Ivanhoe Park cultural landscape is a heritage-listed former clubhouse, croquet court, cycling, tramway and pleasure garden and now scout hall, sports venue, commemorations, park, passive recreation, childcare centre and community building at Sydney Road, Manly, New South Wales, Australia. It is also known as Ivanhoe Park (including Manly Oval) cultural landscape and Manly Park. The property is owned by the Department of Planning, Housing & Infrastructure.
History Pre and post-contact Situated immediately between the inner harbour to south, the ocean beach to the east, the entry point to North Head to the south east, the eastern escarpment plateau and fertile lands north, the land of Ivanhoe Park and Manly Oval. Ivanhoe Park's eastern end (now bowling greens, Manly Oval and tennis courts) is on low land prone to flooding and tidal surges. Some or all of that land was likely swamp country vegetated by mangroves and reeds for basket making and home to various crustacea, fish, birds and plant food supplies. Rising westwards in the park (currently botanic gardens) are reasonably steep slopes of sandstone which could well have offered shelter (ideally facing east and north east) and firewood. Most importantly, flowing down these slopes was at least one watercourse providing essential potable water. Water courses still flow through Ivanhoe Park. This environment provided good food supplies from the sea and mangrove swamp areas.
Early records of the first European contact with Aboriginals near present-day Manly attest that they were numerous and well settled. "The explorers attempted to count the number of indigenous Australians around the north shores (of the Middle Harbour/Manly area) saw 94 men, 34 women, six children and 67 canoes, but they felt many more were hidden from sight." Various early records demonstrate that the "Kay-ye-my" people of the Manly area, as Arthur Phillip called them, had a rich heritage.
Describing Captain Arthur Phillip's arrival in North Arm in January 1788, it is recorded "The boats, in passing near a point of land in this harbour, were seen by a number of men and twenty of them waded into the water unarmed, received what was offered them and examined the boats with a curiosity that gave me a much higher opinion of them, than I had formed from the behaviour of those seen in Captain Cook's voyage. And their confidence and Manly behaviour made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place." quoting "The Official Account through Governor Phillip's Letters to Lord Sydney." Phillip was impressed by the stature and inquisitiveness of these Aboriginals.
Aboriginal life in the Manly area was well observed by Phillip, Hunter and Bradley and others in the very early years of colonisation (1788-1790). Together, as detailed in Curby's book they recorded a quite sophisticated and enduring people in the area. Curby wrote: "For at least 20,000 years before Europeans passed through this grand "entrance" (Sydney Heads) Aboriginal people lived in what is now known as the Manly district, but which they knew as "Kay-ye-my". They fished in the pure sparkling waters, gathered food in the dunes and swamps, and hunted in the eucalypt forests and open heath country."
Many petroglyphs depicting various sea and land creatures, canoes and other aboriginal equipment, in cultural sites around demonstrate the aboriginals' cultural advance. Curby, ibid p 19, records that in an encounter between Phillip and the Kay-ye-my people on 28 May 1788, one man took back a crawfish to "the hut". This indicates that huts, as well as shelters, were built for accommodation. indicates that on the hillside above Kay-ye-mai Point (the hillside leading up to the western end of Ivanhoe Park) were "many rock shelters providing cool shade from the hot sun, shelter from prevailing winds or a place to leave a stencilled ochre image of a hand or tool. Along the ridge tops (lying north of Ivanhoe Park) may have been fruiting trees and flowering plants and tall trees with bush honey and mammal life"
While tangible evidence of these activities has not been identified in Ivanhoe Park, its close proximity to the Kay-ye-mai people's gathering place provide strong circumstantial evidence of such use. Further illuminating the Kay-ye-my lifestyle, Virginia Macleod writes: "They controlled vegetation on land by regular burning to flush out prey and create clear glades which facilitated hunting".
In less than a year of European arrival in 1788, over half the indigenous population living in the Sydney Basin had died from smallpox. The region, once alive with a vibrant mix of Aboriginal clans, now fell silent. Those not ravaged by disease were displaced when land was cleared for settlements and farms. Dispossessed of the land that had nourished them for so long, the Aboriginal people became dependent on white food and clothing. Alcohol, used as a means of trade by the British, served to further shatter traditional social and family structures and traditional use of the land and water. The area of Manly Council is the site of a number of historical notations relating to the early contact between the encroaching Europeans and local Aboriginal people. 22 January 1788two cutters and a long boat enter the Harbour and encounter Aboriginal people of the Gayamaygal clan at North Harbour who wade out to the boats and make a strong impression on Captain Phillip. 1789Arabanoo kidnapped from Manly Cove by Europeans. 1790Governor Phillip speared in Manly by Willemering. Corroborees held at Manly on the site of several churches above Careening Cove. During the visit of Albert Prince of Wales, the Koori visitors come from different Guringai, Darkinyung and Garigal areas to dance a large corroboree Mrs Janet Kennedy (née Williams) recalls "that the Manly district contained a number of Aboriginal camps".Kennedy, 1937 The people were living on a mixture of British food (especially tea, flour and sugar) and bush tucker. Manly carrier R. J. Wild claims to have witnessed the last Aboriginal corroboree in Manly held on vacant land near St Matthew's Church on the Corso in the late 1870s.
"It was discovered that in every part of the low levels skeletons of natives were dug up in a fair state of preservation, proving that the submersion theory of the flat was untenable. Mr. Adam Russell, who planted Manly with trees, says, "I never dug a hole without coming upon some portion of a skeleton, particularly in the low levels."
Local Aboriginal people have connections with Ivanhoe Park. For example, David Watts, manager of the Aboriginal Heritage Office, grew up in Manly and remembers an Aboriginal man (possibly called Dave) who used to throw boomerangs on the oval. David Watts himself would cut across Ivanhoe Park on his way to the shore to go fishing as a boy in the 1970s. The areas surrounding Ivanhoe Park include a number of recorded Aboriginal sites. Within there are three rock shelters, one with rock art and shell midden and two others with shell midden. Within there are rock engravings and more rock shelters. Within there are more rock engravings, shell middens and a burial site. The burial was uncovered in 2011 and found to be of an Aboriginal women from the 1830s. This suggests that the land was important for ritual practice, even after European settlers were established. The AHO previously mapped Ivanhoe Park as High Aboriginal heritage Potential due to the surviving landscape features (sandstone features suitable for engravings, shelters, grinding grooves are present and/or land is in areas likely to contain Aboriginal archaeological material) and lack of intensive previous assessment / accessibility. The oval was mapped as Low Aboriginal heritage Potential, due to the greater modification for the oval, grandstand and associated infrastructure. This was based on tangible heritage.
A further review of intangible cultural heritage indicates the area was important for practices such as burials, rituals, and cultural events. Koradgee /medicine men known to have led ceremonies at North Head and across the shared Northern Sydney area. Early portraits of Aboriginal people show them painted in different coloured ochre, with different patterns and applications for different cultural events, e.g. funerals, war, marriages and corroborees.
The rock art, rock shelters and midden sites in the nearby area also suggest use of Ivanhoe Park, and its surrounds for day to day living. These areas may have been gathering places for people to eat, socialise, and create art. The swamp area of Manly (including where the bowling greens and Manly Oval now stands), would have provided Aboriginal people with resources such as food, fibre, shelter and medicine. The midden sites indicate a rich diet of seafood, and to the subsistence habits of early Aboriginal people. Both the marine harbour and freshwater swamp resources would have been exploited. Migratory and local water birds would have flocked to this area, also providing seasonal food and eggs for the population of the time.
Colonial development of Manly The earliest land-grants in central Manly were granted in 1810; granted to Gilbert Baker, a constable and Richard Cheers was granted . Until the mid-1850s, Manly was undeveloped bushland. "In 1836, in Governor Bourke's time, the parish of Manly was computed to contain 43 souls, including 14 Government men clearing the quarantine ground. "In 1850," says a writer, "the district was nearly as wild as when Captain Phillip first found it." Charles De Boos says, "the beginnings were all in tyranny, blood, and crime;" but these things have all passed away with happier and more settled conditions. A sort of "cattle duffing," amounting to bushranging, prevailed, some murders being committed, which even living residents remember, and much "dark work" going on in those wild and lawless days, it being too far away and ungetatable for Sydney to exercise much control. The names of some of the early settlers were the Whalans, Collins, Parker, Mildwater, Miles, Wilson, Fell, Smith, and Symons, many of whose relations are still in the district, though none of the originals remain to tell of Manly prior to the settlement by Henry Gilbert Smith, about 1852."
Henry Gilbert Smith
Henry Gilbert Smith, an early entrepreneur, often referred to as the "father of Manly", played a significant role in the early development of Manly. In 1853, acquired 100 acres at what was then referred to as Cabbage Tree Bay from John and Anne Mary Thompson. He wrote to his family about Manly: "Its situation, 7 or 8 miles from Sydney by water, is as fine a thing as you can imagine and it takes in the only ground which has the sea beach on one side and a fine sandy cove on the other...".Manly Council's Heritage Committee 2002 After some initial failures as a merchant, Smith started succeeding in his commercial ventures and in 1835, he was elected a director of the Commercial Banking Co. of Sydney, and in 1853, as the chairman to its board of directors. Additionally, in 1835, he became the virtually independent Sydney agent of the Bathurst Bank. He left for England in 1836 and on his return in 1846, he was appointed provisional director of the proposed railway association. Later he was one of the three government directors of the Sydney Railway Co. From May 1856 to August 1858, he was a member of the Legislative Council. Between 1853 and 1855, Smith acquired a consolidated estate in Manly. While living in Darling Point, he spent two days a week in Manly, where he had erected two iron houses, which were prefabricated and imported. Later he built a fine stone house in Fairlight, adjacent to Manly.