The Hawkesbury River: A Social and Natural History

Prologue – the best hidden river in the world

This is a book about the Hawkesbury River, a river described recently as ‘the best hidden river in the world’.² To early British explorers the river concealed itself at the rear of a large embayment, Broken Bay, surrounded by rugged land and behind a zigzag of steep sandstone cliffs. Only later, in the most upstream reaches, does it open out into a wide, fertile floodplain with obvious agricultural potential to the European eye. To many contemporary Australians it is a hidden river because, despite lying only a hour’s drive north of Sydney, the Hawkesbury plays only a minor role in their lives and, other than for those fortunate enough to live along its banks, regrettably few people pay it close attention. Some recent books on the city of Sydney simply ignore the river completely. Delia Falconer’s (2010) Sydney, for example, did not mention the river at all, quite in contrast to the enthusiastic treatment the Hawkesbury and its surrounding national parks received at the hands of Ruth Park in her The Companion Guide to Sydney of 1973.

As Harry Recher pointed out in his Foreword, for many years he, like presumably most other Sydneysiders, blithely crossed the river on a regular basis without really seeing the marvellous waterway that lay directly below him. Seemingly only artists have attempted to make seen the unseen river and, somewhat mystifyingly, the way the Hawkesbury has been a muse for artists, poets and song-writers is a topic that has rarely, if ever, been tackled in a coherent way. Perhaps this is a symptom of a more generic malaise, given that the Hawkesbury lacks an up-to-date monograph that draws together what is known about the river’s origins, its biota and ecology, how it simultaneously formed a barrier and a conduit to human passage, and of its strategic importance as a gateway for a possible invasion of Sydney from the north. In contrast, we are awash with books on the Murray–Darling River system and, to a lesser extent, even on hydrologically minor streams such as the Yarra River in Melbourne, on which at least four books have been published in the past decade alone. My book attempts to redress this neglect, and to show how wonderful and how valuable the Hawkesbury River is, and why it needs and deserves our utmost protection.

Given its title – a social and natural history – the book is shamelessly eclectic. It is not a book solely on the European social history of the Hawkesbury. That topic has been addressed in many earlier works, commencing in the late 1960s with Charles Swancott’s (1967) Hawkesbury River Saga, soon supplemented with Doug Bowd’s (1969) Macquarie Country and the 1986 follow-up Hawkesbury Journey, and reaching a recent pinnacle with Jan Barkley-Jack’s (2009) Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed.³ Nor is it a collation of memoirs. That field also has been covered well, such as in Micke Joffe’s (1992) Yarns & Photos, Trevor Brown’s (1997) Working on the Hawkesbury … a Memoir, John Holland’s (1998) Growing Up on the Hawkesbury, and Tom Richmond’s (2005) Bar Island and Lower Hawkesbury River Settlements.

Instead, the book is an attempt to draw together a wide range of topics into a single overview of the river, how and when it was formed, how it functions ecologically, how it has influenced humans and their patterns of settlement and, in turn, how it has been affected by those settlements and their people. There have been many studies of the impact of humans on the Hawkesbury and its catchment⁴, and the monograph most similar in scope is Sue Rosen’s (1995) Losing Ground: An Environmental History of the Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment. But my book differs from Sue’s in many ways. The obvious one is that hers is now more than 20 years old, and much has happened in the intervening two decades: foremost is that the population of the Greater Sydney Region has increased by ~800 000. Losing Ground examined the Hawkesbury River and the Nepean River together; I deal only with the Hawkesbury and its tributaries, especially the Grose, Colo and Macdonald Rivers. Sue used a chronological approach to describe the impact of humans on the river, focusing on Europeans. I take a thematic approach and my book contains far more on geology, geomorphology, biology and ecology. Water quality is examined in detail, as are hydrology, rocks and soils, and plants and animals. Sue was interested mostly in how humans have altered the river. I am just as interested in how the river has influenced humans.

Because the book is more a synthesis of other people’s work than a report on my original investigations, it is inevitable that some topics are covered more fully than others. It was not possible to include every subject I wanted to, nor in many cases to the depth that I would have liked. In some cases the omissions spring from gaps in the literature, and these may provide pointers to where additional effort could be directed in the future. In other cases, I simply ran out of space to deal with them adequately. In terms of what I did decide to include, three criteria were applied.

First, could I add anything useful to what has already been said about the river? Despite the amount of material available on the European history of the Hawkesbury, there is almost nothing on how the river has inspired artists and other creative folk over the past 200+ years; Chapter 15 addresses that topic. The quite exceptional mosaic of protected areas that surround the river – and safeguard its water quality and biological diversity – also lack a recent, coherent and integrated treatment; this topic I tackle in Chapter 7. The way the river has acted simultaneously as a barrier and as a conduit to human movement has rarely been brought out explicitly; those topics are covered in Chapters 11, 12 and 13. And the river’s military and strategic significance is also somewhat of a neglected field. What I have been able to glean from the available sources – and it’s a fascinating story – is set out in Chapter 14.

Second, how does the Hawkesbury River sit within the broader perspective of other Australian rivers? Does the Hawkesbury have a unique combination of geology, soil, vegetation and land-use that makes it exceptional in the Australian context? If so, have these fundamental characteristics informed the way the Hawkesbury has been used by generations of humans, and in turn how have these uses modified the river? Questions such as these were a crucial desideratum and they inform almost all the book. They make up what Matthew Colloff in his book on the River Red Gum Eucalyptus camaldulensis recently called ‘environmental history’, which focuses on how nature has influenced people.⁵ It can be differentiated from ‘historical ecology’, which focuses on the converse: how people have modified nature.⁶ Almost all books on Australian landscapes and their rivers focus on the latter, yet it is arguably the former that is just as interesting. In fact, the historian John Hirst made the astonishing claim in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005, page 63) that, with regard to the impact of Europeans on the Australian environment:

The one subject which demands that the whole human occupation of the continent be considered is a history of the land itself. But whatever the influences of people on the land, the land has not had a determining influence on the nature of human society which has existed upon it.

This seems to me an exceptionally odd interpretation. It is certainly not one shared by another historian, Tom Griffiths, who showed clearly in his 2016 book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft how the Australian environment structured not only the development of the country but the way that development was interpreted by historians. Similarly, I believe that the qualities of the Hawkesbury and its catchment have greatly influenced the way humans have used the river and its surrounding lands, and in turn those qualities have often been substantially modified by that use. Much of the book attempts to illuminate this two-way interaction.

Third, is the matter important, relevant or, quite simply, just plain interesting? So much of a river’s human interest comes from those strange little things that define a people, a place and a time. An example is the proposition put forward by the Commonwealth Government in the 1960s to build a nuclear reactor on the mid-Hawkesbury, at Spencer. I imagine not many people, even residents of Spencer, know their quirky little village was selected to be part of a great ‘nation-building’ enterprise in the mid-20th century. This surprising initiative aimed not only to generate enormous amounts of electricity for housing and for industry, but to produce plutonium from which tens of atomic bombs could be constructed and the country thus defended against marauding hordes from Asia.

The question then arises: ‘To whom is this book directed?’ On the one hand it will, I hope, be of interest to those who count themselves lucky to live alongside the Hawkesbury or to visit it regularly – to boat, to fish, to photograph, to botanise or to walk in the surrounding bushland. I hope that they will learn a little more about how the river was formed and how it functions ecologically. On the other hand, if the book prompts a recognition and eventually a love of the river among those who do not know it well already, so much the better. They may be inspired to learn more and to enjoy it with sympathy and with understanding. Unless this occurs, the Hawkesbury is doomed and:

We will be hated by our children’s children and all those who come after them for having destroyed the world of nature, leaving them without choice, opportunity, or freedom.⁷

It is my hope too that any new-found awareness translates into a ferocious motivation to protect and conserve and, where possible, improve the health of the river. Indeed, in my quieter moments I sometimes wonder whether the book is actually a love letter to the Hawkesbury, written by an absent paramour who simply wishes the very best for his beloved.

Given the anticipated audience, how should the book be approached? Only the bravest – or the comfortably retired – would try to read it in one go, starting at the Prologue and ending at the Epilogue, reading all chapters in between in sequence. Instead, it might be easier to dip into the different chapters, one at a time. If your primary interest is water, go to Chapters 3, 4 and 5, which deal with the estuary, hydrology and water quality, respectively. If your interest is more biological or conservation-orientated, go to Chapters 6 and 7. If you want to know more about the social history of the river, go to the chapters on Aborigines and Europeans, Chapters 8, 9 and 10. Roads, bridges, railways and ships? – Chapters 11, 12 and 13. Strategic significance? – Chapter 14. Artistic inspiration and how the river has been portrayed by generations of artists and sung about by musicians? – Chapter 15. Each chapter has been written to stand alone, and each one can be read more or less in isolation. You will see that each chapter also includes as many supporting references, provided as endnotes, as space would allow. I felt it would be useful to provide these references so that readers could easily look up any topic that caught their attention. The endnotes show just the author and date; a full citation for each reference is found at the end of the book.

Endnotes

¹  Hutchinson (2016)

²  Notes to the soundtrack by Burkhard Dallwitz, The Secret River. ABC Classics 368884

³  Other notable books on the European history of the Hawkesbury include Jack (1986, 2010); the two books edited by John and Jocelyn Powell (Powell 1997b; Powell 1998b) and the book edited by Powell and Banks (1990); Ross (1989); Barkley and Nichols (1994); Dharug and Lower Hawkesbury Historical Society (2002); and the collation of literature sources complied by Powell (2006)

⁴  For example Wolanski (1977); National Trust of Australia (1979); Davey et al. (1980); Toghill (1981); Department of Environment and Planning (1983); State Pollution Control Commission (1983); Day (1986); Warner (1991); Burgess (1992); Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Trust (1998); Simmons and Scott (2006); Collis (2013)

⁵  Collof (2014)

⁶  Note that not all ecologists follow this distinction. Bowman (2001), for example, used the two terms in a quite different way

⁷  Recher (2015, page 2)

1

Geography – physical and human

How to tackle this chapter

This chapter provides an overview of the physical and social geography of the Hawkesbury River. Because there is so much ground to cover − both literally and metaphorically − it may look daunting at first inspection. However, this densely packed information on localities, place names and tributaries provides the foundation essential for all the subsequent chapters. With the groundwork safely laid, the book can then open out to unpack the various stories I want to tell. The chapter has five components, the first four of which have a strong physiographical orientation. The first relates to the catchment of the Hawkesbury River and the geological depression, the Sydney Basin, in which that catchment is located. The tricky question of where the river commences and ends is tackled in this part too. The second describes the waterways that make up the Hawkesbury system, with a focus on the main-stem of the river and on how various sections of it were divided into identifiable Reaches in early colonial times. The third describes in greater detail the tributaries that discharge into the main-stem. Islands − long a subject of fascination to biologists, geographers, novelists and artists − are addressed in the fourth component. The chapter ends with a demographic element, a description of the human settlements intimately associated with the river.

The Hawkesbury-Nepean River system

The Hawkesbury River is part of a much larger river system, known collectively as the Hawkesbury-Nepean. The catchment of the two rivers and their tributaries, shown in Fig. 1.1, drains an area of ~22 000 km². The Nepean and the Hawkesbury are, in fact, the same river. The part upstream of the confluence with the Grose River is known as the Nepean; the part downstream, the Hawkesbury. They have different appellations as a consequence of the order in which they were they were discovered and named in the first years of the British colonisation of New South Wales. As described in Chapter 9, Governor Arthur Phillip gave the Hawkesbury River its name in a dispatch to Lord Sydney of 13 February 1790, a note that briefly described the various expeditions Phillip had led to the Hawkesbury region. He named the river in honour of Charles Jenkinson, 1st Earl of Liverpool and Lord Hawkesbury, a Tory politician who at the time was President of the Board of Trade. Aborigines called it Deerubbun or Deerubbin, and on and off it has been known under that name by many locals ever since. Captain David Collins, the colony’s lieutenant governor and judge advocate, recorded in the 1790s the Aboriginal name as Dee-rubb-in, which in the Gandangara language meant yams, so the term could have meant the plants that grew abundantly on the floodplain of the river and which provided Aboriginal people with an important supply of food.¹ Old settlers sometimes called the river the ‘Oxboro’.² The river was formally reassigned the geographic name ‘Hawkesbury’ in August 1969, under the Geographical Names Act 1966.

It took some time for the British to work out that the Nepean and the Hawkesbury were the same river. The Nepean River had been ‘discovered’ in June 1789 by Lieutenant Captain Watkin Tench, who at the time was in command of the outpost at Rose Hill (today’s Parramatta³). The posting meant that, much to Tench’s chagrin, he could not participate in the early exploration of the Hawkesbury with Phillip. In the 1790 dispatch, Phillip suggested that the Nepean River was likely continuous with the Hawkesbury River but that the relationship between the two had yet to be clarified. The Nepean River was known then as Tench’s River, and it kept this colloquial name for some time, even after having received its formal (and current) name. The riddle was finally solved in 1791, when Tench and Second Lieutenant William Dawes led further explorations to the west of Rose Hill and, in the words of Tench, showed that they were ‘… the one and the same river’. The Aboriginal name of the Nepean was Yandhai.

Figure 1.1: Catchment of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system. The catchment of the Hawkesbury system is shown with the broken cerise line; that of the Nepean system to the south is indicated with the broken orange line.

The Nepean River is not the focus of this book, but as it discharges directly into and is contiguous with the Hawkesbury it must receive some attention. It supplies most of Sydney’s potable water supply, and the damming and regulation of its tributaries have affected the volume of fresh water that flows into the Hawkesbury. The Nepean is (or, was) also, with inputs from the Grose and Colo Rivers, the main source of the floodwaters that regularly inundate the Hawkesbury floodplain, a topic covered in Chapter 4. The headwaters of the Nepean River are near Robertson, ~100 km south of Sydney and only ~15 km from the ocean. The Nepean’s main tributaries are the Avon, Cordeaux and Cataract Rivers, which together make up the major eastern tributary of the Hawkesbury-Nepean system. Just after Penrith the Nepean joins the Grose River, and it is here that the Hawkesbury River commences. Or does it?

Where does the Hawkesbury start and end?

Setting the upstream limit

The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales states unequivocally where the Hawkesbury River commences: at the junction of the Grose and Nepean Rivers, ~4 km west of the city of Richmond. It goes on to say that the river then flows ‘… in a meandering course generally north-east and south-east for ~120 km into Broken Bay’.⁴ This delimitation agrees closely with the boundaries identified by Governor Phillip. In a dispatch to London, Phillip suggested that:

… the fall and sudden contraction of that noble river [the Hawkesbury] are very sufficient reasons for confining its name from where it empties itself into Broken Bay up to the fall; and for continuing the name given to the river (Nepean) which was discovered in going westward from Prospect Hill [near the site of present-day Marrong Reserve, east of Penrith].⁵

Some other descriptions, however, are not so clear-cut, neither are they in agreement with Phillip’s or more modern interpretations. In his 1958 book Sydneyside Scenery, for example, the geographer Griffith Taylor put the start of the Hawkesbury as somewhere between Windsor and Wilberforce, upstream of where the Cattai River comes in, and where its ‘… waters become salty’.⁶ Most people prefer and use the upstream definition provided by the Geographical Names Board. Given the location (near today’s township of Richmond) from which Governor Phillip chose the name of the river during his exploration of 1789, it is clear that he meant to include everything below the confluence of the Grose River too.

Setting the downstream limit

Defining the river’s lower limit, where the Hawkesbury debouches into Broken Bay, is surprisingly problematic, given that the Geographical Names Board does not provide an unambiguous seaward limit and few scientific references are willing to commit themselves to an unequivocal downstream boundary either. Griffith Taylor implied that the downstream limit was just below Wisemans Ferry, stating on page 66–67 of Sydneyside Scenery that ‘Hereabouts Broken Bay gives place to the Hawkesbury River; although really there is no great difference except in the width of the saltwater estuary, for both are due to the drowning of the same valley.’ In this lay the root of the problem, for the Hawkesbury River and Broken Bay, like the Hawkesbury and the Nepean, are part of a continuum. The difference is that the upstream limits can be set with reference to the confluence with another river; the downstream limit requires that some other criterion be applied.

For many people, the lower limit of the river is set by the line joining Juno Point on the northern or left-hand side of the river with Flint and Steel Point (on the Lambert Peninsula) on the southern or right-hand side. This boundary is implied in the positioning of geographic and maritime names on the 1:40 000 Department of Lands map Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park Tourist Map (second edition, no date). As this is also the smooth-water plying limit beyond which houseboats are not supposed to proceed, at least according to the line shown on the 2009 Boating Map for the Mid to Lower Hawkesbury River provided by NSW Maritime (Map 9B), such a boundary has a simple and practical reality. But it is not one shared by other cruising manuals. My Cruisegide [sic] to the Hawkesbury of 1961, for example, stated definitively on page 35 that ‘The entrance to the river lies between Juno Head on the east and Eleanor Bluffs on the west.’⁷ This line is implied also in Alan Lucas’s (2010a) Cruising the New South Wales Coast, which on page 153 commented that the Hawkesbury starts ‘2 miles west of Broken Bay, between Juno Point and Eleanor Bluff.’ But the 1961 Cruisegide complicated matters by limiting Broken Bay to the line between Juno Head and Challenger Head, and this creates a large triangle of open water between Eleanor Bluff and Challenger Head on the south and Juno Head on the north with no clear home. The implication in the Cruisegide is that this is Cowan Creek. Such an interpretation is supported by the book having separate chapters devoted to Broken Bay, Pittwater, Cowan Creek, Brisbane Water, and the Hawkesbury and its tributaries, with Cowan Creek not included in the latter. There seems to be no practical, geomorphological or hydrological reason to exclude Cowan Creek from the rest of the Hawkesbury system and thereby making it either a stand-alone waterway or a part of Broken Bay.

Conversely, a broader definition of the downstream limit of the river might go even beyond the line between Juno Point and Flint and Steel Point, so as to include more easterly waters, from say Middle Head to the north and West Head to the south. Such a boundary is implied by the third edition (2000) of the 1:25 000 Broken Bay topographic map published by Land and Property Information NSW (Map 9130–1N). It also coincides, more or less, with the easternmost limit stated by that most quoted of sources, Wikipedia: 151°18′0″E.⁸ As the expanded delimitation would include Patonga Creek, the most seaward township of the Hawkesbury would then be Patonga.

I think the most parsimonious definition is that the downstream limit of the Hawkesbury River is set by the line between Juno Point and Flint and Steel Point. This is the boundary that I have adopted (even if a bit loosely) in the book. It means that the most downstream settlements are Brooklyn on the main-stem of the Hawkesbury and Cottage Point on Cowan Creek, and that Cowan Creek is, like Berowra Creek, considered part of the Hawkesbury River system. By implication, I have largely excluded from this book consideration of Brisbane Water to the north of Broken Bay and Pittwater to the south, not because they are uninteresting but merely to keep this whole enterprise within reasonable limits. Lion Island is excluded for the same reason. Even so, the downstream definition is inevitably permeable. In keeping with the three criteria established in the Prologue, when something of interest crops up that is outside these boundaries, I’ve included it. The Lambert Peninsula and Barrenjoey Head, for example, are included because they are part of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park and this protected area more or less encircles the lower Hawkesbury River and several of its southern tributaries. Warrah Sanctuary, just to the east of Patonga, is also included, because it is part of Brisbane Water National Park and, like Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, is closely linked with the Hawkesbury and owes its existence largely to the foresight and perseverance of one remarkable person, in this case Miss Minard Crommelin. Her role in establishing Warrah Sanctuary, and Frederick Eccleston Du Faur’s role in establishing Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, are covered in Chapter 7.

And what about the tributaries?

While it is unequivocal where the main-stem of the Hawkesbury River commences, establishing the upstream limit of the river’s tributaries – and thus setting the book’s geographic scope – is the most problematic task of all. If I included all the country drained by streams that discharge into the Hawkesbury, the book would be 1000 pages or more. This is the case because two of the Hawkesbury’s major tributaries – the Grose River and the Colo River – have their origins in the Blue Mountains. In turn, the Blue Mountains are important because of the way they constrained human passage across the upper Hawkesbury’s tributaries and from there into the western hinterland. Bells Line of Road is of interest because it starts at the historic Kurrajong Road Bridge at North Richmond and provides a northerly route across the Blue Mountains from the Hawkesbury, the only such direct route from Sydney across the Great Divide other than the Great Western Highway at Springwood/Katoomba. The Putty Road – the remade but ancient Howes Track – was the earliest overland route from the Hawkesbury River north to the Hunter River. It passes through Wollemi National Park, also a component of The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Yengo National Park, through which the Macdonald River flows, is similarly a part of the World Heritage Area. Thus, although this book is not about the Blue Mountains, it cannot avoid them. Even more so than Brisbane Water and Pittwater, the Blue Mountains deserve their own treatment. They are not the focus of this book, but I include material on them when necessary. The convention I have adopted is the streams that discharge into the Grose, Colo or Macdonald Rivers are, in principle, all within scope. They all lie to the east of the Great Divide and can thus be considered as ‘coastal rivers’, even if in fact they lie quite some distance from the sea.

And this provides a convenient segue into the geological structure that constrains the Hawkesbury and its tributaries: the Sydney Basin.

The Sydney Basin

The way a river flows through a given landscape is understandable in large part in terms of the underlying geology, which in turn strongly influences the topography of the catchment. Over 100 years ago J.W. Gregory, the eminent Melbourne-based geographer, made the point that:

The course of a river is the result of a struggle between its waters and the ground of its basin. The water that falls as rain seeks the shortest, steepest route to the sea; and the rocks of which a country is made obstruct the water, and prevent it having a straight, direct course. A river begins as a trickle of rain-water, flowing in gutters down the hill sides; this rill is joined by water that oozes from sodden swamps, or is discharged from springs upon the hill flanks. Many rills of water join to form a stream; streams unite again and again, until the drainage of a wide area is collected into a large and vigorous river. The river rushes with boisterous energy across the part of the basin where the slope is steep; it jumps over rock ledges as waterfalls; it dashes down steep banks as cataracts; it wears away its bed and banks, and carries the material down stream. At length the river slackens its pace, as it meanders across the level lowlands near the sea.⁹

So it is with the Hawkesbury-Nepean, which lies almost in the middle of a large geological structure in eastern New South Wales known as the Sydney Basin. The Hawkesbury drains most of the centre of this depression. The northern parts are drained by the Hunter River, the southern parts by the Shoalhaven River. The ~40-km long George Downes Drive, from near Peats Ridge in the south to Laguna in the north, runs along the ridge top that almost completely separates the catchments of the Hawkesbury and Hunter River systems. Several other smaller rivers – the Hacking, George and Parramatta – drain very small catchments within the Sydney Basin.

A minor complication with this simple description is that there are really two ‘Sydney Basins’. First, there is the geological structure known as the Sydney Basin (upper case B), a depression made up of Permian, Triassic and younger rocks. This is the ‘Sydney Basin’ introduced below and described in more detail in Chapter 2. Then, second, there is the geomorphological ‘Sydney basin’ (lower case b), the catchment area around Sydney and Parramatta more or less defined by the Cumberland Plain. The Cumberland Plain is the central and lowest part of the Sydney Basin. As David Oldroyd noted in his historiography of the rivers of the Sydney region, ‘The Sydney Basin (geologically speaking) is a larger entity than the Sydney basin (geomorphologically speaking).’¹⁰

The best way to conceptualise the (geological) Sydney Basin is as a huge asymmetrical saucer, ~350 km long and with Sydney near the centre of its eastern boundary (Fig. 1.2). It extends from Newcastle in the north to Durras Lakes, near Batemans Bay, in the south. Its western boundary extends in a near-straight north–south line, from Marulan in the south, up through Lithgow, and to Ulan in the north. From Ulan it then extends along the Liverpool Range ~80 km north of Muswellbrook, then ~200 km back to the coast near Newcastle. The Basin’s geological boundaries are established by the Blue Mountains to the west (delimited by the Lachlan Fold Belt), the Mount Coricudgy Anticline to the north-west with the Gunnedah Basin further outback, the Hunter Valley Dome Belt to the north-east (delimited by the New England Fold Belt), and the Sassafras Plateau to the south.¹¹

The eastern boundary of the Sydney Basin is set not by today’s shoreline, but by the edge of the continental shelf, which can be 60 km or so further out to sea. The total onshore area of the Sydney Basin is ~44 000 km², but this submerged, offshore component adds another ~5000 km². The apparently strange eastern limit is a consequence of sea levels being markedly lower (~130 m below current levels) ~24 000–12 000 years ago. At that time the Hawkesbury River discharged to the sea at least ~25 km further to the east than it does today. The ancestral Hawkesbury used to flow across land that is currently submerged from as early as ~80–100 million years ago, when tectonic events caused the land to rise, the Great Divide to form, and the drainage patterns of the ancient coastal rivers to change fundamentally. It still flowed over this land until ~12 000 years ago, when sea levels rose sufficiently in the Holocene to create the flooded river valley we see today as the modern Hawkesbury River and Broken Bay. The geological events that led to the current drainage patterns are described in Chapter 2 and the rise in sea levels and the drowning of the prior river valley in Chapter 3.

Figure 1.2: Extent of the (geological) Sydney Basin in eastern New South Wales.

The topographically lowest part of the Sydney Basin lies at Fairfield, near Liverpool, in the Cumberland Plain, in older documents often shown as the Cumberland Basin. The Cumberland Plain is fringed by a ring of plateaux: Hornsby Plateau to the north; Woronora Plateau to the south-east; Illawarra Plateau to the south-west; and the Blue Mountains Plateau to the west (Fig. 1.3). All are built on sandstone: the Hornsby Plateau is underlain by Hawkesbury Group Sandstone of the Triassic geological period; the Blue Mountains Plateau likewise but with large portions also of sandstones and shales from the slightly older Narrabeen Group; and the escarpments behind Wollongong on even older Nowra Sandstone from the Permian geological period.¹² The significance of these different geologies for human settlement and for the underlying ecology of the Hawkesbury River (and for Sydney more generally) is outlined in the next chapter.

Figure 1.3: Block diagram of the central part of the Sydney Basin, showing the main structural units and the underlying geological strata. Source: Langford-Smith (1976, fig. 36). Reproduced with permission of Science Press, Sydney.

Within the (geological) Sydney Basin the division between the Hawkesbury River catchment and the Sydney Harbour catchment to the south is a low line of hills, known now as Seven Hills, ~10 km west of Parramatta. They curve to the north-east around Baulkham Hills and continue through Pennant Hills, Ku-ring-gai Chase and Frenchs Forest, and end near Manly. This division separates the drainage basins in the centre of the Sydney Basin between those basins with rivers that discharge into the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system to the north and west and those that discharge into the much smaller Hacking, George and Parramatta Rivers, nearer to Sydney, to the south and east.

The main-stem

The Hawkesbury River has three major tributaries (Fig. 1.4). All enter on the left-hand bank. Hydrologists describe the position of the two banks of a river in terms of right-hand and left-hand sides, allocated as one travels downstream, rather than in terms of a northern and a southern shore. The reason is presumably that lowland rivers can be so sinuous that they often wind back on themselves, with the result that there might be banks with a given orientation at a given spot but no bank that always faces north or south or east or west. The main-stem of the Hawkesbury from Sackville to Lower Portland shows this pattern quite clearly, with the river meandering so much that there are variously north, east, west, north-west and north-east facing reaches.

The first major tributary is the Grose River, which rises near Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains. The main-stem of the Hawkesbury then flows past the towns of Richmond, Windsor and Pitt Town and the villages of Sackville and Lower Portland, where it is joined by the Colo River, which drains very large sections of the northern parts of the Blue Mountains to the north and the west. Past the Colo, the Hawkesbury is joined by the Macdonald River (at Wisemans Ferry), the tributary that drains the northern-most parts of the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment. The Macdonald is the last substantial stream to enter the Hawkesbury before it discharges into Broken Bay.

Figure 1.4: Map of the Hawkesbury River system, showing its major tributaries, the Grose, Colo and Macdonald Rivers, and the major protected areas.

In addition to these three major tributaries, several smaller streams enter the main-stem of the Hawkesbury at various points. On the left-hand side, draining catchments mostly to the north of the river, the main inflowing streams are, consecutively, Howes Creek (between the Grose and Colo Rivers), Webbs Creek (just upstream of the confluence with the Macdonald) then, downstream of Wisemans Ferry, Mangrove Creek, Mooney Mooney Creek and Mullet Creek. On its right-hand side, draining catchments mostly to the south of the river, the Hawkesbury is joined by Rickabys Creek and South Creek near Windsor, Cattai and Little Cattai Creek slightly downstream, and then much further downstream, Berowra Creek and Cowan Creek. Mangrove Creek, Berowra Creek and Cowan Creek are often considered as blind arms or extensions of the central drowned river valley through which the main-stem of the Hawkesbury flows. They too have their own small freshwater streams that flow into the tidal parts of each arm, and these are described later in the chapter.

The main-stem of the Hawkesbury

The Hawkesbury, unlike the Nepean River, has a very low gradient and it frequently meanders over a wide, depositional floodplain.¹³ Just below the confluence of the Nepean and Grose Rivers, near Richmond Bridge, a low terrace of shale (‘The Terrace’) forms a border on the left-hand or western bank. The floodplain on the right-hand bank is largely converted to agriculture. Between Richmond and Windsor, the river takes on a more open feeling, with a wide floodplain on both sides, separated from the main-stem by a natural levee up to 10 m high along the banks. This general vista continues downstream of Windsor, and at Pitt Town Bottoms the floodplain is especially broad and fertile (Fig. 1.5). The 1983 report on the physiography of the Nepean and Hawkesbury River system, the Hawkesbury/Nepean Valley Report, called this section of the Hawkesbury ‘… one of Australia’s most Europeanised landscapes’.¹⁴ Figure 1.6 shows why this is an appropriate description.

The river changes markedly below Cattai, and here it starts to flow through the sandstone country that becomes the dominant feature as one goes further downstream (Fig. 1.7). The paper by Lesley Hall, published in the 1926 issue of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, gives an excellent summary of the physiography of this section of the main-stem of the river. It remains, 90 years later, one of the clearest descriptions of the Hawkesbury between Windsor and the more strongly marine-influenced reaches downstream of Wisemans Ferry.

In the most downstream parts of the Hawkesbury, to where it eventually debouches into Broken Bay, the river is deeply incised into the sandstone of the Hornsby Plateau as a drowned river valley (Fig. 1.8). The river is so entrenched into the valley in these downstream sections, especially in the drowned arms of Berowra Creek and Cowan Creek, that sandstone cliffs (and in their absence, steep banks) may be ~100 m higher than the river-water level, which, with the surrounding land’s largely intact native vegetation, creates some quite remarkable and beautiful landscapes (Fig. 1.9).

Figure 1.5: Floodplain of the Hawkesbury River at Pitt Town Bottoms. Photograph taken September 2011.

Figure 1.6: The Hawkesbury River at Windsor, just downstream of the road bridge. The scene is typical of the river in its uppermost sections. Photograph taken October 2011.

Figure 1.7: The main-stem of the Hawkesbury River at Liverpool Reach, as seen from Green Road. This section is typical of the river in its middle reaches. Photograph taken September 2013.

Figure 1.8: The lowermost section of the Hawkesbury River, in the strongly marine-influenced zone downstream of the confluence with Mangrove Creek. Photograph taken September 2012.

Figure 1.9: Houseboat Bay, a quiet embayment within Cowan Creek, just downstream of Apple Tree Bay, and typical of the drowned arms that make up substantial parts of the lower sections of the river. Photograph taken August 2013.

The other notable landscape element in the more sheltered parts of the lower Hawkesbury is the extensive fringe of mangroves (Fig. 1.10). The 1983 Hawkesbury/Nepean Valley Report accurately summarised the interplay of the fringing mangroves, the terrestrial sclerophyllous vegetation and the towering sandstone cliffs in these lower parts of the river:

The strong horizontal bands of the mangroves and their yellow-green foliage contrast markedly with grey-greens of the sandstone vegetation and the vertical massing of the rock faces. Where mangroves have been cleared to facilitate views and boat access these long horizontals have been broken, causing considerable visual disturbance. As the clearance of mangroves is also biologically unsound no further disturbance of these areas should be permitted.¹⁵

Hawkesbury River ‘Reaches’

With a total length of ~120 km, it is not surprising that the main-stem of the Hawkesbury has been divided into a series of smaller components by those who have to regularly navigate the river. The different sections are known locally as ‘Reaches’, spelt with the upper case R. To a fluvial geomorphologist, the word ‘reach’ has a defined set of meanings: (1) a length of a river channel uniform with respect to discharge or geomorphology; (2) a length of a river channel for which a single flow gauge provides a satisfactory measure of the river height and discharge; or (3) the length of a river between two gauging stations. More colloquially, the word can refer to a single stretch of a river that people agree is a ‘reach’, and it is this fourth meaning that informs local usage along the Hawkesbury. It probably derives from a 16th century meaning of the word to describe ‘as much of a stretch of river as can be seen in one view.’¹⁶ The division of the river into various Reaches between sequential bends applies only upstream of Mangrove Creek. Downstream, the river is simply described as the main-stem of the Hawkesbury. Once more this distinction probably relates to the sinuous nature of the upstream parts and accords with the 16th century meaning: downstream of Mangrove Creek the river has only a couple of (very large) bends and most is visible from one or a few vantage points.

Figure 1.10: Bands of mangroves (Avicennia marina) fringing the Hawkesbury opposite Spencer. Photograph taken October 2011.

The sequence of Hawkesbury River Reaches from Richmond to Gentlemans Halt, just upstream of Berowra Creek, is shown in Table 1.1. In her 2009 history of the early British colony in New South Wales (The Colony: A History of Early Sydney), Grace Karskens noted an interesting pattern to the names of many locations along the Hawkesbury. Those around the fertile alluvial flats of the upper river often have Governor Macquarie’s ‘gentrified’ names: Richmond, Windsor, Wilberforce, Sackville, Argyle. Those further down the river retain their workingman’s names: Halfmoon Reach, Trollope Reach, One Tree Reach, Foul Weather Reach, Sentry Box Reach.

Table 1.1. Sequence of river Reaches down the main-stem of the Hawkesbury River from Richmond

The origins of the names for each Reach are from Powell (1994, 1997a), Powell and Powell (2004) and Powell and Jacobson (2011).

The tributaries

Grose River

The Grose River is ~60 km long and drains a relatively small catchment of 650 km² on the northern side of the central ridge of the Blue Mountains Plateau. It was named by Captain Paterson in September 1793, in honour of the Colony’s then Lieutenant Governor, Francis Grose. The major tributaries are Govetts Creek and Wentworth Creek, which together add another ~100 km to the length of the Grose River system.

Figure 1.11 shows the upper catchment of the Grose River, seen from Govetts Leap Lookout near Blackheath. It is no wonder the river (more accurately, its gorge) posed such a barrier to early exploration, especially when the British explorers tried to traverse the country by going up the valleys rather than along the ridge lines. Much of the Grose River is flanked by sandstone cliffs. They are commonly over 200 m high, but can be as high as 510 m in the case of Banks Wall. Figure 1.12 shows the most downstream part of the Grose, near where it joins the Nepean to form the Hawkesbury. Here the cliffs have nearly exhausted themselves, but the landforms can still be quite spectacular (e.g. around Vale Lookout).

Over 80% of the Grose River catchment is preserved in the Blue Mountains National Park, a protected area gazetted in 1959. Fifty-seven per cent is declared and managed as wilderness, and indeed 72% remains in wilderness condition. As described in Chapter 7, the Grose River valley was the scene of one of the earliest conservation battles in Australia. A group from the Sydney Bush Walkers Club, led by Alan Rigby and camping in Blue Gum Forest, by chance came across a local farmer, Clarrie Hungerford, who held a lease over an area in the forest and told the bushwalkers of his intention to fell the trees to grow walnuts. Hungerford’s explanation, which might have been embroidered to elicit the desired response, outraged the bushwalkers and led to their campaigning to save the area. In 1931–32 they raised £130, no small amount of funds during the Great Depression, which was paid to Hungerford to relinquish the lease. Even earlier, in 1875, Blue Gum Forest was the site of an artists’ camp established by Eccleston Du Faur, who later established Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, as described in Chapter 7.

Figure 1.11: View into the upper catchment of the Grose River from Govetts Leap Lookout. Photograph taken September 2013.

Figure 1.12: The most downstream section of the Grose River, at Yarramundi Reserve, where it joins the Nepean River to form the Hawkesbury River. The line of rocks is probably a playful creation of the children enjoying themselves in the river, or perhaps of earlier recreationalists. Photograph taken October 2011.

South Creek

South Creek was known to local Aborigines as Wianamatta, meaning ‘mother place’, and the waterway retains this dual naming under its entry in the Geographical Names Board. The Aboriginal name is recognised also in the designation of a geological series of shales and other sedimentary rocks in the Sydney Basin, as outlined in the next chapter.

South Creek is arguably the most degraded and the most infamous of the tributaries of the Hawkesbury (Fig. 1.13). Despite investments into sewage and stormwater treatment over the past four decades, it continues to contribute highly nutrient-enriched water to the river. The 2007 River Health Strategy of the Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment Management Authority described it as:

… perhaps the most degraded subcatchment in the Hawkesbury Nepean. Hydrological and sediment regimes have been dramatically altered due to vegetation clearance and increasing urbanisation. Increasing impervious surfaces in the catchment are causing changes to hydrology which has greatly altered the geomorphology and ecology of the watercourses. A number of major Sewerage [sic] Treatment Plants discharge into South Creek and these, along with stormwater from urban areas and agricultural run off, contribute to the poor water quality of the streams.¹⁷

Figure 1.13: South Creek at Windsor, looking upstream. The green colour of the water is caused by the large amount of suspended algae (phytoplankton) in the water column. Note the absence of native vegetation along the riverbanks. Photograph taken August 2012.

South Creek rises south-west of Sydney, ~4 km north-east of Narellan and ~7 km west of Minto, and then flows for ~70 km until it joins the main-stem of the Hawkesbury at Windsor. Its flow-path is generally to the north, but on its way to the confluence with the Hawkesbury it is joined by 17 smaller tributaries, including Badgerys Creek, Kemps Creek, Ropes Creek and Eastern Creek. All flow through highly urbanised areas, including the suburbs of Bringelly, Rossmore, Badgerys Creek, Kemps Creek, Claremont Meadows, Orchard Hills, Werrington, St Marys, Werrington County, Dunheved, Llandilo, Shanes Park, Berkshire Park, Windsor Downs, Riverstone, Vineyard, Mulgrave, Windsor, McGraths Hill, Mt Druitt and Pitt Town Bottoms. It is this highly urbanised catchment that gives rise to the creek’s dreadful water quality.

Although it is in poor ecological condition now, South Creek was not always so degraded. As outlined in Chapter 10, land around the waterway was taken up by Europeans as early as 1794, when farmers started to colonise the upper Hawkesbury and its tributaries. The catchment was much modified by the spread of agriculture over ensuing decades, but it seems that little change in agricultural holdings or practices occurred over the century that followed.¹⁸ The rate of urbanisation started to increase markedly in the 1930s, and became exponential in the decades after World War II. By 2000, 20% of land in the catchment was urban. Another 17% was devoted to intensive irrigated agriculture, 34% to unimproved pasture, and 19% to roads, parks and urban bushland. Only 10% of the pre-European area of native vegetation currently remains, and little of South Creek’s catchment is protected in reserved areas. The catchment is, also unlike much of the rest of the Hawkesbury, shale-based and lacks gorges and sandstone-dominated landscapes. These geological and topographical characteristics contributed to rapid and extensive development by Europeans, as the landscapes around South Creek are generally flat and the soils considerably richer than those derived from the Hawkesbury or Narrabeen sandstones so common elsewhere in the Sydney Basin. Marked deterioration in water quality occurred during the period of rapid urbanisation in the 1950s.¹⁹ Poor water quality was one of the major issues that prompted concern in the 1970s and 1980s about the ecological health of the Hawkesbury and its tributaries, as outlined in Chapter 5. It is clear that the ensuing remedial work has not been entirely successful, given that as I wrote this text the Hawkesbury Gazette reported a fish kill in South Creek in which fish, eels and reptiles died. Toxic run-off from a fire at an oil-processing plant was blamed.²⁰

Cattai Creek and Little Cattai Creek

The next tributaries to enter the Hawkesbury are Cattai Creek and Little Cattai Creek, which despite their similar names have separate catchments. ‘Cattai’ may be a derivation or variation of the words caddie, catta or catye, all Aboriginal terms of unknown meaning. It may also be derived from the nearby farm established by Charles Grainger ~1805 and named Cat Eye.²¹ Both creeks enter the Hawkesbury on its right-hand side, opposite Ebenezer, through the small (4.2 km²) Cattai National Park. Cattai Creek meets with the main-stem of the Hawkesbury in Clarence Reach, and Little Cattai Creek just downstream, in Swallow Rock Reach. Both creeks provide some of the most important wetland areas in the entire Hawkesbury-Nepean system.

Figure 1.14: Cattai Creek as it flows through the Cattai Bridge Reserve, just downstream of the heritage-listed Cattai Creek Bridge. As with the previous photograph, the water is green because of the large amount of algae suspended in the water column. Photograph taken August 2012.

Little Cattai Creek has its headwaters in the north, near Maroota, and these and the upper parts of the creek are in good ecological condition. Indeed, the 2007 River Health Strategy noted that Little Cattai Creek was among the most aquatically biodiverse creek in north-western Sydney, and ‘… the clean water contributed to the Hawkesbury River from Little Cattai Creek is extremely important to the health of the Hawkesbury River’.²²

In contrast, Cattai Creek and its main tributary, O’Hara’s Creek, draw water from some of the most extensively urbanised areas in north-western Sydney, including from around Rouse Hill, Kellyville and Castle Hill. The headwaters and mid-stream sections have suffered from increased sedimentation, a result of rapid urbanisation and vegetation clearance. Water quality is made worse by inflows of stormwater and by the effluent discharged from the sewage treatment plant at Rouse Hill, as described in Chapter 5. Typical again of the degradation that takes place in rapidly urbanising catchments, woody weeds, including privet and willows, dominate the riparian zone (Fig. 1.14).

Colo River

The Colo River discharges into the left-hand (here, northern) side of Hawkesbury River at Lower Portland (Fig. 1.15). Originally the Colo River was known as ‘The Second Branch’, the Macdonald River being ‘The First Branch’ as one travelled upstream from Broken Bay. Powell (1994) argued that the term ‘Colo’ was almost certainly an Aboriginal word, possibly derived from coolah, meaning the junction of two streams. The Geographical Names Board gives no indication as to the origins of the name.

The Colo’s catchment (~4600 km²) is geographically complex and consists of the inter-plateau valleys of the Capertee, Wolgan and Wollangambe Rivers, and of Wollemi Creek (Fig. 1.4). As it provides one of the largest sandstone riverine canyon systems in Australia, the Colo and its tributaries were assessed to be of ‘wild river’ status by the Department of Environment and Climate Change in 2008.²³ The Colo Gorge, which runs for 30–40 km within the Wollemi National Park, is one of the most dramatic sections of the river and is one of the longest gorges in New South Wales. For many decades the river and its steep-sided gorges have been simultaneously adored and feared by bushwalkers, canyoners and other lovers of wild places.²⁴ Many years ago, when in my early 20s, I also ‘enjoyed’ it during a lilo-ing trip: ‘enjoyed’ to the point where I was starting to suffer from hypothermia in my repeated, failed and increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out of the cold, wet and shaded gorge and up onto the dry plateau to find some sunshine, get warm and go home.

The Colo River is formed by the confluence of the Capertee and Wolgan Rivers. The Capertee River has its headwaters near Genowlan Mountain, to the north-west of Newnes. The Wolgan River is formed by the confluence of Carne Creek, sometimes known as Wolgan River (Eastern Branch), and the Wolgan River (Western Branch), and its headwaters are near Wallerawang, just north of Lithgow. The two streams meet at Mount Morgan, near Glen Davis. The Wollangambe River rises near Happy Valley Springs, below Newnes Junction, in the western Blue Mountains. It joins the Colo River west of Parsons Forest, near Colo Heights. Wollemi Creek rises in the Kekeelbon Mountains, north-west of Putty, and meets with the Colo River deep in Wollemi National Park. As the streams that feed into the Colo are situated in valleys that become progressively narrower downstream, they all sit in steep-sided gorges near their confluences with the Colo.²⁵ The same geomorphological condition holds for the downstream sections of the river itself, including the section of the river near where it joins the Hawkesbury (Fig. 1.16).

Figure 1.15: Confluence of the Colo and Hawkesbury Rivers at Lower Portland. The vessel crossing the river is the Lower Portland vehicular ferry. Photograph taken September 2013.

The Colo River is short (variously recorded as 70 km or 86 km) and drops ~214 m between its source north-east of Newnes and the confluence with the Hawkesbury main-stem at Lower Portland. The Colo River drains a catchment of 1468 km², the Capertee adds another 1496 km² and the Wolgan another 531 km²; the catchment of Wollemi Creek is 1134 km².

Although the upper reaches of the Wolgan and Capertee Rivers flow though agricultural land, the Wollemi catchment is almost totally within the boundaries of the Wollemi National Park, itself part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. The catchment of the Colo is therefore almost entirely in protected areas of one type or another. As shown in Chapter 5, this means that water in the Colo River is of excellent quality and the discharge of this high-quality water ameliorates some of the pollution problems caused by the input of nutrient-enriched water further upstream, especially via the heavily polluted South Creek and Cattai Creek.

Figure 1.16: Colo River at the Colo–Putty Road crossing, looking upstream. Note the clarity of the water in comparison with South Creek and Cattai Creek in previous photographs, a consequence of differences in the development of the catchments of the various streams. Photograph taken October 2011.