Hearing stories of Norman Sykes, he seems like the sort of man you wish you could have sat down and shared a cup of tea with.
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Something of a character in Railton for many years, he is the namesake behind Skyes Sanctuary just outside the town’s centre.
Sykes migrated to Australia from England in 1947, eventually buying a bush block in Railton where he could get away into nature, which he thought was good for the soul.
When he left the town in 1977 Sykes donated the 15 hectare property to the council to create a bush sanctuary for the “young people of Railton” where they could be in nature, hear the birds and find sanity.
Born in England and a fighter pilot in World War I, Sykes came to Tasmania with his Australian Born wife.
He was notoriously reserved and had certain eccentricities, perhaps from his time served in the war.
He was quoted in the Sunday Examiner in 1968 as saying, “I was disgusted by the war and I was disgusted by cities and people”.
He hated waste, and despite being an engineer he disliked machinery.
In the letter in which he left his instructions for the property he said, “It is difficult to find healthy work in these days of machinery.
The human body is the most efficient machine ever invented. Use it to attain health, happiness and sanity.
- Norman Sykes
“The human body is the most efficient machine ever invented. Use it to attain health, happiness and sanity.”
Railton locals Paul Barker and Murray Blenkhorn remember Sykes from their childhood as an “old gentleman, a loner and a little bit of an eccentric”.
“He rode his bike everywhere and you’d see him down the street and he’d have a pair of sports trousers, a singlet with braces over the top and sometimes a coat, sandshoes and no socks,” Barker said, adding he must have upgraded to the gumboots he was known for at some stage.
Murray adds, “He’d ride that bike to Devonport on a weekly basis … and down along the waterfront along where the wharf he’d spend the night under an upturned dinghy and come home the next morning.”
Sykes was renowned for his gumboots and rickety bicycle, as well as his piano playing, which it was rumoured he would play “starkers”.
“We used to sneak up the old railway there as kids and if he didn't hear you you could hear him play the piano,” Barker said.
Sykes said in his leaving letter, “You have my old piano – my only friend. Treat it kindly.”
Just a man sick of society and craving the peace he found in nature, Sykes has been labelled Tasmania’s first greenie.
His little bush shack didn’t have power and he pedalled a bicycle to generate a light to read by.
“He was known to pick up the roadkill too if it was fresh and cook with it,” Blenkhorn said.
Sykes even designed and built a pedal-powered car with scrap materials like plywood and cycle parts for his wife’s shopping.
Suddenly, in 1977 Sykes left Railton for the mainland and never returned.
He packed everything he wanted into a pram, went to Melbourne and he pushed that pram from Melbourne to Wauchope up in northern New South Wales.
- Paul Barker
“He packed everything he wanted into a pram, went to Melbourne and he pushed that pram from Melbourne to Wauchope up in northern New South Wales,” Barker said.
He left his property and anything that couldn’t fit in his pram in the stewardship of the Kentish council.
Sykes died in New South Wales a little over 90 years old.
Janette Barker, who has compiled research and notes about Sykes said, “The sawmill caught on fire where he lived and he took his gumboots off ... and he left them in the middle of the track and walked into the fire and two days later he died in hospital.”
Something of an enigma when he was there, he left Railton suddenly and with little clue as to why. But his legacy lives on in the bushland he left behind to become Sykes Sanctuary.
He closed his letter of instruction with, “Our natural bushland is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by sloomy pine plantations. Some parkland should be saved from the wreck of a state.”
