Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

Listen first. A whipbird cracks its call through the gum trees, a sharp note followed by a soft reply. Underfoot, the track is pale and gritty, sandstone ground down into coarse grains. The air smells of eucalyptus oil and warm leaf litter, with a trace of salt rising from the water below. Somewhere ahead, a lizard slips through dry bark. You are standing in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, on the northern edge of Sydney, where the city ends and the old country begins.

This park is older than most visitors expect. It was proclaimed in 1894, which makes it one of the oldest national parks in Australia, and one of the oldest in the world. Only the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, came earlier in this country. At the time, the idea was simple and quite new. People wanted to protect a piece of wild land so that ordinary city dwellers could walk, picnic and breathe within reach of their homes.

But the history of this land does not begin in 1894. It begins thousands of years earlier, with the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney region. The park's name comes from the word Guringai, used for the traditional people of this area. Scholars still discuss exactly how that name was recorded in the nineteenth century, and which groups it should cover. What is not in doubt is the depth of connection here. This coastline fed families, held ceremonies and carried stories across countless generations.

The evidence lies in the rock itself. Ku-ring-gai Chase holds one of the largest concentrations of Aboriginal rock engravings in the Sydney basin. On flat platforms of sandstone, people carved outlines of whales, fish, kangaroos, ancestral figures and human footprints. The lines are shallow grooves, worn smooth by rain and time. In some rock shelters you can also find hand stencils, made by blowing ochre pigment around a hand pressed against the wall. Please treat these places with care. Stay on the paths, and never walk across an engraving.

Here is something many visitors miss. The engravings are easiest to see when the sun is low. At midday, the flat light makes the grooves almost vanish into the rock. Early in the morning, or late in the afternoon, shadows fill the carved lines and the figures appear clearly. Some people also visit just after light rain, when the wet stone darkens and the outlines stand out. The same rock, at a different hour, shows you a completely different picture.

Now look at the stone around you. This is Hawkesbury sandstone, laid down as river sand roughly two hundred million years ago. It is soft enough to carve and hard enough to last. Notice the honeycomb patterns, the orange and rust streaks of iron, the rounded overhangs shaped by wind. Sydney's older buildings were often made from this same rock. Here, it shapes everything: the ridges, the gullies, the poor sandy soils, and the plants that have learned to live in them.

Those plants are worth slowing down for. Smooth-barked angophoras twist upward with salmon-pink trunks, shedding their bark in summer. Banksias hold up their stiff, bottlebrush cones, some still closed tight after years. In spring, the bush fills with wildflowers: yellow pea flowers, pink boronia, white flannel flowers that feel soft like felt. If you are lucky, you may see a waratah, with its large, bright red flower head. It is the floral emblem of New South Wales, and it grows naturally in this sandstone country.

The animals here are mostly quiet and careful. Swamp wallabies move through the undergrowth at dawn and dusk. Large lace monitors, a kind of goanna, sometimes climb trees near picnic areas. Echidnas, the small spiny anteaters of Australia, dig for ants beside the tracks. And then there is the superb lyrebird. This brown bird is famous for its song. It copies the calls of other birds so well that you may hear a whole forest of voices coming from a single throat.

Water shapes the character of the park as much as stone. Its western side follows Cowan Creek, a long, deep inlet that winds down toward the Hawkesbury River. At Bobbin Head, boats sit at their moorings beneath steep wooded slopes, and the water is calm and dark green. To the east lies Pittwater, a sheltered bay with sandy beaches. Between them, the land narrows to a high, rocky finger that points north toward the open waters of Broken Bay.

At the end of that finger is West Head. From the lookout, the view opens across Pittwater to Barrenjoey Headland, with its sandstone lighthouse at the tip. Lion Island rises from the mouth of Broken Bay, and on a clear day you can see it really does look like a lion resting on the water. Beyond it lies the Central Coast. Most visitors come for this view. Fewer notice the concrete remains nearby, which tell a later story.

During the Second World War, Australia feared an attack on Sydney from the sea. Soldiers built a coastal battery at West Head to guard the entrance to Broken Bay and the Hawkesbury River. Today you can still walk down to gun emplacements and old structures tucked into the cliffs below the lookout. Grass and wildflowers grow around the concrete now. It is a strange feeling to stand there, in quiet bushland, and imagine soldiers watching the horizon for enemy ships.

The best way to know this park is on foot, or from the water. Walking tracks lead to beaches, waterfalls, ridges and engraving sites. Some walks are gentle; others drop steeply to the shoreline and climb back again. At The Basin, on the Pittwater side, there is a campground you can reach by ferry from Palm Beach. Families swim in the lagoon there, and wallabies often wander close at dusk. Carry plenty of water. The sandstone holds the sun's heat, and shade can be thin.

As you stand here now, take one more slow look around. Notice the colour of the stone at your feet, the pattern of light through the leaves, the line of water far below. This land has been cared for by Aboriginal people for thousands of years, and protected as a park for more than a century. On your way out, listen again for that whipbird. Its call was here long before the tracks, and it will still be here after you have gone.