Tascott , NSW. By Peter Fisher, a resident of Tascott since 1987. On the railway line just north of Woy Woy is the little station of Tascott. It is so small a station that to get on or off the train you must be in the rear carriages. Some might say that the station and the little community nestled next to the surrounding hills of Brisbane Water National Park have the general look of that old TV show ‘Petticoat Junction’. But few passing through would realize that Tascott has a fascinating history. It is named after Thomas Addison Scott (ie T.A. Scott), an early settler who helped to introduce sugar cane growing into Australia. He was also a business entrepreneur and a compulsive letter writer to a number of early newspapers, so he has left a long legacy of opinions and ideas in the archives and many of these can now be easily accessed on www.Trove.com. He also could be one of Australia’s oldest fathers as he had his last child with his much younger wife at the age of 82. Scott was born in Glasgow in 1777. As he died in 1881, he probably broke another record as that made him 105 years old when he passed. Before arriving in Australia he visited several canefield farms in USA, and once in NSW he was hired to oversee the first sugar cane operation at Port Macquarie. By 1830 he had his own land and he was soon growing his own sugar cane, and later bananas and oranges, in the area that is now known as Tascott. This sugarcane legacy lives on in other ways as one of the Tascott creeks still shows small clumps of sugarcane, presumably left over from Scott’s era, although Council cuts down the vegetation and clears the small creek every few decades. After the train line went through in 1888, the Scott family developed a holiday resort on the Brisbane Water waterfront called ‘Waterview’. This was for the many Sydney tourists who were interested in boating, fishing and hunting up in the ‘wilderness’ areas of what is now known as the Central Coast. The area of the Scott family’s property was called Point Clare in those days but it was renamed Tascott when the Tascott train station was built in 1905. The Waterview resort was a success and it became quite famous. They even produced a series of tourist postcards for the souvenir collector. By about 1920 the resort business was not as successful and it was shut down. Much of the Scott land was sold off and made into today’s housing estate. Another somewhat famous feature of this area is the strange and controversial ‘Hieroglyphics Gallery’. These are a series of deeply etched Egyptian-type hieroglyphics found in an isolated crevasse not far from Tascott, just up the hill and on the boundary with Brisbane Water National Park. Over the years they have been referred to as either the Tascott Hieroglyphic Gallery or the Kariong Hieroglyphic Gallery, although in recent years the latter has become the accepted name. Nobody really knows who made these extensive and detailed engravings, or why. Few can agree on exactly when they would have been done, but most people agree they would have been completed post World War II, although there are some on the internet who claim they are proof that either aliens visited earth centuries ago or that the Egyptians were the first discovers of Australia. Local historians tend to agree that they were likely created in the 1960’s and that they are probably the work of a hermit or an eccentric ‘vandal’. Locals and boy scouts groups have been visiting them for many decades so they have become a permanent part of our folklore, much to the chagrin of Park Rangers as the markings have been known to attract to this isolated spot New Age groups and the curious, who sometimes do not fully respect the surrounding bush and environment.

Tascott, NSW