AUSTRALIA is a very old, mysterious land with secrets still surviving. Or, do they?
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For example, did ancient Egyptians once live near Woy Woy, on the Central Coast?
And did they also settle briefly in present Newcastle and travel as far as Morisset?
Let's debunk this right away, for in the words of a Sydney academic, "it would be wonderful news, but it's not possible".
It's fascinating to speculate though about our pre-European history, especially as boomerangs have reportedly been found in Egyptian tombs.
Before Dutch explorers, or even Captain James Cook arrived on our shores, were there other maritime expeditions around, say, 5000 years ago, visiting probably in secret?
But where, I hear you say, is the proof positive? And fair enough.
Everyone likes a detective story, and for years a rumour has persisted that the lost gold mines of the fabled King Solomon, of Biblical fame, were really in Australia, on Cape York Peninsula.
Every three years, expeditions would supply Solomon with gold from his mines at the mystery Ophir (not to be confused with later gold strikes in colonial NSW). So, could the port of Ophir truly be in Australia?
This seems highly implausible looking at the cargo manifests which, besides gold, also included apes and peacocks.
The site is more likely in Saudi Arabia, but Ophir could also be in Sri Lanka, India or Africa, and the animals simply collected as curiosity pieces while sailing home.
And how did I get to this point? Well, there's a row brewing about a proposed housing development in Central Coast bushland, to extend the urban footprint of suburban Kariong, above West Gosford.
The area contains the "Gosford Glyphs", or "Kariong Hieroglyphs". There are more than 300 of them carved into sandstone, allegedly by ancient Egyptians, high up within the Brisbane Water National Park.
For years they have been a local tourist attraction.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and academics say they are a hoax, with some carved in the 1920s by returned World War I servicemen who had served in the Middle East, with the majority done in the early 1980s, possibly by students studying ancient Egypt.
But before we get onto this, let's turn to the famous Blue Mountains researcher, the late Rex Gilroy, who was interested in the Kariong carvings and also interested in large black cats roaming in wilderness near Lithgow, plus the Tasmanian Tiger, Yowies and UFOs, plus pyramids in the Pacific.
In his own words, Rex Gilroy said his relatives regarded him as "mad" and that the scientific community had blackballed him long ago.
He was a big fan of what he termed Egyptian-Phoenician hieroglyphs, exploring the possibility of ancient, now lost, Pacific colonies.
He said his late father W.T (Bill) Gilroy found part of a rusting Egyptian axe blade (an adze as used by ancient Egyptian shipbuilders) in 1969 above Lapstone Gorge, west of Penrith.
It was uncovered two metres deep in soil by railway workers who were excavating a pipeline trench.
It was thought to have been a convict relic, circa 1800. Later, a metallurgist was supposed to have identified it as a hand-smelted iron tool from centuries before.
The find, near Glenbrook, was about three kilometres from the Nepean River. Rex Gilroy theorised a few thousand years ago that the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers were much broader and deeper than today, enabling large wooden craft to sail far inland.
Rex Gilroy, labelling himself a cryptozoologist, also claimed he had found an "Egyptian" ship carved in rock at Mount Victoria, also in the Blue Mountains, in 1970.
Then, in 1974, he claimed to have found a faded engraving of a Phoenician trireme on a vertical rock platform, also at Mount Victoria.
But now, let's return to the strange, so-called hieroglyphs at Kariong, and who better to be our guide than Lake Macquarie teacher, bushranger author and bushwalker, Greg Powell, of Valentine.
"Yes, I know them well and last visited there, maybe four years ago," Powell said.
"It was a regular trip with the Ramblers bushwalkers' club.
"There are other ways, but we catch the train down south and get off at Point Clare and climb up the ridge to see the carvings in a narrow gorge, then climb down towards Woy Woy to catch the train home.
"The rock slab grooves (hieroglyphs) are at the top of the mountain.
"At first glance, they are very, very convincing. You reach out and can touch both sides of the gorge.
"And just above them are some Aboriginal ones (petroglyphs).
"Being there, what makes the carvings extra impressive is climbing over the boulders and suddenly seeing them.
"Discovering them after all this effort and away from anywhere tends to make them extremely believable," he said.
Powell said when he once lived in the Blue Mountains, the late Rex Gilroy was "very prominent". His father then ran a museum at Echo Point.
Rex Gilroy had his followers, but others dismissed him as a "crackpot".
"I believe he and his Dad were also responsible for building the 'Explorers' monument' in concrete at Mount York." (This showed three busts of explorers Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, which were later decapitated, presumably by vandals.)
"Rex only died recently but had had a butterfly farm at Wilberforce," Powell said.
Meanwhile, back at the Kariong site, the most accessible rock inscriptions are within two, 3.5 metre tall parallel sandstone walls.
They depict dogs, boats, an owl, sarcophagus symbols, two cartouches which appear to be the names of kings, the Egyptian God Anubis (the largest carving), a sphinx and the Eye of Horus.
In 2012, an amateur Egyptologist from Swansea speculated an ancient burial chamber was hidden in this sandstone escarpment. If true, this would be proof Egyptians had once visited the area.
Carvings were first reported here in 1975 by Alan Dash, a surveyor working for Gosford Council, who then kept finding more. A NPWS art expert found another one in 1983, but believed it had been carved less than three months before.
Authorities have debunked the hieroglyphs as an elaborate hoax, possibly spurred by interest in all things Egyptian after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 and returning WWI soldiers from Egypt.
Other sceptics suggest high school students pulling pranks in the early 1980s.
A Yugoslavian immigrant caught "red handed" carving on site, or so it's claimed, is another candidate.
Associate Professor Boyo Ockinga, a Macquarie University ancient history expert, describes the rock inscriptions as very disorganised, wrongly shaped and cut.
Australian Egyptology Professor Naguib Kanawati has been also quoted in the past declaring the rock etchings fake. Some signs are even carved backwards.
However, perhaps the most damning evidence is from geologists who say the 250-year-old Indigenous sandstone art above the "ancient" foreign hieroglyphs is eroding much, much faster than the carvings that some like to believe might be more than 4500 years old.
