2nd September 2019
This one is mainly for our fellow Adelaide-ians who may have forgotten how blessed we are with so much Nature right in our own backyard, in the form of “The Hills”. And also for you if you’re from somewhere else and just happen to find yourself with a spare fine day in this great old capital city – easily the best in Aus, but what would I know!?
Adelaide is on a coastal strip wedged between the sea and the long line of bumps we affectionately call “The Hills” - technically the Mt Lofty Ranges. And being so cheek-by-jowl, the suburbs to the east and southeast of the city run fairly abruptly into the foothills, giving a whole bunch of wooded and watered gullies at our disposal tucked away no more than minutes from the daily grind.
We’ve walked some magnificent trails on the other side of the world over the years, and yes, they spoil you, makes you tend to overlook the small and simple pleasures at home. And one of the best of these is Brownhill Creek, and not many minutes from coffee and sangers afterwards at the Unley and Mitcham shopping precincts. Yesterday we had a spare Saturday morning, the last day of Winter, fine, mild breeze, 200 C, puffy clouds in a welter of blue. Not to be wasted, we need a decent walk, and haven’t been up into the Mitcham Foothills for a while. So, why not? Park the car in a quiet street, head off with no plan in mind, just follow our feet, and soon find ourselves in the Brownhill Creek Reserve up the back of Old Mitcham Village.
This was known to the indigenous Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains as Wirraparinga, meaning "Creek and scrub place", and it still is – I mean, nothing sensational and all that, not Yellowstone or Kakadu or anything y’know, just a long quiet walk along a winding creek, hills up each side, still green for the moment from our sparse winter rains, frogs glonking, kookaburras chortling, wildflowers on the move, small birds busy doing pre-Spring bird stuff, huge old redgums dotted about that have seen the last 200-plus years of people – indigenous and usurper – wander about under their massive arms.
Even though its upper reaches became largely market garden and horticultural in the early days, the lower half has always been a regular goto recreational spot, for the original Kaurna people, and for the colonials, with plenty of reports in the 1850s of church picnic groups and assorted buggy-loads of weekenders and day trippers. And eventually it became a prescribed park, with a camp ground set up in the mid 1950s, today looking just brilliant, having managed to retain a fairly natural look amongst the trees.
And while the narrow road is popular with cyclists, you meet a jogger or two along the main trail that follows the creek, but mostly it’s walkers and families, and kids just being kids on the loose. But for the more adventurous there’s plenty of side tracks, all way-marked, that disappear up into the hills in a network that I’m sure is online somewhere.
We’ve been beachside people for the last thirty-odd years, having had the be-whatsits scared out of us living amongst it in the disaster of Ash Wednesday in the horror summer of 1983, but we both still have a child’s attachment to running creeks and big gums and frogs and birds, as in different ways, those things became part of each of us at a young age.
And we had a great morning, which left us wondering why it’d been so long since we explored the place, and vowing to come back next good Spring walking day before the Summer hits, hike the whole length of it. Do yourself a big favour and go and have a look - plenty of picnic tables in quiet spots, plenty of running water for the kids to fall in.
And if you can’t get here in person, do a GoogleMap and dial in “Brownhill Creek Caravan Park” and wander upstream from there on the bitumen.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>