To find the cache:
HIGH TIDE IS ESSENTIAL.
Cache is a camoed bison tube with a waterproof log.
You will need a canoe/kayak,the area around GZ is tidal so it can
get shallow.
It's a pleasant paddle so take a look around. Do not get out of
your boat to retrieve the cache.
Swimming to GZ IS NOT recommended.
If launching from the recommended area beware of the River Cat and
other fast moving boats.
From Homebush Bay to Parramatta, the river is a serpentine shallow, narrow channel increasingly flanked by mudflats and mangroves. For many years it was thought this growth represented the river's natural foreshore ecological community; that which existed prior to European modification of the landscape from the early nineteenth century. The first colonial accounts referred often to mangroves. It was in the upper stretch in the 1790s that the colony's first master boat builder, Daniel Paine, obtained the mangrove wood which was 'very useful for cutting into boats.
More recent studies, however, have suggested that saltmarsh covered much more foreshore than is currently the case, particularly on the flatter southern side; while casuarinas, melaleucas and eucalypts grew down to a hard water's edge elsewhere. The prevalence of mangroves today is thought to be result of landscape change rather than remediation, in particular the siltation that has resulted from land clearing.
As early as 1793 the colony's first free immigrants were granted land to farm on Wangal land at Liberty Plains – around present-day Homebush Bay. By the 1830s wetlands there were being drained and filled in to create firm and arable land.
At Homebush – the vast Wentworth family estate that had been established in 1811 as a horse stud – the bay was progressively filled in with soil and rubbish. Much of the land was acquired by the government to build an abattoir from 1907 and a brickworks in 1911. Industrialisation attracted illegal dumping and the river assumed a new identity as an open sewer.
Nearby Rhodes was home to the Walker family from the 1820s until 1919 when the property was bought to accommodate a flour mill. Timbrol, which manufactured timber preservative, was established next door in 1928. Carcinogenic pesticides were produced there during the 1940s. After the site was taken over by Union Carbide in 1957, the pollution of the waterway increased further. By the end of the century factories and plants had been established along the length of both sides of the river from Rhodes to Parramatta. At Rhodes the appalling state of the water was equalled to that of the air. The area was an environmental calamity.
The 1988 bicentenary of European settlement showcased the harbour to the world and provided an impetus for the creation of Bicentennial Park on degraded river wetland near Homebush Bay. It also encouraged Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympics. A centrepiece of that proposal was the remediation of polluted Homebush Bay. When the athletes left the land was given over to residential redevelopment.
By the end of the twentieth century, industry started vacating the riverside sites along the length of the waterway for a variety of other reasons.