Histories of Green Square - City of Sydney

Histories of Green Square
Fig. 6.1 Photographer Sam Hood captured this portrait of local Alexandria people who had gathered to watch a fire of the
Metters factory in 1934. (Source: Sam Hood, ‘Crowds watch over the back fence’, Hood Collection, courtesy of the
Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.)
The earlier industries were rural-based and demonstrate the
relationship between the growing town and its rural hinterland.
The Lachlan and Waterloo Mills represent some of
Australia’s first industries. 5 They were originally built for
grinding wheat but in 1827 they were converted into woollen
mills. Wool was a continually expanding industry at this time,
strongly supported by Commissioner Bigge who had been
sent from Britain to inspect the colony in 1819. 6 As historian
Lucy Turnbull observes ‘The wool industry was the fuel that
ignited the economic boom of the 1830s’. Wool led pastoralists
to rapidly invade Aboriginal lands in the interior. But
transporting, processing, storing and exporting wool ironically
also fostered Sydney’s development. 7 Wool shaped the
fortunes of the city: when the first economic bust occurred in
the 1840s the collapse of the wool industry played a major part
in the financial crash. When drought hit wool prices, Sydney’s
industries took it hard. Many new companies, which had been
established in the previous decade, fell apart. The new mills at
Waterloo were lucky to survive.
Another industry established before 1850 was Hinchcliff’s
Waterloo Mills wool washing establishment set up in 1848
on the Waterloo Dam, which had originally been constructed
by Simeon Lord for his mill (see also Chapter 4). The Hinchcliff
mill was located at what is today the corner of Allen and
George streets in Waterloo. 8 Woolwashing was important
for the industry because the wool had to be cleaned of the
oily lanolin and dirt before it was exported to Britain or sold
locally. 9 The area continued to be an important centre for
the wool industry into the second half of the century, with
continual developments of new technologies. One establishment,
Ebsworth’s woolscouring works, was well known for its
technique of drying the wool with hot air. 10
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6.2.2. Phase 2: 1850–1900
The area around Redfern was developed as a working class
residential area in the 1860s, and Alexandria and Waterloo’s
suburbs grew in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 11 But
the area was not a completely ‘industrial landscape’ early in
this phase. Factories were sparsely spread out around the area.
By 1871 the Hinchliff works were still surrounded by open
ground, and the prime industries at this time were still rurally
based trades. A Health Board Inspector’s 1876 report gave ‘the
impression of large parts of the area as “semi-rural”, that is,
without large accumulations of population and with much
market gardening’. 12
More industries were established in the area in the 1880s.
They were attracted to Alexandria and Waterloo by the flat
landscape, the availability of water, the close proximity to the
city and Port Jackson and the railway at Eveleigh. 13 They were
also mainly noxious trades which had either been banned
from the city or were increasingly unacceptable as Sydney was
transforming into a business district rather than an industrial
centre.
The South Sydney Heritage Study provides a list of industries in
the wider South Sydney area (Alexandria, Waterloo, Redfern)
in the nineteenth century. It lists forty-three types of industry,
including breweries, wool washing, soap works, brickworks,
dairy, market gardens, tanneries, boiling down works, glass
works and the Sydney Jam Factory (later known to workers as
‘The Jammy’). 14 At Hinchcliff’s wool washing establishment,
there were approximately one-hundred hands employed,
most of whom lived on the estate, and ‘wool was conveyed
to Sydney three times a day. 15 The Goodlet and Smith Brickwork’s
on Botany Road, Waterloo was established in 1855 and
covered four to five acres of land (now the block between
Epsom and Cressy Streets), producing bricks for Sydney’s
rapid expansion. 16 Overall, though, many of these industries
© Susannah Frith
were small-scale companies, employing between ten and fifty
men, boys and girls.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Noxious Trades outlined
the type, condition and practices of industries that existed in
1883. Mr James Johnson’s Wool-washing and Fellmongering
in Waterloo carried out ‘the businesses of wool-washing,
sorting, pressing, and fellmongering’ in buildings of iron and
wood ‘in fair repair’. The place boasted a steam engine with
two boilers, sweating-room and soak-pit, and ‘all other requisites
for a large business’. It employed on average ‘forty men
and six boys’. Two dams supplied water, while the excess water
drained from the surface into a creek and thence into Shea’s
Creek, along with all the ‘refuse’. The works processed 5,000
bales a year, including the wool taken from skins. 17 The Commissioners
were refused entry into the Alderson Tannery so
they were unable to inspect it. A map of Waterloo dating from
around 1885 showed approximately fourteen identifiable
industrial sites, including two breweries, three soap works, a
rope works, three wool washes, a dairy, a brickworks, a pottery,
a tallow works and a flour mill on the corner of Pitt and Wellington
streets.
The Royal Commission into Noxious Trades also gave some
insight into what it would have been like to live close to such
industries. Witnesses complained of the smells from the dyes
in the tanning and leather industries and meat in the slaughterhouses
prominent in the area. Together with smoke from
the chimneys, these stinks created an atmosphere rather
different to the Waterloo we know today. 18 As Scott Cumming
discusses in Chapter 4, many of these noxious industries were
based around the Alexandria Canal and washed their waste
straight into it, so the quality of the water would have been
appalling.
But these industries also provided much needed employment
in Sydney, especially during the hard years of the depression
of the 1890s, and again in the 1920s. Fitzgerald observes that,
already in the 1860s, 74 per cent of Alexandria’s population
were blue collar workers—‘far exceeding the metropolitan
average’, with ‘not a single doctor, clergyman or lawyer’. 19 Cable
and Annable trace the location of working class residents in
the areas of Alexandria and Waterloo:
In Alexandria in the 1870s those occupants who are
identified as ‘gardeners’ appear to be resident in the
areas of Wyndham Road, Buckland Street, Ricketty
Road, Mitchell Road and Garden Street, with dairymen
on Mitchell Road, Wyndham Street and Botany Road.
In the late 1880s…by contrast the area along Barwon
Park Road was devoted to brickworks. 20
According to some, the living conditions for workers were not
very desirable, with many workers living in what were regarded
as crowded slums and as squatters (see also Chapter 7). 21
6.2.3 Phase 3: 1900–1950
In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth century, the types of industries in the area did
not vary to great extent. It was not until the 1920s that new
types of industries began to appear in the area. Meanwhile,
the market gardens, which had been a huge establishment in
the area up to this period, petered out. 22 These new industries
were on a different scale. They were heavier, they employed
more people, for now workers numbering in the hundreds,
and companies began to expand their factories to accommodate
higher product demand. The turn of the century brought
© Susannah Frith
Chapter 6 – From Tanning to Planning
Witnesses complained of the smells
from the dyes in the tanning and
leather industries, and meat in the
slaughterhouses prominent in the
area. Together with smoke from
the chimneys, these stinks created
an atmosphere rather different to
the Waterloo we know today.
great changes and development for industry, as the manufacturing
sector experienced rapid growth and the further
extension of heavy industry. 23
Australian industry benefited greatly during the First World
War from the guaranteed sale of wool and beef to the British
government for the duration of the war. 24 During the postwar
boom of the 1920s, large-scale industries were established and
many more factories built. This development brought many
new people to Alexandria and Waterloo in search of work, so
this period is also marked by the rapid growth of the industrial
suburbs. The Depression which hit Australia between 1929-
1933 slowed the development of industry down only slightly,
and it had recovered a roaring pace at the outbreak of the
Second World War. By 1943, the Municipality of Alexandria
proudly boasted that it contained 550 factories, and was ‘the
largest industrial municipality in Australia’. 25 Peter Spearritt,
however, estimates the number of factories to be 342 in 1944,
employing 22,238 workers; with ‘one half of the suburb …
occupied by large industrial concerns’. 26
The Second World War also had a significant effect on
Waterloo and Alexandria. Most industries devoted all their
resources to the war effort, suspending their own production
to take up the manufacture of rifle butts and stocks or other
wartime products, depending on their plant and equipment.
Some companies managed to continue to make their own
products alongside their war effort work. In order to do their
bit, Felt & Textiles of Australia Pty. Ltd. had to abandon a
section of their activities and were forced to compromise on
the quality of their products for the duration of the war. 27 Slazengers
(Australia) Pty. Limited, a sporting goods company is
a good example of the kind of sacrifice and effort that was
made by industries in the war (though the contracts could also
be lucrative). They ‘sought and obtained one of the earliest
contracts for pre-fabricated huts’, while also making rifle
furniture as well as sporting equipment to encourage health
and fitness in the armed forces. 28
While the majority of working people who lived in the area
laboured in its factories, ‘only one-tenth of the factory labour
force lived in the area’. 29 This means that industry was drawing
huge numbers to work each day from outside the area. One
factory that prided itself in employment of local people
was Hadfields Steel Works Limited, where many of the five
hundred employees in 1943 were locals. 30 The size of industries
grew at a considerable rate at this time and average
employee numbers grew to between two and four hundred.
Metters Limited employed a massive 2,500 staff.
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