Push to protect the North Shore cave where poet Henry Lawson used to dry out

By the time famed Australian bush poet Henry Lawson came to be living at 58 Market Street in Naremburn and hanging out in a nearby cave, he was 40 years old and his life was a shambles.

Lawson had “lived a troubled and unstable” existence, according to a Willoughby Council document that charts Lawson’s time on the lower North Shore.

“From an early age he suffered major hearing loss and mental illness, and by the time Lawson moved to Naremburn in 1906, his creative and personal life was in decline … with the writer suffering from the compounded effects of poverty, depression, and alcoholism.”

According to local historian Eric Wilksch, Lawson would frequent the Crows Nest Hotel — where he would exchange verse for drink.

“[He] was apparently not received into the community with any great enthusiasm owing to his sorry reputation for alcoholic addiction and related inability to maintain his financial obligations,” Wilksch wrote in The Naremburn Story. 

“His first stay was from June 1906 to January 1907 when he was able to maintain the sympathetic concern of Mrs Isabel Byers who occupied an iron-roofed cottage with a tall poplar tree at one end, at 58 Market Street.”

The Flat Rock Creek cave in Naremburn, which was used by Lawson about 120 years ago as a place to retreat from society and dry out, is now the subject of a push by Willoughby Council for Heritage protection.

Since the late 1990s, the cave and surrounding sandstone amphitheatre have been used for public poetry recitals and live music performances.

The cave and surrounding amphitheatre join 14 other buildings, structures and features of the local landscape for which council is seeking a Heritage listing.

• They include Narremburn's Sisters of St Joseph’s Convent, the Chatswood Bowling Club and a 1913 Federation cottage hosting the Willoughby Museum. 

What does it do: Local Heritage listing means that significant alterations or demolition of a structure or building requires consent from the relevant local council. This listing does not guarantee a site will hang around forever. 

• In some cases, local councils will permit the partial demolition of Heritage sites. 

• The state government can also overrule local councils to permit the demolition of a local Heritage site. 

Thumbnail: Willoughby City Council, National Archives of Australia