There’s nothing I like better than a scene of elegant industrial decay. Place that ruin-porn in the tranquillity of the Hawkesbury at midwinter. What could be finer than a paddle around a rusted out wreck on a still morning, in the company of breakfasting eagles and kites?
What surprised me, back on land, when I dug around to find out more, was the age of this beautiful ruin. The Parramatta was the very first ship commissioned for the newly formed Australian Navy after Federation. It was built in 1910, the first of six torpedo boat destroyers to be constructed by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Glasgow. The destroyer was part of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific during the Great War, hunting enemy ships up the Sepik River in New Guinea, patrolling the waters around the Phillipines, Malayan and the East Indies, and later, battling submarines in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.
The interior of the wreck of the Parramatta
It’s been a very long time since the Parramatta did what she was designed to do. She was taken off to be dismantled in 1929, when my granddad was a toddler.
But in her post-naval career, she’s certainly been reused a few times.  After being decommissioned, she was sold to the NSW Penal Department, along with her sister ship The Swan, and towed to Cowan Creek where each boat was to accommodate 50 convicts. The prisoners were supposed to work on a new road from Bobbin Head to Brooklyn that was to be “the finest marine drive in the whole world”. The stretch from Windybanks to Bobbin Head was declared a detention area, but in the end, with a change of government and not a single vote in favour of the plan from the Kuring-gai Chase Trustees, the idea of building a road was shelved and the boats were sold again. Their purchaser hoped (ultimately fruitlessly) to use them as a floating hotel for fishermen. It’s rumoured they went on to house unemployed men and store water during the Depression, before being towed to the north end of Milson Island and used as a floating sand and gravel pit.
Looking north past Milson’s Island – the wreck location is near the right of the photo
In the early 1970s, the historical significance of the wreck was began to be appreciated and the bow and stern of the ship were retrieved and preserved for posterity – the stern at Queens Wharf Reserve on the Parramatta River, and the bow at the Garden Island military base in Sydney. Other bits have been less officially repurposed – all its valuable brass portholes, for instance, have been nicked.
It’s not really clear how the wreck ended up on a mudbank on a bend of the Hawkesbury. It’s rumoured she and her sister ship The Swan were being towed downriver in a gale in 1934 when they broke away.  The Swan filled up with water and sank twenty metres deep in the river near Little Wobby public wharf, while the Parramatta was stranded in the shallow water amongst the oyster farms below Cascade Creek.
Looking over to Grace’s Shore in Muogamarra National Park
She’s not the only bit of flotsam and jetsam on that bend of the river, though, by a long shot. I pulled in amongst the mangroves to stretch my legs below the waterfall, to find all manner of rubbish. A discarded shopping bag was filled with drink bottles, polystyrene, coke cans, bait bags and the odd thong in a matter of minutes. I even found a functional tupperware container and matching lid, some thing that I almost never see in my own kitchen cupboards.
I have no pictures of any of this trash, needless to say. Unless it’s on the epic scale of Edward Burtynsky’s sublime depictions of industrial landscapes, utterly transformed by excavation and waste, our tide of plastic detritus is nowhere near as photogenic as the rusty bones of our military past. But it will will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer.
Other local history posts
The Hawkesbury vs the engineers: some history of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge
Canberra on Cowan Creek? The strange and beautiful story of Smith’s Creek.
The ghost freeway: the wildlife and history of Mooney Mooney creek
Two sad islands, three whistling kites: stories from Peats and Barr Island
Further references
Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history, CSIRO publishing.
