Horse 1651 - Ten Suburbs. No.20 Clyde 2142

Oops... I think I may have goofed here... I think that everyone may have goofed here.

In this run of Ten Suburbs, I've touched on the idea of what actually constitutes a suburb. The problem with Clyde is that even after looking at several maps, I can't honestly tell if it is one or not.

According to The Geographical Names Board of NSW a "suburb" is a bounded area within the landscape that has an "Urban" Character. This is as opposed to a "township" or "localities" in rural areas.
On the Geographical Names Board of NSW's website, you can do a search to see where a suburb/locality is. The problem is that on one section of the website, it provides a map of an appropriate area and yet on another, it thinks that the entire of Clyde (if it exists) is part of Granville.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that Clyde doesn't appear as a suburb in the Gregory's, UBD or even Google Maps which presumably get there information from... The Geographical Names Board of NSW.

Part of the reason for this whole problem, lies in the fact that The Commissioner of Railways of NSW, Edward Miller Grant Eddy (for whom Eddy Avenue near Sydney Terminal is named), changed the name of Rosehill Junction station to Clyde Junction in 1901 and then the name reverted to Clyde in 1904.
It also doesn't help that Clyde Engineering which is next door built railway locomotives there until 1973. Nor does it help that Clyde railway station itself doesn't lie within the boundaries of the suburb of Clyde, if in fact the suburb even exists in the first place.

One of the odd things about Sydney and its suburban railway network is that a railway station usually accompanies a particular suburb. The suburb of "Sydney" which lies in the postcode of 2000, for instance, has five stations within its boundaries: Wynyard, Town Hall, Circular Quay, St James and Musuem and Sydney Terminal/Central lies in the suburb of Haymarket.
Clyde was even sort of legitimised (if it isn't a suburb) by the existence of the former railway station of Clyburn which was between Clyde and Auburn. Jokingly, it is often said that trains frequently stop at the imaginary stations of Strathbush, Camperbury and Kogadale.
Clyde Junction serves a useful purpose, being the junction between the Carlingford Line and the Western Line but I don't know if even that necessarily makes it a suburb.

Clyde either is a suburb or it isn't. I don't know if it is or not; mapmakers prefer to rule it out rather than in and not even The Geographical Names Board of NSW has a definative answer.
Asking the question of whether Clyde is, is like asking "What Are Birds?"... we just don't know.

- just Look Around You

Horse 1650 - Ten Suburbs. No.19 La Perouse 2036

Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, apart from having a ridiculously overly long and complicated name, lent his name to the suburb at the very very end of Anzac Parade in Sydney's east. What we learn about de Galaup (Lapérouse was the name of a family property that he added to his name) is that if there had been more storms in the world for the previous 36 weeks, Australia would probably be French speaking.

After the famed cantankerous Yorkshireman, James Cook, had published details of his First voyage in 1771, the French Government were equally as keen to sail around the world and steal countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around and stick a flag in.
De Galaup would have been successful in sticking a flag in Australia if it weren't for the fact that France didn't actually have an until after the French Revolution and the other rather annoying fact that when his two ships, the Astrolabe and Boussole, arrived in Botany Bay on 24 January 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip already had had 11 ships there for 6 days.
Undaunted, de Galaup pottered up and down the eastern coast for a while and over the next six weeks, 11 visits recorded between the French and English. His ship probably left Australia in March of 1788... he was never seen again.
Except that in 1826 an Irish captain found evidence of shipwrecks on Vanikoro in the the Solomon Islands and in 1964 an actual wreck was confirmed to be that of the Boussole.

The underlying narrative of La Perouse is that of invasion. La Perouse is unique in the story of Sydney in that the Kameygal people are the only people group in Sydney to have retained possession of their lands from European settlement until today.
Governor Arthur Phillip declared that the area immediately around Botany Bay was infertile and in 1812, Governor Lachlan Macquarie prohibited settlement in the area.

Today, La Perouse is marked with overpriced fish and chip shops, a customs tower which was used to spot smugglers and a large amount of really really ugly architecture.
However, La Perouse also has a strong Aboriginal community who have defied Boards of "Protection", survived the Depression and through the Aboriginal Lands Trust and the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council secured the rights to their land which Cook, Phillip and de Galaup successfully took away from practically everyone else living on this wide brown continent.

As a smug white person, it is all too easy to think of La Perouse as a chance meeting of the British and French in the beginning of the story of Sydney. If anything, it is the Kameygal people who are the heroes of this story. January 26 should be a celebration of Survival Day and a people who despite everything done, have held on.

Horse 1649 - Ten Suburbs. No.18 Liberty Grove 2138

http://www.libertygrove.net.au/
Liberty Grove is a quiet and relaxing lifestyle suburb filled with lush greenery and many spots to sit and relax. However, Liberty Grove also has many facilies to keep residents active such as tennis courts, basketball court, bike track, two pools and two large parks.
The serenity and tranquility of Liberty Grove gives nothing away to the fact that it is located only 16 kilometers from the Sydney CBD. Liberty Grove is a place where residents feel that they have escaped from the daily hustle and bustle, and where they have the chance so simply relax.
All Liberty Grove amenities have been created for the exclusive use of residents, so that they have a sense of privacy and can feel at home throughout the whole of the estate.
- from the Liberty Grove website.

The suburb of Liberty Grove was opened in 1998 in the run up to the Sydney Olympic Games. Jammed in between Homebush Bay Drive and the Northern Line railway, it feels exceptionall cramped and sterile. Liberty Grove to look at is kind of like a giant retirement village and as I've found at, shares many aspects with one.

The blanket speed limit in Liberty Grove is 20km/h. What's not immediate obvious though is that this is in fact unenforceable by the Department of  Roads and Maritime Services because all of the roads in Liberty Grove are private. They are technically Private Access Ways and not Public Roads as defined by the Roads Act 1993.
Because of this quirk, it means that the estate itself can set internal by-laws, even if they are technically inenforceable. For this reason (and the fact footpaths tend to be non-existent), the local "Parking and Traffic Sub-Committee" has banned L-Plate drivers from driving within the suburb; a feature shared with Centennial Park.

I suppose that Liberty Grove is similar to a gated community or a retirement village in that it employs its own security staff. It has only got a single shop and no transport links within its borders (features it shares with Dharruk) but it is less than a mile away from Rhodes Shopping Centre and Rhodes railway station; so it isn't like it is far away from everything. It is also a short walk from Bicentennial Park and you could even be at the Olympic stadium within 20 minutes if you walked.

Liberty Grove is the sort of thing that pulls into question what a suburb actually is. The word suburb comes from the Latin "suburbium" and the two parts sub+urbae; which means "under the city". This was due to the fact that in Rome, wealthy citizens often have villas in the higher parts whilst the plebs tended to live in the lower parts.
I find in Cicero's "In Defense of Sextus Roscius of Ameria" (c.80BC) that he referred to the large walled estates and villas as "suburbia". Liberty Grove I think, meets Cicero's criteria quite nicely.

Australia has only a few actual gated communities and I suppose that a lot of issues don't quite apply but this piece from America's NPR was interesting.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/04/30/sanford-florida-neighborhood
I do wonder what creating a spatial enclave like this actually does for the residents though. Does it add to a sense of security because outsiders can be easily identified or does it make residents more paranoid? Is Liberty Grove an social experiment to find to the answer? I don't know.

Horse 1646 - Ten Suburbs. No.17 Wahroonga 2076

When I go on Skype and talk to people in the United States in real time, I'm reminded of just how far in the future we actually are living. The ability to speak to and see someone in real time, is the sort of thing which would have seem distant in the era when The Jetsons or Star Trek was first broadcast on television. Even the mobile phone I have in my pocket, which looks a little like the tricorders from Star Trek, contains more computing power than the entire Apollo Space Program.

Yet even the Apollo moon landings which were seen on television, or even the Australian Cricket tour to England which was broadcast on ABC Radio 31 years before that, must have looked so far in the future to the event which took place in 1918 which a small monument commemorates.

I have just returned from a visit to the battlefields where the glorious valour and dash of the Australian troops saved Amiens and forced back the legions of the enemy, filled with greater admiration than ever for these glorious men and more convinced than ever that it is the duty of their fellow-citizens to keep these magnificent battalions up to their full strength. W.M. Hughes, Prime Minister.
- 22nd Sep 1918, 13:15

Royal Australian Navy is magnificently bearing its part in the great struggle. Spirit of sailors and soldiers alike is beyond praise. Recent hard fighting brilliantly successful but makes reinforcements imperative. Australia hardly realises the wonderful reputation which our men have won. Every effort being constantly made here to dispose of Australia's surplus products. Joseph Cook, Minister for Navy
- 22nd Sep 1918, 13:25

"Officially" these were the first two wireless messages received from the UK in Australia. In practice, German wireless transmissions were received by stations in Papua New Guinea as early as 1917.
These two messages were sent by the Marconi station MUU at Carnarvon in Wales and the person at the Australian end who received them was a Sir Ernest Fisk, who was the Managing Director of Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd. (AWA) at his house in Wahroonga.
I have done some research into land sales in the area and it seems that a lot of what is now an obviously established and respectable suburb, was just an idea and a few arbitrary lines drawn on a land survey back then. The streets which exist now, in some cases didn't even exist back then, or if they did, were dirt tracks through the bush.

During the First World War, correspondents from the battlefield could send news back to places like Paris or London by courier or carrier pigeon and have reports appear in the newspaper the next day. Australia though would have to either rely on telephone or the mails which often took far longer.
This little forgotten and unassuming monument in Wahroonga isn't a so much a monument to a specific event which happened but to the world becoming a little bit smaller and Australia itself, not being quite so isolated.

Horse 1645 - Ten Suburbs. No.16 Tregear 2770

The postcode of 2770 made headlines on 8th February 1997 when the Daily Telegraph accused students from Mount Druitt High School as being "an abject overwhelming failure" after the entire Year 12 had failed to get one student above the TER ranking of 50. As a result of this, Mount Druitt High School was threatened with having its funding cut unless it did better and nearby Whalan High School was closed before the new school year in 1997 in a "consolidation drive".

These events though, seem to be about the only thing that the entire collection of suburbs within 2770 have ever newsworthy of. 2770 encompasses suburbs like Shalvey, Emerton, Hebersham, Whalan, Dharruk which is a suburb with absolutely no shops within its boundaries and Tregear. Tregear is so forlorn that it only has  two sets of traffic lights within its boundaries.
You could almost be forgiven for completely being unaware that these suburbs even exist; Tregear itself is Sydney's cheapest suburb when it comes to housing and so it isn't exactly winning any accolades on that front, in this property obsessed city.

What you do notice about Tregear as compared with say Mosman (Horse 1328) is that the cars are roughly the same size; but instead of being Audis and BMWs, they're old Falcons and Commodores that have seen days. The houses themselves which are often owned by the Housing Commission are more often than not, fibro and the people are more likely to shop at KMart, Big W, Best & Less than shops with fancy Italian and Spanish names.

What else is immediately obvious, is that Tregear is a suburb whose residents have virtually no control over what happens to them. They are more likely to be working in retail jobs, in shops which are managed and owned by people in other suburbs; they are more likely to be paying rent to people who live in other suburbs and if they're living in Housing Commission owned houses, they'll have little to no say over what happens to them if the government decides to sell the land from under them.

The fact that public transport chooses to skirt around the edge of places like Tregear and Dharruk, that there aren't really very many shops and that there are virtually no local jobs at all, are expressions of economic power and control living somewhere else.
It's almost as if the people of Tregear and surrounding suburbs have been thrown off the cart and left to fend for themselves. It's all very well to accuse people of living off of handouts but when there aren't any jobs or even any shops in the local area, then what? How can you tell people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps when they don't even have bootstraps?
I suppose that the state government is at least paying a token of attention by at least in name acknowledging that Western Sydney exists with the appointment of a relevant minister but would the Minister for Western Sydney really be able to point out where places like Tregear are on a map?
I wouldn't think so.

Horse 1644 - Ten Suburbs. No.15 Beverley Hills 2209

The suburb was originally named Dumbleton after a farm which had been established in the 1830s but as you'd expect, residents scarcely like the name very much at all. The name was changed to Beverley Hills in the 1940s during the so-called "golden age of Hollywood" but suburb in Sydney really had very little to do with a world of movie stars. I will admit though that 70 years later, Sydney's Beverley Hills is a far nicer place than Los Angeles' which can look pretty trashy in some areas.

Beverley Hills would have remained a relatively dull had it not been for the Department of Main Road's decision to connect Canary's Road and Dumbleton Road in 1962 and rename the new route King Georges Road as part of Ring Road 3. Thus a quiet suburb would have a six lane arterial road slice in in twain in 1964. A lot of the shop fronts on King Georges Road have a sort of late art deco look which were built during that time.

Also and as a result of the post-war immigration boom, Beverley Hills became home to a lot of Italan and Eastern European migrants arrive; which changed the area from mainly Protestant to mainly Catholic. One of the results of this was the very fine Regina Coeli church which stands on the highest point in the suburb and may been seen for many miles.
Regina Coeli Roman Catholic Church is the only "war memorial church" in Australia. Regina Coeli was opened on Coral Sea Sunday, May 5, 1963, 21 years after the aircraft carrier battle of World War Two. It was partly funded by an Australian-US veterans' alliance and commemoration masses are held every year on that weekend.

Ironically, if you look for something that Beverley Hills is noted for, it is its local cinema. Even though it looks like any other local suburban cinema, look inside and... it still looks like any other local suburban cinema. The local cinema actually appears to be a thing of note in this suburb; that is noteworthy. Beverley Hills is a blob of normality among a sea of mediocrity.
Although Beverley Hills was named after a land of swimming pools and movie stars, it is a land of red brick houses and medium density housing as far as the eye can see, where there is the odd swimming pool but no movie stars. Beverley Hills is a land of the national average. A land where Toyota Corollas live in the streets, where people make almost exactly bang on the national average and where it really is difficult to find anything interesting about it at all.
Beverley Hills is almost a living snapshot of what all of Australia currently is, in miniature. It is the perfect representative sample, all by itself.

Horse 1643 - Ten Suburbs. No.14 Golden Grove 2008/2042

In my 1932 Gregory's Street Directory, the idea of definite boundaries for where suburbs lie, isn't marked. I imagine that in 1932 that street which could have been run from Parramatta to Harris Park, might very well accept mail labelled either.
In my 1967 Gregory's Street Directory, Golden Grove is a definite suburb and marked with the postcode of 2006 which it shared with Sydney University but in my 2009 Gregory's Street Directory, Golden Grove as a suburb just doesn't exist at all; with all of its former environs being claimed by either Newtown or Darlington.

Does Golden Grove even belong in Ten Suburbs? Absolutely. Golden Grove brings into question, what our notion of place actually is and the fact that I remember that it once was, means that it probably still might exist in the minds of other people too.

Golden Grove was named after one of the eleven ships which trudged its way across the ocean in the First Fleet, to dump convicts on a bit of land which the British had declared terra nullius or "empty land"; despite there being very obvious evidence to the contrary. Australia was yet another example of the British Empire stealing land by the cunning use of flags by sailing round the world and sticking a flag in something. 

I suspect that being an inner city sort of suburb, Golden Grove probably acquired something of a bad reputation at some point. The area which was once Golden Grove is built a bit like inner parts of London which terrace houses and lanes running behind the houses. This being Australia, they quickly acquired the distinctly Aussie nickname of "dunny lanes" after the night carts which would remove people's poo before the installation of proper sewerage. Maybe Golden Grove which was noted being something of a slum which is why people would rather suggest that they came from either Newtown or Darlington - I really don't know.
It could also have something to do with Sydney University gradually acquiring property in the area and extending outside its own 2006 postcode. Without houses to call its own, Golden Grove just might not have been viable as a specific locality.

Today, all that is left of Golden Grove are a few reminders of it ever having even existed including a retreat centre owned by St Andrew's Cathedral, a Bed and Breakfast hotel and the eponymous street which humiliatingly is split in twain and depending on which side of the street you're on, you're either in Newtown or Darlington.

Horse 1641 - Ten Suburbs. No.13 North Epping 2121

Being a commuter, my working knowledge of Sydney is biased towards those suburbs which either lie on a railway line, or a bus route; it also helps if there are major roads running through them. North Epping has neither a railway station; nor even a through road and the only bus route which run through the suburb is the 295 which runs back to Epping.
Surrounded by three sides by creeks and the Lane Cove National Park and on the fourth by the M2 motorway, North Epping is a giant cul-de-sac. The whole suburb is connected to Sydney (including that bus route) via a single artery, Norfolk Road.
Perhaps as a direct result of its isolation, North Epping has decided to have no fast food chains, no major chain petrol stations and no major supermarkets within its borders.

- Stolen from Google Maps https://www.google.com.au/maps/

It would be easy to pass off North Epping as a little twee (and maybe it does begin to parody itself) but there's a certain charm about the place. There tends to be more children playing in North Epping's parks than other suburbs and there are more people out walking in the cool of an evening and motorists need to be a little bit more careful and mindful of cyclists.
Of course being physically surrounded by a National Park probably does encourage people to to get out and walk and explore more; which is in stark contrast to a suburb like Blacktown where the biggest participation sport of a Saturday appears to be walking around a shopping mall, buying $9 trinkets and excessive amounts of burgers and chips.

Maybe as a result of this perceived isolation, North Epping families have on average 2.9 children which is more than the national average. This in turn means that you're more likely to see 6 and 7 seven seat cars on the road like the Honda Odyssey, Mistubishi Grandis and Toyota Kluger on the roads. Also, because household income is higher on average, you'll probably find screens in the back of seats more often. I find it a little ironic that kiddiewinks might be watching Dora The Explorer but these sorts of vehicles never do any exploring.
North Epping normally has some of the lowest rates of crime in the entire of Sydney (except for one particularly famous incident) and I would wager that if a measure of Gross National Happiness were adopted in Sydney, as it is in Bhutan, then North Epping would be among the richest in this city of four and a half million.

North Epping through a geographical quirk is a virtually unknown pearl and as obvious on a map as North Adelaide 5006.

Horse 1640 - Ten Suburbs. No.12 Chatswood 2067

I imagine that once upon a time, Chatswood would have been similar to Roseville in character but those days are long gone. Chatswood is a far more vibrant and lively place than Roseville could even hope to be.
Legend has it that the name Chatswood derives from the then Mayor of Willoughby, Richard Harnett, who named the suburb after his wife Charlotte. Charlotte was known as "Chattie" and thus the area was named Chattie's Wood, which was later shortened to Chatswood.

At some point probably during the 1970s because of a plan to decentralise government services, Chatswood was picked upon as the new location of several departments including the then Department of Construction and Housing and the Australian Taxation Office.
As the area grew in importance, several shopping centres would begin to occupy the area including the Wallaceway, Chatswood Chase and the Mandarin Centre but looming to one side of Victoria Avenue and opening in 1986 was Westfield. This massive behemoth temple to the great god Dollar, has so far managed to eat one city block, jump another, infect two more with its tentacle car parks and if it is allowed to go unopposed, will continue to devour everything in its path.
Not content with just Westfield, the Interchange Arcade which once connected Chatswood Railway Stattion to Victoria Avenue, has been equally voracious. The new Chatswood Transport Interchange which was opened in 2008 following the construction of the Epping-Chatswood rail link, devoured Orchard Road and was only halted by the pedestrian mall of Victoria Avenue.

- Stolen from Google Maps https://www.google.com.au/maps/

Chatswood though, unlike Roseville is far more multicultural. Chatswood which is far more business oriented than sleepy little Roseville, became a place where lots of cultures blend together in the name of selling things. Almost two-thirds of people living in Chatswood were born overseas and a little over a quarter of the population speaks either Mandarin or Cantonese as their first language. The Chinese Cultural Centre is now 15 years old and is an active member of the life of the suburb.

Chatswood still does manage to retain some of its older character though. Chatswood Oval and Beauchamp Oval are examples of quaint little fields which wouldn't be out of place in an English village. Architecturally, there are a wide number of styles when it comes to public buildings and churches and the interior of Our Lady Of Dolours church is simply stunning.

Unlike a suburb like Parramatta though, Chatswood goes to sleep at about 6pm. After about that time, when Westfield closes and the shops on Victoria Avenue shut their doors, it can be a bit of a ghost town and is a wee bit scary. Maybe if Chatswood Oval hosted an A-League team of something, there'd be a reason for Chatswood to stay awake but I suppose that even though it has a cinema complex, it just has never reached that sort of critical mass yet.

Horse 1639 - Ten Suburbs. No.11 Roseville 2069

If for a second, we enter the realm of fantasy and quietly delude ourselves that politicians are bought with the ballot box and not the cheque book, then a small section of Roseville in the east are among the richest in Australia, for their local members of state and federal parliament are The Premier of NSW, Barry O'Farrell and the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. I think that this might be the first time in Australian political history that such a thing has happened (more research is required).
If we snap out of our fantasy and delusion, we find that the average income is $133,000 per year, which would suggest that Roseville is also more likely to be able to buy opinion with their cheque books too,

The median house price in Roseville is about $1.6 million, though it isn't uncommon for detached residences to change hands for $2-$3 million.
As little as 30 years ago, there was a class of residents in Roseville who were referred to as the "poor-rich". These people either bought property or inherited to live in in the mid-1940s and 1950s and although the value of their land shot up amazingly during the 1970s and 1980s, they were in effect asset rich but relatively income poor. For this reason, Roseville tends to have a lot of untouched older style housing, which gives it a sort of old-fashioned look.

- Stolen from Google Maps https://www.google.com.au/maps/

The high street of Roseville appears to be stuck in 1963. Although people walk about with the latest gadgetry such as iDevices and eWhatevers (thus proving that evolution is a lie because if anything we must be all descended from moths - ooh look at the pretty lights), it still has a butcher a greengrocer, a florist, a milk bar and newsagent. I bet that apart from the cars on the street, Roseville probably looks pretty well much the same as when Khrushchev was threatening the free world by sending bleeping tin balls into space. Maybe in a few years time, the newspapers here, might carry the headline that Neil Armstrong has kicked the surface of the moon.

That brings me to another odd thing. Looking through the census, Roseville appears to be among the whitest in the country. I fully expect Mrs Marsh to jump out from behind a BMW X5 (because although everyone is an individual, they all think and buy exactly the same) and explain the evils of letting coloured things get into white chalk. Her "ring of confidence" in Roseville is that no-one with a funny surname is getting anywhere near there at all.
Thankfully the local MPs have enacted discompassionate policies of stopping the boats by turning them all back and stopping the bogans by allowing the spread of toll roads everywhere. No bogans, oafs, oiks or foreign types are getting into Roseville. Hurrah؟

For the first ten suburbs, see Horse 1328 - Horse 1337

Horse 1337 - Ten Suburbs. No.10 Oatley 2223

If you look at a map of Oatley, three streets stand out immediately. Oatley Avenue and Oatley Parade could very well be the same street but are separated by a strip of park and Wonoona Parade East appears on the map as a double street because of a line of trees which form a line down the middle.
At the end of Frederick St, stands a clock tower made from red brick which looks like it could very well be a sewer chimney. The high street in Oatley is one of the prettiest in Sydney and the gentle hill sloping downwards towards the railway station makes it ideal to wander down.

The reason why I mention Oatley though is that once a upon a time, before there was television and when they used to walk faster in the movies, the Oatley Pleasure Grounds was home to a miniature zoo of sorts. I imagine that it must've been similar to Alexandra Park & Zoo in Bundaberg, Queensland, but the reason why the zoo was closed wasn't due to the animals, but the people. The Oatley Pleasure Grounds for a few mad seasons in the late 1920s gained a reputation for having a pretty wild Wine Bar. I found at least three headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald by accident when looking for something else entirely, that when Dame Nellie Melba performed operatic pieces in the park in supposedly "low-key affairs", the police were called in.

Just to the north of Oatley Station are a set of railway sheds. In 1926 when Sydney finally saw electric railways arrive, Oatley was the end of the electric lines and there still exists a crossover point. When the electric trains first saw operation, the very first services ran from Oatley and ran to Museum and St James. However unlike those two stations, Oatley never received any of the fancy tiling.

In the west of the suburb; beyond the line of houses, Oatley Park juts around Jew Fish Bay. What makes this patch of parkland interesting is that its probably one of the few refuges in suburbia where playtipii and echindnae are found in the wild. Traffic doesn't go through here and the Georges River is not as busy as either the Parramatta River, Port Jackson or Middle Harbour; so they're left more or less in relative tranquility.

Oatley has one rather remarkable hidden gem. Within the unassuming building of the Hurstville Christadelphian District Ecclesia, there sits a pipe organ dating from 1905. After the Grand Organ in the Sydney Town Hall was finished in 1890, the same company was comissioned to build a pipe organ in Wahroonga. That organ was moved and after rennovations, now occupies its current home.

Horse 1336 - Ten Suburbs. No.9 Narellan 2567

I suppose that including Narellan in the definition of a Sydney suburb is pushing it somewhat but the truth is that the connurbation of Sydney is so vast that in terms of sheer size, it eclipses other world class cities like London and what is loosely alled Tokyohama. Narellan is on the very fringes of this swirling metropolis and has its own problems that the people with money and power living in the inner suburbs do not know or care about.

For a start it takes so long to get anywhere. The M5 and M7 have helped I suppose but they've been built more with the motive of taking money from people's wallets, rather than making lives any easier. There are buses and schools which make feeble attempts to cling on but the only real concession to proper development is a Woolworths.

This tryanny of distace does come with certain benefits though and one of these is the tremendous space. Up the road the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens sprawl over a massive 416 hectares and if you just want to run headlong at the horizon and get totally lost in the countryside, then then this is the place for you.

I found myself wandering into the Mt Annan Club Hotel and unlike the pubs you get in the city, the locals seemed friendly and said hello. There would be a distinct oppotunity for them to regard outsiders with suspicion but I as with most of Australia, I find that the further you move away from postcodes 000 (2000, 3000, 5000 etc) the more likely you are to find real characters.

Traffic through Narellan has a strange habit of moving at only two speeds. Either it rips along at 100 clicks irrespective of whatever speed limits are posted, or else it crawls along; even on Camden Valley Way which mysteriously has been widened from a two lane road to a six-lane behemoth.

I that that people have a distinc trespect for speed out here. Maybe it's because they know only too well of the consequences. You don't have to drive too far to see fences made of barbed wire and hitting the scenery will more than likely put you face to face with livestock than a house. Get it wrong and you'll hit redgums.

I did notice whilst coming to one particular junction that I was being watched by three kids in a corner paddock. Being the beginning of ute country, I doubt that they'd have seen many French hatchbacks out here; maybe I was a novelty for them. This illustrates something that this unfortunately becoming very different these days. These kids had ventured into that strange land which few kids see now, that magic place called "Outside".
With the abundance of space out here, kids can kick the ever-loving uss out of a footy and not worry about bumping the furniture, hitting mum's car or going over the fence and into Mr Franklin's pool. "Outside" was a magical place which was burned into the childhood memories of generations in this wide brown land but is in danger of becomng mere just that...memories. We might remmeber doe-eyes about playing by the creek ad perhaps for many people reading this, it is just a stylised canvas but for these kids it's in 360° living colour, widescreen and full super hyper HD.

I guess that eventually even this too will be swallowed by he encroachment of cheaply built houses, owned by the people with money and power living in the inner suburbs and that this part of Sydney will look like places like Auburn and Summer Hill may have looked 30 years ago but for the moment, the tyranny of distance which causes an annoyance acts as both a safeguard and a theatre in which the memories of this generation will be played out and burned into minds for safekeeping.

Horse 1335 - Ten Suburbs. No.8 Tamarama 2026

Bondi Beach to the north is arguably the most famous beach in Australia. Bronte which is immediately to he south is a flat beach with excellent but hideously overpriced cafes. Tamarama which sits nicely between these two is in my opinion the nicest beach in Sydney.
Firstly, I have to open this account with one important and overarching statement: I hate going to the beach. That is, I hate going to the beach as a concept, not specifically any particular beach. If this is true, why then would I include Tamarama in the ten? I personally don't think that you can describe Sydney without doing so.

For many Sydneysiders, summers are marked with seemingly endless days burned into the memory, of swimming at the beach, surfing, developing skin cancers etc, and generally having a whale of a time. I can not   swim and rather do not like the idea of being pricked by a million small particles in the wind. For me, going to the beach is a tedious affair and to be perfectly frank, I'd rather be back in the pavillion with a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, a cup of Russian Caravan and a nice buttery scone.

Tamarama is a quiet, tucked away beach. Although it has no largish pavillions, it has a bus stop and is very easily accessable by road. Also, because it's protected by two very big headlands on either side, the long sweeping winds that you get at Bondi or even South Steyne, never show up. Most of the time the windsocks hang limp.
If you do decide to walk from Bondi, you'll can walk all the way down past Tamarama, Bronte, Waverley Cemetery and end up in Clovelly. Incidentally, this walk also hosts "Sculpture By The Sea" in the springtime, which I'm led to believe is Australia's largest outdoor and most attended art exhibition in the country.
Being a rather narrow and funneled beach, the breakers come right up to the shoreline, which means that surfers get more value for their efforts than elsewhere. Actually I should point out here that on a per mile of beach basis, Tamarama is the most dangerous beach in the world. During heavy swells, it's probably best that most swimmers do not go out, because rips of up to 4 knots can develop and waves as high as 15 feet have been recorded.

If you intend to take your car, then park all the way back in Birrell St. The very steep walk down through Tamarama Park passes through a its own micro-climate and in doing the research for this I discovered that that small park has its very own sub-species of Soft Tree-Fern, the Dicksonia Antarctica Tamarama. Whether or not it is native to this particular micro-climate or from somewhere else (we will stop the boat ferns) is unknown.

Apart from that, there's little else to tell. Obviously the people that live there, moved in because they want to be close to the ocean. There aren't any real shops to speak of at all in the suburb, and the houses themselves are all either sitting on small blocks or are squished up apartment complexes.

Except maybe this:
Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram
In the Tamarama ding dong?

Horse 1334 - Ten Suburbs. No.7 Pennant Hills 2120

As I sit here and type this out into my phone (whilst struggling with the Sydney Morning Herald) in the Corner Cafe Pennant Hills, I really do get an idea of the comings and goings of this suburb. The people in this suburb on the whole drive nicer than normal motor cars, they wear nicer than normal clothes, even the coffee which is sitting in front of me is nicer than normal.
Pennant Hills (at least this side of the railway station) is the quiet, peaceful; almost Norman Rockwell-esque version of what a modern Australian suburb is like. Almost conspicuous by their absence, neither Coles or Woolworths have set up a supermarket in Pennant Hills. I imagine that if the locals want to do their shopping, they they do it in Thornleigh, which is one suburb to the north.

Perhaps Pennant Hills is most famous for the 6 lane arterial road which roars through it. On the other side of the railway line to where I'm currently seated, there are a number of car yards (which are also nicer than normal - being Toyota, Skoda, Holden, Hyundai and Audi), a KFC but the Hotel Pennant Hills has obviously given up and has decided to barricade itself against the noise by blocking up and covering over any trace of the windows of what I imagine would have been a Georgian style pub. I am assured that there is a 350 seat bistro somewhere behind the walls but from the outside it looks as inviting as a Soviet power station.

Head a little bit to the east though and instead of the maddening bustle, you find yourself in Lane Cove National Park. Two miles from Pennant Hills Station and a million miles from care. It's curious that apart from Pennant Hills Road, if you head eastwards, there are no north-south roads until you get to Lane Cove Road which is another 6 lane arterial.
At this point Lane Cove National Park's main features are Scout Creek and Camp Creek. They both cut very deeply into the landscape which has created an area of quite tense, temperate rainforest. Lane Cove Valley Walk is somewhere down below at the bottom and that in turn forms part of the Great North Walk which eventually ends some 250km away in Newcastle.
I find it extraordinary that Sydney keeps on playing this trick again and again. You don't have to go very far at all to find yourself completely surrounded by no buildings. A lot of cities are built on grids but Sydney had to contend with a very squiggly landscape and changes in height; it coped by having roads meander and leaving pockets of bushland very close to people's houses. Less than 2km in a straight line from the offices of some of the biggest technology companies in the world like Microsoft, Orix, Lucent Technologies etc. you can find wallabies and wallaroos, rainbow lorikeets, galahs and big lizards going about their business; completely oblivious to the industry going on around them.

Before I completely paint Pennant Hills in a rose wash, I should point out that this is the first of the ten suburbs that I've actively been made to feel unwelcome in. Whilst seated here, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "You look like you don't belong here"; I really had no idea why, for I was clad in a plum-coloured collared shirt, a black crombie coat and a nice pair of jeans. Was it supposed to be a compliment to suggest that I was of a better quality than the suburb? Was it a put-down? Either way, who goes around saying stuff like that anyway?
I'll assume that Pennant Hills possibly has nicer than normal people, though immediate experience might lead me to believe otherwise.

NB: This post was mainly written on Saturday 2nd May, and would have appeared as Horse 1332

Horse 1333 - Ten Suburbs. No.6 Merrylands 2160

Merrylands which in Sydney's west has gained a fair amount of notoriety of late due to a spate of shootings in the area but is the notoriety deserved, or is it just a victim of circumstance?

Merrylands is the seat of Holroyd Council, the home of a largish Stockland shopping mall, at least four established churches and has a fairly vibrant town centre. The obvious tensions which the suburb is likely to hold are on ethnic lines with more than half of the suburb's inhabitants settling from overseas. The council's website suggests that there are Lebanese, Italian, Assyrian and sub-Saharan African peoples living in the area, but again that doesn't account for the violence which has happened on the streets.

No, I'm afraid that violence in the suburb of Merrylands has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of Merrylands no matter how much the media tries to paint this picture. Merrylands is in the grips of a turf war between motorcycle gangs.
This is one of the sad facts about Australia; although we'd like to think that we're a reasonably tolerant society, certain sectors of the community think themselves to be pseudo-superheroes and above the law. If you were to take an ethnic survey of members of bikie gangs, I bet that the vast majority of them would be white.

The truth is that walking around the centre of Merrylands is for the most part a completely dull sort of experience. The most offensive thing that I saw was a woodfired pizza restaurant with a meal deal for pizza and chardonnay and I'm sorry but there's just no excuse for white wine ever.

This week's Parramatta Advertiser quotes a Mr Tony Georgiou who at the age of 60 is ready to retire from working at his greeting card shop:

Mr Georgiou wants to trade cards for keys and finally learn how to play the piano, but he insists that the past 19 years have been the most satisfying of his life.
“I’ll miss the sense of community,”
- Parramatta Advertiser, 1st June 2012.

That there is the heart of Merrylands. It's a fairly normal, piece of suburbia. Head in any direction you like away from the centre of the suburb and you'll find people who go to work, send their kids to school, play in the various parks, do their shopping... whilst mostly living in free-standing, single storey, wood frame houses.


Although a friend of mine used to live in Guildford which is one suburb away (and which according to a piece of graffiti on Railway Terrace, Elvis is still purported to live), I would on occasion walk from Merrylands railway station simply because I liked the Al-Mouwal Chicken shop which is right on the corner when you get out. Their chicken Shish Tahouk was fantastic.

The more I walk around the various suburbs of Sydney expecting to find difference, the more I find that the vast majority are fairly much the same, even if the media doesn't think so.

Horse 1332 - Ten Suburbs. No.5 Rouse Hill 2155

The story of Rouse Hill is one marked with abject failure and probably 200 years of neglect by state governments because of a few historical events. Richard Rouse for whom the suburb is names after moved to the area in 1802, but it is the events of two years later which thrust this place into Australian history.

In 1798 Irish Catholic Republicans who were probably inspired by the American and French Revolutions rose up in bloody conflict against British Rule in Ireland. One such battle was the battle of Vinegar Hill in county Wexford and perhaps some of the veterans who were in that conflict eventually found their way to Australia as a result of being transported; most notably a Mr Phillip Cunningham who would lead a band of rebels.
Having settled in their new land, they were able to mobilise maybe a thousand convicts and between March 4 and about March 14, as many as 120 of them were killed by British troops once a state of martial law had been declared. Eventually nine would be sentenced with rebellion and summarily executed.
The place and the event would become known as the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill and probably took place where the current Mean Fiddler Hotel (which was also designed by an ex-convict Francis Greenway).

Rouse Hill was named in plans for an expansion of a railway line to service Castle Hill in 1932 to replace the existing tram service, however neither the trams were replaced and nor did the railway ever come to fruition.
In 1998 a proposed North West railway line was supposed to drive through the suburb, finally linking it to any sort of transport under the then transport minister Carl Scully, however the railway never came to fruition.
In 2008 a proposed North West Metro project would have linked the suburb to the city via Ryde, Gladesville and Drummoyne, however the project was cancelled forever and the railway never came to fruition.
Under the current O'Farrell government, plans are supposed to exist which would see the railway built by 2017, however given Infrastructure Australia's snubbing of the project and current transport minister Gladys Berejiklian's insistency to want to sell off te ferry network, I seriously doubt whether the current plan will ever come to fruition.

I digresss...

Rouse Hill is on the Windsor Road and grew up as a rest point for coaches and bullock trains servicing Windsor; hence the reason why the church and coachhouse in the area were built at all. However what really makes Rouse Hill interesting is a sterling piece of urban development that almost never happened at all.

It was only after repeated lobbying over a period of almost 25 years and the completion of the M2 that Windsor Road was improved from a narrow two lane road to a four lane arterial road. Trucks which used to travel down the road would often pass each other with only a few inches to spare and it was not uncommon to hear of cars which had been wiped out whilst trying to overtake.

Rouse Hill Town Centre is built on what used to be a 27 hole golf course. The first stage opened in 2007 and was finally completed in 2008.
Unlike any other shopping centre I have ever seen, the carparks are all under the facility and there is a criss-cross of streets meeting at a plaza on top. Quite literally the place has been designed as a fully functioning town centre where previously there was nothing. Unlike previous shopping centres which enclose everything inside a building, Rouse Hill Town Centre has streets open to the sky and proper fountains.
I'd go so far as to say that Rouse Hill Town Centre is probably the only embodiment of some of the ideas put forward for "the future" in the Life Science Library series book "Wheels" published in 1967. Admittedly Rouse Hill Town Centre exists purely because of the motor car, which I guess can't be helped that much.

Up the road is Rouse Hill Regional Park which is a portion of land which has been set aside for a time when the area is developed further. Currently it looks like open fields but I imagine once the bush has reclaimed some of the land and it starts to return to what it may have done in times past, that it will provide a nice contrast to the encroachment of housing which is inevitable.

The suburb of Rouse Hill generally gives you an idea of the potential of Sydney's suburbs; whilst sharing the flaws of the lack of inrastructure which is common of so many suburbs. I can only hope that proper investment happens which will turn the suburb into what it can truly be.

Horse 1331 - Ten Suburbs. No.4 Marrickville 2204

Newtown is often cited as the "trendy" area of Sydney but just one suburb to the south, Marrickville, is a far more livelier and experimental place. If Sydney is ever to be seen as a world centre for creativity then Marrickville will be the engine room of that creativity.
The little white sign at the end of the platform of Marrickville Station informs me that we're just 7km away from Central; keeping with its inner-city outlook Marrickville is a place of closely packed terrace houses, single storey and blocks of flats.

Usually when you bring a lot of people closer together, one of two things happens: either they start to display tensions between each other or they invariably start to produce more creative and innovative work. Marrickville it seems is possibly Sydney's greatest hotbed for the fine arts.
Marrickville Council last year hosted an event called MOST or the Marrickville Open Studio Tour, in which various artists, sculptors opened their houses and studios to the public. The council also runs such events as the Impossible Theatre in which short plays are performed in exceedingly small spaces like alleyways and the suburb holds a range of classes in oils, watercolours, the exploration of colour, light and dark and is also home to both The Pine Sreet Gallery and the Chrissie Cotter Gallery.
The neighbouring suburb of Enmore boasts the Enmore Theatre in which many many touring music acts from around the world have performed and The Factory Theatre in Marrickville proper, is more prodigious in the production of modern plays than any of Sydney's commerical theatre troops.

One of the jewels in the crown of Marrickville is a not-for-profit organisation called Reverse Garbage on Addison Rd. It is a place where industrial off-cuts, discards and things which would have otherwise have been wasted an be brought and resold to the public. It is something of an artists' treasure chest and is also a tremendous resource for craft supplies and schools.

However if you want a really fun night out in Marrickville, then head away from the centre of the suburb to the Alexander The Great - Greek and Macedonian Club on Livingstone Road. Although Melbourne is home to the largest Greek community outside of Greece, the Alexander The Great Club does its level best to distill everything Greek in one place. The music, the food and drink, the dancing; it's all there but all hidden away in a quiet part of the suburb on Livingstone Rd.

 Marrickville requires a little bit of exploration to enjoy properly but that's usually the case with everything worth finding.

Horse 1330 - Ten Suburbs. No.3 Auburn 2144

If you stand on platform 4 of Auburn Railway Station and look across at the shops on the south side of the street, you will find shop signs in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Thai, Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Take a short walk from Auburn Railway Station and you can find various Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormon and Independent churches, a Mosque, Sri Mandir Temple, et cetera et cetera et cetera and that's not even a truly representative sample.
Auburn which lies 20km west of the city is noteworthy because of the multicultural expression found in the suburb but increasingly unremarkable precisely because of this same notion.

According to the 2006 census more than 20% of all people living in Australia were born overseas and this figure jumps to more than 50% if you include one or more of peoples' parents. Furthermore if you look at the 2011 census, Australia generally had who were people born in 204 countries. I personally know of people who can claim to have come from the 206th nation of the world, and the one exception is the Vatican City. Australia has people living here from almost every country on Earth bar one.
But something distinctly curious happens in Australia that doesn't really happen elsewhere in the world; within two generations of people finding a home in Australia, they almost always end up speaking like an Australian; with an Australian accent, irrespective of where on earth people's cultural heritage comes from. Auburn in particular is one of the most diverse suburbs in the country; possibly because it happens to have good access to road and rail networks, but even in Auburn which is visibly an ethnically and culturally diverse suburb, something distinctly Australian still shines through.

In the immediate streets surrounding the railway station, there are some rather imposing blocks of flats, up to 9 storeys tall but the further away from the railway station you move, the blocks of flat become smaller and are eventually replaced with free standing houses. Some of the housing dates back to federation, but a great deal of it looks like it was built during the wave of red brick frenzy of the late 1960s.

I'd say that Auburn is a little like taking a snapshot of Australia all by itself. If you wanted to put your finger on the pulse of the nation, it's attitudes, aspirations, hopes, fears, then Auburn is the place to do it, for within 2144, there's a representative of everyone.

Horse 1329 - Ten Suburbs. No.2 Parramatta 2150

Parramatta tries desperately in vain to cling to the claim that it is Sydney's second CBD and whilst there are some very big names such as Deloitte who have massive towers there, the claim doesn't quite stack up. Yet Parramatta performs another trick in that it is the suburb that the suburb of Sydney 2000 wants desperately to be.

Parramatta was the second settlement in the fledgling colony of New South Wales and where Governor Phillip decided to put his seat of government. Old Government House which is set within the 260 acres of Parramatta Park and is really Australia's first public building with parts of it dating to 1799 when John Hunter knocked in and build upon Arthur Phillip's house. Parramatta generally was seen as the place where experiment and model farms were set up and from where the colony would start its expansion from.
Modern Parramatta although it is aware of its colonial past is actually probably a more modern thing than Sydney ever was.

On the southern side of the railway line is the incredibly monstrous Westfield Parramatta Shopping Centre. As he largest single shopping centre in the southern hemisphere it has such a tremendous economic pull, that even the shops in the immediately surrounding streets are affected. It is not until you jump the railway line and head a little way north that Parramatta plays its conjuring trick.
Church St heading north has a host of cafes and restaurants, all with awnings and/or umbrella shades right out on the pavement. In the suburb of Sydney proper, it is rare to see outside dining and if you do, it's usually only really a concession with patrons huddled in the spaces that aren't filled up with massive skycrapers. Parramatta's outside dining spaces; particularly on a warm spring night, fill the air with all sorts of exotic smells and the whole thing is reminiscent of Paris or Rome, even Melbourne but certainly not Sydney.
Across the River is the Parramatta Riverside Theatre. Not I'm not suggesting that Sydney doesn't have the theatre but Parramatta's theatre has a patronage that is just as likely to arrive in T-Shirt and jeans than suit and tie. Parramatta's theatre is therefore somehow accessible to the masses. Whilst you're not likely to see Shakespeare or Ibsen being performed there, you will see comedy that is as sharp as what's found elsewhere in the greater metropolitan area.

Of course it would be remiss of me to write of Parramatta without mentioning their Rugby League team, the Eels. The name "Eels" is quite an apt name for any team representing Parramatta, for the word itself in the Darug language means "the place where the eels lie down".
Parramatta has quite a range from which to draw Rugby League players from. There are a number of private schools in the program, boasting a strong tradition in the game and this probably stems from a wave of post-war immigration into the area.
Actually the very existence of Leagues Clubs itself is a uniquely Australian thing, for the idea of Leagues Clubs and RSL Clubs has no direct parallel existence either in the UK (where the sport came from) or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

Parramatta is probably more complete as a thing than the suburb of the City of Sydney and for that reason, I think that it's a better place; that's usually the case with a second attempt.

Horse 1328 - Ten Suburbs. No.1 Mosman 2088

Located just 8km from Sydney and on the north side of the harbour, Mosman is a prized suburb on the property ladder, but scratch the surface even just a tiny bit and you find that gilt finish is ever so painfully thin.

Mosman purports to be a one suburb, one postcode council*; however if you send a letter within 2088, you soon realise just how much of an outright lie this is. Contained within the boundaries are the localities of Balmoral, Clifton Gardens, The Spit, Georges Heights, Spit Junction as well as Mosman. There are even two Post Offices, namely Mosman Junction and Spit Junction.

*From council records, 29th Nov 2005.
http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/file_download/612/051128-agenda.pdf

A quick scan of the area reveals that there are no McDonald's, no KFC's, no Hungry Jacks', no Subways and only a single take-away only Pizza Hut which is so far removed from the centre of Mosman it may as well be in another suburb. There are two pubs but neither of them are close to the heart of Mosman (if it ever had one), and if you were to make a quick run from the incorrectly named Spit Junction to Mosman Junction, you'd notice that apart from the almost empty boutiques selling clothing with three and four figure price tags, every other shop is vacant.
Mosman is a suburb whose residents for the most part do not work, shop or play within its environs. Being so close to the city, they're more than likely to be employed, find entertainment and go shopping in the city proper across the harbour. In fact it you were to walk from Spit Junction to Mosman Junction, roughly a third or all shops are boarded up. If this is a suburb supposedly where the money of the wider metropolitan Sydney lives, the evidence on the ground is in short supply.
Yet parked on the sides of the roads are a never ending column of Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volvo battle tanks, used to cart around kiddywinks. Certainly there are plenty of places to buy coffee in Mosman, and it is in these sorts of places where we find the driver's of the over-represented SUVs taking a rest.

Of the boutiques which do exist in Mosman, most of them will have flagship stores in the city proper, and so it  would appear that the reason for their presence in the suburb is mainly as a window display for those other stores.

I wonder if Mosman does represent something of the character of wider Sydney. Mosman appears to be rather concerned with property prices, position and making that vital impression. Underneath the vizage and we find a largely soulless suburb. Perhaps like the spirit of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, Mosman is about making the statement that the people of Sydney know little of style, taste or culture, but isn't the harbour pretty?