Tag Archives: 1910s

Sussex Street

The image above is an extraordinary glimpse into the past of a street which is familiar to so many of us Sydneysiders – Sussex Street. Being one of the major streets in the CBD of Sydney, it is a street which sees hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles every day, yet the vehicles it sees today are vastly different to those clogging the street in the postcard image. In fact, Sussex Street today is indeed a vastly different place to that shown in the busy image above.

Sussex Street is, compared to many others in Sydney, quite small running for just 1.7 kilometres between Hickson Road and Hay Street. Yet its relatively short length is crammed with history, and historic buildings. Sussex Street has long been a centre of activity and business in Sydney, just as it continues to be today. The street runs adjacent to Darling Harbour, and as a result many of the buildings along the street were once, and still are, associated with harbour activities. Hotels, Warehouses, Commercial Stores and even the Hunter River Steamship Navigation Company once lined the street, and today their buildings are often preserved by heritage listings.

Woolloomooloo Part 1

The image above is an evocative image which provides a glimpse into the history of an area of Sydney many are familiar with. Today, Woolloomooloo is well known as a trendy and affluent area of Sydney, which visitors and locals alike enjoy visiting to enjoy a touch of history, an excellent view and a meal. Yet Woolloomooloo was once a very different place, with working wharves, and working class residents.

Originally, Woolloomooloo was a valley which had a creek, known as the Yurong Creek, running through it. To get to Woolloomooloo you had to walk along a track around the rim of the valley, and this track later became Woolloomooloo Road (William Street now). Yet when the creek was in flood, the road was impassable, and besides, it was the haunt of thieves who lay in wait for travellers leaving Sydney. The land was so swampy, and flooded so regularly that early settlers didn’t want to take up grants in the area. It was good land for farming though and in 1793 John Palmer took up a grant, built a house and successfully began to farm the land – even growing tobacco! The name of Palmers home was Woollamoola House, which eventually became the basis for the name of the whole area – Woolloomooloo.

In 1822 Palmer sold his grant to Edward Riley, and by 1826 Governor Darling had decided that the area East of the town, including what was then known as Woolloomooloo Heights, on the high ground above the Woolloomooloo valley, would be a ‘high status area’. He made many land grants, but a condition of these was that residents would have to build grand houses and landscape them according to standards set by Darling. As time went by the high status grants and houses began to spread to the lower, valley areas of Woolloomooloo and the whole area became high status and gentrified. This was not to last though!

Come back next week to find out what happened next in Woolloomooloo!

A Very Different Gosford

This week, The Past Present has decided to turn attention north of Sydney, to this stunning postcard image of Gosford, on the Central Coast of NSW. Gosford has long been a popular destination for day trippers and holiday makers from Sydney, yet as this image shows, Gosford was not always the city it is today.

Although today Gosford is the administrative centre of the Central Coast, with a growing city to match, Gosford was not always the coast side metropolis we see today. European colonisation of the Gosford area did not begin until the mid 1820s, because although the area had been explored within years of the colonists arriving, it was too difficult to access. The soils were rich though, and agriculturalists soon began to move into the area. By 1850 there was a cart track between the Hawkesbury River and Brisbane water and by the end of the 19th century the area was abounding in market gardens and orchards, particularly citrus orchards.

Gosford itself was named in 1839 after the 2nd Earl of Gosford, Archibald Acheson in 1885 Gosford was officially declared a town, with the declaration of a municipality following a year later in 1886. Yet it was not until the rail link was completed between Sydney and the area in 1887 that settlement really began to accelerate. Even by the 1920s, Gosford was still simply a small town, though it had already grown a reputation as a popular tourist resort. When the Pacific Highway was opened in 1930, settlement in the area rapidly expanded, slowly but surely creating the Gosford we know today – a thriving coast side city.

 

The Rise, Fall And Rising Again Of Balmain

Balmain Sydney 1 Front

This week, The Past Present is sharing a postcard image of a place in Sydney which has undergone vast changes over the history of European colonisation – Balmain. The area is one which many Sydneysiders would be familiar with, yet the postcard view above is remarkably different to the Balmain we see today.

Grants in the Balmain area began quite quickly after European colonisation, with the first being given in 1800 to the colonial surgeon, William Balmain, after whom the area is still named today. Yet true settlement of the area was much slower, as Balmain was difficult to access, with no transport to the area. When ferry services began to the area (with Henry Perdriau establishing a steam ferry service in 1842), it became much easier to access the area, and the suburb really began to thrive. At this time, people were reliant on ferries, steamers and other ships for travel, and a thriving community of ship builders soon moved into the area too, bringing not only work, but workers who wished to live near the shipyards. With new families moving to the area, services were needed to support the growing community, and soon enough shops, churches, schools, police services, and even a hospital were established. In 1860, Balmain Council was even opened.

By the 1880s many claimed that Balmain was the leading social suburb in Sydney, complete with clubs such as those catering for rowers and cricketers, and institutes such as the Balmain School Of Arts. Yet it was also this same suburb that was, in the 1880s, increasingly overcrowded and poorly organised. Soon enough the suburb went into decline, businesses and industries closed down and people moved out, being replaced by younger, poorer families. By 1933 nearly 40 percent of workers living in Balmain were actually out of work. It would not be until the 1970s that the gentrification of Balmain began to occur, leading to the affluent and popular foreshore suburb we see today.

Tourist Towns – Terrigal

 

On Terrigal Beach Front

With the weather rapidly cooling down, it seemed the perfect time for The Past Present to focus one last time on a beach before Winter hits properly. Many Sydneysiders have spent the recent holidays enjoying the last of the warmer weather with a beachside holiday. Many have headed up the coast to the Central Coast, like the one featured in the image above – Terrigal Beach.

Today, Terrigal looks very different to the Terrigal featured in the image above, with abundant shops, hotels and houses. Yet Terrigal was once a much quieter place, and in fact, until the 1970s, had only one market, one medical practice and a lot of orchards! The first European settler in the area was John Gray who arrived in 1826. He named his property Tarrygal, after an Indigenous word he heard the original inhabitants, the Awabakal Aboriginal people using. Tarrygal was believed to mean place of little birds. In the 1870s a sawmill was opened, with a tramway to run timber to a newly built jetty, where it would be shipped to Sydney. Soon after dairying became an important part of the area.

Tourism though was slower to arrive, not really beginning to impact the area until 1889, when the Sydney to Newcastle Railway was opened. Roads were built, and people did visit the area for the healthy sea air and for leisure. A life saving club was established in 1925 and beach houses were increasingly let to tourists who came to the area for holidays. Yet Terrigal remained a sleepy coastal town, right up until the 1960s and 1970s, when tourism to the area really boomed. In the 1970s the first high rise hotel was built, and the future of Terrigal as a tourist resort was set.

Sydney Panorama

complete panorama

This week, The Past Present is doing something just a little bit different. Usually, the focus is on a specific place, but the series of postcards above (six in total), show not one place, but many. This is a series of panoramic postcards, which fit together to create a complete and uninterrupted panoramic view of Sydney. Such panoramic photos, whether sold as a series of cards, or as a single, intact panorama, have a fascinating history.

Today, panoramic photographs are quick and easy to produce. Cameras and various devices with cameras featured in them are able to take a panoramic photo with the simple click of a button. In the past though, panoramic photographs were extremely difficult to take. They involved several unique photographs being taken, and then ‘stitched’ together to create a single, seamless view. The earliest photographic panorama of an Australian scene is believed to date from 1854 and is an eight panel view of Melbourne taken by Walter Woodbury. Sydney photographers were not far behind though and the first panorama of Sydney was taken just four years later by the Freeman Brothers.

The most famous of the Sydney panoramas were taken by Bernard Otto Holtermann and his assistant Charles Bayliss (Bayliss being the photographer, and Holtermann providing funding and photographic assistance). The famous Holtermann Panorama as it is known was taken in 1875 and made up of 23 discrete photographs, taken from the top of a specially built tower. This tower, which became known as the Holtermann tower, was part of Holtermanns home in Lavender Bay, and was used for many years as a photographic tower. Some even suggest it continued to be used after Holtermann’s death. The panorama above was taken not from Holtermann’s tower but from Miller’s Point and dates from the early 1900s.

Bents Basin

Bents Basin
This week, with the weather having been a little cooler, it seemed the perfect time for the Past Present to turn attention to a popular picnic spot in the Sydney area. Bents Basin, which is a State Conservation Area near Penrith has a long history of being a popular destination for Sydney siders looking for beautiful scenery, peace, quiet, bushwalking and even swimming.
Bents Basin is what is known as a ‘scour pool’ – a geological formation created over a long period of time by repeated, fast flowing floodwaters which rush out of the gorge. The basin, which resembles a small lake, is up to 22metres deep and has long been popular for fishing, swimming and boating. The Aboriginal people of the Gundungurra, Dharawal and Durug people are the traditional owners of the area, and they know the basin as Gulger (which means spinning or whirlpool). According to local stories the basin is home to a terrible water creature called Gurungadge or Gurungaty, but none the less, it was also an important area for trading between the Aboriginal peoples.
The first European to sight Bents Basin was Botanist and Explorer George Caley. He visited the area in 1802, and later returned to collect plant specimens. Later still, early travellers used the basin area as a stop over on their trips east, and in the 1860s an inn was established. As time continued on, the area became popular as a picnic area and centre of leisure for many living in the Sydney Basin area.

The Art Gallery Of New South Wales

Art Gallery New South Wales

This week, The Past Present turns its attention to one of the many beautiful and somewhat iconic buildings around Sydney. Sydney has spectacular architecture displayed in many of our old buildings. One of the most spectacular, with its beautiful facades and imposing columns, is the Art Gallery of New South Wales, pictured above on a postcard from the early 20th century. Intriguingly, note the building work going on, indicating that, at the time of the postcard, the Art Gallery was yet to be completed!

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has its inception in the 1870s,when an Academy of Art was established to promote fine arts in Sydney. With funds contributed by the Government of the time, the Academy purchased the first works to be held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Over the next decade the collection developed and grew, and a permanent home to house the collection quickly became a necessity and John Horbury Hunt was asked to submit plans for the gallery. This original building, which became known as ’the Art Barn’ was not much more than a series of thick walls, but provided a temporary home until funds for a more appropriate building could be obtained. In 1889 Hunt was asked to complete a further set of plans for the gallery, and in total he submitted three designs. However, none were viewed as appropriate, being too large, too grand, and too much a hybrid of architectural styles.

The trustees of the gallery really wanted a Classic Ionic design, a temple to art in the Greek style, and they looked to Walter Vernon to provide it. At the time, this was quite different to the type of architecture Vernon was known for, but his design certainly met with the demands of the trustees, though what we see today is a little more austere and less ornamented than Vernon envisaged. The building was completed in four stages and by 1901 the southern half of the building had been completed and in 1909 the front of the gallery was complete. However, nothing further of Vernons designs was built, despite plans to do so during the 1930s. Further extensions to the building were completed in time for the 1988 Bicentenary, and there have been many additions and alterations since.

Kiama

Kiama

This week, with the holidays well underway, and many people enjoying the beach as a way to beat the recent heat, it seemed the perfect time to share this postcard image of a popular seaside destination – Kiama.

Kiama has long been a popular seaside destination for holidaymakers, though of course, its history dates back well before European colonists. The original inhabitants of the area were the Wodi Wodi Aboriginal peoples, who called the area Kiarama-a or Kiar-mai, which is most often interpreted as ‘where the sea makes a noise’. This is where the name Kiama comes from, and the reference to the sea making a noise refers to perhaps the most famous feature of Kiama – The Blowhole. The first European to see the famous blowhole was George Bass, who anchored near Kiama in 1797 and recorded the sight in his journals. The next to visit the area were cedar getters, who by 1815 were busily clearing the bush and shipping the timber to Sydney from Black Beach. By the 1820s most of Sydney’s cedar came from the Kiama area. The Kiama area soon became famous for another trade – dairying. In fact, by the 1850s dairy farming and production was the main industry of the area, and as more people came to settle with their families and farm the land, a proper settlement grew up. A postal service was established in 1841 and the first church was built in 1843, with a school being built just a year later. In 1863 a local paper, the Kiama Independent was founded, and is today the oldest family owned newspaper in the whole of Australia.

Of course, another important factor in the local economy was the tourist industry, which truly began to thrive in the 1880s. Many Sydney residents were drawn to the beautiful scenery, and of course the seaside, a draw which has continued. Today, many head to the seaside town for a relaxing seaside holiday.

Her Majesty’s Theatre

Her Majesty's Theatre

This week, with the weather having been so poor, it seemed the perfect time to turn attention to one indoor attractions in Sydney. Sydney has a wonderful history of theatre and entertainments, and once Her Majesty’s Theatre, pictured in the postcard above, was a central part of this.

Over the course of European history, Sydney has actually been home to not one, but three theatres by the name of ‘Her Majesty’s’. The first of these was proposed in 1882, but construction on the actual building, which stood on the corner of Market and Pitt Streets, did not begin until 1884. At the time of opening, in 1887, it was the largest and best venue for shows in the entirety of the city, with a grand interior including a dome and chandelier. The theatre was also the first to actually conform to regulations put in place following the NSW Commission on Theatres. The main result of this was extensive fire safety and prevention measures, which included an asbestos drop curtain! Yet in 1902, just 15 years after opening, a fire broke out during a production of Ben Hur. The asbestos safety curtain did not operate properly, and the interior of the theatre was completely destroyed.

The theatre reopened in 1903 with an new Edwardian interior, though the Pitt Street side retained the original facade. The newly reopened theatre had the latest in technology and once again fire precautions were upgraded. This was not to be the final incarnation of Her Majesty’s Theatre though, and in 1933, ostensibly due to pressures from council rates and taxes, the theatre closed. There was a third theatre which was o be known as Her Majesty’s Theatre, which evolved from an existing theatre – The Empire. Yet this theatre did not open as ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’ until 1960, well after the original theatre had closed.