Bytes: Sydney Suburbs, continued: Bringelly, Bronte, Brooklyn

BRINGELLY
Location:	Bringelly is located 67 kilometres from Sydney, on the Northern Road between Penrith and Camden.
Name Origin:	Some historians say the name came from early landholder, Ellis Bent, supposedly after a family estate in Wales. Others have claimed it is a corruption of an Aboriginal word, possibly meaning “unobtainable”.
Trivia: · The principal surgeon of New South Wales, D'Arcy Wentworth, received a grant in the area. · Legend has it that The Wild Colonial Boy Bold Jack Donahue also used the suburb as a hideout and was eventually killed on Wentworth's property. · Donahue was an Irish rebel who became a convict, then a bushranger, and was eventually shot dead by police. The song about him was outlawed as seditious, so the name in the song was changed to Jack Doolan. The Irish version is about a Jack Duggan, young emigrant who left the town of Castlemaine, County Kerry, Ireland, for Australia in the early 19th century. According to the song, he spent his time "robbing from the rich to feed the poor". The Australian version is quite different from the Irish version. It is about a boy named Jack Dolan, born in Castlemaine. The poem then continues on to tell of his exploits without mentioning his moving to Australia, which implies that the Castlemaine in question is that in Victoria.

Gallery:

D’Arcy Wentworth

The lithograph of John Donohoe's body as it lay in a morgue in Sydney Hospital is attributed to Sir Thomas Mitchell, Surveyor-General of New South Wales

-------oOo--------

BRONTE
Location:	Bronte is located 7 kilometres east of the Sydney CBD in the Waverley Council local government area of the Eastern Suburbs.
Name Origin:	Robert Lowe who later became Viscount Sherbrooke, bought 17 hectares (42 acres) of land from Mortimer Lewis, the English-born Australian Colonial Architect who owned most of the frontage in the area in the 1830s. His home was completed in 1845 and was named Bronte House, for Lord Nelson, who was the Duke of Bronte, a place in Sicily, Italy.
About: · In 1799, King Ferdinand III created Bronte as a Duchy in Sicily, and rewarded Admiral Horatio Nelson with the title of Duke for the help he had provided him in suppressing the revolution in Naples and so in recovering his throne. As well as being made a Duke, Nelson was given as a fief the Castello Maniace, which at the time was the remains of a Benedictine Monastery. · Bronte House, a single-storey stone bungalow located in Bronte Road, is owned by Waverley Council and leased to private tenants who hold open days a few times a year. It is listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register. · Waverley Cemetery is a heritage-listed cemetery on top of the cliffs at Bronte that was opened in 1877. the cemetery is noted for its largely intact Victorian and Edwardian monuments and is regularly cited as being one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world. The cemetery contains the graves of many significant Australians including the poet Henry Lawson.

Gallery:

Bronte House

Bronte Beach

Waverly Cemetery

Henry Lawson’s grave

A tram at Bronte beach terminus. There were trams up until about 1955 when they were replaced with buses.

Bronte Beach tram, 1959

Bronte tram terminus, year unknown

-------oOo--------

BROOKLYN
Location:	Brooklyn is located 34 km (21 mi) north of Sydney CBD in the local government area of Hornsby Shire.
Name Origin:	Although it sounds very British (or, perhaps, American) Brooklyn was reputedly named after Breuckelen, a town in the Netherlands just south of Amsterdam. There is an alternative explanation which suggests that it was named because the Union Bridge Company of Brooklyn, New York built the first railway bridge across the Hawkesbury. This is unlikely as the settlement was known as Brooklyn before the bridge was built. The general area was known as Peat's Ferry crossing for a long time until January 1884 when a plan of survey for the subdivision of land owned by Peter and William Fagan was registered with the suburb name of Brooklyn.
About: · Brooklyn is a charming village on the shores of the Hawkesbury River. · Sometimes referred to as "the gateway to the Hawkesbury", it occupies the narrow strip of land between the river's southern bank and the extensive bushland of the Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park and Muogamarra Nature Reserve. · Boating is Brooklyn's major attraction. There are houseboats, hire boats, ferries, water taxis, boat ramps and a number of marinas stretching along the shoreline from the Brooklyn Bridge. On the 20th January 1944, a Kempsey bound train travelling downhill into the town of Brooklyn crashed into a bus at a level crossing at the Brooklyn station. In total 17 people died and five were injured. The gatekeeper was committed to stand trial for manslaughter for failing to close the gate but these charges were later dropped by the Crown. According to the Canberra Times on 21st January 1944: Fifteen persons, including several children and two Nuns, were killed and five seriously injured when the Kempsey mail train crashed into a bus at a level crossing at Hawkesbury River. The bus was cut in two. One half was carried 400 yards along the line by the train. The tender of the locomotive was derailed. The dead and injured were scattered along the line for many yards. Among the dead were a mother and her two daughters, the father being taken to hospital. The train, which was crowded, was travelling down an incline at the time of the smash. The engine struck the centre of the bus. The crash was heard half a mile away. An inquest in April 1944 heard level crossing gatekeeper Peter Cecil Tolley, 20, had not fully closed both crossing gates to road traffic that morning. Detective Martin McMahon explained Tolley said in a statement that he had opened the gates to let a bread truck cross about half an hour earlier, saying: “I had not closed the gate, and the bus driver thought the line was clear and drove on to it.” Asked why he had not closed the gates, Tolley said, “There was a lot of traffic, and it is the most monotonous job on the railway. You do not realise how serious it is until something like this happens.” After a four-day hearing Tolley was committed for trial, charged with manslaughter for alleged negligence in failing to close the crossing gates, but in June 1944 the Crown decided not to proceed.