Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 35
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[Page 35]
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just a big expanse of low bushes on white sandy soil, through which passed the straight narrow red-gravelled military road connecting the South Head and Bondi coast-defence forts, with their six inch calibre disappearing guns.
The low flat area between Rose Bay and the sand dunes behind Bondi Beach was occupied partly by the Royal Sydney Golf Club's links and also by a big acreage of beautiffuly laid out Chinese market gardens. Bondi Beach was still in its natural state, quite undeveloped and almost uninhabited. Behind the south end of the dunes was a barbed-wire fenced triangle of about 25 acres of virgin bush, known as "O'Brien's Bush", this being the name of the family that owned it. A tall grey octagonal burial vault stood in the middle of a small clearing, and engendered in beholders an eerie feeling of ghostly mystery. Despite the high fence it was a favourite rendevouz [rendezvous] of daring boys, and ideal for playing "cops and bushrangers", or for finding fruity "Five Corner" bushes that grew wild there. It was less than a mile from Bondi Public School in Wellington St, which I briefly attended, and many a joyous romp my school chums and I had in this lonely and allegedly haunted bush: strangely enough nobody ever came to hunt us out of it.
The whole of the eastern slope of Bellevue Hill (it is really a long ridge) was also in its primal rocky scrub-covered state, and between it and the Chinese gardens lay a strip of flatter land, the Cooper Estate, which could not be subdivided and sold for building sites for nearly twenty years to come, because of some legal disability. At the north end of Bondi Beach four small shanties huddled on the easier slope of Ben Buckler point, in one of which dwelt "Nosey Bob ", the red-nosed bearded official hangman at Darlinghurst Gaol, later the East Sydney Technical School and Art School.
The only electric trams were those that clanged up and down George St, between Circular Quay and Railway Square, where the big new Central Station was being built on the site of Sydney's original city cemetery in Devonshire St. All the human remains and gravestones were carefully transferred to a special new