The Woy Woy Rd hieroglyphs

In the bush just off Woy Woy Rd, there are some very unusual rock carvings of what appear to be Egyptian inscriptions carved into a narrow crevice.

The crevice lies below Lyre Trig and is near the Bulgandry aboriginal carvings site.

No one seems to know who did these carvings and when they were made.

They were first documented in 1975, but are thought to have been in existence since the 1920s.

Recent tests comparing the age of nearby aboriginal carvings (200 to 250 years old) to the glyphs suggest they could be almost 100 years old.

Alan Dash, a surveyor for Gosford Council, first noticed them in 1975 and also noticed more additions on each of his return visits.

Neil Martin, a ranger for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, may have discovered the author in 1984 when he came across an old mentally handicapped Yugoslavian man chiseling away at the rock.

His chisel was confiscated and he was let off with a warning.

These later incidents were merely people adding to the original carvings.

With the age of the Internet, the story of the carvings reached a new audience.

Theories abounded involving shipwrecked Egyptian sailors, Phoenician settlers adding to the carvings and even some visiting aliens having a bit of a carve as well.

On some websites, the carvings were deciphered by a couple of "so called" experts on Egyptology.

They were supposed to tell a story of how the crew of an Egyptian vessel had become shipwrecked in Broken Bay and the gradual death of its crew from snakebite, starvation and entanglements with the local aboriginal population.

In fact, in 1983 the whole site was photographed and the pictures were sent to the Head of Egyptology at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Professor Nageeb Kanawati concluded that the carvings were very good fakes, some were carved back to front as if from a transfer, some of the carvings did not make sense as they represented different kings hundreds of years apart.

He thought they may have been done by someone copying a postcard or an old National Geographic photograph - a fan perhaps inspired by his wartime memories serving in Egypt in World War I.

In the 1920s, there was a passion for all things Egyptian.

Egyptmania it was called, inspiring fashion and design, and flapper girls were inspired by the Cleopatra look.

Art deco has a very strong Egyptian influence and this can often be seen in buildings from this era.

Possibly the carvings were influenced by the well documented construction of a small sphinx in the Ku Ring Gai National Park in the 1920s.

A man named Private Shirley and a group of returned diggers carved a small sphinx out of a solid boulder as a tribute to their fallen comrades in Egypt.

There was uproar at the time because it was seen as vandalism in a national park by stiff-collared bureaucrats.

I decided to take a look at the whole site for myself.

Firstly, I tracked down some old Northumberland parish maps dating back to 1910.

The area in question was divided up into several blocks and two of these were owned by the Pollan and Gilford families.

There are streets named after both families in Kariong today.

On the maps, there are marked locations of aboriginal carvings in two areas but no mention of the hieroglyphs.

The glyphs lay just over the boundary in the national park adjacent to the Gilford property.

Before the construction of Woy Woy Rd, the road running past the Gilford property was one of the only ways into town.

Once you descended the hill into Koolewong, you could then cross the Woy Woy Bay inlet via boat or later on walk across the railway bridge (before the construction of Brisbane Water Dr).

The farmhouse on this property was on that road and is three minutes walk from the glyph site.

While on site I found a boulder on the boundary with the initials DG carved into it, almost certainly a member of the Gilford clan and a good chance of being one of the original authors of the glyphs - a quirky roadside attraction for passing trade perhaps or a good old Woy Woy style practical joke to spring on visiting friends.

Someone knows who really did them and could well be chuckling away to themselves to this day.

Steve Spillard, 19 Nov 2008