O’SULLIVAN’S FOLLY, NARROW NECK KATOOMBA NSW AUSTRALIA
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Near the lowest point on Glenraphael Drive, a
well-made road leads off to the right. Vehicles won’t get far along it,
however, as there is a locked gate at the first bend. See my video on Narrow Neck lookouts for more information.
The road leads down to a Sydney Water pumping
station at the cliff edge. This is an historic spot, because in this vicinity workers
from the oil shale mines in the Megalong Valley below once had a series of
ladders to get up the cliffs at a point where they are at their lowest. More
recently ladders were built here when the pipeline was constructed from the
Fish River Dam. I can remember climbing them several
times in the 1960’s.
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| Pick marks |
Since then, the top and bottom ladders have been removed
to discourage climbers from using them.
It is not with ladders or the pipeline that we are
concerned here, rather with the road itself which has long been known locally
as “O’Sullivan’s Folly”. The fact
that the cliffs were lower here, and the presence of the miner’s route to
Katoomba, gave root to the idea that it might be possible to construct a road
at this point into the Megalong Valley. As you look at the cliffs you might
wonder how the road was to be built from where it now ends down to the valley
floor.
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Jesus told the story of a man who began to build a tower, but left it
unfinished when he ran out of money (and thereby made himself look foolish).
So it was with this road.
Edward
William O’Sullivan was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in
1846 of Irish Catholic parents. He eventually settled in NSW where he became a
successful journalist and printer. He strongly supported the fledgling Labor
Party of the day and by all reports was an honest, hard-working man. Having
been elected to the NSW parliament in 1885 as the representative for
Queanbeyan, he soon became one of its most prominent members. In 1899, as
Secretary for Public Works, he approved the expenditure of funds for the
construction of a road from Katoomba into the Megalong Valley via the
approximate route of the then existing miners’ ladders.
The money ran out long before the road could be
completed (if it ever could have been) and jokers began calling it
“O’Sullivan’s Folly”, which, of course they still do. It doesn’t ring true to
O’Sullivan’s character to waste public money that way. He would have been
thinking of the jobs the project created and the benefit to the residents of
the valley below. Perhaps he was just given bad advice by Katoomba residents
who should have known better.
My interest in EW O’Sullivan goes back more than
30 years to the time I found several bottles underneath an old house. Much the
most interesting was a Codd or marble bottle from the town of Queanbeyan, bearing
the inscription “GN Morton Queanbeyan
EWOS The Keystone” surrounding a picture of a man’s head. The portrait is,
of course, none other than that of the subject of this blog. GN (George Nairn) Morton
was a cordial maker in the town around 1900-1915.
But what did “The Keystone”
mean? O’Sullivan died in 1910, and in the various newspaper reports of his life
I discovered that he frequently referred to himself as “The Keystone of the Democratic Arch”. I now believe that Morton had
this bottle designed to honour a man he greatly admired and that this probably
happened soon after EWOS’s death. So it was that the soft drink bottles of
Queanbeyan (and, as it turned out, those of the new Federal capital, Canberra)
bore the likeness of a politician.
The design remained in use for perhaps 10 years,
long enough, at least for the old-fashioned marble bottles to be replaced by
new-fangled crown seals. These bottles are in great demand from collectors
today. My specimen has been packed away for years and the photograph is one I
extracted from an online auction catalogue. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it
bring $1000 +, which isn’t far short of what O’Sullivan’s Folly cost to build.
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