Rocky Headlands

About seventy thousand years ago the sea level in this area rose sixty metres, flooding the Karuah River valley and forming the estuary of Port Stephens. The drowned valley has been described as a water wonderland. Much of the beauty is below the surface. The best place to scuba dive is off Halifax Point, where large sponges and a great diversity of marine life exist, to a depth of twenty-eight metres. Here you will meet a friendly blue groper before reaching the rocky bottom, which is covered in sea urchins.

A more sheltered dive is off Fly Point, featuring sponge gardens and coral life. One of the best shore dives in New South Wales lies protected within the Fly Point-Halifax Park Aquatic Reserve. Outside Port Stephens, there are a number of other dives, the best being a swim right through Looking Glass Isle, near Broughton Island. This dive features sheer walls, schools of fish, rays, colourful sponges and the novelty of swimming right through a natural fault in the island.

Tomaree Headland separates the calmer waters of Port Stephens from the swells of the South Pacific Ocean.

Many of the boats hired in Port Stephens head straight for the tranquillity and splendid isolation of the Myall Lakes. Here houseboats, yachts, runabouts and luxury cruisers disperse to their favourite anchorage or campsite in this vast system of brackish-water lakes.

Boats choosing to ply the salt water of Port Stephens have plenty to choose from. There is carefree swimming over the sands of Shoal Bay, Winda Woppa and Dutchies Beach. It is possible to have a picnic, or a wedding on Corrie Island. Mud crabs and flathead await the fisherman in Bundabah Creek. Sea eagles and kites circle over the snug anchorage of Fame Cove. For the explorer, there are the blockhouses and gun emplacements around Tomaree, the convict-built harbour at Tahlee, the huge fig tree on Snapper Island and hectares of oyster farms in Big Swan Bay.

Migrating mullet enter the port in such numbers as to darken the water. Mackerel tuna come in from the open sea to feed on schools of small fish. Gannets, terns and gulls dive and swoop to pick up casualties when the tailor are feeding. Breaking the surface to breathe could be a dolphin, turtle, cormorant or fairy penguin.

Protected by Yacabba and Tomaree Heads, a dolphin watch tour boat glides across the smooth waters of Port Stephens.

Port Stephens is many things to many people. For the professional fisherman, it is a place where prawns, oysters, mullet and bream can be profitably harvested. The worker on holidays finds a tradition of accommodating the visitor while enjoying, year round, the natural beauty of Port Stephens. It is a popular holiday destination for those who love fishing, sailing and swimming in a bushland setting. Nelson Bay is the biggest town on the southern shore and is well set up to satisfy the needs of visitors. Highly productive offshore fishing grounds cater to the game fisherman, with over one thousand marlin being caught, tagged and released in the annual two week interclub fishing tournament.

In late August, a special cry can be heard from the cliffs of Tomaree. On the eastern side there is a huge gash, as if a giant axe had tried to cut the mountain in two and nearly succeeded. On an inaccessible ledge, a young peregrine falcon keeps up its begging, shrill scream. The parent is away hunting. Somewhere on the heathlands there is a galah or a honeyeater who has not taken cover. A spectacular swoop, peaking at three hundred kilometres a hour, the deadly talons make contact and another meal is ready to be shared. The swiftest of hawks, the peregrine falcon is admired the world over for its speed and audacity.

The most obvious geographic features of Port Stephens are the volcanic peaks that rise dramatically straight up from the sea to over two hundred metres. They were formed forty million years ago when molten rock flowed out of faults in the ground to become toscanite, andesite or rhyolite, depending on the minerals present and the rate of cooling. Time has weathered the softer parent rock away, leaving distinctive volcanic peaks with names such as Tomaree, Yacaaba, Stephens Peak, Glovers Hill, Kurrara Hill and Gan Gan Hill. The rest of the landscape is made up of sand, washed in from the sea, blown ashore or left behind after a fall in sea level. Some of this sand is pure silicon, and sought after by the glass industry. Others seek the heavy minerals of zircon and rutile that lie in concentrations here and there.

But, most importantly, the sand forms a base where things can grow. Firstly the grasses colonise, even where the sand is still moving. Then the wattles, tea trees and banksias further fuse the sand. Stabilised by roots and nourished by organic material, a community of plants and trees can develop. The coastal heathlands are born, and what a community it turns out to be! Angophoras, bloodwoods and blackbutt reach sufficient size and maturity to provide nesting hollows for the brushtail possum, eastern rosella and kookaburra. The nectar-rich banksias and blackboy trees feed an army of honeyeaters, noisy miners and rainbow lorikeets. Grey-headed fruit bats, known as flying foxes, visit the flowering angophoras at night. King parrots and scaly-breasted lorikeets swarm over the blossoms of swamp mahogany. Sugar and feathertail gliders scratch the trunk for a sweet flow of sap. Magpies walk confidently across the ground to sweep the area clean of anything that wriggles. Gum leaves flutter to the ground to cap a compost of bark, seeds and dead branches. After dark, the New Holland mouse makes a meal of wattle seeds. The brown antechinus, a small native marsupial, sniffs and scratches in the litter for insects.

The final resting place of water is at sea level. Some water does not quite make it, lying about in shallow lakes, swamps and wetlands. Here, waterbirds are happy to feed on the small fish and waterplants. Dragonflies mate on the wing. Flying foxes roost in paperbarks where land predators dare not go. In the Wanda Avenue wetlands, nocturnal birds such as the rufous night heron rest the day away. In the Mambo Creek catchment, swamphens and ducks raise families on permanent or floating islands. Egrets breeding in the swamps around Seaham make use of the local grazing cattle to help flush out grasshoppers.