IVANHOE PARK The green heart of Manly Jane Mundy A Save Manly Oval Alliance Inc. (SMOA) publication IVANHOE PARK The green heart of Manly Jane Mundy A Save Manly Oval Alliance Inc. (SMOA) publication i First edition published in Australia in 2020 by Save Manly Oval Alliance Incorporated (a not for profit). Copyright © 2020 Jane Mundy All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-6481411-1-2 Commissioned by Save Manly Oval Alliance Inc. (SMOA). Front cover: Christmas carols on Manly Oval. Photo: Kate Zarifeh ii Contents Introduction: The green heart of Manly ...................................................... 1 Chapter One: In the beginning .................................................................... 5 Chapter Two: Henry Gilbert Smith’s vision for Manly ............................. 11 Chapter Three: Ivanhoe Park becomes a public asset .................................. 15 Chapter Four: The Park takes shape ........................................................... 17 Chapter Five: Manly Oval ......................................................................... 23 Chapter Six: This sporting life .................................................................. 35 Chapter Seven: Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Australian Air League .......... 49 Chapter Eight: A gardenesque watering place ............................................. 53 Chapter Nine: The campaign to save Manly Oval ....................................... 57 Chapter Ten: Ivanhoe Park listed on the State Heritage Register .............. 65 Acknowledgments......................................................................................... 67 Further Reading…………………………………………………………..... 68 iii iv INTRODUCTION THE GREEN HEART OF MANLY he story of Ivanhoe Park is the story of the power of a community. It is the story of how local people, over many years, have defended the TPark and protected it against threats to its future and integrity. The Park’s original custodians were the Gayamay (Ka-ye-my) people who lived in the area and cared for the land for some 60,000 years. Tragically, within a few short years of the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip in Manly in 1788, disease and dispossession saw these proud indigenous people all but disappear. In their place were the European colonists who were quick to recognise the seaside appeal of Manly and to see its potential as an English-style ‘pleasure ground’ and ‘wellness’ centre. The ‘Father of Manly’, Henry Gilbert Smith, was one of the first to appreciate this potential. Smith had a vision of Manly as a resort, a ‘watering place’ to be set aside for passive recreation to enhance the ‘health and amusement’ of the people of Sydney as well as visitors from all over the colony of New South Wales. In 1853 he bought a 100-hectare package of land and committed to setting parcels of it aside for informal village green use. One of these parcels, a 5- hectare strip bounded by Sydney Road to the south, Belgrave Street to the east, Raglan Street to the north and Park Avenue to the west, became what we now know as Ivanhoe Park. As the population of Manly expanded and so-called ‘expeditioners’ from around the colony discovered the delights of a seaside sojourn, the Park quickly assumed its place at the heart of the fledgling community. It offered a mix of gentle outdoor activities including dancing, rambling, picnics, eating and drinking in a green open space where locals could gather and 1 where others could come to escape the smoke and dust of the city during their leisure time. Developments and improvements have been made to the land over the years, often brought about by the action and determination of the community. Improved facilities and infrastructure have seen the initial informal, passive activities expand and diversify to include more formal, active and organised activities. As the Father of Manly had envisioned, it has remained the hub for relaxation and healthy leisure activities and the centre of sporting, community and cultural life. Today the Park combines a botanic garden, a war memorial, a village green and sporting complex and is home to a wide diversity of sporting, social and cultural clubs and other organisations. It is a venue for picnics, dances, church outings, shows, school activities, celebrations for national events, and annual Christmas carol concerts, and a place to enjoy the natural environment of the tranquil Ivanhoe Park Botanic Garden. Manly Oval and Ivanhoe Park. Photo: Kate Zarifeh 2 Ivanhoe Park is where the community comes together to play, to celebrate and to relax, as it has done for more than 150 years. On many occasions throughout its history, community groups have mobilised to protect the Park and preserve its role in the sporting, cultural, and other aspects of Manly life. The most recent example of community commitment to the Park was the successful campaign, fought over several years by Save Manly Oval Alliance Inc. (SMOA), to save Manly Oval from moves by Manly Council to develop it as an underground car park. It was the first time since Council had become Trustee of the Oval in 1887 that an idea that was not related to community or leisure activities of any kind had been proposed. The potential destruction of this much-loved community sporting venue by a development proposal brought the local community together in unified action to save and protect it. Some members of SMOA had high-level technical expertise; others were active in local government and politics; most were simply concerned individuals, outraged to find that the future of this historic local icon was under threat. Subsequently, and as a further outcome of the successful SMOA campaign, Ivanhoe Park has been listed on the New South Wales Heritage Register in recognition of its cultural landscape heritage. This means the Park’s heritage significance is recognised by law, with any future proposals to alter anything within its boundaries subject to the approval of the Heritage Council. Announcing his decision to approve the heritage nomination, Special Minister of State Don Harwin MLC expressed his admiration for the public commitment to the Park and its heritage preservation, saying community commitment to a key New South Wales asset had won it enduring protection. 3 4 CHAPTER ONE IN THE BEGINNING ayamay (Ka-ye-my) is the name the Aboriginal people gave to the Manly area: the Gayamaygal (gal meaning the people of the clan) Gare the traditional owners of this Country. These people cared for the land for thousands of years, hunting and gathering, passing down their stories, songs and dances and conserving resources for future generations. Country was their hardware store, their supermarket, their farm, their chemist and their church. Country gave the Aboriginal people all they needed: they said Country cared for them and they would in turn care for Country. Gayamaygal women and children would have been seen at low tide on the rocks of the Harbour, collecting pippies, mussels, cockles, crabs and oysters. They would have fished by line from their bark canoes and cooked the catch on board. Try to imagine a harbour full of bark canoes, some even venturing out past the Heads into the open ocean where scallops and abalone were also to be found. The shell middens we find in the area today are evidence of this bounty. The men would have hunted large mammals with long hunting spears, working in teams. They would have fished from the rocks with lightweight barbed fishing spears. Fish traps and bird traps would have been visible in the Harbour waters and amongst the reeds. In the local wetlands there would have been migratory birds coming from as far away as Siberia and from Papua New Guinea. Black swans, herons and other birds would have bred here. The wetlands may have contained woven traps for catching eels. Bird eggs would have been collected and transported by canoe through the creeks or wetlands to the sea. 5 ‘A View in Port Jackson, 1789’ showing women and a young girl fishing from canoes. Engraving by T. Pratten: British Museum. Stretching up the hillside in the area we now know as Ivanhoe Park were many rock shelters providing permanent homes and cool shade from the hot sun, shelter from prevailing winds or a place to leave a stencilled ochre image of a hand or a tool. Flowing down these slopes was at least one watercourse providing essential drinkable water. Along the ridge tops may have been fruiting trees, flowering plants and tall trees providing bush honey. Mammals would have been plentiful. Here, images may have been carved onto the flat sandstone. Are these images depicting Dreamtime stories that tell of the cultural and spiritual connections of the people to the environment and their kinship systems? Or are they telling generations of the future what animals they could find and 6 hunt? We will never know. The Dreaming stories of these places were never recorded. First contact with Europeans John Hunter, Captain of the Sirius, was the first European to set eyes on the beautiful Gayamaygal women. He named them after Eve and called one of the many bays in the Manly area ‘Eve’s Cove’. ‘A group on the North Shore of Port Jackson, New South Wales’, showing a group of Aboriginal men, women and children gathered around a campfire on the shore of a harbour inlet. Thomas Watling: British Museum. Captain Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales, met the strong and powerful Gayamaygal men when he and his small boat party landed at North Arm in January 1788. 7 In his Letters to Lord Sydney, Captain Phillip wrote: The boats, in passing near a point of land in this harbour, were seen by a number of men and twenty of them waded into the water unarmed, received what was offered them and examined the boats with a curiosity which gave me a much higher opinion of them than I had formed from the behaviour of those seen in Captain Cook's voyage, and their confidence and manly behaviour made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place.