Toongabbie

In the Blacktown City Council district north of Parramatta in Sydney's west, the suburb of Toongabbie is at the centre of a number of popular weekend excursion and holiday destinations for Sydneysiders. There's Australia's Wonderland Sydney, which incorporates The Australian Wildlife Park, Eastern Creek Raceway and Go Karts, NSW's premier international motor sport and racing facility and home to the Australian Racing Drivers' Club, and Featherdale Wildlife Park, which houses Australia's largest private collection of native birds and animals. The region around Toongabbie Creek has been important for thousands of years to Aborigines, who knew the area as Toongab-be (meeting of the waters) and it also played an explosive role in the early development of the fledgling NSW colony. Overseen by a tyrant in Thomas Daveny who'd been charged with forging a productive farm at Toongabbie, more than 500 convicts were at the point of rebellion in August, 1800, but authorities learnt of the uprising. A large cache of weapons was uncovered and the ring-leaders rounded up. A year later Governor King tried to defuse the still-simmering rebellion by transferring most of the convicts to a new farm at Castle Hill. After several skirmishes, however, full rebellion erupted in the Battle of Vinegar Hill in March 1804 after hundreds of Castle Hill and Toongabbie escapees clashed with troops - a bloody episode in which more than a dozen convicts were slain and another eight were eventually hanged.