2026-06-30
A childhood playground eventually reveals its secrets
By Dr Andrew Turk, a member of the Green Issue Editorial Team
This story compares the significance of the ashes of two individuals, spread at a cave in Angophora Reserve on the Avalon side of Bilgola Plateau in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney. It discusses the importance of this cave, for the author, as a child and in recent decades.
The Cave on Bilgola Plateau
My brother Chris, two years older than me, used to hang-out with me all the time, when we were not at school. In the 1950s we lived in the bush on the top of Bilgola Plateau, initially in a shed built by our father on a dirt track pretending to be a road. It was more than a kilometre to the next house so we had no friends to play with. One day, when I was about five, we found a huge cave on the northern face of the plateau, that is on the Avalon side. I cannot remember anything clearly recognisable as Aboriginal art, but there were markings on the walls of the cave and a place where many fires had been lit in the most spacious part of the cave, looking out through trees to the coast in the distance. It seemed to us that Aboriginal people must have lived there before British colonisation. [1], [2]
We returned to this cave many times, during the next few years, enjoying it as our very special private place. However, I also thought about how colonisation had removed Aboriginal people from this area. Even as a child, this made me feel a deep sadness and a sense-of-shame about this history. Those thoughts ended up shaping my future. For about thirty years from the early 1990s, I worked with Aboriginal communities in Western Australia, giving them practical assistance and seeking to understand their languages, culture and spirituality. I still write about this, in different ways including a PhD dissertation, a resulting book and many dozens of academic articles and conference papers.
Nance Turk
As well as my brother, I had a sister Linda, four years older than me, born in 1945. Our mother’s maiden name was Agnes (Nance) Fishburn. She was conceived in Scotland but born in Sydney in 1913. After her schooling she trained as a stenographer and typist, then worked for a business in Sydney. During World War 2, she answered a call for a volunteer to work on a secret government project that needed secretarial support. She was accepted for the job. She assisted engineers and scientists, who were developing a top-secret set of equipment, attempting to produce petrol from oil-shale seams at Glen Davis in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales. Japanese submarines had been successful at torpedoing ships bringing much needed petrol to Australia, leading the government to take the drastic step of trying to produce petrol. The extensive oil reserves in various parts of the continent having not been discovered yet. The first ‘flowing well’ was not found until 1953 (at Rough Range, WA). Commercial extraction of oil only began in 1961 at the Moonie field in Queensland. I don’t think this trial set of equipment at Glen Davis produced significant amounts of petrol, but the project benefited my mother.
Our father’s name was Herbert (Bert) Turk, born in Queensland in 1918. His father (William Frederick Turk) was very wealthy, being the first Ford car agent in Queensland from 1910. However, he sadly abandoned his family and our father grew up in poorer financial circumstances in Sydney. This made Bert value the culture of his mother (born Emilie Marre Struver) who had emigrated from Germany. As a result, Bert was heavily involved in the German association in Sydney, including assisting in arranging the visit to Sydney (in May, 1938) of a member of the German aristocracy, immediately before the declaration of the Second World War. This was the World War 1 German naval hero Count Felix von Luckner. Australians involved in this visit were strongly criticised once WW2 was declared.
To try to demonstrate his loyalty to Australia, Bert then contributed to recruiting campaigns. However, I suspect his ‘file’ was marked ‘not to be trusted’ (or something similar). He failed in attempts to join the Australian Navy and the Airforce, He succeeded in getting a junior role in the Army, but never left Australia. One of his duties was to guard the secret petrol plant at Glen Davis. There he met my mother and after the war they married, with Nance adopting his surname, as was then the custom.
In her twenties and thirties, Nance was an avid bushwalker and climber of cliffs. Although she had not had the benefit of significant post-secondary education, she was a constant reader and interested in lots of different ideas. She joined a reading and discussion group which would take short trips away together on weekends. One of these trips was to Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. While there, she took the opportunity to climb up Bilgola Plateau and saw a sign there advertising for sale a large area of land (virgin bush). Once she married Bert, she convinced him to take out a loan and buy that block of land and build a shed to house them and their (eventually) three children.
During my early years living on The Plateau, Linda and Chris went to primary school in Avalon. Nance had to carry me on her shoulders for a couple of kilometres down the hill, through the bush, to take them to school in the morning then carry me home. In the afternoon, the process needed to be repeated, to pick up my siblings from school. My father needed to drive their only ancient car to get to work in central Sydney and, in any case, my mother never learnt to drive. So walking was her only option. Carrying me down through the bush with large boulders and small cliffs was initially not too difficult for Nance, given her fitness and bushwalking history. However, as I grew older and larger, she tried hard to teach me to walk and to climb the hill back up to our shed on the top of The Plateau.
The land owned by my parents was ultimately subdivided into about twenty blocks, with the necessary roads to provide access. As these blocks slowly sold, the family were able to have a large house built by one of Bert’s brothers. Unfortunately, there was a ‘credit squeeze’ created by the Federal Government. The bank foreclosed on my parent’s mortgage and sold the land for just sufficient to cover their debt. The family had to rent a house in Newport, where we children then went to school. Nance and Bert never owned a house again, for the rest of their lives.
Dad died in poverty in his 50s then Chris was able, through his church connections, to get Nance into a community house for two widows. She was eligible for a full aged pension and said that she never in her life had more money to spend. Sadly, Nance became very ill. She had seen friends suffer terribly from the same illness, before dying, despite the best efforts of doctors. So, she said that she did not want any treatment. It took her a very difficult fortnight for Nance to die, in the late 1990s.
Linda and Chris and I discussed what to do with mum’s ashes after she was cremated. She said she did not want a grave where we would have to visit her. We all agreed that Nance would want her ashes scattered in the Bilgola Plateau bush she loved. The perfect place for that was from the edge of the cave that Chris and I had found. We had not been there for decades and there were no tracks through the bush in those days, however, after a bit of ‘bush-bashing’ and searching, we found the cave and I was given the job of emptying the big jar of ashes into her beloved bush.
Aboriginal Girl
Bilgola Plateau is now mostly covered by very expensive houses, except where the topography is too steep, especially on the Northern side (towards Avalon) where the bush is preserved as ‘Angophora Reserve’. There is a well-maintained track through this reserve running up from Avalon. This roughly follows the journey through the bush that Nance used to make, taking my siblings to school and carry me as a small child. The cave is about fifty or one hundred metres west of the trail, but there is no track to it.
In the 1980s children living on The Plateau had, of course, found the cave. While scratching in the dirt floor there, they discovered a small finger bone. Being well-bred children, they took the bone to the Police, who decided it was from a child. They were very concerned that it could belong to one of the children who had gone missing in their area over the past decades. They called in medical and archaeological experts to investigate the bone and the site where it was found in the cave.
Josephine McDonald and other archaeologists found an Aboriginal burial site and historical shell middens and artifacts in the cave floor, dating from 2,000 to 5,000 years ago. Details of the examination of this find and site can be found in The Archaeology of the Angophora Reserve Rock Shelter: (or Helping the Police with Their Enquiries) by Josephine McDonald.[3] I understand that the finger bone was from an Aboriginal girl. Apparently, the cultural tradition at that place and time was to cremate a child who had died. The archaeological research indicated that Aboriginal people camped near the coast in summer, catching fish and gathering other seafood. In winter they retreated to this cave and lived on a variety of local flora, kangaroos, wallabies, goanna and other fauna.
Recent Visits to the Cave
I visited the cave a couple of times after spreading mum’s ashes there, including with my second wife (Kathryn) in the early 2000s. In October 2025 I flew to NSW to visit my brother Chris who lives with his wife Annette in Junee. I also went to see my Antarctic mapping friend John Manning in Newcastle.
High on the list of ‘sacred sites;’ on the Northern Beaches of Sydney was ‘the cave’ on Bilgola Plateau. From my previous visits, I knew about the walking trail starting at the edge of Avalon and proceeding up through ‘Angophora Reserve’ to near the cave. This time I was by myself so I packed my shoulder-bag carefully. I had a jumper, my mobile phone, some biscuits and a full water-bottle.
Once I thought I was about at the correct part of the track, I started looking through the bush towards the cave, which was probably between fifty and one hundred meters away. I was hoping to recognise a tree or some rocks. I was surprised to see some coloured tape in a tree near the trail, then a bit further west the same sort of tape on another tree. Walking about ten metres away from the track in the direction of those two trees I made out tape in a third tree about thirty metres closer to the cave. Obviously, someone had put the tape in the trees to indicate the way to the cave, although the undergrowth was still as thick as previously and there was no sort of pathway. By the time I reached the second tree, and could clearly see the third in the distance, I was confronted by a huge oval-shaped boulder, about two metres by three metres wide, and about a metre high. It was blocking my path so I climbed on top of it.
On the far side of the rock, towards the cave, there was a lot of vegetation and the ground seemed flat, but was not visible through the vegetation. With my left hand I grabbed hold of an overhanging branch, as I launched myself off the cave-side of the rock. Unfortunately, the branch broke as I was in mid air, so I fell heavily on the far-side of the rock. Unknown to me, the ground was not level there but the vegetation hid a rock cliff about three metre high, which I fell down frantically waving my arms and legs.
It was not just hitting the rocks after a three-metre fall, but also the shock of the unexpected cliff, that took my breath away, as I collapsed in a heap. I lay there panting, trying to establish if any bones were broken. It seemed like none were, but I could not stand up. I checked that my bag was still over my shoulder containing my mobile phone. My first instinct was to turn on the phone and dial 000. Then I thought about the sort of information I could give about my exact location. Huddled at the bottom of the cliff, with vegetation overhanging it, I realised that, if I became unconscious, I would be extremely hard to find. Much better to get back to the track, if I could manage it.
I crawled along the bottom of the cliff, roughly in the direction of the track, until I found a section of the rock wall that was not vertical. It had some holes in the rock-face large and deep enough to work as hand and foot holds. Very slowly and with great effort, I pulled myself up the rock face, then lay at the top completely exhausted. It was less than thirty metres from there to the track but it took me an hour to crawl and pull myself through the undergrowth, stopping frequently to ease the pain and to recover my breath. At last, at the track, I propped my back against a tree trunk, took a drink from my water-bottle and ate some biscuits.
I must have fallen asleep because I was woken my two tourists from the USA, who were standing over me looking very worried. I assured them that I was not dying and could get myself to the bottom end of the trail, since it was all downhill. The couple immediately said no to that suggestion and offered to carry me to their car. I rejected their kind offer, but accepted holding onto the shoulder of the man till we reached their car at the bottom of the track. They used their mobile phone (that was in their car) to request an ambulance. They waited with me till the paramedics arrived. After a quick inspection of my battered body, the ambulance took me to the Northern Beaches Hospital. I spent the night there while they checked that I had no major injuries.
Once I had recovered from my ordeal in a Newport hotel, I visited Chris and his wife Annette in Junee, near Wagga Wagga, ‘so good they named it twice’. After spending time there I returned to Sydney by train and flew back to Perth.
So, I never made it to the cave on that trip but was keen to investigate who might have placed the coloured tape on the three trees indicating the route to the cave. Back in Perth, Google helped me find the story about the children finding the finger bone in the 1980s and the subsequent archaeological investigations. They revealed that the ashes and bones are of a young Aboriginal girl, from all those years ago. I had previously been totally unaware of this investigation and the confirmation of my expectation that Aboriginal people used to live in that cave.
In April 2026 I was again in NSW visiting the same people as the year before. By chance my daughter Cate, her husband Gerd and two of their children (Amelia and Lotta) were also in the Sydney area for a couple of days. I showed them some of the ‘sacred sites’ from my childhood: the pier at Newport where Chris and I used to fish, then Newport Public Primary School and various sporting grounds where I had played cricket or rugby. We then had a swim at Bilgola Beach.
After all my stories over the years, Cate was super keen to see the cave. So, we drove to Avalon and left the car at the start of the track through Angophora Reserve. I roughly knew how far we needed to go up that track. There is also a prominent tree, near where we would need to leave the track, and head for the cave. The coloured tapes were still in the three trees but there was no path to follow through the bush to reach the cave. We got as far as where I had fallen down the short cliff the year before.
We sat on the rock and I told them what I knew about the cremated Aboriginal girl. We were unsure whether there had been any official declaration of an Aboriginal sacred site. However, we considered whether my fall the year before might have been a warning against inappropriate trespass on an Aboriginal scared place. We decided that we should respect the importance of the Aboriginal girl’s ashes more than those of my mother and proceed no closer to the cave. We walked back down the trail, disappointed at not seeing the cave, but confident that we had made the correct decision. I am sure that our mother Nance would agree, that the older First Nation ashes are the most important ones. What do you think?
[1] https://www.facebook.com/NarrabeenReunions/posts/angophora-reserve-at-avalon-beach-is-known-to-many-locals-as-a-special-place-bec/5919903178037344/
[2] http://pnha.org.au/whatsinside/uploads/2020/10/Issue-2-Pittwater-Nature.pdf
[3] https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Archaeology_of_the_Angophora_Reserve.html?id=E-14AAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
Header photo: Entrance to Angophora Reserve, Bilgola Plateau, Sydney, NSW
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]