Daytripper: 52 great days out in the Sydney area

Introduction

Daytripping has been part of Australian life since the Aborigines first went out hunting and returned with an armful of magpie geese and a couple of funny yarns to tell. In Victorian times one of life’s few pleasures was a family day at the seaside every now and then, even if no one was allowed to swim because the human body between the ankle and the eyebrow was a tool of Satan.

Life’s better if you put aside a bit of time to get together with loved ones, liked ones or imaginary friends and explore your backyard (that’s your metaphorical backyard; exploring your actual backyard is technically the same as staying at home unless you live on a cattle station).

But the daytrip’s in trouble. In fact, it should be on the endangered list along with the northern hairy-nosed wombat and the human telephonist. As life becomes busier, daytripping is in danger of becoming extinct. And for the sake of the nation’s mental and physical health — and the nice old ladies who volunteer at historic houses and wouldn’t have anything to do any more — that can’t be allowed to happen.

I was lucky: I was forced to daytrip when I started writing a weekly ‘Daytripper’ column for the Sun-Herald in April 2006. I swam at Palm Beach and talked Islam in Lakemba Mosque, cruised around Kings Cross in a hearse and hitched a ride with a riverboat postman, dived with sharks and walked an Aboriginal songline.

Daytrips can go wrong. But no matter how bad the traffic, the weather, the food or the company (don’t know about yours, but my imaginary friends can be annoying), daytrips are never a waste of time. You discover new places.

You splash about in water and climb hills. You learn about your history. You stop thinking about work. You eat hot chips made with varieties of potato you’ve never tried before. You may find you actually start talking to your partner (if you have one). At the very least, you’re not at home in the laundry emptying the lint-catcher.

This book is not just a list of places, phone numbers and opening times. There’s a bit of that, but mostly it’s about personal experience — about 52 daytrips I did.

I paid my own way for each one. Well, actually the Sun-Herald paid my way, but the important fact is that I didn’t accept any freebies and didn’t feel obliged to say something was great when it wasn’t, or to leave out the dud bits (which is a shame in a way because I’m partial to gifts and can be bought quite cheaply).

Through doing these daytrips I’ve seen sides of Sydney and its surrounds that I’ll never forget. It’s an amazing place. I hope you’ll be inspired to explore it yourself.

If you don’t, you know what to expect: old ladies in bikinis outside historic houses saying, ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

CHAPTER ONE

Wild

Introduction

Australia is blessed when it comes to wildlife. Not only are so many Australian animals extremely exciting in that they might kill you, but a large number are very silly looking.

While an impromptu encounter in the wild with a shark or a red-bellied black snake might not appeal to the average daytripper, seeing such creatures in captivity clearly does. Not that the animals have to be dangerous or Australian to get the crowds in.

At the Australian Reptile Park on the Central Coast the punters are three deep all the way around the square where a spider expert demonstrates how to catch a funnel web.

In Manly, children watch through a thick-glassed tunnel as mums and dads in scuba gear are frisked by stingrays and investigated by sharks.

In the western suburbs, at Fairfield City Farm, a farmer shears a sheep in front of an audience of school kids. At Taronga Park Zoo, on the north shore, campers who stayed behind after the gates have closed see lions playing football.

And at Sydney Wildlife World, in Darling Harbour, wallabies laze around in red dirt and gaze at the city skyline.

For other wild daytrips, see:

La Perouse • Blue Mountains Walkabout

Botanic Gardens • Australian Museum

Ku-ring-gai Chase • Weird Sydney

Australian Reptile Park

Hit the ground running

Things can get hairy at the Australian Reptile Park

Forget Bad Santa. The Australian Reptile Park has got Bad Snake Man. With jokes about colostomies and how well endowed his wombat is, Mick makes Billy Bob Thornton look cuddly. ‘Why do we take a picture of you?’ he asks a nervous young girl who’s been plucked from the crowd and photographed with a Burmese python around her neck. ‘It’s to give the plastic surgeons a guide.’

Rosie the alligator grew up in his house, Mick tells the crowd. ‘You may have seen my daughter around the park — hobbling on her wooden leg.’ Any complaints, he says, should be addressed to the complaints officer: Mick.

With a show about every half-hour, there’s no time for complacency. Just like in the wild, it’s survival of the fittest. Sit down for a cup of tea and you might miss the alligator feeding. Go to the loo and you may never learn how to catch a funnel web.

The Daytripper Family decides to operate like a meerkat mob: one of us always on tiptoes, alert to the possibility of a show starting, while the others gorge on hot chips.

We missed the first two shows. For all I know the Galapagos tortoise feeding involves them jumping through hoops with lettuce leaves balanced on their noses, and the funnel web spider milking is done by a row of little people on little stools, squeezing the spiders’ little udders.

I can report, however, on the feeding of Eric the crocodile, a 60-year-old who has apparently become ‘Australia’s most loved crocodile’ since he was moved to the Central Coast from the Northern Territory as punishment for terrorising an Aboriginal community in the wild and biting off two female crocodiles’ heads in captivity. There’s actually not a lot of competition for the ‘Australia’s most loved crocodile’ title, but no one’s game to tell Eric that.

He is a giant — he weighs 750 kilograms and is 5 metres long — and considering his track record, I wouldn’t be volunteering to be one of his feeders. They stand by the side of his pool and hit the water with a stick, and when Eric hauls his gargantuan frame onto dry land and rears up on his hind legs, they hit him on the snout a few times with a small chicken. Why Eric takes the chicken when he looks perfectly capable of taking the man is a mystery … up there with the Bermuda Triangle and why people keep buying Blu-Tack.

Though Eric is the size of, well, a large crocodile, his pool is the size of a large jacuzzi, which seems a bit unfair when the alligators — mere blow-ins from America — get an entire lagoon in which to flare their nostrils and look menacing.

But unlike the alligators, he needs heated water, and the park insists that crocodiles only move when they have to and are quite happy just lying in the one spot all day.

Besides, he’s retired. It would be too much to look after a whole billabong, what with all the housework.*

As well as entertaining adults and terrifying children, the reptile park claims to be the only zoo in NSW involved in a breeding program to save the Tasmanian tiger, and the only one to collect venom for the production of antivenom.

Rather than kill the next funnel web you see, the park would like you to catch it and hand it over, to help save a life. Catching one is a simple case of using a jam jar. They can’t jump and they can’t climb smooth surfaces, so it won’t get out and bite you while you’re putting the lid on (don’t forget some air holes, or the RSPCA will be after you).

After a walk around the park’s spider exhibit a funnel web won’t seem so scary, anyway. The South American tarantulas are the size of kittens and just as hairy — they make Aussie arachnids look like amateurs: ‘Call that a spider, gringo? This is a spider.’

History

It didn’t take too much guessing to work out what Eric Worrell wanted to be when he grew up. As a boy he charged a penny for admittance to his backyard zoo in Paddington — the star attractions included snakes, lizards and frogs from Centennial Park and a dingo he’d picked up as a stray in the city.

Reptiles were his favourites, though, and he got the chance to see the big ones up close when he moved to Darwin during World War II to work as a blacksmith. After a brief stint back in Sydney he returned to the Northern Territory and took up freelance journalism to pay the bills while devoting the bulk of his time to studying reptiles, with the help of Aborigines in Arnhem Land.

He opened the Ocean Beach Aquarium at Umina on the Central Coast in 1948, and soon became a serum provider for the Commonwealth, collecting snakes in the Territory and far north Queensland and taking them down to his aquarium, which also had a snake pit.

The aquarium moved to North Gosford in 1953 and became the Australian Reptile Park. Ten years later Worrell commissioned the construction of the park’s mascot, a 30-metre, 40-tonne concrete replica of a dinosaur, Ploddy.

Worrell received an MBE in 1970 for his work in the development of antivenoms. He died in 1987, aged 63.

The park moved to its current location in 1996 (and Ploddy with it, after a parade through the streets of Gosford), but burnt down following an electrical fault in July 2000. Almost all the indoor animals were killed. An exception was a female alligator-snapping turtle who was nicknamed Terminator after forging her way through the embers to freedom.

Snakes and spiders were rounded up all across Australia in a bid to keep the antivenom program running, and after some speedy construction work the park reopened — just 7 weeks after the fire.

While you’re there

Go really wild. Brisbane Water National Park has fantastic views of the Hawkesbury River, plus wildflowers and accessible Aboriginal engravings (www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au).

Get in the saddle. Glenworth Valley Horse Riding claims to be Australia’s biggest riding school and offers pony rides for the nippers as well as trail rides on 50 kilometres of wilderness trails (phone 4375 1222; www.glenworth.com.au).

Explore the Yarramalong and Dooralong valleys. There’s a maize maze, a lavender farm, a macadamia farm, stunning scenery and heaps more horseriding. See Yarramalong Valley Maize Maze.

Take the bait. They love their fishing on the Central Coast. Take your pick from lakes, estuaries or the deep blue sea (phone 1300 132 975; www.visitcentralcoast.com.au).

Climb 96 steps. Tours of Norah Head Lighthouse run on Saturdays and Sundays from 10am till 1.30pm, and on Tuesdays and Fridays during the school holidays. Book ahead (phone 1300 132 975; www.visitcentralcoast.com.au).

The small print

WHAT: Australian Reptile Park

WHERE: Somersby, Central Coast

WHEN: 9am–5pm every day

HOW TO GET THERE: It’s about 1 hour north of Sydney by car or 1 hour 30 minutes from Central to Gosford by train, followed by a 15-minute ($20–$30) taxi ride. If you produce a taxi docket you’ll get 25 per cent off the entry price.

HOW MUCH: Adults $20, concessions $13, children $10, families $52

PHONE: 4340 1022

WEBSITE: www.reptilepark.com.au

Fairfield City Farm

Animal magnetism

Fairfield City Farm will captivate the kids till the cows come home

The children swarm across Fairfield City Farm like plagues of red and navy blue ants, scurrying tirelessly from pigpen to cattle yard, chook shed to koala cage, picking up gigantic lumps of facts and figures to carry home.

A hairy pig called Tiny lies on his side, eyes closed, pretending to sleep while a host of blue-uniformed munchkins scream at him: ‘Wake up, wake up, oink, oink, oink!’

A sign on the pen says pigs are usually sold for meat at 18 weeks. ‘Eighteen weeks?’ thinks the pig. ‘How come I got 5 years?’

From there it’s on to the cow milking, where a farm worker keeps children behind the yellow line by turning a teat sideways and firing a squirt of full cream at transgressors. It’s like turning a water cannon on rioters.

The working dog show gets off to a bad start. The shortsighted hound can’t find the sheep (though they’re in plain view at the other end of the paddock) and the farmhand has to go and point him in the right direction. Where’s Babe, the sheep-wrangling pig, when you need him?

To his credit the dog recovers and puts on an otherwise flawless display. And he’s not the only one. Farmer Ron turns out to be a handy sheep shearer.

He opens with comedy: ‘OK, we’re here to milk a hippopotamus.’ And then turns to trickery: ‘Hands up if you’re not here.’ Can’t believe I fell for it.

The little ’uns lap it up, though their attention starts to wander during the shearing of the brilliantly handled and therefore very compliant Baaabara. Perhaps it’s because Farmer Ron takes so long about it — at 10 minutes he is at least 9 minutes outside the world record.

The kids start practising their moos and cock-a-doodle-doos. Tough crowd.

You’d have to practise pretty hard to shear a sheep in anything like world record time (36 seconds), but with the going rate for shearers only $2.10 a sheep there’s plenty of incentive to get the job done quickly.

It looks like back-breaking work. A real man’s work. Personally, I’d be trying to convince the sheep and their owners that the bald look is out, the afro is in, and maybe they’d just like a shampoo and blow-dry this year.

Farmer Ron also turns out to be an expert whip man, showing off the stockman’s crack (not a low-slung pair of jeans, but a flick of the whip out in front of the body) and the cattleman’s crack (off to the side for when you’re on horseback).

He then warns about the tourist’s crack (right in front of your face, splitting you open from eye to mouth with the whip you’ve just bought from the souvenir shop).

It’s a brutal story for the nippers, but they tell it how it is here: the kids learn that these animals aren’t just for cuddling, they’re for meat.

The farm begins where suburbia ends. One minute you’re in lifeless streets, cruising past McMansions with double garages, the next you’ve fallen off the end of the world and landed on 240 hectares of outback. It should be heritage listed before someone turns it into housing estates.

The kids love it, the grown-ups love it, even the pigs love it. Though they’d love it a lot more without all the shouting.

History

Scotsman John Jamieson was granted 240 hectares of land in Darug country between 1806 and 1823 and in 1826 he did something with it — he built three huts and a dairy, at a cost of £100.

He named the property Coulmesly Hill, but the spelling was later changed to Calmsley Hill, because you have to be Scottish to know how Coulmesly is pronounced.

The farm was sold eight times after Jamieson’s death in 1850, before the Big Brother Movement bought it for £12,750 in 1947.

The Big Brother Movement may sound like an Orwellian engine of state terror but in fact it was a charity that helped young British migrants settle in Australia by giving them accommodation and training them in farm work. It was established by Sir Richard Linton, a pro-British philanthropist and politician, who had arrived in Sydney from New Zealand knowing his big brother was already there to help him.

Established in 1925 (24 years before George Orwell’s 1984 gave the term ‘Big Brother’ more sinister connotations), the movement stopped operating during the depression and World War II but bounced back with the purchase of the farm, which was dedicated to all the ‘little brothers’ who had lost their lives in the war.

Almost 4000 teenage Brits passed through the farm between 1947 and 1971. The movement expanded the dairy herd, established a piggery, a poultry farm, an orchard and an irrigated market garden, and built a steel water tower that’s still standing.

The movement sold the farm to the state in 1972 and it became part of a services corridor providing water, gas and electricity to western Sydney. Part of the farm was leased for dairy farming, and in 1984 Fairfield City Council took up the lease and established Fairfield City Farm.

The Big Brother Movement still exists, supporting underprivileged young Australians, and giving them the chance to broaden their horizons by visiting the UK.

While you’re there

Get airborne. Several flying schools operate at Bankstown Airport. An introductory half-hour lesson is $70 (www.bankstownairport.com.au).

Think big. The Big Chook at Mount Vernon is a 4-metre high chicken made out of steel, chicken wire (naturally) and fibreglass. It’s at the Big Chook Egg Farm, 350 Mount Vernon Road (phone 9826 1305). For more on daytrips to Big Things, see Bells Line of Road.

Punt. Head out to Warwick Farm Racecourse, where the horses go like the clappers — about the same speed as your cash is likely to leave your wallet, unless it’s your lucky day. It’s on the Hume Highway, Warwick Farm (race dates at www.ajc.com.au).

Take a stroll. Western Sydney Regional Park has picnic spots, walking trails, rolling hills and a modern play area. The Sydney International Equestrian Centre is in the park, but you’ll need your own horse. The entrance to the Pimelia picnic area and play area is off the roundabout at the junction of Cowpasture Road and The Horsley Drive (www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au).

Picture this. The Fairfield City Museum and Gallery has a community exhibition space, a vintage village (where you can scoff Devonshire tea), a museum dedicated to Fairfield and a gallery. It’s on the corner of The Horsley Drive and Oxford Street, Smithfield (phone 9609 3993; www.fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au).

The small print

WHAT: Fairfield City Farm

WHERE: Darling Street, Abbotsbury

WHEN: 9am–4.30pm every day except Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and Good Friday

HOW TO GET THERE: From Central it’s a 40-minute train ride to Fairfield station and a 35-minute bus ride to the farm. Or it’s a 50-minute drive from the CBD.

HOW MUCH: Adults $16, children $10, concessions $12, families $45

PHONE: 9823 3222

WEBSITE: www.cityfarm.com.au

Shark Feed Extreme

Jaws and effect

Dad goes to extremes to keep the kids entertained

A 3.5-metre shark with three rows of haphazardly arranged, very pointy teeth emerges from the gloom. He’s heading straight for me. There’s no doubt he’s lined me up. And he knows I know it.

He’s staring at me with his piggy eyes. And I’m wide-eyed, staring back, the bubbles leaving my regulator in a rapid-fire stream of gulps, those little spheres of air desperate to get up to the surface, where they belong.

He’s 5 metres away, 4, 3, 2, 1. I drop down to my knees slowly — there’s no other way underwater — and kneel behind the waist-high metal fence that is my only protection, and the shark passes overhead, all barbed fangs, hunger and muscle. He’s so close I could tickle his chin.

A few metres away another scuba diver on his knees takes a fish from a bucket and holds it up. One of the half-a-dozen circling sharks pulls out of its flight path and descends. The diver lets go of the fish, leaving it floating there for an instant before the shark’s jaw seems to dislocate, teeth and gums extending out of the mouth like Albert Steptoe’s false teeth, then snap down on the fish, which is devoured with a shake of the head and a quiver of gills.

My dive trainer’s words echo around the more cavernous reaches of my skull. ‘Awesome chompers,’ he’d said before the dive. Naturally, I thanked him.

Suddenly the feeding diver’s buddy grabs him by the tank and drags him backwards, out of the way of another shark that is descending on him from behind. My dive partner taps me on the shoulder and I turn to see another giant shark behind us. I duck as it glides over my head, its eyes darting, white with a black pupil and no iris — like the undead, with fins.

I turn to my