My name’s Dean O’Connell. I came to Long Bay to live when I was about ten, back in 1976-77,
and my Dad got a job here probably in 1973-74, before we got a Park Ranger house.
Being lucky enough to live at the park I had access to everything. Obviously, the water,
the cliffs, the farm, the reserve. Looking back at it I thought it was normal, I thought growing up
here everybody had the opportunity to do something like this. Looking back at it now obviously I
was pretty lucky and realise now that maybe I was one of the few that had the opportunities.
My Dad being the Park Ranger, I thought he had the best job in the world. I used to follow him round,
drive the tractor or jump on the back of the tractor collecting the rubbish with him,
even cleaning out the toilet blocks when that was part of the job,
fixing the fences. Everybody knew who he was and tagging on the back people got to know me as well.
We lived down the far end of the park in one of the Vaughan homesteads, but not the Homestead.
It was as far as you could go, as far as we were concerned, without going into private
property. It was the best place in the world, as a kid we didn’t know how lucky we were.
As a young fulla I used to spend my whole life on the beach, I mean if I didn’t have to
go to school, I would have spent my whole time down there. I was always fishing, or swimming,
or living there, it was 6 o’clock in the morning, 7 o’clock in the morning you’d be out the door
and came home when it started getting dark or you started getting hungry.
Where we’re standing now is where I used to do a lot of abseiling. As a Boy Scout
I learned how to abseil on a relatively small wall which our trainers coached us on,
to show us how to abseil. And I used to borrow the ropes from the Scout den
and all the carabiners and harnesses, and we’d spend all day out here just rock climbing.
The park seemed to be bigger, I think because we were little, but the park was pretty big to us. It
was a lot more open back then, there’s a lot more trees here today than what there was back then.
School was just directly behind me, but this was all open fields, and the cattle and the
horses used to roam through here. And I used to jump all the fences, the barbed wire, and
there was a bit of a creek a little bit further up. I used to jump over that and then run up the
hill, in behind those houses to school. But obviously that was all farmland back then.
This is 1954, it’s a lot different to when we moved here, all through here was all camp sites,
they weren’t there when we moved in. Obviously, this is what the farm used to look like;
I can remember that. And the southern end, down this place, which is all developed now,
that was pretty much like that. And the road winds its way this way and our house would have been
about there, and that’s the old Vaughan Homestead up on the hill over this side.
We also had a creek running round the back of the house where we did a lot of eeling,
rabbit shooting, duck shooting, making forts, making rafts. So, there was lots of
other things we did as well. So, from the second bridge was part of the farm, not part of the park,
and we’re looking to the west going up the creek. And just at the curve - obviously
this was all farmland, there was no bush here – is where I used to do a lot of duck shooting.
This is the Vaughan creek, we’re about 200 metres upstream from the Vaughan Homestead, and the house
I lived in is just behind us. So as a kid I used to come down here quite a bit, do a bit of eeling.
We used to put rope bridges up, and if you have a look just in this direction over here
towards the west you can see a post sticking up out of the ground,
that’s a fence post I put in, probably about 40 years ago now. We used to tie a rope
across the creek, make rafts out of some of the drums and pull ourselves across. And head
up – it was all farmland, none of this bush was here – up into the trees to build treehouses and
huts and my friends would come down, we’d play war games and things like that.
When I was 12, raising money for going to the Jamboree, to raise my money, I used to thistle
chip all the thistles or the gorse from the southern end of the park or the farm, out to
the Okura, which is just beyond that point, that far point over there and as far as you can see.
I think living in the park and growing up and learning
skills through the park – especially with my Dad being the Park Ranger – I’m still using
those skills I learned today, and showing Boy Scouts today, now I’m a leader. And
they’re the type of skills most people these days probably have lost, which I’m passing
on to their kids. Things like tying knots and abseiling, and even sailing, lighting fires…that
type of stuff that I’ve learned from the park, ‘coz we had the freedom, we had no boundaries.