Sydney Harbour by Ian Hoskins

Author:Ian Hoskins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2022-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

‘[A] pond in a privately owned and guarded paddock’

The establishment of the Sydney Harbour Trust coincided with a wide-ranging zeal for urban reform aimed at undoing past mistakes and the unplanned development that had allowed the town to ‘grow like topsy’. In some cases this meant applying the most basic tenets of utilitarianism. Fort Macquarie, which had distinguished Bennelong Point since 1817, was demolished in 1901 and replaced with a tram depot. The State government disingenuously suggested that the castellated façade surrounding the enormous shed would elevate the structure to ‘an order of architecture … [corresponding] with that of the fort … as well as that of Government House’. Others were not convinced. ‘Useful and even necessary such dismal places may be, but beautiful and conducive to the enjoyment of the people they certainly are not,’ was the view of one correspondent.27

The design competitions for a harbour crossing in 1900 and 1903 were more thoughtful. Norman Selfe entered both and won the approval of the government’s committee in the second with a design that accommodated trams, trains, pedestrians and horse traffic along a cantilevered span stretching from McMahons Point to Dawes Point. To span the beautiful harbour with a bridge horrified some. Planning expert John Sulman recommended a tunnel to avoid interference with navigation, minimise cost and preserve the beauty of the waterway. There were schemes to completely remodel the Rocks – long hated and feared by the middle classes for its unplanned mess of cottages and lanes and the gangs that inhabited them. The desire to erase this link with convictism was most starkly expressed in a plan drawn up in July 1900 showing a precinct flattened and totally rebuilt with avenues and enormous city blocks in the manner of Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century remodelling of Paris.

The most ambitious manifestation of the urge to establish order and institute modern planning ideals came in 1909 with the Royal Commission into the Improvement of the City of Sydney and its Suburbs, whose board of commissioners included Norman Selfe and Robert Hickson. It was an extraordinary inquiry that ranged across proposals both realisable and improbable. Many of its recommendations, however, had long-term ramifications for the development of the harbour and its foreshores. High on the list of reforms were communication and transport around the waterway: the hilly topography that made Sydney’s deep-water harbour such an enviable anchorage also complicated access to and from the water. The streets were clogged with exhausted horses pulling wagons of wool between warehouses and the holds of waiting ships. Many of the problems stemmed back to ‘the mistakes of the early rulers and residents’, but in an age of heroic engineering there was great confidence in the remedial potential of tunnels, bridges, railways and resumption. The city should have an underground train loop, it was argued, heading from Central Station down to Circular Quay and back. The lines would branch off in underwater tunnels to Balmain on the west side and North Sydney on the east. A tunnel should also link Woolloomooloo with the city.

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