BROWNHILL CREEK: In the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia

Another deep crease in the Adelaide Hills face, - another chance to go bush in our own backyard… only seven kilometres from Victoria Square, Brownhill Recreation Park offers a narrow upstream journey into a rural pioneer patch.

A keystoned colonial bridge stands as a marker of the early village of Mitcham. The South Australian Company's Sheep Station Number One was set up and here where the creek leaves its snug gully, and within a couple of years after HMS Buffalo, the Old Gum Tree and all that there were a couple of thousand sheep overlanded from NSW and grazing up the banks. Mind you, their young shepherd, Pastor Finlayson, was not the first European to get to know the brook… official colonists found a hut several years old up here. Maybe it was the home of an escaped convict from Van Dienens Land who'd come via a season of sealing on Kangaroo Island?

Adelaide's early surveyors under Light had three hillsface landmarks - Blackhill, Greenhill and (in summer at least) Brownhill. Down on the creek that carved its rotundity, a narrow Crown Land reserve was retained along its banks for three kilometres or so. The old horse and sulky photos show its was clearly popular in its "national pleasure resort days". Now, it is known as Brownhill Creek Recreation Park under the state's National Parks and Wildlife Service.

A century ago it was a well known quarry district. High above, McElligott's produced the giant blocks for the Outer Harbor breakwater (they went by horse and dray to Mitcham Station and then by train to the park). Now, the lookouts over the plains also provides a window into geological time via interpretive panels that explain the twisted rocklayers revealed.

Down in the camping ground and caravan park, cunning visitors get the best of both worlds - a bush holiday that's only fifteen minutes from Rundle Mall. They're in considerably more comfort than Dyer's Cave offered. Hidden in the olive and eucalypt scrub above the creek, it housed a robber - cum - prison escapee who even evaded the legendary police inspector Alexander Tolmer when he tried to smoke him out. Dyer had already shot through! The swimming pool is gone too. It was all the rage in the 1930's but now it's completely silted up. The creek still spills over the weir beneath a giant redgum, however, and it still makes a pretty photo.

The Brownhill Creek Caravan Park is approaching its fiftieth anniversary, but that pales into insignificance next to the age of an ancient river red gum within its bounds. It is now but a stump of its former majestic self, but on a walk through its charred hollow chamber you are dwarfed by its girth and height still. "The Monarch of the Glen", as it is known, was probably a sapling when Shakespeare was penning his plays more than four centuries ago. And it's still alive.

Next to it is a transplanted foundation stone of a chapel that was built much further upstream. We can get to its original site - safe from the traffic - on the "Wirraparinga Trail". The upper section was cut by the Friends of the Park. The Kuarna people called it Wirraparinga or "scrub and creek place". On a half-moon river flat below the road after its turned to head along the hills - probing gully, there are a set of huge stone pines - four are left of what were known as the Seven Sisters. This scene has been a powerful image for me since I rode my treddly up here as a kid. Was it, as I always imagined, a good sheltered winter campsite for a Kuarna clan?

Way up further, where Brownhill Creek forks into two historic gullies, you come across the not-so-romantic manure pits. Now, the old open concrete tanks are crumbling, but they've been recognised as heritage constructions, monuments to the market gardeners who took produce downstream to market and returned with horse manure for fertiliser. One hundred and ten years ago, a dozen pits were built to stop the storage piles from fouling the creek that now flowed through leafy villages below.

At this top end of the Recreation Park reserve and beyond, there are plenty of signs of an era when they were famous up here for their celery and all manners of greens. The Grigg's Valley market gardens even featured in one of those scenic Women's Weekly full-page photos in the 1950's. The narrow road ends at on old farmshed and entries to mysterious properties beyond the gates, but there is a set of wooden steps up to the Pony Ridge Walking Trial. It's very steep (not recommended in winter), but it leads up to the Sheoak Road and links with the Belair National Park.

Back at the fork and the ford over the gushing creek, the fenced horse arena - another Friends of the Park project - harks back to the equine era when pioneer families came by buggy to worship at the now-gone Bible Christian Church. The chapel in the valley became a little bush school as the twentieth century dawned with its wily teacher, Miss Helen Lewin, poaching students from Mitcham by bringing them up the creek track in her horse and trap. (The chapel was burned out in a 1950's bushfire and crumbled away. An architecturally interesting bush retreat is now built on its site, right on the edge of the creekbank reserve.)

The gully that turns past it and bends eastward deep into the hills is a rustic sight from high on the narrow road over the ford, but the suburbs are just over the round top of Brownhill. Nevertheless, it's easy to sense the pioneer days here. Woodcarters' tracks are still visible edging at a crazy diagonal up the steep slopes. Perhaps it was up there that a twelve year old, Robert Forrest was crushed to death when his bullock-wagon-load of wood fell on him. A couple of years later in 1881 a silver-mine worker plunged to his death down a shaft of Wheal Grainger. On a happier note, there was even a beer making works somewhere down on the pretty spring-fed creek for a few years….the Deep Dell Brewery. Good name.

I trust you'll pay a visit soon to an old boyhood haunt of mine, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I always have. It is truly a bit of the bush in our own backyard…Brownhill Creek.

Details
Brownhill Creek Recreation Park brochure and map
The Environment Shop
77 Grenfell Street
Adelaide SA 5000
Ph (08) 8204 1910
Fax (08) 8204 1919

Brownhill Creek Caravan Park
Brownhill Creek Road
Mitcham SA 5062
Ph (08) 8271 4824
Fax (08) 8373 2293
Freecall 1800 626 493
Email brownhillcreek@ozemail.com.au

 

Further information
Mitcham Historic Society Room 5
242 Belair Road
Lower Mitcham SA 5062
Ph (08) 8271 1832
www.mitchamcouncil.sa.gov.au

Thanks:
Maggy Ragless, Mitcham Local History Officer
Friends of Brownhill Creek
Hamish Barley and Cathy Lotton
Flinders University Cultural Tourism Degree.