BRISBANE WATER NP – 5 August 2023
It has to be at least 15 years since I first heard of “the biggest overhang” on the Central Coast. That’s how it was described in NPWS Discovery Walk to Mooney Cave. But it was one of those walks that I wouldn’t usually do … local and only a half day walk. And you all know that I wouldn’t usually get out of bed for a half day walk (lol), let alone waste a Saturday or Sunday on one! So, I put it on the back burner for when I was too old to do a hard walk!
But then I looked up the BWOC calendar, and there it was, a walk to Mooney Cave, and it was on a weekend that I had to stay home anyway, AND, in the interests of getting fitter, I was up for a local 1/2 day walk, so, I signed up.
Shane (our fearless leader) started with a visit to a well-known Aboriginal art site. Turns out that I’d been there a couple of times before, but had approached from a different direction.
The site is huge, a big rock platform, this image is possibly of Baiame, the engraving is about 3 – 5m in length. Many of the engravings appear to have been re-grooved, this can only be done by First Nations people, and specifically should only be re-grooved by those of the “mob” who first engraved the images.
The head “decorations” of what could be the Baiame image.
Fish and kangaroo.
Re-grooved fish.
Man with a boomerang. If there is an image of Baiame, then this is a sacred men’s site. However, there’s no interpretive signage, and it’s only my interpretation, you would think that being well known as an aboriginal site in the bushwalking community, there’d be some signage to say “women keep out”.
We next visited an area that reminded me of “Roman Baths”.
Tamara posing at the Roman baths, years ago I had the idea to come to this spot on a summer’s evening and have a picnic as the sun went down … these days I’m thinking “too many mosquitoes and there are probably eels in the pools”!
Back on task and we’re headed for the route to the Cave.
Nice views over Mooney Creek.
Shane leading the way.
The track is pretty easy to find and blind Freddy could find his way (even in the dark). So, what was it with all the flagging tape? 100m into the walk, Steve and I started picking up degraded tape off the track and taking old tape off the trees. Some trees had at least 3 different tapes on them, and sometimes there was a mere 4m between tapes. If you can’t follow a track without flagging tape, you shouldn’t be out there. And if you need to put up tape, for whatever reason, if there’s already one on the tree, take the old one off! The track is less than 2k and this is how much litter Steve & I picked up and took off the trees … and popular opinion was that we should leave some in place (obviously not my opinion lol), so every 50m there is still a tape there for those who need it to follow.
Back to business … after a lovely walk in the bush we came to the bottom of the cliff-line.
There must have been about 200m of mini overhangs that we walked through before we came to the main cave.
And, there we are. It’s one of the biggest overhangs I’ve even been in.
The geology was amazing, at one level there were honeycombed sections and then further up the rock looked almost tortured, lots of ironstone, in amongst the sandstone. At one point along the cliff-line before we reached the cave, I came across to small rocks that looked like “red ochre”, I could just see traditional owners making a pilgrimage to this cave to get red ochre to trade.
Once we’d had our fill of the cave we made our way out, through really nice bush-land.
The wildflower display was pretty impressive.
Shane kindly extended the walk to Piles Creek where we had lunch by the swing-bridge, hadn’t been here for almost 20 years, forgot how pretty it is.
The cave is truly amazing, I’d definitely return (and remove the tape that I didn’t remove for the first couple of hundred metres on the track LOL), and revisiting Piles Creek was a bonus.
Big thanks to Shane for putting this walk on the BWOC calendar, and it was so nice seeing BWOC bushwalking friends after such a long time, great to catch up, and meet new members. Good fitness walk, I clocked up 17,000 steps!
Looks like something I will do in the near future. Thank you, M, for the excellent photos and commentary.