Histories of Green Square - City of Sydney

Histories of Green Square
4.9 Residential subdivisions
Urbanisation also changed the face of the physical environment
in the area, and occurred hand in hand with industrial
development after the break up of the Cooper Estate. As noted,
residential subdivisions were released within the Cooper
Estate prior to 1914 but usually on a leasehold basis. A good
population overview was provided in the 1892 Government
examination of the proposal to extend Shea’s Creek Canal. In
April 1891 the Alexandria municipality was recorded as having
a population of 7, 499, with a 1,705 dwellings. Waterloo had
8,615 residents and 1,875 dwellings. 33 These suburban areas
were usually promoted as ‘working man’s townships’, being in
close proximity to the industrial areas that needed to employ
workers (see Chapters 6 and 7). Physically they criss-crossed
the landscape in grid fashion and each new lawn, garden and
yard transformed the previous environment. 34 The associated
increase in human usage of the environment bought with it
other environmental problems. A 1995 study of the Cooks
River noted the significant contribution of urban pest control
to the build up of organochlorines in the surrounding water
system. 35 Other activities by residents of areas surrounding
the Alexandra Canal and Cooks River system have had major
environmental impacts. Washing cars released grease and
heavy metals into roadside gutters. Oils, detergents, chemicals
and paints were also released into roadside gutters. Cars, car
parts, storage drums, trolleys and rubbish were often directly
dumped into waterways. The 1991 annual ‘Clean up Australia’
campaign resulted in a total of twenty-four cars being hauled
out of the Cooks River. 36 Although industrial activity has
surely been the biggest contributor to environmental degradation,
human activity in residential urban areas has also played
a part.
4.10 Roads and transportation
The development of roadways and transport infrastructure
was essential for the opening up of the area for industrial and
urban expansion. The first main road through the area was the
Botany Road, completed in 1821 by Major Druitt, an engineer.
The road went from Sydney to the Waterloo Mills, a distance
of two miles, and required the construction of six bridges.
Road construction was mainly focused around the more
occupied northern section of the Cooper Estate until after
the Estate was broken up. 37 By 1891 a tramline ran through
Waterloo, Alexandria and out to Botany. 38 In the twentieth
century the development of transportation infrastructure
carried on apace. The needs of industrial expansion and the
growing urban communities resulted in the industrial railway
links and a dramatic increase in the construction of roads. As
the car became more affordable, traffic on the roads increased
and added to the already significant atmospheric pollution in
the area. Increasingly trucks serviced the needs of industrial
transportation and so roadways became noisier and more
polluted.
4.11 The Waterloo Incinerator site (GSTC site)
The Waverley & Woollahra Process Plant (Waterloo Incinerator)
site lies at the heart of the Green Square development
area and will, at some stage in the future, become the site of
the Green Square Town Centre. This seems particularly apt in
light of the fact that it is also the site of the beginning of industrial
development and the centre for European usage of the
area. It was here that the first chimneys were constructed and
it is here that one of the last chimneys stands. The Waterloo
Incinerator chimney dominates the surrounding area by its
immense size and is visible from many kilometres away. The
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It was here that the first chimneys
were constructed and it is here that
one of the last chimneys stands.
name given to the incinerator by local residents, ‘the Zetland
Monster’, reflects the imposing physical presence of the facility
and its perceived baleful influence. So this site encapsulates
the two constant factors in the post European alteration of the
environment: change and chimneystacks.
The original Waterloo Mill, named by Governor Macquarie
after he visited the newly completed mill in 1821, was located
close to the site of the now defunct Waterloo Incinerator. There
does not seem to be a surviving image of the mill, but it was
most probably steam powered with the associated operation
of heavy machinery, so it would have had a chimney. 39 Hinchcliff’s
Waterloo Mills Woolwashing Establishment was established
in 1848 near the site of the earlier mill, the upper dam
works with two large chimneystacks and the lower dam works
with two or three more (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). In 1855 Goodlet
and Smith’s Annular Brick Kilns were established on the site
of the earlier Waterloo Mill and two very imposing chimneys
were integral to its operation (see Fig. 4.6 ). The brickworks
continued to operate until some time in the 1930s and in 1933
a garbage destructor was constructed on the site. 40 This facility
only operated for about ten years and newer brickworks made
simultaneous usage of the site. 41 All of these usages of the site
required associated chimneystacks.
By 1949 the Waterloo Firebrick Company Ltd and the Industrial
Brick Co. Ltd. were operating at opposite ends of the
Incinerator/Town Centre site and the old garbage destructor
was abandoned and unused. In 1966 the Waverley and
Woollahra Councils purchased the site to establish a new
waste incinerator and the old brickworks were demolished
to clear the way for construction. A Development Application
was approved in 1968 for the new incinerator and office
building. 42 The old flourmill and brickworks chimneystacks
were demolished to make way for the much larger chimney for
the venting of fumes from the high temperature Incinerator.
The Incinerator building was deliberately designed to look like
a 1960s office block. However, only a bare minimum of space
was actually for offices; most of the space inside was taken up
by waste pits and furnaces. 43 This design, along with the highly
euphemistic name given to the Incinerator, ‘The Waverley &
Woollahra Process Plant’, betrayed a desire to disguise the
Incinerator’s purpose, as well as an awareness of community
resistance to the project from the outset. The Incinerator
began operating around the clock in 1972, employing only
thirty-two people (five in administration and twenty-seven
in the actual operation of the plant). 44 For such a huge and
intrusive infrastructure project it offered only a very small
amount of employment to the local community.
From the beginning of the Incinerator’s operation in 1972,
the local community began protesting. As early as 1975 the
plant was shut down due to corrosion of the electrostatic
precipitators and scrubbers, and upgrading was required.
Local residents had to endure stench, pollution and particle
fallout almost fifteen times that allowed under the Clean Air
Act 1961. Their response was to rally in the streets and at the
council chambers. 45 The Incinerator opened again within a
year, with assurances that it had complied with appropriate
emission control requirements. It operated continuously for
close to the next twenty years despite local residents’ objec-
© Scott Cumming
Fig. 4.8 The ‘Zetland Monster’ – the Waterloo Incinerator
(Photo: Grace Karskens 2004)
tions. Ann Brown, a local resident of Zetland from the early
1980s, recalled that ‘through the eighties and nineties putrid
smells associated with the incinerator worsened’. 46
A report in 1991 by the State Pollution Control Commission
warning of toxic emissions of between 12–38 times the most
stringent international standards reinvigorated local resistance
and attracted Greenpeace to the cause. 47 There was a
strong sense of outrage within the local community and the
South Sydney Council became active in its opposition to the
incinerator. This second campaign took on a higher profile as
residents, Greenpeace and the South Sydney Council united
in their struggle to close the incinerator. In the early 1990s
Greenpeace occupied the incinerator site for thirty-six hours,
and in March 1991 a major rally involving more than twohundred
people took place at the Incinerator. 48 Ann Brown
remembers the ‘David and Goliath’ nature of the struggle and
the way the community saw it a social justice issue. ‘It began
to dawn on us’ she said ‘that we were going to be the dumping
ground for all the eastern suburbs trash, with no say…’ 49 The
plant resisted calls for its closure until 1996, when it was finally
shut down.
The campaign to close the Incinerator provides an insight into
changing attitudes towards the environment that were taking
place in the latter part of the twentieth century. No longer did
local communities simply accept the conventional wisdom of
unhampered industrial development, that jobs always outweighed
environmental conditions, and that the environment
was simply a resource to be exploited. Changes in Government
environment policy after 1960 also reflected the shift
in societal attitudes to environmental issues. The Clean Air
and Clean Waters Acts (No.69, 1961 and No.78, 1970) marked
© Scott Cumming
Chapter 4 – Chimneys and Change
the beginning of these changes. In 1970 the State Pollution
Control Commission (SPCC) was established, and in 1974 the
responsibility for the administration of the Clean Air Act and
Clean Water Act were transferred from the Health department
to the SPCC. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the SPCC took
on increasing responsibility for environmental matters. 50 By
1991, when it reported on the excessive toxic emissions of the
Waterloo incinerator, the SPCC had become a significant and
active government body in the area of environmental protection
and management. 51
Changes in broader societal attitudes towards the environmental
impact of land usage and industrial development
are reflected in the legislative changes outlined above.
The campaign to close the ‘Zetland Monster’ by the local
community, the support from South Sydney Council, the
involvement of the international organisation Greenpeace
and the damning report from the SPCC provides a telling case
study. This struggle offers insights into the way local environments
and people were no longer invisible or regarded as
insignificant, and a window into a new phase in our attitudes
to the environment and its use.
4.12 Statement of cultural significance
The cultural significance of understanding the way in which
this environment has been exploited and altered since
European arrival lies in learning from those experiences.
Similar environments still exist in a relatively unspoilt state, so
knowing what we do about the impact of European land usage
on the Waterloo/Botany wetland area, one would hope that
similar development of these areas would not occur. As much
as the environment of this area has been radically altered by
human activity, it still broadly follows its original geographic
contours. In times of heavy rains water still flows from the
heights of Paddington, Bondi Junction and Randwick through
Centennial Park, Waterloo and Alexandria, Shea’s Creek and
out to Botany Bay. Developers of the Green Square area are
aware of this and must factor such considerations into future
development planning.
The Waterloo Incinerator chimneystack is an artefact of
cultural significance that connects the site with the history
of its human usage, and the struggle of people in the local
community for a say in the control of their environment.
4.13 Ideas for interpretation
The Incinerator and its chimneystack should be preserved and
used to interpret the history of Green Square Town Centre.
It could stand as a powerful reminder of the environmental
impact of human land usage practices on the area throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would also recall the
long struggle of the local people to claim a measure of control
over their environment and the changing attitudes toward the
environment that were taking place more generally in society
from the 1970s.
Steam power was a very significant nineteenth century technology,
which dominated the industrial usage of the Green
Square area, and could be thematically incorporated into
public space, especially public art. The water theme has
already been used in the development of public space and
art, which is most appropriate. Perhaps, as Jason Doran also
suggests (Chapter 3) some representation of the lost wetland
environment could be recreated and remembered in Green
Square public space.
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