It's a little bit country...

My Christmas present this year from my lovely sis-in-law was a little pocket guide to "Sydney's hidden and intriguing places". That sort of thing is right up my street - just the thought of being able to brag: "I know the perfect place and it's just round the corner and you've never heard of it" makes me purr with smug self-satisfaction. Especially if I'm in a city where I've not lived for five years.

Anyway, such thoughts were going through my head as I got to the end of Adelaide Street the other day and dropped down into Cooper Park.



Ask most Sydneysiders about it and they'll tell you they've never heard of this 38 acres of never-developed bushland strung between the ponce of Double Bay and the bustle of North Bondi. Which to me is absolutely extraordinary.

In London, a treasure like this would be on the cover of every travel guide and filled with dogs, strollers and kids on bikes every weekend of the year. Think of it as Hampstead Heath with Jurassic tree palms, massive stringybarks corkscrewing their way into the ground, ghost gums surrounded by litters of peeled bark, and native birds sounding and whooping all around.

Because it's a steep stream gully, you can rarely even see the tops of the terraces and apartment blocks on the surrounding streets. Looking up through the treetops, you could imagine yourself in the Blue Mountains, or further afield still. Barring a bit of management and some work on the paths, this little scratch of land has not changed much since the days when the local Darug had never seen a European face.



For anyone who lives within 30 minutes' walk of Bondi Junction, the main transport interchange for Sydney's eastern suburbs, a walk through Cooper Park would seem an obvious way to work out the stresses of the day on the way home from work. But the strange thing is, the place was pretty much deserted on the three occasions I've been there so far.

Perhaps Australians are so used to being surrounded with genuine native wilderness that they become blasé to it when it's on their doorstep. But I can't escape the suspicion that the Double Bay types are too busy carving people up in their 4WDs, while the Bondi types aren't interested in any green space you can't jog through. There's a few tennis courts at one end of it, but I guarantee that visitor numbers would go through the roof if they knocked down an acre or so of forest and laid out a bland grass footie oval.

Anyway, I'm happy for it to stay that way. The second time I visited it was the week before Christmas, and I was on my way back from shopping for essentials at the massive Westfield centre in Bondi Junction. My backpack was full of drink and cat food and similar nonsense and it had been drizzling all day, but the weight seemed to disappear as I climbed down the mossy staircase into the gully. The spray fell in veils through the fern fronds and beaded on the leaves of the forest floor shrubs. A native magpie bristled on a trunk a few metres away, then unfurled its wings and dropped deeper into the valley. I felt nowhere near the city.