Watiparinga and Shepherd’s Hill Recreation Park: In the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia
The panorama down the hills face and all the way to Glenelg and the gulf is priceless, and that makes the wooded gullies below priceless. In this case, however, we are not talking dress circle real estate prices, because this is Watiparinga Nature Reserve, kept in trust by the National Trust of South Australia for your grandchildren and beyond. Regular train trippers on the hills line get a glimpse of these hidden deep pockets of scrub on their way up to Eden Hills station. Linking up with the Shepherd’s Hill Recreation Park down the creek, Watiparinga creates a green corridor from hills suburbs right down to the plain.
There is a bonus geological lesson along some of the tracks, providing an illustrated guide to a half-billion years of sediments and erosion, with occasional heavy duty buckling and lifting that has produced picturesque waves of exposed layered rock. It is the bushland, however, that is the star of the show here. On the high side, there is classic open woodland dominated by gray box - twisting, multi-trunked eucalypts - that would have stretched over vast areas of Adelaide and the lower foothills two centuries back. At the bottom of steep gullies, the smooth white bark of tall river red gums stands out in the shade.
The surprise in Watiparinga is that all this is a result of a quiet miracle - and an extraordinary family. As the early railway pictures of the area show, this was once the almost completely cleared and well-grazed Wittunga farm. The Ashby family owned it, and Watiparinga wonder-worker Enid Robertson traces her passion as a botanist and conservationist back there.
“I attribute it to my grandfather Edwin Ashby. He was an enthusiast. Everyone should have an enthusiastic grandfather living next door”, she observed with a smile.
Her aunty, Alison Ashby, began the bush revival here at Watiparinga when she gave these gullies to the state branch of the National Trust and started planting. Miss Ashby is remembered nationally as an artist and botanist, with a street named after her in the national capital.
“She was a botanic artist. She loved plants”, Enid explained. “She decided she would paint every wildflower in Australia”.
Her delicate wildflower watercolours are still sold on postcards, while Enid Robertson’s contribution at Watiparinga is still going on too, thirty years later. I asked her the big question.
“How do you get the natural bush to return?”
“Slowly”.
Enid laughed knowingly, because the task has involved hundreds of volunteers over three decades. The “Watiparinga Method”, as it is known around the country, has involved disturbing the soil and plants as little as possible, taking out the invaders and letting the good return. Nature was lurking in the rocky nooks that sheep and farmer could not reach.
“There were so many niches”, enthused Enid. “There were so many native plants waiting to spread their seeds. It was quite incredible. They came back of their own volition”.
The kangaroo grass clumps and all its cousins are fragile, however, and the National Trust is keen that we don’t leave the established walking tracks. And no mountain bikes please, although they recognize that riders use trails to connect with the Shepherds Hill Recreation Park below.
While Watiparinga borders quiet backstreets of hills suburbs, a state-owned green space links to it and opens on to the plain to meet the enormous traffic corridors heading south. On one side of them are the Mitsubishi car plant and automotive component suppliers that symbolize twentieth century urban life, while opposite, the entrance to the park marks the point where the bush rules and it is walkers only on the network of tracks along Viaduct Creek and its tributaries. Late each afternoon and on weekends a steady stream of joggers and strollers (many with four legged friends) swap suburbs for scrub just ten kilometres from the GPO. Horse riding, bike jumps and archery fit in too, on land brought exactly fifty years ago to become a “national pleasure resort”. With more modest aims, it is now one of our well used state parks.
There is some very attractive open woodland in the park, and keen walkers push on up the creek and through into Watiparinga as the gully narrows and the track crosses the stream and starts to climb towards some surprising railway history relics. The chosen route for the line through the Mt Lofty Ranges involved tunneling under the westward reaching ridges here. It also called for two tall viaducts across two steep gullies. “Too flimsy!” they cried, as the construction was completed, but the spidery steel from Delaware in the US withstood the trials. Exactly 120 years ago, then, the first steam trains headed up for Mt Lofty Station, and continued to do so for more than three decades until the new tunnel and cuttings took the route that is still in use today.
The old concrete foundations are still there, strange relics amid the bushland…well, most of them, because the army blew up a couple for munitions practice in World War 2. The old disused railway tunnel came in handy then, too, housing precious Art Gallery paintings. After that, commercially grown mushrooms thrived within.
This is a special enclave for me, as my grandfather, Andrew Conlon, walked across the slender viaducts on the way to and from his job in the old Eden Hills brickworks. These gullies are also special to all of us, of course, given the miracle of Nature that has occurred here and seen the revival of a precious pocket of bushland so easily accessible. We have to thank the volunteers who toil to continue to protect this significant cultural landscape, and we can do so by taking only photos and inspiration and leaving only footprints in precious Watiparinga.
Watiparinga Reserve
Via Belair, Blackwood or Eden Hills, South Australia
Watiparinga, Restoration of a Grassy Woodland (128 pp)
Enid L Robertson
Published National Trust of South Australia, 1999Level 2, 27 Leigh Street
Adelaide, South Australia, 5000
Ph: (08) 8212 1133Thanks to Botanic Gardens Board of SA and the South Australian Museum Board for watercolours by Alison Ashby.
Alison Ashby’s Wildflowers of Southern Australia (1981) and postcards available from South Australia Museum and Adelaide Botanic Garden book/gift shops.
