About 25 years ago, Bruce Ashley was walking beside the Hawthorne canal in Sydney’s inner west when he stopped to chat with two men planting native species next to the footpath.
Ashley, an environmental planning consultant, had been thinking about how to link paths and scraps of bush to create a “greenway” along the old goods line from Pyrmont to Dulwich Hill since the mid-1990s, when the state government had commissioned him to examine the potential for cycle rail trails throughout New South Wales.
