Most motorists who regularly drive within a 10-15km radius of the centre of Sydney have found themselves at some time at the intersection of Parramatta and Liverpool Roads – not uncommonly in heavily banked-up peak traffic. In the pioneering days of the New South Wales colony, the routes of the two major roads played a seminal role in the exploration and discovery of new areas to the west, south and north of Sydney.
The first rough tracks crudely carved out of the wilderness by the colonists in 1788 pretty much follow the routes of Parramatta and Liverpool roads as they were later constructed✲. For many of the early explorers of NSW this intersection of the Great Western Road (to Parramatta, the Blue Mountains and beyond that the Central West and the continent’s vast interior) and the Great Southern Road (to Liverpool and the Southern Tablelands), was the jumping-off point for many exploratory treks into the colony’s hinterland.
The intersection at the junction of three inner west Sydney suburbs, Ashfield, Summer Hill and Haberfield, is thus the ideal place to commemorate those early heroic efforts of exploration, endurance and hardship, and in 1988 as part of Australia’s Bicentennary of European settlement, this is precisely what happened.
If you turn from Parramatta Road into Liverpool Road, immediately on your right, between a fast food chicken outlet and the corner, you will see a small, narrow tree-lined park (about 85-90m x 35m). The most intriguing association of the park is its name – Explorers Park✪.
The park comprises as its centrepiece a long arched trellis covered with the thick, verdant vines of a climbing plant, forming a tunnel effect. On the paved floor, along the length of the trellis, are plaques which celebrate those early 19th century Australian explorers. Starting with Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, who with the inestimable help of local aboriginal trackers from various clans and tribes, made the breakthrough discovery of a viable route across the Great Dividing Range, there are plaques with brief summaries of the achievements of all those who followed – the likes of Oxley, Mitchell, Sturt, the tragic Kennedy, Hume and Hovell (one half of which gave his name to the iconic Hume Highway that has its genesis at the intersection).
At the north end of the park, there’s a dome-shaped trellis which backs on to Parramatta Road. The trellis contains a white wall with a stencil pattern depicting images of the participants who made the pioneering achievements of exploration possible – the explorers themselves, their mode of transport (the camels) and their invaluable indigenous guides.
Long before the advent of the Bicenntenary triggered the construction of Explorers Park, the location was a busy thoroughfare for mounted travellers, horse and carts and livestock, especially after Liverpool Road was opened in 1821. One hundred years later exactly, with the age of the automobile established as the dominant and future mode of transport, this exact block of land was purchased by a motor engineer Frank Dale. Two years later in 1923, he built a motor service station (Dales Garage) on the site. Over the following decades ownership of the garage regularly changed hands (Major Motors, Western Service Station, etc.). Eventually the land was acquired by the DMR (Department of Main Roads) and the garage demolished to allow for the widening of the high-traffic intersection [‘Sydney’s fork in the road’, Inner West Courier, 19-Feb-2019 (Ann O’Connell, Ashfield Historical Society)].
Dales Garage (photo: Inner West Courier) ∇
Footnote: An early landmark pub for travellers
Opposite the Explorers Park site, across Parramatta Road (in what is today Haberfield), there used to be another building at this important intersection…this was a hotel called Speed the Plough Inn (often abbreviated to ‘The Plough Inn’), one of Sydney’s iconic travellers’ pubs of the early colonial era. The Inn was built by a pioneering settler of Haberfield, David Ramsey in the late 1820s [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, (Ramsey Family History), http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/dobroydestate.html].▲ An early drawing of the hotel by George W Roberts (c.1845) (State Library of NSW)
Long gone, but in it’s day the Plough Inn went far beyond merely providing food, drink and shelter…boasting extensive stabling for livery and coach horses, as well as ample enclosures and water for livestock (the yard and adjoining paddocks were used for sheep and cattle sales) [Harvest of the Years – The Story of Burwood, 1794-1974, Eric Dunlop (1974 Burwood Municipal Council)]. The Plough Inn closed down in 1911 with the land becoming part of the Haberfield subdivision.
Speed the Plough Inn, Parramatta Road ∇
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✲ as illustrated in Captain (later Governor) John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea at the time
✪ Explorers Park is only metres from the larger Ashfield Park which features a statue of the popular children’s literature character Mary Poppins, commemorating the fact that the author of the Mary Poppins books, PL Travers, once lived in the suburb
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