The Wetland Beneath the Walk

Near fifty-one McLachlan Avenue, the beauty of Rushcutters Bay can hide what stood here before the lawns and seawall. In the early colonial period, this was not a clean public foreshore. It was a wetland system: Rushcutters Creek running into marsh, mudflats spreading out at the bay edge, and soft ground alive with birds.

One reason we can picture it at all is Obed West. He was born in eighteen-oh-seven, grew up nearby at Barcom Glen, and spent his childhood in a family tied to Thomas West’s early mill on Rushcutters Creek. When Obed looked back in an eighteen eighty-two reminiscence, he was not describing a legend. He was describing the country of his own early life, safest placed around the eighteen-tens.

His sharpest memory is the one that snaps this place out of postcard mode. He recalled dingoes coming up near the house in daylight and taking poultry from the swamp country above the bay. That detail matters because it fixes the lost landscape at a human scale. This was not just low ground waiting to be tidied. It was habitat, close enough to family life to be inconvenient.

Later histories, planning documents, and local accounts line up on the larger point. Before reclamation, Rushcutters Bay was marshland and mudflats. West gives that fact texture. You can feel reeds, shallow water, mud underfoot, birds feeding on the flats, and a creek moving through country that has since been drained, filled, edged, and repurposed for roads and recreation.

That is the quiet force of this place. A beautiful park and coastal walk now follows a bay that once behaved very differently. The change was not only visual. An entire wetland system disappeared here, along with the animal life and older knowledge attached to it. What survives is a pleasing shoreline, and one man’s memory of the wetter, rougher world beneath it.