Histories of Green Square - City of Sydney

Chapter 4 – Chimneys and Change
Chapter 4 Chimneys and Change:
Post-European environmental
impact in Green Square
4.1 Introduction: the larger wetland environment
The Green Square area is best understood as part of a larger
environmental space. From the heights of Paddington and
Bondi Junction in the northeast, water has traditionally run
through a series of ponds, marshes, swamps and creeks down
to Botany Bay, in the southwest. The areas of Waterloo, Alexandria,
Zetland and Rosebery are bound up with this larger
wetland environment and lie at an intermediate point in this
chain of water catchment and run-off. The character of the
area as a natural water reservoir and drainage corridor, has
had far reaching consequences for human exploitation and
activity in the area since 1788.
Dramatic environmental change has resulted from this
human usage, and the specific environment of Green Square,
is best explored within the context of this larger environmental
story.
4.2 Early European observations of the area
Thomas Woore made detailed observations in a letter to the
President of the Commission of Inquiry into the supply of
© Scott Cumming
Scott Cumming
water to Sydney, in 1869. His comments provide an insight
into the great environmental changes that took place in
this area between 1829 and 1869. Woore visited ‘the Botany
swamps’ in 1829, 1833, 1834 and again in 1869. His sketch of
the Waterloo Mills in 1833 shows the structure standing on
the edge of an extensive marsh.
By 1869, though, Woore reported that great changes had taken
place. The once copious stream had almost ceased to flow, the
aquatic plant life had gone and an equestrian could ride over
any part of what was originally a fluid morass. The area had
become ‘…a tract of barren sandhills that immediately the
rain descends on them, rushes to the sea in torrents’. 1
The activity of settlers had wrought these dramatic changes.
The limited timbers were cleared for the purposes of construction
or for use as firewood. The lower scrub was cleared to allow
for the grazing of cattle and horses, whose tramping hooves
further hardened the ground surface. Areas of marshland were
deliberately drained to facilitate the establishment of market
gardens or to channel the water itself, for use, for example, in
the powering of steam mills.
Fig. 4.1 Upper Dam, Hinchcliff’s Waterloo Mills wool washing establishment.
(Source: Town and Country Journal, 16 June 1877, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.)
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