Regular users of North Shore trains will have seen a sign at Waverton Station urging passengers to ‘Alight here for beautiful Balls Head.’ The history of that iconic graphic is uncertain. A faded version was already in place by the early 1980s. But it is likely considerably younger than the retro typeface suggests. The designer probably borrowed ideas from the subdivision posters advertising suburban allotments on the North Shore in the lead up to the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932.
And that is appropriate, for ‘beautiful Balls Head’ was dedicated as a public reserve in 1926 – along with Berry Island, the next headland to the west. This year marks their centenary as parkland and vestiture in North Sydney Council. The ‘saving’ of both areas were important steps in the development of town planning. As Premier Jack Lang said at the opening of the reserves on 23 October 1926, ‘apart from the needs of the port of a great commercial city, every part of the foreshore of the harbour should be open to the use and enjoyment of the people…’
The government had already acquired the land from private hands in 1906 when a ‘swap’ took place. The waterfront from Berry Island to Berrys Bay was ‘returned’ to the Crown by the Trustees of the Berry Estate, in return for the construction of a public hospital in Berry on the South Coast. The name ‘Berry’ points to the colonial ownership of over 200 hectares of lower North Shore land and a larger estate on the Shoalhaven River by Alexander Berry. The Harbour estate was originally granted to his business partner Edward Wollstonecraft.
Before then, the land was that of the Cammeraygal (Gameraigal) people, with carvings at both Balls Head and Berry Island still there today.
Both Berry Island and Balls Head may have become industrialised waterfronts. A coal loader was built on the Balls Head peninsula around 1920. But the aesthetic value of both areas was recognised as early as 1901. Lobbying of the Nationalist Country Party coalition, in power from 1922 to 1925, by residents and council, did not secure a preservation of the sites for reserves. The premiership of Jack Lang in 1925 made the difference. Political opponents of Labor applauded him: ‘Mr Lang would be blamed for many things…but he would be blessed for what he did that day’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1926).
For the People: the Centenary of Balls Head and Berry Island Reserve exhibition is on at the North Sydney Heritage Centre, Stanton Library.
