Narwee, New South Wales
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| Narwee Sydney, New South Wales |
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 Shops on the south side of Broadarrow Road, Narwee |
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| Postcode: | 2209 | ||||||||||||
| Location: | 18 km from Sydney CBD | ||||||||||||
| LGA: | City of Hurstville City of Canterbury |
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Narwee is a suburb in southern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located 18km south of the Sydney central business district and is part of the St George area. Narwee lies across the local government areass of the City of Hurstville and the City of Canterbury. The postcode is 2209, which it shares with neighbouring Beverly Hills.
The main street of Narwee is Broadarrow Road, which runs from King Georges Road in Beverly Hills to just past Bonds Road in Riverwood. Broadarrow Road is also the boundary line between the northern part in the City of Hurstville, and the southern part in the City of Canterbury.
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[edit] Commercial Area
The main shopping strip is located in Broadarrow Road parallel with and adjacent to Narwee railway station. Like many small suburbs, Narwee was formerly served by two banks (Westpac and Commonwealth), and many small shops. Both banks are now closed, although the post office remains. The Roselands shopping complex is located in the adjacent suburb, to the north.
Narwee has a public school and once had a high school. Narwee High School, located at the suburb's highest point, with views west to the Blue Mountains, closed in 2001 and is to be redeveloped as a complex of residential apartments.
[edit] Transport
Narwee railway station is on the East Hills line of the CityRail network. This station is served by an 'all stations' service that runs every 15 minutes on weekdays, and half hourly on weekends.
[edit] Demographics
The postcode area 2209, which includes Narwee, has a population of 13,294 at the most recent census. Of these, 59% are Australian born. The average house price in 2005 was $531,000, and the average unit price was $329,000.
[edit] History
Narwee is an Aboriginal word meaning "sun", an appropriate name for an area once called 'Sunning Hill Farm'. The language and dialect it was derived from is unclear. A number of Sydney suburbs developed during the 1930s have similar allegedly Aboriginal names, the origins of which are uncertain, including nearby Panania, and Jannali. Jannali supposedly means "moon" and was apparently named at the same time as Narwee, as a "sister suburb".
The name Narwee was adopted when the railway station opened on the 21st December 1931. People living there at the time were mostly poultry farmers and market gardeners, and a city florist had a large garden west of the railway station. After the railway came through, people bought up land for residences. Little building was done during the Depression and World War II, but the suburb grew rapidly in the 1950's, when the area was settled by young families. The post office opened in 1948.
Narwee Primary School is built on land given in 1809, to Richard Podmore, a free settler, who came to New South Wales as a soldier in the N.S.W. Corps in 1792, on the ship "Pitt". Land between today's Penshurst Road and King Georges Road belonged to Richard Tuckwell, another soldier from the same Company. At the time of the land grant, the area was covered with a very thick ironbark forest.
Tuckwell and Podmore sold their grants to Patrick Moore and Robert Gardner, both ex-convicts, in 1819 and 1820, and "Bob the Gardener", as he was known, began to clear trees and develop a farm on Podmore's grant, which he called "Sunning Hill Farm". The property was later extended to cover Emery's 30 acre grant next door. This was farmed by Gardner's adopted son, Thomas Gardner Whitehall.
At that stage there were very few farms in the district. Men earned a living by cutting down the trees and selling the logs for firewood and timber to build houses and boats. Narwee did not exist as a locality; it was called "Bob the Gardner's Farm", and there were so few people living in the area that bushrangers could easily hide for weeks in the forest without being discovered.
[edit] Sydney Hunt Club
In the 1830s, the Sydney Hunt Club used to hold its hunting meetings in this area. Reports in the newspapers of the time tell of groups of men trotting through the thick forest below Oatley's (near Beverly Hills) and chasing deer across Bob the Gardener's and other nearby farms. It was called "wild and difficult country". The deer were imported by the upper classes when they came from England, so they could follow the same gentlemanly sports they did at home. The fields of young barley particularly attracted the deer, and many a crop was damaged by first being grazed by escaped animals, and later being galloped across by the Hunt in pursuit of a good day's sport.
At the top of the hill, in the block surrounded by today's Shorter Avenue, Penshurst Road, Grove Avenue and Karne Street, there was a farm and orchard called "Stacey's Farm". Dennis Stacey, the ex-convict owner, lived there at first, and later it was occupied by Joseph Williamson. A wooden cottage containing four rooms, with a kitchen built separately for fear of fire was built, plus a stable, a fowl house, and huts for the men working on the property.
The land south or Broadarrow Road was granted to Dr Robert Townson as sheep grazing land in 1809. It was not used for this, as Townson complained it was not suitable, being too hilly and rocky. It was sold to John Connell, a Sydney merchant, and became Known as "Connell's Bush". It was also occupied by sawyers and firewood gatherers, among whom were Thomas Collins, John and Betty Hardy, Joseph Fretus, Michael Connolly, William Humphreys, Samuel Lewis, Thomas Sheldon and the Whitworth family. The name of the locality was later corrupted to "Connelly's Bush", after one of the farmers who lived there.
When Bob the Gardener died in 1873, he was, it was claimed, over one hundreds years old. His farm was left to his wife, Sarah or Basalena Gardner, his step-children, the Hickman family, and his only son, also named Robert Gardner. When rumours that a new railway would be built through the district began to spread in Sydney, a land speculator called William Graham Cameron persuaded the family to sell Sunning Hill. In 1885, however, the Minister for Public Works, decided on a more northerly route, and Cameron was unable to sell his land. For this reason, he became one of the most vocal opponents of the railway to Burwood Road (now Belmore). The property was eventually subdivided by the Intercolonial Investment Land and Building Company Ltd in 1912, and sold as the ten-acre farms of the "Graham Park Estate", each costing between 65 Pounds and 142 Pounds 10 Shillings.
[edit] Boxing
Tuckwell's Farm stayed in the family of Patrick Moore until this century. His son, Peter, was well known among woodcutters of the district, because he was the coach for everyone who wanted to become a boxer. This was a very popular sport among sawyers of the nineteenth century. They fought in clearings, cut well away from settlements, because they did not want to be found by the police - the sport was officially banned. They did not wear boxing gloves, and fought, sometimes for 150 rounds, until one of the boxers was knocked out, or had his arm broken.
[edit] References
- The Book of Sydney Suburbs, Compiled by Frances Pollen, Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1990, Published in Australia ISBN 0207144958
- MUIR, Lesley. Narwee: early history. In: Canterbury & District Historical Society Journal Series 2, No. 12 .
[edit] External links
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- Street map from Street Directory, MSN Maps and Multimap.
- Satellite image from Google Maps, WikiMapia and Terraserver.
