Annette Sharp: Sydney’s road system driving motorists to distraction

Getting to early-morning boot camp should be a 20-minute drive from home for Annette Sharp. Instead it’s an expensive and traumatising three-hour return trip thanks to Sydney’s roads.

According to my GPS, Haberfield is either a 16-minute drive from my house via the M4 at a cost of $5.41, a toll-less 20-minute drive via Concord Rd through Concord, or a 22-minute drive via the Gladesville Bridge.

The reality, in my experience, is it’s an expensive and potentially traumatising three-hour return trip — including unscheduled roadside panic break — and best avoided.

Ironically, this is one of the key lessons I’ve learned in my ongoing quest for inner calm, something aided, my GP insists, by improved fitness levels during menopause.

It is definitely not helped by taking a trip in Sydney’s catacomb of expanding motorways.

However, last year, my preferred fitness guru — for reasons known best to herself — decided to start offering pre-dawn classes at Haberfield, a suburb that, as far as I have been able to determine, exists only in legend, like the mythical El Dorado or Brigadoon.

Haberfield is a delightful suburb known for its excellent eateries. This picture was not taken by Annette Sharp, who is yet to find her way there.

Unfamiliar with the suburb and its location (though not with the bold claim that Sydney’s best arancini is produced there), I turned to Google Maps, confident my go-to GPS phone app would get me to a Haberfield bootcamp class by 5.45am kick-off.

Let me declare at this point I am a huge fan of Google Maps but, as it turns out, not even the might of Google is a match for the hell that is Sydney’s poorly signposted, counterintuitive underground motorway system.

Haberfield, according to an online suburb profile, was the nation’s first planned Model suburb.

It is located 6.5km west of the Sydney CBD as the crow flies.

That, and the reported prettiness of its homes and gardens, may be true but, following three failed expeditions, this weary bitumen tripper can offer no insights.

My first confident foray to Haberfield was via what appeared to be the most direct route, south on Concord Rd.

Sydney’s new Rozelle Interchange … which was no help at all to our columnist. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

A cursory glance at a wider map left me with the impression I’d cross Parramatta Rd and arrive at my destination.

I was unprepared when the GPS directed me onto a broad sweep of road to my left and dumped me into the unnerving pre-dawn silence of the M4.

As the GPS scrambled to make sense of my new underground location, Haberfield, with no clear off-ramp signpost, would whip by overhead, sight unseen.

It seemed an hour had passed before I arrived, in a state of some anxiety due to the disquieting emptiness of the tunnel and a prevalence of signposts marking far-off distant destinations, in Mascot, kilometres and half a city away from my target.

I wrote off the day’s outdoor exercise session.

My dodgy burpees and piss-weak push-ups could wait.

Accumulated costs: one bootcamp session, petrol and some $40 in tolls.

How is a woman supposed to get to boot camp, asks an exasperated Ms Sharp. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

I attempted to pay greater attention on the return trip, hoping lessons might be learned and improved upon on my next time out.

What a wistful notion that was and is.

On my second pre-dawn trip, the GPS once again fed me onto the M4, however this time further west, at Homebush.

Again a blur of white tiled walls would offer up a confusing and seemingly random set of suburb names that seemed to bear no relationship to where I thought I was going — “Five Dock”, “Camperdown”, “Tempe” and “Arncliffe” flashed by.

A sort of claustrophobia took hold about 20 minutes in as my GPS informed me I might be in this boring endless tunnel for another 17km.

I decided to abandon the course at the first sign of daylight and emerged in unfamiliar territory.

Having lost faith in my GPS app, I pulled over, hopped out of my car and sidled up to the window of an open cafe, the first open corner shop I encountered.

The man serving coffee informed me I was in “Alexandria”, before revealing the M4 was proving very good for business. I was the third lost person it had spewed into his shop that week.

Is Haberfield home to Sydney’s best arancini? Don’t ask Annette Sharp.

For my third attempt I trundled down the old congested corridor of Victoria Rd towards Drummoyne, turning right at Lyons Rd before, inconceivably, entering a motorway at an unknown juncture and ending up … at Homebush.

Once again, in frustration and self-disgust, I gave up, resigned to the fact I may have to live with this middle-age spread.

Months on, having completely given up the quest to find Haberfield, hope arrived in an unlikely form.

The controversial and equally appallingly signposted Rozelle Interchange — which maddeningly utilises the names of destinations accessible by water, “Port Botany” and “Iron Cove”, rather than broadly recognised destinations like “City” and “Airport” — has a confounding northbound middle lane off the Anzac Bridge, which sometimes bears the digital riverside location “Iron Cove”.

If you accidentally take that lane, having failed to observe another sign which says “for Drummoyne use left lane” or similar, you will find yourself transported, almost magically, to Ashfield, which as it happens, incredibly, is right next to Haberfield.

You’re on your own though, to get home.

SYDNEY LOST A VISIONARY IN LANG WALKER

Former NSW MP Peter Collins has praised property developer Lang Walker as a “visionary” with a “deep commitment” to the preservation of culture in Western Sydney.

Collins, president of the Powerhouse Museum Ultimo Trust, acknowledged Walker’s generous $20 million donation to the museum in 2021, a sum earmarked for in-school STEM education programs for school students from Blacktown, Campbelltown, Liverpool, Penrith and Parramatta.

Property developer Lang Walker has been remembered as a visionary. Picture: Getty Images

The billionaire boss of Walker Corporation died last weekend aged 78. Walker’s cause of death has not been confirmed, however he had been ill — and in and out of hospital — for some time.

“Lang had a deep commitment to culture in Western Sydney and brought a wealth of experience as a trustee when we were having to navigate a trying time concerning the Powerhouse’s Parramatta and Ultimo campuses,” Collins said.

“It was important to have someone to give us a deep understanding of the issues we faced in moving the state’s biggest cultural project since the Opera House forward.

“Lang understood that and what it meant to Western Sydney to have its own cultural institution.”

Walker joined the board of trustees for the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, also known as the Powerhouse Museum, in 2020.

Acknowledging Walker’s work transforming Parramatta, Collins said Walker was in the process of transforming Blacktown when he died.

Collins also recognised father-of-three Walker’s early years as a naval reservist, something the men had in common.

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