My quest through Southeast Sydney continues into another coastal suburb. Here's
Malabar
From my previous suburb
Maroubra, I intended to enter this suburb through the coastal Malabar Headland National Park. The sandy path into the national park greeted me with this foreboding sign,
but I figured the sign must be referring to the fenced off area from where gun shots could be heard,
rather than the clearly open route into the national park.
This route runs along the scrubs past Maroubra Beach,
meaning that if you hit the right angle, you do get a pretty reasonable beach view.
But alas, my optimism was clearly misguided and it turns out they do in fact close entire national parks so that some lads can fire some rifles. Rats.
As such, my intended coastal walk through Malabar Headland was not to be,
and I had to backtrack to where I started.
This led me to a carpark,
where a mohawk pigeon was waiting for a mate,
Thankfully, this car park had an alternate route into the national park where I wasn't going to get shot.
This path through is an elevated one,
along where you can see the lads shooting at a rifle range.
This path, while surely not as scenic as the original plan, does have a couple of tricks up its sleeve.
You do get some sweeping views past the rifle range,
this rock with a hole in it,
and this rocky open bit you could have a very uncomfortable picnic on.
Soon, my walk through this path ejected me into the actual suburb.
Well, some sporting fields in the suburb anyway.
Bonus dogs.
I continued through to reach street level.
Now, Malabar has a beach, and along my walk I'd seen a couple of signs pointing me in the direction of Malabar Beach. In my forced-detour induced confusion, I had it in my mind that the beach was deep in the national park and thus inaccessible today. Nope, it turns out it was a couple hundred metres from me and I completely waltzed right past it. Oops.
As a consolation prize, here's a Malabar Beach photosphere from Google Maps of Malabar Beach which is better than a picture I would've taken anyway.
Instead of a beach trip, here's the wide and divided Anzac Parade instead,
just up the road from the local shopping strip.
Between the chicken takeaway, small supermarket, pharmacy, post office and bakery,
this quiet strip is all pretty conventional.
Less conventional in Malabar's commercial corner is this cowboy-spec cafe,
and this spectacularly roofed church.
The church actually has a school attached to it, an interesting enough building in its own right.
This landed me in residential Malabar for the first time.
Other than this house which will never have leaves stuck in its gutter,
the rest of what I found in suburban Malabar all seemed pretty standard.
Some newer houses,
this older one with curves in all in the right the places,
and home for some,
Long Bay Prison.
Having heard of Long Bay but never really knowing where it was until coming here, I can now check Malabar off my list.
Luckily, the next suburb is just across the road.
Malabar: Home to Auburn's most famous deputy mayor.
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