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It is tacky Kiwi tourism writing, but there are some shades of truth in it... "Sydney's river of life"



 
 
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  #1  
Old January 15th, 2007, 11:45 AM posted to misc.immigration.misc,rec.travel.australia+nz,soc.culture.australian
Max Power
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Posts: 12
Default It is tacky Kiwi tourism writing, but there are some shades of truth in it... "Sydney's river of life"

Sydney's river of life

Sydney's river of life

http://www.stuff.co.nz/print/3926635a34.html

Much of colonial Sydney has disappeared, but history can still be found on
the Hawkesbury.

Every morning about 9.45, June, known to everyone as the "Queen of Wobby",
looks out the windows of her small fibro house on Wobby Beach, sees the
Hawkesbury Explorer approaching, opens her front door, walks the length of
her tiny jetty and waits for her daily supplies to be delivered.

As the Hawkesbury riverboat postman draws alongside, the captain, Len
Staples, and his "first mate", Karren Martin, call out a friendly welcome.
June takes her loaf of bread and anything else she may have ordered, then
stands back as the postal boat pulls away to slowly head upriver.

There is something wonderfully timeless and enduring about the Hawkesbury.
June first arrived as a young girl when her father built the simple house
she now lives in after he returned from World War II.
She moved away when she got married, moved back with her husband when her
parents died and now lives alone in a world punctuated by the regular visits
of the riverboat postman.

It is, by any measure, an idyllic life. The sounds of the water lapping
against the islands, the passing parade of boats making their way up and
down the Hawkesbury, the cycle of the rising and falling tides, the
simplicity and beauty of life on the banks of the river all make the world
of the city - only a 10-minute ferry trip and a short, fast-train journey
away - seem very rushed, modern, and rather pointless.

On the boat this morning is Betty Atkins. She has lived at Bar Point, the
westernmost limit of the riverboat postal route, for the past 20 years.
Every couple of weeks she catches the ferry to Brooklyn and goes to Sydney
to visit family and friends. It's not an escape. It is just part of her
restless spirit.

As the boat approaches the jetty at Bar Point, she explains that she loves
visiting friends but always loves returning to the peacefulness of the river
where she can sit and fish and contemplate.

As the riverboat postman criss-crosses the river between Brooklyn and Bar
Point, it offers potent reminders that here, on Sydney's northern edge, is a
region that has remained unchanged since it was first settled by Europeans
in the early 1790s.
It is a world full of eccentricity and charm where each day Ron, from the
home for disabled people at Peat Island, comes down to the jetty to exchange
mailbags with Karren Martin and to point out, with great pride, to the
travellers on the riverboat postman that he has four combs for his hair.

Then there's the prawn fisherman hidden behind the mangroves so passionately
turning his back on the life of the river that he can only go prawning at
high tide.

The rest of the time his boat is stuck in mangrove mud. And there's the old
woman, all elegance and grace, who dresses up to "go to town", catches the
ferry and heads for Star City Casino, returning one or two days later.

The river has always attracted these gentle characters. To live on its banks
is to make a statement about your priorities in life just as the characters
in Anna Reeves's 2004 movie Oyster Farmer - with names such as Mumbles,
Pearl, Brownie, Slug and Skippy - evoked a world little understood by people
who are only 15 minutes away by water.

And that is part of the charm. All of the places visited by the riverboat
postman can be reached only by water. To go to the Hawkesbury is to excuse
yourself, with a knowing smile, from the world of roads, cars and trucks.

A trip to the shops means getting out the tinnie or waiting for the postie -
but then the postie can bring your mail as well as a few groceries and you
can remain sitting and watching the broad green river as it ebbs and flows
with the tide.

Remarkably, the Hawkesbury has remained resistant to the arrival of the
cashed-up. There's very little sign of gentrification. Oh, sure, the signs
in the real-estate agency at Brooklyn will show houses for $1.3 million but
they are usually $1.3 million for the location and you get the fibro shack
thrown in for free.

People talk about a Bar Point house where, oblivious to the unassuming and
modest culture of the area, an excessively rich owner had building materials
helicoptered in from Mooney Mooney.

But, interestingly, Betty Atkins can't identify the house and has no
interest in the owners. She doesn't complain or make disparaging remarks.
The Hawkesbury is not about status.

It is not only the river that has remained unchanged. Go searching for the
ghost of Samuel Wiseman, the subject of Kate Grenville's evocative Secret
River, and you'll find that you are again entering a world that seems
timeless.

Fifty years ago, the traveller arriving in Sydney from the country drove on
roads that had remained largely unchanged since they were built in the early
19th century.

From the south-west the traveller meandered on a sealed bullock track that
ran through Picton, climbed Razorback, wound down into Camden and didn't
really hit Sydney suburbia until it arrived at the outskirts of Liverpool.

The road through the Blue Mountains was much as William Cox had built it in
the 1820s. St Marys, with its remnants of the old munitions factory, was
still way beyond the suburban sprawl.

And, from the south, people stopped at Bulli Pass when their radiator
overheated, then drove along the edge of the escarpment until finally
reaching the southern suburbs around Sutherland.

Today all this has gone. Freeways and "cost ya lots" ways carve wide arcs
through the suburbs. A driver leaving Canberra doesn't really have to pause
until they reach Sydney Airport - or Newcastle.

And, like some alien monster in a 1950s movie, suburban Sydney has slowly
and inexorably flopped across the Cumberland Plain, filling every undulation
and valley.

The one notable exception is the Hawkesbury. The roads across the flood
plain still meander. The road from Baulkham Hills to Wisemans Ferry, once
known as the Old Great North Road, has run unchanged for nearly 200 years
along the ridge.
It offers truly spectacular views of the wide river and its flat, rich flood
plain, then drops to the riverbank before crossing the river via the ferry,
which is an echo of the one used by Samuel Wiseman in the 1820s and 1830s,
and turning into a dirt road which twists and turns its way beside Macdonald
Creek all the way to St Albans.

The same applies if you turn your back on the freeway at Pearces Corner and
opt for the old Pacific Highway. What a dog track! It twists and turns down
the hill to Brooklyn, across the river on the old bridge (with people in a
hurry rushing past only a few metres away on the new bridge) and up the hill
to Mangrove Mountain and Central Mangrove.

By the time you get to Spencer, a sleepy little hollow beside the meeting
point of the Hawkesbury River and Mangrove Creek, you have gone back a
century.

There's no flash new suburban mega-houses and no sense of this being a
weekend getaway for wealthy Sydneysiders. There's a real feeling that this
is still proudly working class. And there's no pub.

If you are thirsty, the best you can hope for is to go to the Spencer
Village Store, ask for the alcohol of your choice, take it across to the
solitary bench that sits under a tree beside the river and drink it under a
wooden sign attached to an overhanging branch which proudly declares
"Dunkirk Hotel".

It is so easy to remain indifferent to spectacular beauty so close to home.
By 1872, the Hawkesbury was, to the locals, just "that river you have to
cross on the Great North Road".

Then the English novelist Anthony Trollope spent two days on the river and
was so overwhelmed by the beauty and drama of the landscape he later wrote:
''On the Rhine, on the Mississippi and on the Hawkesbury alike there is
created an idea that if the traveller would only leave the boat and wander
inland, he would be repaid by the revelation of marvellous beauties of
Nature ...

''The Hawkesbury has neither castles or islands, nor has it bright, clear
water like the Rhine, but the headlands are higher, the bluffs are bolder,
and the turns and manoeuvres of the course which the waters have made for
themselves, are grander, and to me more enchanting than those of either the
European or American river.''

The locals, sniffing the value of a little local promotion, repaid the
eulogy by naming the arc of the river below Wisemans Ferry, Trollope Reach.

The real importance of the Hawkesbury, however, lies beyond Wisemans Ferry.
As early as the 1790s, in a desperate attempt to feed the starving colony,
settlers moved onto the rich flood plain.

By 1799 three-quarters of the colony's grain, and 55 per cent of the
colony's entire agricultural output, was coming from the region. But there
was a problem. This granary was based on rich alluvial soils that had, over
centuries and with great regularity, been spread by devastating floods.

Between 1799 and 1819 the Hawkesbury flooded eight times. These were not
minor floods but great walls of Noah-like water that resulted in the river
rising more than 13 metres on each occasion.

In 1810, Governor Macquarie, realising the economic importance of the entire
area, rode into the district and, with an eye on sites above the flood
plains, planned towns at what are now Richmond, Windsor, Pitt Town and
Wilberforce.
It was a fortuitous accident of nature that between February 1819 and August
1857 the river did not experience a major flood.

It was during this time that not only did the agriculture prosper but the
trade with Sydney (and it must be remembered that it was predominantly by
small ships which went out through Broken Bay, down the coast and entered
Sydney Harbour laden with corn, melons, potatoes and other produce) boomed.

In one infamous incident, some local farmers, in an attempt to save 20
shillings in freight costs, carried 60 bushels of corn to Port Jackson in a
12-footer fitted with a temporary mast and sail. The sail collapsed and they
were forced to row for almost half of the distance. The trip took 17 days.

Somehow, probably because it has never been overdeveloped and the roads are,
at best, primitive, the Hawkesbury has never really moved beyond those early
days. The flood plains, from the start of the Hawkesbury at Grose River near
Richmond, are still primarily farming land.

The lower Hawkesbury, which starts at Cowan Creek in the Ku-ring-gai
National Park and extends upriver beyond Wisemans Ferry, is wonderfully
unpretentious with the riverside shack being the dominant domestic housing
and access by water being the desirable option.

As Sydney expands and the city rushes into the 21st century, the Hawkesbury
is a reminder of slower and less complex times when individuality,
eccentricity and generosity were admired. It is also a reminder that a
simple life beside a beautiful, unspoilt river is about as good as it gets.





  #2  
Old January 19th, 2007, 02:45 PM posted to misc.immigration.misc,rec.travel.australia+nz,soc.culture.australian
quietguy
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 17
Default It is tacky Kiwi tourism writing, but there are some shades of truthin it... "Sydney's river of life"

Just thought I'd mention that the post boat takes passengers - it is a very
pleasant trip and well worth the small charge.

David

Max Power wrote:

Sydney's river of life

Sydney's river of life

http://www.stuff.co.nz/print/3926635a34.html

Much of colonial Sydney has disappeared, but history can still be found on
the Hawkesbury.

Every morning about 9.45, June, known to everyone as the "Queen of Wobby",
looks out the windows of her small fibro house on Wobby Beach, sees the
Hawkesbury Explorer approaching, opens her front door, walks the length of
her tiny jetty and waits for her daily supplies to be delivered.

As the Hawkesbury riverboat postman draws alongside, the captain, Len
Staples, and his "first mate", Karren Martin, call out a friendly welcome.
June takes her loaf of bread and anything else she may have ordered, then
stands back as the postal boat pulls away to slowly head upriver.


 




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