Sandy Bay Beach – Tasmanian Beaches: Exploring the Coast on Foot, by Bicycle, Kayak and Sail

Derwent River: Long Beach (aka Sandy Bay Beach)

November 4, 2015

From Summer Camp to Solstice Swim

: Long Beach: the view from the south

I was puzzled why anyone bothered with this popular beach when I first visited it one hot summer’s day during my first year in Hobart. There were a lot of uncertain people sitting in their bathers on the sea wall but swimming wasn’t an attractive proposition because the water came all the way up to the steps and slapped against the concrete in a discontented manner. I sympathise with the river now. It was trying to build a beach and this seawall, built without understanding, impeded it.

Yet this has always been a popular beach, even when, in the 1980s, it was barely there at all. An artificial dune was cultivated in the corner bound unnaturally with marram grass. This once magnificent beach had become a desultory shadow of its previous self and I think that those who still came here were in love with a memory. (It’s still a lovely spot when the sun is shining on it but it was overcast yesterday when I returned to take some more photos, earlier ones being lost in the uncatalogued innards of iPhoto.)

Before the convict ships arrived to set up camp Long Beach was called Kreewer and the Mouheenener had a summer camp in this sheltered spot. In those days the beach was wide and backed by small dunes. Picture a bark kayak, exquisitely woven dilly bags full of the jewels of the sea, children playing on the sand. The land was flat and shaded behind the beach, a great spot for huts as well as some easy hunting, and there was a handy stream.

Although the rivulets that flow sporadically down the slopes of Mount Nelson are not well known, Wayne Rivulet has a slightly higher profile because it still enjoys daylight along some of its course, beautifying the grounds of Fahan School before entering the river at Long Beach / Little Sandy Bay. It brings with it eroded dolerite from the heights, creating a delta of clay over which the once dense sand of the beach now sits as a thin sheen.

Having already succumbed to epidemics, the distress and fear that took hold at Kreewer is outside the comprehension of anyone who hasn’t faced the end of their world and all they hold sacred. The forests they tended, the trees that were their totems, were knocked down to make way for an alien landscape of farmland, divided up between fences that ran all the way down into the river. The Mouheenener, in a state of deep existential crisis, retreated and the beach became a popular destination for Hobartians in their strange clothing, who no doubt moved stiffly in the landscape not seeing the visual detail, not taking direction from the fragrance of the bush or hearing in the calls of birds the rhythm and events of the day. Shooting expeditions from town, well recorded by the Rev Robert Knopwood, had rendered the emu extinct and chased the frightened animals that still survived further away from European settlements. At that point the odd little handfish that moves about on its fins and inhabits the lower bays of the Derwent, still enjoyed an easy life in this beautiful bay.

The beach was so accommodatingly wide and so beautiful (see links to early photos below), that it served as a place to promenade, socialise and relax, and to enjoy the regatta that finally found a home here, or the start of a horse race. Enjoyment was yet again marred by disputes over right of way to the beach that reached a climax around 1910. There were petitions. There were meetings. The government was persuaded, buying up land to create the park, and a long jetty was built on the beach so that people could arrive by boat as the Tramway Company wouldn’t extend the line along Sandy Bay Road.

Francis Cotton, in 1880, noticed that the sea level was rising on Long Beach. He asserted it was the building works happening at Sullivans Cove and Norfolk Island settlers, including Maning and Fisher, considered that the sea had risen by about 50 feet in less than three decades.

There’s a more recent, curved seawall now, over which, in great storms, the sea breaks and which causes a significant wave to reflect back off it during high tides but there is a bit more beach than there used to be in the days of the old sea wall. This area is often a gourmet adventure because there are cafes, making it, in summer, a great place for an evening pizza or a day time coffee, or a place to come on a Friday evening to enjoy the summer market. From here you can walk north around Sandy Bay Point or south around Blinking Billy Point, the two sentinels of Little Sandy Bay and while the water in the bay is usually calm (unless the sea breeze is filling in from the south east), out beyond these two points gales frequently whip up raging white caps.

Sundown Park behind the beach was described in the 1800s as ‘the Hyde Park of Hobart’ and it’s occasionally vivid with small flashes of colour when eastern rosellas and swift parrots swoop between trees. There’s a crocquet club and a petanque piste, a playground and the playing fields. There’s a platform just offshore that swimmers can lay claim to and that is alternatively occupied by cormorants drying their wings. Kayakers launch from here and seek refuge as well when conditions on the river turn wild.

In the heart of winter, when snow lay deep on the mountain’s summit and gardens were white with frost, the most adventurous Hobartians rose from their beds in the black pre-dawn and found their way down to Long Beach for the Dark Mofo Festival Solstice Swim. They took off all their clothes and plunged en masse into the freezing water of the Derwent just on sunrise.

I’m sure it took their breath away.

When I arrived at the beach a good two hours after this, apart from footprints in the sand, there were no clues that this midwinter event had taken place.

I looked. I contemplated. I imagined the Mouheenener regarding this activity from the ghostly forest and the sharp gasp of the Rev Knopwood. Then I went home to a hot coffee and a warm bowl of porridge. The frost still lingered but my kitchen was snug with the wood fire roaring.

Other people’s photographs:

Large wave striking the seawall (Sept 2009) Long Beach | Large wave, Long Beach

Historical

The closest to its natural state (post 1870)

The esplanade taking shape

Regatta at Long Beach & another (some time after 1921)

Showing the old sea wall

Before the sea wall | Taken from Sandy Bay Road

Jetty and sea wall, Long Beach

Blue gum tree - favourite hang out of the swift parrots — Blue gum tree – favourite hang out of the swift parrots

Further information:

Goc, N. 1997. Sandy Bay: a social history. Gentrx Publishing, Hobart

Leaman, D. 1999. Walk into history in Southern Tasmania. Lehman Geophysics, Hobart

Derwent River: Nutgrove Beach

October 8, 2015

Those racing days

Nutgrove Beach is my wonderful ‘go to’ beach, one I mostly associate with pale sand, sunshine and activity, but because I’ve been walking through winter these photos show its moodier, more introspective personality.

I come here to think, to catch up with friends, to watch yachts racing, to enjoy the best of the day and to be walked by the dogs. The water quality is dubious but canines aren’t discouraged by that. There can be snow on the sand and they’ll still take the plunge. and some dogs, entranced by ducks bobbing on the water, and the more sight impaired by a bobbing buoy, head off in futile pursuit. Their owners cheery commands for them to return grow ever more plaintive as small crowds gather and their dogs recede into the distance. The dogs don’t stand a chance but avian business is always disrupted when people, with or without dogs come down to the beach.

Nutgrove is north/south facing, a 700 m long stretch of sand that starts at the rocky platform below the cliffs, south of Red Chapel beach. It swings slightly east and broadens out a little as it approaches Sandy Point at its southern extent. There are substantial houses – one the size of a small hotel – barricaded by pathetically small sand dunes, no more than the slightest of slopes really and at a certain spot there are no dunes at all. This beach suffered along with Short Beach because early settlers removed a large amount of sand from here too.

It’s a beach with a surprisingly fragile sense of identity. I’ve read about it and heard people refer to it as Sandy Bay Beach. In some earlier documents it also seems to have been known as Long Beach. It is longer than today’s Long Beach to its south and in earlier times when both beaches were far broader their identities were probably more fused than today. Further adding to the confusion, the Derwent Estuary Program, in a map locating monitoring sites, divides it into Nutgrove East and Nutgrove West but perhaps this is only for the purposes of checking water quality. Whatever, it can do your head in.

The Sandy Bay beaches aren’t named on the nautical chart for the Derwent River but it is identified on the Taroona 1:25,000 series. Its current name comes from a small orchard of walnut trees that used to be attached to Nutgrove House on the land behind it. The house, built in the 1880s, still exists today.

I vaguely knew the beach was there when I first came to Hobart because you can see it at certain points along Sandy Bay Road but I largely ignored it in favour of the ocean beaches. I was also understandably confused about what it was called until a friend set me straight when suggesting a group of us meet there. It was a sunny morning and the river glittered. The children paddled while we talked. For a beach of its dimensions, it was surprisingly empty that glorious day. I began to make it a regular haunt, arriving on it usually via the right of way off Sandy Bay Road, a pathway between homes that you’re unlikely to discover unless someone tells you about it – or you’re an observant walker, or you’ve parked there, perhaps to buy something delicious from Lipscombe Larder and you’ve wondered why dogs are leading their owners up or down what looks like a private driveway.

The pink historic house with the Iceberg roses, the driveway with the wooden carport, transport me to France every time and the dogs are always full of anticipation, which is catching. You walk past various flowering plants in summer and then turn to take the steps where the nasturtium grows, and there is the jetty, the splendiferous river and the moored yachts. There are the conifers we sometimes use to help us find the Nutgrove buoy when racing, and there is the beach spread out to the south. At times you feel part of a communal passagiata but it’s also possible to have the beach entirely to yourself. And you have to marvel: the land sweeps up to become the hill that is Mount Nelson, carrying the weight of Sandy Bay’s large houses, and despite suburbia that beach stretches out and you have it to yourself.

You need the tide on your side walking Nutgrove Beach. When it’s really high there’s not much space between water and dunes and you end up treading a soggy path. This is sobering. When Hobart started hankering for a race course, they decided this would be it – that it would begin south of Sandy Point and end at Nutgrove’s northern end. In 1816 that first race was run. A crowd gathered on Long Beach to watch the start but most would not have seen the horses galloping up Nutgrove. There’s no doubt many people raced in pursuit of the horses to enjoy the celebrations at the finishing line below the Beach Tavern – that very same pink building with the right of way down to the beach.

Later, as boundary fences were built and jetties split the beach up, access across private land wasn’t guaranteed and caused a lot of community friction. Fierce debate began appearing in the newspapers with various observations of increased sea level rise being used to explain the descent of fences into the river. Some writers had a fine sense of coastal processes, noting shifts in currents and the carriage of sand because of the changes being wrought in Sullivans Cove – wharfs and buildings, redirected rivulets, for instance. This was just the start of debates about private and public rights to beach access. Tasmanian Traveller has encountered this problem walking the upper reaches of the Derwent. It remains an issue in many places around Tasmania today, Battery Point being a prime example.

If you come to Nutgrove Beach from Red Chapel beach to the north there’s a smidgen of beach tucked between the rocks and the jetty-with-character (the only one remaining. This is the spot where Lipscombe Rivulet emerges encapsulated in its stormwater drain, and this ‘beachlet’ (Thanks, No Visible Means) has a sign to inform dogs that this is just for seabirds. Once, after a massive storm a few years ago, I was astonished to discover an unkempt yacht bearded with seaweed and weighed down with barnacles, sea squirts, jellyfish polyps, mussels… the whole caboodle, washed up here, a sorry sight.

Winter on Nutgrove, down by the jetties — Winter on Nutgrove, down by the jetty

Down the south end of the beach Sandy Bay Sailing Club has its clubhouse and so the beach is often full of Optimists, and an optimist you have to be to allow tiny children loose on the river in dinghies not much bigger than walnut shells. The rescue boat is always hovering. Invariably someone capsizes, a character building experience and perhaps the reason why some fine sailors have emerged from the club.

The yellow Nutgrove buoy, just off the beach, is usually the southern extent of keelboat twilight races down the western shore, so when the sea breeze is in it’s lovely to watch the fleet gybe and run wing on wing back up the river. The beach’s other nautical connection is the orange structure half way along it. This is a light that ships use to help line up their passage under the bridge.

Historical photo: View from Battery Point of Wrest Point and Sandy Point and the beaches in between.

Sources:

Derwent Estuary Program 2004. A model stormwater management plan for Hobart Regional Councils – a focus on the New Town Rivulet Catchment. Derwent Estuary Program, DPIWE, Tasmania.

Goc, N. 1997. Sandy Bay: a social history. Gentrx Publishing, Hobart.

Robertson, M. 2008. From Petal Point to Cockle Creek: a beach explorer’s guide to the East Coast of Tasmania. Regal Printing.

Short, A.D. 2006. Beaches of the Tasmanian coast and islands. Sydney University Press, Sydney.