buy the house, there's the upkeep to consider.

So, onwards and upwards to the famous Kelly's Bush.

In 1892, there was a smelting company established on the waterfront of the peninsula by one TH Kelly.  He set up a buffer zone of preserved bushland to allow public access to the foreshore.  Move on to 1967, when AV Jennings had other plans for the site after the smelting company relocated.  I remember AV Jennings well from my childhood.  It was a very prominent company that built a lot of new houses in the area where I grew up.  Probably on reclaimed bushland, though I never gave that a second thought (or even a first) at that time.  Anyway, AV Jennings wanted to build 147 units on the site, including three eight-storey tower blocks.  The Hunters Hill council said no and asked to acquire the rest of the site.  (It had already bought a small package for a park in 1956.)  In an echo of current planning practices, the State Planning Authority refused the request. 

An argument ensued.  The Hunters Hill Trust was established in early 1968 but, after prolonged negotiation, the Council, no doubt controversially, rolled over and agreed to a modified proposal of 56 residences.  The Trust marshalled its resources and succeeded in reducing that number to 25.

Enter the Battlers for Kelly's Bush, a group of local women - Liberal matrons who wouldn't look out of a place with a blue rinse. 

They met with AV Jennings and Robert Askin, then NSW Premier, to no avail, and were supported by a number of conservation organisations.  All to no avail.  Mr Askin was about to sign the rezoning into law.  At which point, they appealed to the Labor Council of NSW on 3 June, 1971.  It must have been a difficult decision for many of them to run counter to all their political beliefs about the Labor Party and the unions.  But it was the right one.  Two weeks' later, the BLF, under the Communist leadership of Jack Mundey and others imposed the first example of what we now know as a Green Ban.  An immediate stoush with AV Jennings erupted, which they ultimately lost.  Within the next year, 42 other Green bans were imposed across Sydney, leading to the preservation of areas such as The Rocks. 

Surprisingly, the skirmishes continued until 1983, when then-Premier Wran finally announced that the NSW government had purchased Kelly's Bush for open space for the community.  The Battle for Kelly's Bush was finally won, 12 years after it commenced.  My thanks to all of those women who defied convention and took a stand.

If you are taking this walk, it is not clear from the directions that, to find the entrance to the Lookout track through Kelly's Bush, you need to turn right at the end of Prince Edward Parade and head down the hill to the intersection with Tree Ave, where you will find the track.  Or you could do what I did, ignore the 'track closed for maintenance' signs, go straight ahead at the end of Prince Edward Parade, and charm you way past the workmen who tell you the track is closed.  But to do that, you miss the lookout, which I subsequently found when reversing my route on the way back up. 

After a short pleasant walk downhill through the bush, with glimpses of the harbour views to come, you emerge (whichever path you have taken) at Clarke's Point reserve, a sweeping harbourside grassed reserve with spectacular views from the Iron Cove Bridge around to the Harbour Bridge.  Here I stopped to eat my sandwich in the glorious sunshine and think of my office-bound colleagues-that-were.  I decided I definitely had the better deal.

View from my seat at the water's edge

 

Refreshed in body and soul by the perfect combination of food, sunshine and sparkling water views, I meandered on around the water's edge, finally turning in to the cleft in the sandstone cliff that is the Woolwich Dock.

In 1898, the Morts Dock and Engineering Company (remembered in Balmain's Mort Bay) embarked on a massive engineering project on land purchased from the Clarke family.  Sound familiar?  Over the following three years, they excavated 85,000 cubic metres of sandstone to create what was then the biggest dry dock in Australia.  It has been used continuously since then for ship repairs and was especially busy during the two world wars.  It is a fascinating place to walk around.  I stopped to watch a boat being lowered into the water by modern machinery, and marvelled at the ingenuity required to construct such an industrial site over 100 years ago. 

From there, it's all downhill, once you've hiked up the hill through another park to emerge at the Woolwich Pier Hotel.  An opportunity to stop for a cleansing ale, if you're in the mood.  I headed down to turn around at the Woolwich wharf, where ironically a ferry that I didn't need was just pulling in.  At this point, I must not forget to compliment the public toilet facilities at the wharf.  Clean, working, with toilet paper, soap and even paper towel to dry your hands.  Thank you to the Council for their efforts to keep the burghers of the Hunters Hill peninsula well serviced whilst they await the ferry.

From there, it was a matter of retracing my steps back up the fairly extensive hill, but for the diversion where I found the track through Kelly's Bush that I had missed on the way down.  I had time for coffee before my infrequent bus, which was predictably very late.  I alighted to change to my connecting bus and stood on the wrong side of a busy intersection watching it pull up.  For the only time in my life, I was grateful for the disorganisation of a rabble of schoolchildren who took so long to board the bus that I was able to sprint up to its door just as the driver was about to close it and pull away.  And so I arrived back to pick up my car in fading daylight, having completed the first of Part 2.
 

To finish, a gentle touch of Hunters Hill humour... 

 

 

With thanks to the Dictionary of Sydney and the Sydney Harborside Trust for the historical insights, and special thanks to the Battlers of Hunters Hill. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 2. Walking through Retirement

I have found myself suddenly and unexpectedly - to none more so than myself - being a person who has given a retirement speech, collected the flowers and left the building for the last time.  The reasons for this it seems will forever remain divorced from my knowing; nevertheless I am determined not to be a bitter divorcee.  And so I have embraced this opportunity with both feet and am now launching the non-awaited Part 2 of my blog.  As yet, I don't know how long this episode will last.  Part 1 took me through six months.  This may take me through six weeks, or six years.  Time will tell.

In the interim, I have worked more than full-time for close to six years (there seems to be a recurring theme of six) and consequently made little progress through the Book of Walks.  When I concluded Part 1, I had just completed Walk # 13.  Sadly, in the intervening years, I managed only seven more walks from the book, just slightly more than one per year.  In my defence, I have also recently joined a walking group, and done some walking that way too.  http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-North-South-East-West-Walks-40/  Thank you Bruce.  I tried to do one walk every birthday, taking the day off to celebrate in my own favoured style.  But there never seemed enough extra time to write about those walks.  I was too busy completing them, then walking straight back in the office door.

So Part 2 began yesterday.