In the last week or two, Roy has had an exciting time with his cousin Toby who had been visiting from Perth. With a child to spend time with, Roy thought it was an excellent time to go exploring various sites around Sydney which he had been meaning to get to. One of these places, Sydney Park in Alexandria was a place which Roy had been particularly wanting to visit, not only because it had a really interesting history, but because it had an awesome playground too. With Toby here, it was a place which just had to be explored.
If you would like to visit Sydney Park it is located in Sydney Park Road, Alexandria (NSW), not far from the heart of Sydney. It is a massive park, with a huge number of things to explore. Roy was particularly interested in the Brick Kilns, and we were lucky that when we visited some of the kilns were open because there was an art installation. Even if you can't go inside though, the kilns are well worth a look. Sydney Park was also the place where an important fossil of a paracyclotosaurus was discovered. The fossil was about 220 million years old, and is now in the British Museum, but there are sculptures of the fossil to be found by young explorers in the playground. As well as the kilns and a fantastic playground, the park has a kiosk to buy a drink, plenty of room to kick a ball or have a picnic, a bike track with traffic lights, and even a boardwalk through a wetland environment to explore!
Before Sydney was settled by Europeans, turpentine and ironbark trees grew on the rich clay soils which Sydney Park stands on. Other parts of the park were marsh land and swamps, and its location near Botany Bay and not too far from Sydney itself made it appear a perfect place for early settlement. Thomas Smyth, who came on the First Fleet as a marine seargent, had soon cleared the land and planted fruit trees and crops of grain where the native trees had been.
By the 1840s though the focus of the site had changed. The clay soils were perfect for making bricks, which were needed by the fledgling colony and by the 1840s bricks were being made by hand and fired at the site. In the 19th century bricks were in huge demand so it was perhaps unsurprising that in 1871 Henry Goodsell decided to start production of machine made bricks on the site, making it a major manufacturing area. The site continued to be used in making bricks until the 1970s, though the companies involved varied. The most recent company to make bricks at the site was Austral Bricks. If you would like to learn more about Sydney Park click here.
