Travelling Pathetically - Hunters Hill

 With my home divided into warring camps and various plush toys staring suspiciously at each other over hastily constructed barricades I decided to go out for the day.  But where to go?  I gazed at a map of Sydney and my eye fell on a piece of land stretching somewhat phallically into Parramatta River.  Of course, Hunters Hill.  Why had I never been there before?  A good question bettered only by "why am I going there now?".  Still the day was warm, the sun was shining (there may be a connection between those two facts) and I was slightly desperate to get out of the house.

Hunters Hill was once a haven for bushrangers and was subsequently used as a dump for radioactive waste.  It is one of Sydney's more expensive suburbs.  Stapled to the east of it is Woolwich formerly an industrial site situated at what was then considered an appropriate distance from the expensive housing of Hunters Hill.  Now it is home to similarly expensive residential real estate.  I caught the ferry to Woolwich and pointed myself in the general direction of Hunters Hill because once you're in Woolwich there's nowhere else you can go really unless you want to swim.

At Woolwich ferry wharf you get amazing views of the city with the added advantage of not being there

I leapt lightly from the ferry and set foot on Woolwich soil for the very first time.  I breathed deep of the fresh air and gazed around ignoring the curses of the other ferry passengers who were trying to get off the boat.  Actually I hadn't set foot on Woolwich soil but rather on a pontoon wharf.  Woolwich soil was however just a minutes walk away.  In keeping with my usual practice I had studied the map and attempted to find patches of bushland or at least greenery to make my walk more pleasant.  With this in mind I had plotted a walk that would go along the southern shore of what was essentially a riverine peninsula where parks seemed plentiful.  As I stepped off the wharf (and finally onto Woolwich soil) I was greeted with the lush greenery of Valentina reserve which stretched for metres before running into the backs of various houses.

Undeterred I strolled up the street (strolling is like walking but with more casual elegance), took a left turn and headed for the Goat Paddock.  Yes Woolwich has a goat paddock or more accurately it has a park called the Goat Paddock.  There aren't any goats there.  Woolwich also has another park called the Horse Paddock which doesn't have horses as well.

The goat paddock.  Homeless ruminants need not apply

You may be wondering why there are so many parks and suchlike in what is a rather wealthy suburb (as if that didn't answer your question) where land isn't particularly plentiful.  The answer is a combination of military, nimbyism and unions.  Both the goat and horse paddocks used to be military land which is a great way of keeping it out of the hands of developers.  One of the prevailing characteristics of people is that when they find themselves living in a beautiful and desirable location they tend to want to prevent anyone else from living there too.  Thus when the military moved out and the government planned to sell the land for development the residents complained.  And because the complainants were both wealthy and well organised their complaints were successful.

Strolling down the goat paddock towards the water one can see the resident's point.  If I lived here I wouldn't be keen about losing this to a housing development either.  Trimmed grass gave way to slightly less manicured trees as I got closer to the water and by the time a fear of drowning blocked my passage I was surrounded by trees.  And a dockyard, although a rather modest one.

Woolwich Dock was built in the late 1800s by the simple expedient of gouging a rectangular hole in the sandstone big enough to hold what were then considered large ships.  The water is deep here (the attraction for the dockyard in the first place) and Woolwich Dock was large enough to berth and repair the largest oceangoing ships that visited Sydney in those days.  After the Second World War business dropped off and the dock was sold to the military.  When the military moved out a private concern bought the dock and now it provides berthing and repair facilities for yachts both the Sydney to Hobart kind and the sleazy Russian oligarch kind.

Woolwich Dock

In a desperate (and slightly pathetic) attempt to make themselves part of the natural landscape the walking path that takes you from the goat paddock to the horse paddock actually takes you through Woolwich Dock where you can look at the boats (sorry, yachts) and avoid the hundred tonne ship crane (they're very proud of that, it's all over their website) which is the centrepiece of their facilities.

When I said the dock was gauged out of the sandstone I wasn't kidding

As one passes the dock one also passes a fine dining experience where you can presumably watch the storied hundred tonne crane at play while enjoying a good meal.  It must be nice to be so easily amused.  Says the man with a bunch of plush toys and random walking habits.  Fortunately for those of us who aren't hungry the reserve leading to the horse paddock is just past the restaurant.

Leaving Australia's maritime history behind me I stepped into a reserve/large park.  It was hardly virgin bushland, indeed it didn't even qualify as slutty bushland but it was open, green with carefully placed trees and a large water frontage.  The Horse Paddock awaited.  Even more appealing was the sign announcing that one could remove their leashes.  I pulled the collar from my neck and slipped it into my pocket while gazing around guiltily to ensure my dom wasn't watching.  Breathing somewhat more easily I wandered down to the waterside and took photos of what I am informed was a white faced heron.  Ignore the fishing rod in the photo, I'm pretty sure that belonged to a different bird.

A white faced heron

So far my walk, while pleasant, had been heavy on artificial parks and light on natural bushland but this was about to change.  Past the horse paddock and an inconveniently place patch of buildings is Kelly's Bush Park, the last piece of undeveloped natural bushland on the entire peninsula.  Surrounded on three sides by development (and on the fourth by the Parramatta River) Kelly's Bush owes its continued existence to the third of the three determining factors I mentioned earlier.  When a developer planned to build over the entire area a local women's group contacted Jack Mundey, then head of the NSW Builder's Labourers Federation for help.  He responded by placing Sydney's first green ban on the site which meant that no union labour would work on the project.  When the developer threatened to bring in strike breakers the union responded by banning work on all of their other projects as well.  Eventually the developer sold the land to the local council who in turn sold it to the state government which made a virtue of necessity by keeping it as a park.

 So into Kelly's surpringly saved bush I went.  For the first time I felt genuinely separated from people (it was a lovely day and naturally the parks were busy).  The quiet that accompanies such areas was somehow unspoiled by the fact that apparently every aircraft in creation had been rerouted to fly over the area on this day.

Native bushland

Somewhere in there is the Parramatta River

 Kelly's Bush actually isn't that large but when you're in the middle of it you can fool yourself that it goes on forever.  I wandered down to the shore to see a piece of land where the river meets the land without a seawall in place and then hiked back up again through trees and ferns until finally I stumbled out the other end and into Hunters Hill.

There were more parks I could have visited but shadows were lengthening and that seemed like an appropriate ending so I made my way back down the spine of the peninsula past handsome sandstone houses to my starting point in Woolwich for a ferry home.  It occurs to me that I spent far more time in Woolwich than Hunters Hill but I couldn't be bothered changing the title of the blog entry now.