Stories of the coast…
Ghosts of former times — the Bonnie Vale shack settlement
I’ve long had an interest in the Australian tradition of hut building and the people who live in them. Over the years I’ve made more than a few visits to what remains of the once-larger shack settlement at Bonnie Vale in Royal National Park. This brief story originates with those visits.
WHEN DID I first come to Bonnie Vale? I don’t remember. I do remember that it was quite some time ago. I also remember that there were more shacks here then. Their number has diminished over the years in parallel with how the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service’s (NPWS) has changed its mind about these modest structures, this architecture without architects.
The place
The once-extensive Bonnie Vale shack settlement occupied the south bank of the Hacking River close to its outflow into the Pacific. What remains of it stands on a wide river flat with the forested hills of Royal National Park immediately behind. During the ferociously intense bushfires of 1994, those hills sere scorched, their eucalypts reduced to bare trunks, but the fire stopped there. It didn’t come into the area where the huts are.
A narrow beach of yellow sand separates the area from the waters of the river. The huts stand amid a national parks camping area.
Times past
At the turn of the Twentieth Century the land where the hut settlement was built was privately owned by William Simpson, who built a hotel on the foreshore. Today, the NPWS ranger’s house stands on its foundations.
Stephen Ward, once a resident of neighbouring Bundeena village and then the publisher of Village Voice, the local newspaper, reported that the hotel gained some noteriety. “…by the ’30s the hotel’s location made it a haven for a section of Sydney’s racing fraternity. It was known for after-hours drinking and all-night two-up and poker games”.
Recollections of Bonnie Vale’s early history are vague. The NPWS says it is unclear when the first cabins were built there. An early reference suggests that a number of fishermen’s huts may have been there prior to 1918, however records are sketchy and the date conflicts with other evidence. Another report proposed the 1930s, claiming that there were cabins at Bonnie Vale before the Second World War.
Writing in The Bulletin, Stephen Ward said that “ …between the ’30s and the ’50s (Bonnie Vale) grew to about 500 permanent campsites and about 200 fibro cabins”. At first, the depression is believed to have accounted for its popularity, either as a cheap holiday venue or as full time residence for people who found themselves on hard times, like those occupying the impromptu shack settlement at Happy Valley on the northeastern shore of Botany Bay near La Perouse.
By the 1950s, the spontaneous and unplanned settlement was a thriving village of simple, modest shacks of the type found in other shack settlements South Era, Little Garie, Burning Palms and Bulgo. Stephen wrote that by the late-1970s most of the Bonnie Vale huts were occupied by pensioners who received a rent concession from the NPWS. They pre-date the incorporation of the area into the national park in 1947. All of the settlements are now within Royal National Park with the exception of that at the base of the escarpment on the Bulgo seashore just outside the southern border of the park.
On my visits to the area I’ve met a few of the people who still have family shack at Bonnie Vale. One of them, a middle-aged woman living in Sydney’s southern suburbs, has one of the shacks closest to the sandy beach along the Hacking River. She let me check out the inside with its two rooms, one for sleeping in, the other with a simple kitchenette, table and washroom. Another, also a Sydney resident, said that when she was a child, her family came to their holiday shack at Bonnie Vale where some of the children saw the ghost that was rumoured to haunt the settlement.
The shacks
Take a walk around the shacks and you see them for what they are — economically and simply constructed shelters intended to keep a family dry and sheltered during the annual holiday breaks.
Materials are typical of Australian shack construction. Roofs of galvanised iron sheeting, walls of fibro or timber. They are the same as those in the other shack settlements in Royal National Park. Unlike those other shacks, the Bonnie Vale buildings for the most part lack the photovoltaic and solar hot water panels.
The future
Now, nearly 90 years after the first holiday-makers came, it is the settlement to become a ghost of its former self? Some would say it already is. The decline in hut numbers is due not to bushfire, not to abandonment and decay, not to any natural agency. It is due to the NPWS which, since 1967, has been knocking down the shacks.
Within big institutions like national parks services, ideas about the role and place of people in national parks have changed over the decades. The notion that human works should be removed from at least some national parks became popular in the 1970s as the idea of wilderness as something free from human impact gained ascendency. Later, people realised that humans, both indigenous and European, had long been a factor in what are now national parks and wilderness areas and their works represented a heritage, an example of the human experience of those places. That seems to be the situation with the Bonnie Vale shacks as their status shifted from potential demolitions sites to heritage sites.
When more of the huts go, Bonnie Vale will be redeveloped for camping. That the NPWS would do this is understandable for, each January, there are more would-be campers than there are campsites. Bonnie Vale has 40 campsites and between 15,000 and 20,000 visitor nights a year, according to the NPWS. The lucky ones are those pulled out of the ranger’s hat in the ballot for a campsite during busy periods.
What of the people who continue to holiday in the remaining huts under an agreement with the NPWS? Well, they are eventually going to go, so one of the shack owners told me, and to make sure that they do they are offered a short term, non-renewable lease. Pensioners whose only residence is a Bonnie Vale hut will be offered a life tenancy. As the huts are demolished when their leases expire, permanent buildings will be replaced by the ephemeral campsites of seasonal visitors.
How the parks service muffed it
I’m going by what one of the shack owners told me here. I haven’t verified it with NPWS. It goes like this.
As the leases on the shacks ended over years, the NPWS set about knocking them down. Demnolition crews moved in. The modest shacks were reduced to piles of rubble and removed. But not quite removed, it seems. What they didn’t remove was the broken fibro, the asbestos cement fibre with their proven carcinogenic link. It persisted in the soil.
That accounts for what I found on my most recent visit. Areas fenced off behind orange safety mesh with signs proclaiming: danger-contamninated site.
Bonnie Vale’s legacy
What does Bonnie Vale say to the visitors who wander through? For some it speaks of a simpler, less troubled, less complex time. A time like the 1950s and 1960 when a social optimism prevailed, bouyed by plentiful jobs in an expanding economy, a time when just about all workers had a guarenteed four weeks annual holiday and when most people didn’t work on any other public holiday. It also talks of a time when Australia had fewer people and when there was less pressure and less regulation of bushland and coastal areas. A time when you could go build yourself a little shack by the water, cast a line into the river and enjoy time with your family. In retrospect, those were golden times.
The Bonnie Vale shack settlement, what little remains of it, is a monument to the way people lived and enjoyed themselves in the middle years of the Twentieth Century. It is a pocket of Sydney’s social history that, hopefully, will not disappear from the south bank of the Hacking River.
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