365 Places: Brooklyn

Day 18: Brooklyn New South Wales, Australia

Many years ago I lived in the northern region of Sydney, close to the Hawkesbury River, Muogamarra Nature Reserve and the Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park. One of the places I loved to visit was the tiny village of Brooklyn, well-known for its oyster farming industry. If you were driving north from Sydney, you may well miss this little place nestled close to the river, which is not a bad thing, as I remember part of Brooklyn’s charm was that it gave me the sense that I have stumbled onto a place forgotten by time.

In those days, I used to stay with a girlfriend and her family and I was very surprised to know that there was a “dunny man”. (Dunny is a slang Australian word for toilet). Once a week, the dunny man would come and pump out the pit toilets that people had in the backyard. I had vague memories of my grandmother’s house in Brisbane having an outside toilet, but by the time I was at school in the 1970s there was an inside toilet. I am sure that Brooklyn would now have inside toilets too 🙂

Anyway, it is a very cute place. One of the highlights of visiting Brooklyn is to travel there by train from Sydney, stop off have a cup of tea and then head up to Gosford on the train. The trip through Brisbane Waters used to be stunning and I hope there has not been too much development since I left in 1989. At one point, I was living in Gosford (Wyoming actually) and would catch the train to Hornsby to art school. Some mornings the waterways were so magnificent the train driver would beep his horn as the train rattled through Woy Woy and Mullet Creek, before arriving in Brooklyn.

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