The Feel of a Word: creek
In British English, the basic idea of a creek is that it is that it is a small fold or curve in the bank of a body of water. It is a small inlet, often with some run-off from a fold in the land entering the water at that point. It can be tidal, emptying completely at low tide and filling up into the land ditch at high tide. The range of words that are synonymous with it are: nook, corner, cove. In Icelandic a creek in your body is an armpit.
In the early days of the colony in New South Wales, creek had this original meaning. There is an account of a man who lost his boat and employed someone to beat about the creeks of the harbour to find it. He himself joined the search: ‘unable to relinquish hope entirely, I sauntered about the Bays and Creeks five days successively’.
There are many references to creeks in the harbour. An ad in 1803 in the Sydney Gazette forbidding people to take timber or stock from the property of Lieutenant Nicholas Bayly identifies the farm as follows:
Which Farm is situated on the Right‐hand Side of the Road leading to Parramatta, about five miles from Sydney; bounded by the Creeks of Long Cove and Iron Cove, and the Road between them.
Trespassers, after this Notice, will be prosecuted as the Law directs.
It is clear from all these examples that a creek is a small inlet, whether that is from an inland body of water or the ocean.
By the time that settlers had moved out from the harbour they found bodies of water like the Hawkesbury that also had creeks, but some of these could go for a long distance. As early as 1803 there was an article in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser which said: ‘From the improvident method taken by the First Settlers on the Sides of the Hawkesbury and Creeks, in Cutting Down Timber and Cultivating the Banks, many Acres of Ground have been removed, Lands inundated, Houses, Stacks of Wheat, and Stock washed away by former Floods which might have been prevented in some measure if the Trees and other Native Plants had been suffered to remain.’
The result of this thoughtless approach was that trees fell across the stream, ‘rendering water carriage on the Creek, almost impracticable’. There is a reference in this article to South Creek which is about 70 km long and which joins the Hawkesbury near Windsor.
So quite early in the piece the settlers moved from the notion of the creek as a crook or cove or inlet, to the hierarchy of watercourses that we have today. A creek can be of any length as long as it flows into a river. The creek can have as much water in it as the river and flow just as fast but it is the secondary watercourse, not the primary.
It became important to have a range of qualifying adjectives, some of which appear in early advertising for rural properties. A permanent creek was of course very valuable, as was a navigable creek. An ad for a property in Tasmania in 1833 says:
It is fenced, cleared, highly cultivated, and a navigable creek glides smoothly though the centre.
That the creek should be navigable became less important with time but in the early days of settlement it was an asset.
Creeks could be dry, parched, or dusty, or ever-flowing or constantly flowing (if the advertiser was waxing lyrical) or rising, swollen and flooded. They could be shallow or sandy or muddy. The pattern for naming creeks tended to be as follows:
After the body of water to which the creek was attached, so Long Cove Creek ran into Long Cove.
From the use of the creek as a marker of distance or direction. There are many Five Mile Creeks, as well as East Creeks, South Creeks, etc.
After the use of the creek as a stopping place, as Breakfast Creek.
After the predominant vegetation, as Blackwood Creek, Cabbage-Tree Creek, Ferny Creek.
After the nature of the water in it, as Freshwater Creek and Saltwater Creek.
After people and places, as Tommy’s Creek, Back Creek.
It is one of the curious features of the patterns of settlement in Australia that different words become the norm in different colonies. In the West the English hierarchy of the river as the major watercourse and the brook as the secondary one was transferred to the colonial situation. So a brook is the accepted term in Western Australia for what everyone else calls a creek.