Long before Sea Cliff Bridge, the northern Illawarra coast road was a dangerous stretch, as this sign warns. Photo: Supplied.
This “beware falling rocks” sign used to make the old Bulli Road at Clifton the pioneer of adventure tourism in Illawarra.
Some people found the sign funny and claimed to be curious as to what on earth the rocks had to be aware of?
Others didn’t see the joke, for those rocks on that old road – the route of which you can still see today – could sometimes be no laughing matter at all.
Yet some still claimed not to be at all fazed because the helpful advisory sign suggesting one should keep one’s eyes peeled meant that all you apparently had to do was “keep a lookout” – even though the sign didn’t quite manage to explain what you should do if rocks came hurtling down.
For example, in 1910 three men were riding in a horse and cart around a turn immediately below the cliff on the road from Clifton to the new colliery works at North Clifton and only narrowly escaped death.
They heard a rumble and, looking up to the overhanging rock, noticed tons of it coming down with a rush immediately over their heads.
Their horse, however, was whipped up just in time as an immense heap of soils and stone crashed onto the road with a mighty roar, right on the spot where their vehicle had been just a few seconds before.
However the horse, terrorised by the noise, bolted round the winding road and it took the driver all his time to keep the animal from rushing over the cliffs into the sea.
Fortunately no-one had yet been killed but a reporter wondered how long “before the Government have their eyes opened wide enough” to whatever tragedy might occur.
Even in 1910 this part of the road at Clifton was always looked upon as dangerous in view of a number of previous rock falls. But an engineering solution had not yet emerged and there were few other options if you wanted to get quickly towards Stanwell Park.
The very next year, however, a motor party returning from Jervis Bay had reached about half the distance round the track when they found further progress blocked by a huge boulder which had toppled from the cliffs and planted itself in the middle of the road.
The motor party (six in all) were equal to the occasion and promptly secured levers from a stack of timber evidently kept for such a purpose and quickly set to work long tipping the obstructing rock over the edge of the road into the sea below.
The news report of the event noted: “This is only one of many such incidents.”
Back in 1884 a resident of Clifton described living in that place “as something like a besieged city”.
In the first place he said “communication has been cut off between the people on each side of the cliff by a fall of a rock, blocking about three hundred yards of the narrowest part of the road”.
Two years later, it was reported that “one of the most necessary steps that should be taken to make the road safe was the pulling down of several overhanging rocks, which might come down at any moment, and perhaps cause loss of life or serious injury”.
By 1885 the Bulli-Clifton road was already in a parlous state and this was said to “especially to be deplored at those points where it comes very near the rocks”.
Finally in the 1980s things got sufficiently bad for action to definitely need to be taken, as the wonderful photo above by Greg Kotze clearly indicates.
It still took until the Sea Cliff Bridge opened in December 2005 for this replacement section of Lawrence Hargrave Drive to be improved after it had to be permanently closed in August 2003 due to the regular falls of rock.
Yet really, getting any kind of road along these cliffs was a remarkable nineteenth century achievement in the Illawarra.
