| Historical notes: | Aboriginal occupation:
Prior to European settlement the Cooks River Valley was the home of a number of clans of the Aboriginal people. The Gameygal lived on the northern side of Botany Bay, between present day La Perouse and the mouth of the Cooks River. To the north of the Cooks River between South Head and present day Darling Harbour lived the Cadigal people and the Wangal people lived in an area between the Parramatta River and the Cooks River from Darling Harbour to Rose Bay. To the south of Botany Bay in the coastal area including Kurnell and Cronulla and the south coastal strip to Nowra lived the Gweagal people. While there is some argument about the location of land of the Bidiagal clan, there is some evidence that this clan lived in the area between the southern bank of the Cooks River and the northern bank of the Georges River. It is also thought the Cooks River formed the boundary between two dialect groups, the Bidiagal and the Gweagal. Previous reports on the Aboriginal past of the area have suggested that it was occupied by the Bidiagal. (Tranby Aboriginal Co-operative College, 1986; King, 1999; McDonald, 2005). The potential association of the Bidiagal people should not be discounted as a result of this lack of historical detail as after the collapse of the clan structure due to the smallpox epidemic of 1788 and general impact of European invasion, individuals travelled beyond the pre-1788 traditional boundaries. It is thought that the warmer months were spent nearer the coast and the cold months of winter were spent further inland. (Muir L 2007 Cooks River Valley Thematic History)
Due to the impact of the arrival of European colonists from 1788 and the almost immediate impact that this had on established patterns of subsistence, our knowledge of the Aboriginal people of the Sydney district is limited. Some eight individual groups or clans within the vicinity of the Parramatta area have been identified and two, the Cadigal and Wangal, most likely lived in the area that now makes up the Ashfield municipality (Attenbrow, V. & Pratten, C., quoted in SWC, 2005, 5).
Aboriginal people lived along the Cooks River for thousands of years prior to European arrival...The Cadigal and Wangal peoples made use of the land and seasons to hunt, trap, fish and forage for fruit and plants. As firestick farmers, they burned off scrub near rivers leaving only large trees spaced several meters apart, creating an open, park-like appearance (Marrickville Council website, quoted in ibid, 2005, 5).
While land closer to the town of Sydney was relatively quickly carved up as land grants to settlers in the first years of the European colony, the land on the southern side of the Cooks River was not subject to land granting until 1904. It was not until 1808 when a number of very large land grants were made over land which traditionally provided Aboriginal people access to the resource rich area of the Georges River, Kurnell Bay and Salt Pan Creek that land became the reason for conflict between the Bidiagal and European settlers. In 1809, an attack was made on two farms at Punchbowl led by a Bidiagal man named Tedbury. Tedbury was the son of Pemulway who had led perhaps the best-known campaign of resistance in the Sydney Basin including a spear attack on Governor Phillip's game keeper, a man renowned for his hostility to the Aboriginal people of the Sydney area. Pemulway and Tedbury spoke the Bidiagal dialect, and are known to have come from around Botany Bay (King, 1999)
The attack at Punchbowl was the last reported act of Aboriginal resistance to European settlement in the Cooks River Valley. In the following years due to alienation from their land and its resources and being subject to the devastation of European infectious diseases, the Aboriginal population in the area dramatically reduced. In 1845 it was reported to the NSW Legislative Select Committee that there were only 3 people of the Botany Bay clan and only fifty Aboriginal people were living in the area between the Cooks and Georges River. (Muir, L., 2007, Cooks River Valley Thematic History).
During the 19th Century European settlers transformed the land along both banks of the Cooks river as farms were established for grazing, family food needs and for other industries such as tanning, production of sugar, harvesting of timber and production of lime from many middens left by the Aboriginal people of the area for thousands of years. Lime was a scarce and necessary commodity for European settlement in the early years of the colony. (Renwick, C., Pastorelli, C., Muir, L., Sheppard, H., Denby, J., Chalcroft, G., 2008, Cooks River Interpretation Strategy).
Post-contact, the stretch of land between Iron Cove and the Cook's River was known as the Kangaroo Ground, the natural woodland would have provided a suitable habitat for possums, fern rhizomes and tubers, all of which would have been identified as valuable food sources for the Wangal (Pratten, C., quoted in SWC, 2005, 5).
Canterbury:
The first European land grant in this suburb...was of 100 acres to a "very good, pious, inoffensive man", the Reverend Richard Johnson (1753-1827), the colony's first chaplain, in 1793. He called his grant Canterbury Vale, as a tribute to Canterbury in England, and the suburb took its name from the farm. The farm extended over the area of modern day Canterbury and Ashbury suburbs. By 1800, when it was sold to Lieutenant William Cox, the property covered 600 acres. In 1803, when it covered 900 acres, it was sold to Robert Campbell the elder (1769-1846), who then bought up most of the land north to Liverpool Road.
The village of Canterbury was formed after 1841 subdivision of this land, then owned by Campbell. Sales of the land in the area west of Canterbury Road and north of the railway, were successful, and several other sales followed in the 1840s and 1850s.
Although the soil in this area was rather poor, there was some farm cultivation, but the main work was wood cutting and carting, and brickmaking. In 1840 the Australian Sugar Company bought 60 acres of Campbell's Canterbury estate and a steam engine was installed, but after passing through the hands of several owners, the factory closed in 1856.
The first post office opened in 1858, and the first official public school in 1878, and the district slowly developed. Canterbury Race Course, on the northern bank of the Cooks River has been one of Sydney's major racetracks since 1871. The railway station, on the Bankstown line, opened in 1895 (Pollen & Healy, 1988, 7-8 & 50).
In the first decades after European arrival in the Sydney region, the area of Marrickville was primarily known as a source of timber for boatbuilding. Thomas Moore was granted land in the district in 1799 that he named Douglas Farm. Moore's advertisements in the Sydney Gazette in 1803 indicate that he was actively cutting and selling timber on his grant and he warned those 'intent on cutting timber' that they would be prosecuted (Extent Heritage, 2018, 6).
Moore was followed by Dr Robert Wardell, a wealthy barrister, who purchased more than 2,000 acres (800 hectares), including the former estate of Thomas Moore, circa 1830. The area remained semirural, particularly in the low-lying areas to the south near the Cooks River, till the arrival of the suburban railway in the 1890s brought closer settlement and subdivision of the larger estates. Marrickville also saw the establishment of some significant industrial enterprises, with stone quarries, brick and tile works, woollen mills, steel and metal founders and fabricators and automotive and various service industries (ibid, 2018, 6).
South of the Cooks River, timber cutting was also a key local industry, until the land was sufficiently clear for it to be used for cattle grazing, allowing a small local dairy industry to develop. Today's Earlwood, originally known as Undercliffe, grew eastwards from Canterbury in the early twentieth century, when the arrival of the electric tram encouraged subdivision of land for residential housing (ibid, 2018, 6).
With the rise of industry north of the Cooks River, the area developed rapidly and the various road crossings over the River, notably at Undercliffe Street, Wardell Road and Canterbury Road, became as important as pedestrian routes as they were for vehicles. From the 1890s, there were calls for the construction of separate pedestrian walkways on these road bridges, as the numbers of pedestrians and vehicles using the bridges were too high for safety (ibid, 2018, 6).
The Cooks River itself was, from the 1830s, notably affected by the erection of the dam near the mouth of the river at Tempe. A second dam, built at Canterbury at the site of the Canterbury Sugar Factory in the 1850s, exacerbated the pollution problems and, by the 1880s, low flow, siltation and pollution from tanneries and wool-washing plants had led to a notable degradation of the local environment. From the 1890s, there were calls to remove the dams but it wasn't until the formation of the Cooks River Improvement League in 1925 that things began to change (ibid, 2018, 6).
In 1928, in response to the Cooks River Improvement League and in keeping with its program of stormwater channel construction, which was already significantly improving public health in Sydney, the NSW government allocated funding to remove the two dams and to dredge the Cooks River from its mouth as far as Burwood Road, Campsie. This work included the reclamation of the river banks behind stone and concrete walls and the creation of riverside reserves.
In the twentieth century, the Cooks River continued to be a problem for its water quality and degraded riparian environment (ibid, 2018, 6).
In 1946, the Cooks River Improvement Act was passed, giving control of the Cooks River from Tempe to Canterbury Road to the Department of Public Works. The river was dredged further, mangroves and swamps were reclaimed and the banks were strengthened with iron sheet piling. Despite these efforts, there was little improvement in the water quality, owing to industrial wastes and urban stormwater runoff. From 1975, the State Pollution Control Commission has classified the Cooks River to be a restricted waterway, meaning that it is unsuitable for domestic uses or for swimming but adequate to maintain aquatic life and associated wildlife (ibid, 2018, 6).
Cooks River Sewage Aqueduct
Completed in 1859, Sydney's first sewerage system consisted of five outfall sewers in the central city area that drained to Sydney Harbour. The outfalls were located at Blackwattle Bay, Darling Harbour, Sydney Cove, Bennelong Point and Woolloomooloo Bay. As a result, by the 1870s, the Harbour had become grossly polluted and, following continuing complaints, the Government created the Sydney City and Suburban Health Board to investigate an alternative means of disposing of the city's sewage. As Sydney grew in size (its population doubled in the two decades between 1871 and 1891), sanitation issues became increasingly important. By the 1880s, repeated outbreaks of typhoid, diphtheria, phthisis (tuberculosis) and gastroenteritis in Sydney spurred the construction of sewers and stormwater drains throughout the city, in an ultimately successful attempt to remove foul and contaminated water from the streets (ibid, 2018, 7).
Two gravitation sewers were constructed in the 1880s by the Public Works Department (PWD): a northern sewer discharging to the ocean at north Bondi and a southern sewer draining to a sewage farm at Rockdale. In 1888, the new Board of Water Supply and Sewerage was created and, in 1889, it took over the old harbour outfall sewers and the recent works completed by the PWD. (The Board of Water Supply and Sewerage became the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage in 1892, the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board in 1924, the Water Board in 1987 and Sydney Water Corporation in 1994. It was colloquially referred to as 'the Water Board' throughout the 20th century)(ibid, 2018, 7).
The Southern Outfall Sewer, constructed between 1880 and 1889, ran in a southerly direction through Surry Hills, Waterloo and Redfern and reached the Rockdale sewage farm by means of an inverted syphon passing under the Cooks River. This sewerage farm was expanded when it was joined to the Western Main Sewer in 1898. Designed to serve the western suburbs of Sydney, the sewer line ran between the Rockdale/Arncliffe Sewage farm and an underground penstock chamber at Premier Street, Marrickville. This penstock chamber took the discharge from three main branch sewers, serving suburbs such as Strathfield, Burwood, Ashfield, Drummoyne, Leichhardt and Newtown (the Premier Street vent shaft was built in 1899-1900 to ventilate the penstock chamber). From the penstock chamber, the sewer ran across Wolli Creek and the Cooks River on aqueducts to the sewerage farm (ibid, 2018, 7).
The aqueduct was designed by the Engineer-in-Chief and government-appointed nominee to the Board of Water Supply and Sewerage, Robert Hickson, and construction was contracted to J. F. Carson. The aqueduct consists of two parts, a two-span metal lattice truss crossing the Cooks River and a series of seventeen brick arches crossing the floodplain on the southern side, with the three sewer carrier pipes carried on steel saddles (ibid, 2018, 7).
It is contemporary with and virtually identical to the sewerage aqueduct across Wolli Creek, approximately 450 metres south. The Cooks River Sewerage Aqueduct was one of six aqueducts built between 1895 and 1901 by the Sewerage Branch of the Public Works Department, the others being the reinforced concrete 'Monier' arches at Whites Creek and Johnstons Creek (1897), the mass concrete/brick arches and iron pipe at Wolli Creek (1895), the Mosman Bay steel arch (1901) and the stone/concrete and steel pipe at Lewisham (1900)(ibid, 2018, 7).
The sewage farm occupied 125 hectares (309 acres) when first established in 1890 and, with the addition of the Western Main Sewer in 1898, the area of the farm was more-than-doubled to 251 hectares (620 acres). The farm rapidly became saturated, however, and it was decided to extend these sewers to the coast to discharge into the ocean. Between 1908 and 1918, the Southern and Western Suburbs Ocean Outfall Sewer (SWSOOS) was constructed from the Rockdale/Arncliffe Sewage Farm to the coast at Long Bay and, when opened, the sewage farm was then closed. Much of the land was later incorporated into the Sydney Airport site (ibid, 2018, 7).
In the late 1930s, owing to increases in population throughout its service area and the construction of the North Georges River Submain serving the southern suburbs, the SWSOOS was duplicated from Kyeemagh (the site of the former Sewage farm) to Little Bay. North of the Harbour, a number of local systems were consolidated with the construction of the Northern Suburbs Ocean Outfall Sewer (NSOOS) between 1914 and the 1930s (ibid, 2018, 7-8
Cooks River Sewage Aqueduct:
The Cooks River sewage aqueduct was completed in 1895. The aqueduct was constructed as the Main Western Carrier , later part of the Southern and Western Suburbs Ocean Outfall Sewer System (SWSOOS). The aqueduct was designed and built by the Sewerage Branch of the Public Works Department (Contract No. 64), the design work being completed by 1893. The engineer-in-chief of this department at the time was Robert Hickson, who was also a Water Board member.
The Main Western Carrier was designed to serve the western suburbs of Sydney. The line extended from the Rockdale end of the Arncliffe sewerage farm (which was enlarged for the scheme) to the sewer penstock at Premier Street, Marrickville. The contract necessitated the construction of aqueducts over the Cooks River, Wolli Creek and at Arncliffe between Rocky Point Road (Princess Highway) and Illawarra Road (Arncliffe Street) and extensive tunnelling. The work was undertaken in two contracts relating to the different construction types. The contract for the aqueducts was let to J. F. Carson.
The original design of the aqueduct provided for a triplicate 6-ft. (1.8 m.) diameter wrought iron sewer carrier (although only two pipes were initially laid) supported on 560-ft. (171 m.) of segmental 17 brick arches of approximately 32-ft. (10m.) span, two 80-ft. (24 m.) by 25ft. (7.6 m.) steel lattice girder bridge spans, and 80-ft. (24 m.) of a series of mass concrete arches within embankment. The total length of the aqueduct is approximately 720-ft. (220m.).
The bridge spans are of mild steel riveted construction, the sewer carrier pipes being carried on cross beams on two simple lattice girders (on trusses), with a series of small cross lattice girders for wind bracing. The bridge spans are supported on two metal circular piers. The piers of the brick arches are constructed from mass concrete, faced in decorative brick and seated on mass concrete foundations founded on a raft of timber piles. The arches are a combination of brick and sandstone and mass concrete construction. The two original sewer carrier pipes were fabricated from wrought iron and riveted. Expansion joints of 6ft. sections were installed at the junction of the brick arches and the steel lattice bridge and above the ninth arch south of the bridge.
The third (western) sewer pipe of welded mild steel was laid in 1929. The original pipes have been maintained over the years to the present, with selective replacement of defective sections.
The Cooks River is one of six sewage aqueducts in Sydney completed in the period 1895-1901. Others include the reinforced concrete 'Monier' arches at Whites Creek and Johnstons Creek (1897), the mass concrete/brick arches and iron pipe at Wolli Creek (1895), the Mosman Bay steel arch (1901), and the stone/concrete and steel pipe at Lewisham (1900).
58 Thornley Street, Marrickville
Control of Lots 38-40 occupied by the dwelling were transferred to the MBWS & S in 1898 along with Lots 17 & 18 on nearby Premier Street.1 This land was acquired by the Board as part of ongoing works for the Western Suburbs Sewerage scheme (ibid, 2018, 9).
In 1899, the MBWS & S accepted tenders for the construction of a brick cottage at 58 Thornley Street, Marrickville. The two-bedroom residence was built at the northern end of the Cooks River Aqueduct on the same block of land that the aqueduct abutment occupied. The dwelling is a Federation cottage with simplistic design elements typical of late 19th Century Federation workers cottages common throughout Marrickville and Sydney's inner west, which housed workers from the booming local industry in the area (ibid, 2018, 9).
An excerpt from the Minutes of the MBWS & S Board meeting conducted on the 8 May 1899 states the cottage was built to house a maintenance man, at the recommendation of an engineer, with an estimated construction cost of (Pounds)400.2 Marrickville Council records further document that the house was occupied by a MBWS & S maintenance employee in 1904 and 1926. In 1935, the MWS & DB accepted E. Hammonds' tender for repairs and renovations to the Board's brick cottage at 58 Thornley Street and described the dwelling as a 'residence for sewerage maintenance-man...'. 3 (ibid, 2018, 9).
The role of the employee was to ensure the original pipes were internally maintained through successive coats of tar or bitumen. Treatments, such as the necessary patching of corroded barrels, were undertaken periodically until, in 1943, it became evident that the condition of the original barrels meant that they needed to be renewed or extensively repaired (ibid, 2018, 9).
In order to preserve the pipe's steel shell, the internal cavities were 'gunited'. The Gunite process consists of mixing cement and sand with water under pneumatic pressure to create a hard, dense mortar that possesses high strength and elastic properties. The mixture is then applied as a base coat, then steel reinforcement is added and a second coat applied. This process was isolated to one barrel at a time and took two years to complete.4 (ibid, 2018, 10).
The use of gunite was estimated to preserve the longevity of the aqueduct by at least 20 years. It was these technological developments of the 1940s that made redundant the need for continuous inspection and repair with regular applications of cement, tar and bitumen. With constant upkeep no longer required, the aqueduct also no longer required a permanent maintenance employee (ibid, 2018, 10).
56-58 Thornley Street continued to be occupied by Water Board employees for some time on a unspecific basis but, since the 1980s, the property has been leased to the public until recently (ibid, 2018, 10). |