Kookaburra Close - Kincumber #4 - Brisbane Water #7

The bus to Kincumber rattles and trundles its way over The Rip Bridge, around Daley’s Point, past St Hubert’s Island, down to the wharf at Empire Bay, past Cockle Bay, into Bensville for a quick loop around, past a vast mobile home village and into Kincumber. When it gets to Kincumber it goes up the hill at the east end and winds through and around another big retirement village then down Avoca Drive which goes through the centre of old Kincumber and out the other end.

I walked from one side of Kincumber to the other. It’s not a wide town, only five blocks wide, but it’s fun to do stuff like that. One end of the walk was at the Carrack Road jetty and the other was in Mynah Close at the hill end of Carrack.


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The jetty is at the end of Carrack Road. There’s a little forest of a few dozen pines and an opening onto a muddy carpark between the pines and the back of a retirement village. I stood on the jetty and looked out over Kincumber Broadwater. Down at the other end of the Broadwater there's the low hill of Davistown and beyond it the flattish top of Blackwall Mountain at Woy Woy. To the right of that is the little pointy hill of Saratoga then Yattalunga to the right of that. Yattalunga's low and beyond it you can see the ridge above Koolewong and Park's Bay.


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It's quiet at the jetty there. Few boats, not much noise comes through from Avoca Drive and there's not much in the way of buildings on the Davistown-Saratoga-Yattalunga shoreline so not much noise comes across the water either. There's mangroves on either side of the jetty. A duck was quacking in the swamp behind them and some fluffy grey baby ducks were following their mother about on the edge of them, a lone kookaburra chuckled to itself somewhere nearby and a crow cawed half-heartedly. The sky was low and grey and the water was black from the silt in the shallows. No oyster farms here. Not enough flow expect.

It started to sprinkle and I got on with my walk. Straight up Carrack Road to Kookaburra Street and Mynah Close at the other side of Kincumber. There's a bit of a view of Kincumber Broadwater from there but it's not high. From there I went down to Kincumber Street. Between the Neighbourhood Centre on Kincumber Street and the seventies shopping centre on Avoca Drive there's a little old church and a couple of Federation cottages. The church is not used now and has fallen into disrepair but the cottages are in good nick and in use.


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No6 Kincumber Street. Probably the house owned by John or Peter Burns and built circa 1900. The Burns family house built in 1927 is just out on frame on the left.

I got a look inside one of them, the one now in use as the Kincumber Community College. Its Federation interior is gone but its internal walls are intact so you can see the original layout. Outside its front door there's a blue plaque saying "Burns family, built 1927". There's no heritage number on the plaque but a worker complained about the renovation restrictions of its heritage status. The other cottage, same style and right next to it, had no plaque. One of the two is one my hist list as "House, John/Peter Burns, Avoca Drive (opp. Kincumber Hotel) ... c.1900". They've both got the wide wooden verandas of classic rural cottages and the KCC one had high ceilings to keep it cool inside and tea tree bushes on the sunny side to shade the biggest windows.


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The side of the Burns family house.

The church is another of the plain Carpenter Gothic ones dotted about Australia in small towns. This one's been painted light brown at some point in its life, perhaps by the Girl Guides whose fading logo is by the door. When I was there (November) there was water under the front if it but, apart from some kicked-in bits on the walls, there didn't seem to be a lot wrong with it. Of course, it could be eaten away by damp rot inside or something but it looks pretty salvagable from the outside. It's a pleasant little building and hopefully someone will find the funds and a new use for it.


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Carpenter Gothic style, circa 1840 to circa 1890, like St Luke's in Woy Woy.


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