We spent the day among the markets, shops and food spots of Eastwood, where the history runs a good deal deeper than the shopfronts suggest. Sitting on the north bank of the Parramatta River, Eastwood stands on land that belonged to the Wallumedegal people. When Europeans arrived in the late 1700s — with guns, with diseases, and with a settled sense of their own superiority — that world suffered enormously. The land was claimed, carved into private property, and in time the railway arrived; and out of all that, the Eastwood we walked through was made.
Later waves of European settlers followed. Today, though, a great part of Eastwood’s community traces its roots to Asia — to China and Korea especially — and you feel that presence everywhere. People come here for groceries the mainstream supermarkets don’t stock, and for the Chinese and Korean cooking along Rowe Street and the lanes around it. It is busy and multilingual; the signs speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Korean, often all at once.
And here is the part that stayed with me: I saw no visible marker, nothing to remember the Wallumedegal by. According to the museum at Hunters’ Hill, their name joins wallumai, the word for snapper, to matta, “place of water” — a name drawn from the river itself (see the image above).
Eastwood has one more claim on the world’s kitchens: the Granny Smith apple began here. In the 1860s a local orchardist, Maria Ann “Granny” Smith, found a chance seedling sprouting from the remains of some discarded French crab apples on her Ryde–Eastwood property. Every green Granny Smith in every supermarket descends from that one accidental tree, and Eastwood still throws a Granny Smith Festival each October to mark it.
Further reading: The Granny Smith apple’s Eastwood origins