Royal National Park

This guide to Royal National Park south of Sydney starts in 1879, when the colony's acting premier set aside a stretch of Dharawal bushland for public health rather than more sewers and roads. It traces the park's early decades as a weekend escape for working-class families riding the train down from a smoke-choked city to picnic at Audley, and follows the story forward to a young Queen Elizabeth the Second's train journey through the same bush in 1954. For its first seventy-five years, the park carried no royal name at all.