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When I tell people I live in Waverton, they assume I’m from the eastern suburbs. “Not Waver-ley”, I correct them, “Waver-ton”. This is usually met with blank looks, until I add, “near North Sydney and Crows Nest”. But they never really fully understand where my suburb is. And unless they’re a taxi or Uber driver, that’s a good thing. The fewer people who know about the best suburb in Sydney, the better.
I’ve lived in Waverton for almost 40 years, but it wasn’t intentional. In my 20s, I was living in a flat in Kirribilli and not getting on with one of my fellow flatmates. I decided I had to leave, and my girlfriend at the time had just bought a two-bedroom unit in Waverton, in an old 1930s art deco block of four. She suggested that I could temporarily move into the second bedroom until I found somewhere else. But I never found a better place, and I never slept in the second bedroom; it became my office. And my girlfriend is now my wife.
There’s really no reason to move from Waverton. Our shabby unit has spectacular views of the bridge, the city and the harbour, from every window, including the toilet. Every visitor is blown away by the views and usually hints at how they’d like an invitation to come back on New Year’s Eve to see the fireworks.
But if you do want to leave the suburb, it’s only a short walk from most locations to quaint old-timey Waverton Station, and you can be in the city in less than 10 minutes.
Waverton has a village-like atmosphere. The pace is slow, the footpaths uncrowded (except for New Year’s Eve), and you are only ever a few minutes’ walk from the most beautiful harbour in the world.
The shopping strip on Bay Road has everything you need – a bottle shop, a bar, restaurants, a butcher, a baker, though sadly no candlestick maker. But our Friendly Grocer store run by Steve, Voula and their sons, who have been here possibly even longer than us, carries everything – including candlesticks.
When we first moved here, there wasn’t much: a newsagent, a video store, a greasy takeaway place called The Golden Tuckerbell and a general store that had barely anything on its shelves. Oddly, there were two dry cleaners and a rundown post office run by a little old lady who must have been 100. When you walked in, it was like travelling back in time; a stopped clock on the wall near a faded portrait of the Queen and a curled-up calendar from the 1950s. When she finally retired, it briefly became an art gallery and is now a French restaurant called Le Coq & Fish Bistro.
Across the road is the groovy Bar Quattro that serves up cocktails, wine and beer seven nights a week, augmented by live jazz on the weekends. Next door is Capo Pizza, and a stone’s throw away is Ivory Thai and Giuseppe’s Gourmet Meats. Including the Third Rail Cafe and Bay Brew Cafe, there are now five places you can get a barista-made coffee any day of the week.
But if it’s even more spectacular harbour views you crave, why not take your flat white for a short walk to Balls Head Reserve, 10-odd hectares of rocky peninsula and native bushland. Balls Head is named after Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the First Fleet’s HMS Supply.
The Cammeraygal people before him left their mark on the sandstone here, including a mysterious six-metre-long petroglyph that could be of a whale with a humanoid creature inside it. It’s just outside the Centre for Sustainability in the old coal loader building, itself adjacent to the original, now heritage-listed Coal Loader Platform, with its giant sun-tracking solar towers that look like robot trees, community gardens and seasonal artisan markets.
When I first arrived here, the coal loader was still loading coal onto ships, and there were great black mountains of the stuff that could be seen for miles.
A lot of it ended up in the roof cavity of our building; decades of coal dust, several inches deep. When the body corporate eventually had it professionally vacuumed out, the cleaners emerged looking like coal miners. Fortunately, the coal loader shut down in the 1990s.
The nearby foreshore around the former Woodleys Shipyard site at Berrys Bay will become the “missing link” between Balls Head Reserve and Carradah Park, the former BP site that is now parkland and lookouts, and on to Waverton Park – the go-to dog-walking spot, overlooked by the old abandoned Wavo Bowlo, possibly the only eyesore in the whole suburb.
I should point out that it’s not all beer and skittles here in Waverton. As part of the North Sydney Council area, the already punishing council rates paid by home owners are expected to rise by 52.3 per cent over the next three years, which will inevitably be passed on to renters, making one of the most expensive suburbs to rent in, even pricier.
None of this seems to have stopped the cashed-up Wavertonians (of which, sadly, we are not members) from what seems to be constant renovation. It also creates a street parking problem, where nearly every available space is filled with a humongous ute, like the one that backed into my parked car in the early hours of the morning a few weeks ago.
And while the harbour is a thing of beauty to the eye, to the ear it can be less so. In summer, it attracts party boats blasting dance music that can make your teeth rattle kilometres from the shore.
At least they have a curfew, unlike the oil tankers that dock at Gore Bay, which emit a variety of industrial drones at deafening volumes, sometimes for days on end while running their pumps, almost making the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz seem like a good idea.
But while the Wavo bowlers have long gone, you will still see people dressed in all white, only they’ll more than likely be sailors in dress uniform from the nearby navy base HMAS Waterhen, possibly the least threatening name in the whole naval-naming canon.
Under the coal loader are four long, dark, Dickensian tunnels. One tunnel is home to endangered microbats, another leads to a bush track around Balls Head, and another hosts events such as gin or wine tastings. It’s also been used as a set for NCIS: Sydney.
The area has become a little bit like Hollywood in the last decade or so. In 2014, Angelina Jolie used the former lighthouse ship, now training vessel, MV Cape Don, moored off the Coal Loader Platform, as a location for the feature film Unbroken, which she was directing.
And I once almost bumped into Mel Gibson at Carradah Park while he was using the park’s cliffs to stand in for Okinawa in Hacksaw Ridge.
Bush bard Henry Lawson lived in a cottage in Euroka Street between 1914 and 1921 and loved the place. He even penned an impassioned protest poem, The Sacrifice of Balls Head, in 1916, opposing the destruction of bushland to build the coal loader. Sadly, his effort was in vain. But I think he’d like what we’ve done with it.
Legendary local landscape artist Lloyd Rees loved the locale lots. So much so that he couldn’t stop drawing and painting it. So you can see, it’s not just me. Lots of people love Waverton. Maybe too many … In fact, forget everything I’ve said. Just trust me when I say, whatever you do – DON’T MOVE TO WAVERTON, otherwise you might never leave.
Simon Dodd is a Sydney writer.
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