Sprucing up a communal toilet, I kid you not

Dead chooks and uncollected dunny cans were 'flushed' down Flat Rock Gully, during the Depression [the one that was labelled 'great' by some wag], from areas west known variously in those days as Dog Town, Pension Town and Struggle Town, but later known as Naremburn. Naremburn Falls cascaded 15m into 'the Devil's Hole' to the endless delight of the hordes of local urchins bored out of their brains. But pristine bush can not maintain the rage against human effluent and detritous, and the creek clogged, the falls were throttled, the area degraded into no more than the municipal dump.

Time moves on and, being 15 minutes from the CBD, the area gentrified, the toffs moving in, the strugglers displaced. And there is nothing a toff likes less than an eye-sore that compromises house values. The dump was closed, the Council spending hard-earned rate-payer dollars to renovate the gully into the public open space that it is today, with a thriving eco-system, and hordes of toffettes zipping the cycle-lanes on their Bottecchias and XDS Retros.

Dead Cow Gulch

Way back in the '70s, I hiked through the New England Tablelands of NSW with a bunch of friends. It is a very beautiful area of Australian bush, but the stand-out memory is the rotting cow carcass. By instantly renaming the area to 'Dead Cow Gulch' we created for ourselves a short-hand nomenclature to last down the ages. Which brings me to Flat Rock Gully which from 1940 to 1985 was a municipal tip [or dump].

On the map, the area is split in two by Flat Rock Drive [we are nothing if not original!], with the left being Flat Rock Gully, and the right being Bicentennial Reserve, the location of Walter Burly Griffin's incinerator. The ash and debris from the incinerator was disposed of in the council tip. From 1998 to 2003 the tip was 'remodelled' into public reserve with walking and cycling tracks. This culvert goes under Flat Rock Drive and connects the reafforested reserve to the playing fields of Bicentennial Park. We will take a wander through Flat Rock Gulch in my next post.