Sydney’s Bridge Street, but Where is the Bridge?★

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Social History, Town planning

Bridge Street in the city is one of Sydney’s oldest streets dating back to the formative days of the colony. Where Bridge Street is today, 500 metres south of the Circular Quay railway station and ferry terminus, was the site of the first bridge in the Port Jackson settlement. It was a simple log construction, erected in October 1788 just months after the colony was founded, and allowing passage over the Tank Stream, the source of Sydney’s main fresh water supply in the early days.

After several timber bridges came and went, they eventually put up a more substantial (supposedly ‘permanent’) stone bridge in its place (near the corner of Bridge and Pitt Streets), which also had to be replaced owing to it being considerably less substantial than first thought and not permanent at all◵. Bridge Street at that time was called Governors Row as it housed the colony’s first seat of government and the governor’s residence (on the corner of Phillip Street). A commemorative stone on the site (now housing the Museum of Sydney) marks the historic location.

An early painting of the city (a facsimile of which can be viewed on a wall in The Rocks) shows Governors Row (Bridge Street) extending all the way from the water at Darling Harbour up the hill to the first Government House.

Governors Row became Bridge Street when Lachlan Macquarie took over the colony’s governorship in 1810 and initiated a renaming project of Sydney’s streets as part of his reform program. In 1846 Bridge Street was extended up to Macquarie Street and Government House was relocated to its present location as a domain within the Botanic Gardens.

Lower Bridge Street: Residential to Commercial

Early on, the lower part of Bridge Street contained many fine houses, but these were gradually replaced by the head offices of shipping and trading companies because of the advantage of being close to the harbour.

Upper Bridge St: Chock-full of Heritage sites

From the mid 19th to the early 20th century construction in the upper part of Bridge Street formed the architectural character that distinguishes it today. A series of government buildings—grand in scale and elegance and richly elaborate—were built using sandstone quarried from nearby Pyrmont.

Treasury and Audit Office building (1849-51)

Corner of Macquarie and Bridge Sts. Architect: Mortimer Lewis. During the NSW gold rush shipments of gold were stored here. Today the building with a high vertical extension added is the huge, 580-room Intercontinental Hotel with a section housing the Sydney annex of Southern Cross University.

Chief Secretary‘s Office⍟ (1869)

Victorian Italianate building directly opposite the Treasury building. Architect: James Barnet. Equally impressive sandstone block. One of the most aesthetically endearing features are the five carved figures of women on the corner of the facade. The megasized building block wraps around into the western corner Phillip Street.

Department of Education (1914) and Lands Department (1877-90) buildings

These two havens of state bureaucrats, further down Bridge St, round out the classical sandstone quartet. The Lands Dept block, built to the design of James Barnet, is a Classical Revival style building. Like many of the public buildings of the era it’s built from Pyrmont sandstone. The Education building (Architect: George McRae) is of a later architectural trend reflecting the popular Beaux-Arts fashion.

Commercial buildings dominate the lower end of Bridge St. The Royal Exchange Building (1967) at № 21 Bridge St stands on the original site of the Royal Exchange building (1857) – the first home of the Sydney Stock Exchange. Numerically next to the REB (at № 17-19) is the Singapore Airlines House (1925), an elegant example of the Commercial Palazzo style of architecture.

Perhaps the standout architectural piece of the lower commercial sector is the old Burns Philip and Co head office building (1898-1901) close to George Street, with its elaborate sandstone and brick Neo-Romanesque facade. Architect: Arthur Anderson. Burns Philip were big players in the Australian shipping and trading business. Originally, a convict lumber yard sat on this site.

The pick of the rest of the commercial buildings for compact elegance are probably the brace of adjoining buildings, № 4 Cliveden and № 6, (across the road from BP&Co). The street’s first commercial high-rise building, constructed 1913 in the Federation Free Classical style. Next door to the left of Cliveden is Anchor House (1960), for many years the HQs of the NSW Liberal Party. The site in the early Colonial period contained a female orphan’s asylum which later relocated to a site in Parramatta (now part of a Western Sydney University campus).

Postscript: Macquarie Place

Halfway up Bridge Street, making a refreshing break of greenery from all the high monolithic buildings dominating the streetscape, is Macquarie Place. A diminutive triangular park which in colonial times was part of the governor’s garden. The park which now backs on to a trendy bar frequented by big-end-of-town ‘suits’ contains some gear salvaged from the First Fleet (anchor and cannon of HMS Sirius). A feature of interest of the park for passionate monarchists are two plane trees planted by the Royal duo Liz and Phil back in 1954 (now very tall and expansive).Macquarie Place as it was in the early colonial period, unrecognisable today (Source: http://dictionaryofsydney.org/)

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◵ the bridge was finally demolished in the 1840s when the Tank Stream got channelled into an underground tunnel where it remains, what’s left of it that is

⍟ previously the Colonial Secretary’s Office

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★ The genesis of this piece resides in my curiosity about the street name’s origin. The first association anyone has with Sydney, especially the city itself (ie, the CBD), is the Harbour Bridge. The city is the Harbour Bridge! It’s part of its lifeblood. So I guess I’d always just took it for granted that the street was named in honour of THE Bridge and thought no more about it. Then one day I was casually flicking through the pages of a 1922 Sydney street directory —as you do—when I had the (mini) eureka moment, Bridge Street was listed, it was there on the map, a good ten years before the Harbour Bridge made its debut! That set me off searching for what actually lay behind the naming of the street.

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Reference sites consulted:

‘The History of Sydney: Early Colonial History 1790-1809’, (Visit Sydney),

http://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/history-6-early-col.html

‘Bridge Street Heritage Walk’, Pocket Oz Travel and Information Guide – Sydney (Visit Sydney),

http://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/bridge-street.html

‘Bridge Street’, Dictionary of Sydney, http://dictionaryofsydney.org

‘Bridge Street, Sydney’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/

Birkenhead Point Back Story

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Retailing history

Birkenhead Point Factory Outlet Centre (BPFOC), on the western side of Sydney’s Port Jackson, is a bit of a sleeper as far as shopping centres and malls go. Recently, it ‘celebrated’ (sic) it’s forty-year anniversary (opened 26 July 1979), but it was an anniversary bereft of any fanfare whatsoever! The centre has 170 stores or services including two anchor tenants but can’t attract a major department store chain. In recent times it has tried to lure more paying punters by introducing a “shopper hopper” ferry service from Circular Quay or Darling Harbour. Thursday night shopping is virtually a non-event with most of the vendors not bothering to stay open. The only shoppers you are likely to see at night are those grocery shopping at Coles and Aldi✾.

The reasons for BPFOC’s low-key status among the large retail outlets and malls of Sydney are manifold. It’s relatively small size and its distance away from the Sydney rail network are contributing factors. Likewise, the proximity of Burwood Westfield (a few kilometres away) and the Broadway Centre to name two, gives these shopping complexes a comparative advantage.

Birkenhead Point before it was a shoppers’ haven

The area around the point was originally part of a land grant made to John Harris, the colony’s first surgeon (circa 1800). By the late 1830s Harris’ land on the point, having shifted ownership several times, was a brick-making operation. This business didn’t apparently succeed as the owner, a Mr Dutton, went bankrupt in the early 1840s. At this time Birkenhead Point went under the name of Duttons Point, then part of Five Dock Farm.

(source: Dictionary of Sydney)

“Abercrombie’s Point”

Charles Abercrombie, the next man of capital to acquire Birkenhead Point, turned it into a race track (Abercrombie’s Racecourse). The first Australian steeplechase was held here on 19 September 1844. The horse racing caper failed to produce a worthwhile dividend for Abercrombie, prompting him to transform the site into a “salting and boiling down works” in the mid 1840s. This business as well was apparently not sufficiently profitable and Abercrombie resold the land.

New industry, rubber works

In the following years the land on the point again changed hands several times. In 1885 the property was bought by the Perdriau brothers (Henry and George) who started a business to make rubber engine packing for their ferry service (With a single work shed at Birkenhead Point). In 1899 under the leadership of Henry Perdriau, the brothers established the Perdriau Rubber Company (PRC) and began manufacturing rubber products in 1904. Coinciding with the rise of the automobile, the company launched itself into the manufacture of rubber tyres, sufficiently successfully that PRC took over the whole 7.7 hectare site (by 1928 it was producing somewhere between 500,000 and 780,000 tyres annually)⍟.

Dunlop Rubber plant

In 1929✩ the Perdriau Company merged with the English firm Dunlop (forming Dunlop-Perdriau Rubber Co) and the new enterprise at Drummoyne became the Dunlop Rubber Company (DRC)❂. By the 1960s Dunlop’s Birkenhead Point factory employed 1,600 workers. By the 1970s the complex comprised eight brick buildings⌺ and a number of auxiliary structures (sawtooth roofed sheds). The brick buildings were substantial, being between two and four storey high.Perdriau‘s rubber hose line

From industrial to commercial

In 1977 the Birkenhead Point tyre plant closed its operation with the site being acquired by major Australian retailer/department store chain David Jones for $21M. DJs converted the brick and rust-red tyre factory into a waterfront shopping centre, retaining 40% of the original factory buildings. The shops were eventually replaced by designer brand clothing outlets (including a David Jones factory outlet and a Fletcher Jones factory outlet). In the 1990s apartments were added to the site. A long glass ceiling was installed on the top floor in 2010 and the decade saw the centre undergo a number of extensions and renovations.

Over the last thirty-plus years the Birkenhead Head complex has undergone several changes of ownership. Most prominently in 2004 it was bought by Singapore tycoon Denis Jen for $111M (later unloaded). Currently, Birkenhead Point Outlet Centre is owned and managed by the Mirvac Group.

BP Marina

The prime location of the factory outlet centre fronts on to a marina which caters for over 300 mostly pleasure watercrafts (as well NSW Marine Rescue and Divers maintain operational vessels at the marina). There are also Marine Rescue and maritime industry association offices below the shopping centre at wharf level. The Birkenhead Point complex originally planned to include a series of museums in the site (car, fishing and maritime) but these ventures have never apparently gotten off the drawing board.

Publications and websites consulted:

‘Dunlop Factory Buildings At Birkenhead Point (Former)’, www.environment.nsw.gov.au

‘Five Dock racecourse’, Dictionary of Sydney, www.dictionaryofsydney.org

Graham Spindler, Uncovering Sydney: Walks into Sydney’s Unexpected and Endangered Places (1991)

Brian & Barbara Kennedy, Sydney and Suburbs: A History and Descriptions, (1982)

‘The Names of Sydney: Suburbs D to G’, Pocket Oz Sydney, www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au

‘Roaming Roy Goes Shopping For History – Birkenhead Point’, The Tingle Factor Box, 24-Feb-2013, www.tinglefactor.typepad.com

Josephine Tovey, ‘Resurrected shopping centre up for sale’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Mar-2010

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✾ late night shopping at Birkenhead Point in any case would be a misnomer as the centre’s closing time on Thursday is 7:30pm

✩ a couple of sources give the date as 1928

⍟ shoes were the other mainstay of Perdriau Bros’ production business…in 1928 just prior to the merger they were still producing 50,000 shoes per week

❂ although some of the company’s advertising in the day referred to the business as the “Dunlin Rubber Co”

⌺ architect Peter Hickey’s design of the commercial project allowed the extant brick buildings to retain their former industrial character whilst integrating the centre into the maritime setting of the waterfront…the original buildings are listed by Heritage NSW as being of Federation warehouse design

Chaoyang Jie, Art, Culture and History: A Street Worth Seeing in Shenhe District, Shenyang

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Heritage & Conservation, Travel

Chaoyang Street in the Imperial Palace district of Shenyang, overshadowed by the proximity of the city’s most illustrious tourist drawcard, the Gu Gong Palace itself, doesn’t get the interest it perhaps deserves. Visitors to Shenyang tend to be drawn to Gu Gong and with equal magnetic force to the “shoppers’ paradise” of the Middle Street Pedestrian Mall . But if you divert some of that time to exploring Chaoyang Street, you might happily discover some less known little treats it has to offer.

Fengtian office of Southern Manchurian Railways (131 Chaoyang Street)

It’s hard to credit that this rundown building with its faded facade and peeling paintwork, and the roof vegetation, was once the Fengtian※ office of the powerful Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway organisation, known as Mantetsu. Japanese’s control of the railways network in China’s Northeast came about after Japan defeated Russia in the 1904-05 war. The railway line, running from Harbin in the north to Port Arthur (Lüshan) in the south, was acquired by the Japanese in 1906. The premises on Chaoyang Street were clearly still occupied and padlocked from the outside (apparently currently a training centre for a children’s library system). However, the organic outgrowth of the roof resembling someone’s unkempt backyard, suggested that the property was not a candidate for the local tourist circuit.

Shenyang Huangchengli Cultural Industrial Park (129 Chaoyang Street)

Shenyang and Chaoyang Jie’s penchant for turning the ordinary and mundane into something fresh and different is ably illustrated by the makeover given this old industrial complex. Situated like the ex-Manchurian Railways depot in the 皇城社区 (Huangcheng neighbourhood), a narrow entrance lane from the street leads to a small square. A new project, still presently in the process of completion, is to transform what was a drab old industrial site into a visually more appealing urban landscape. An attractive and classy new arch adorns the entrance to the square and historically and culturally relevant murals and other artworks including elegant carved relief panels decorate the walls. A subject figuring prominently in the industrial park’s paintings is local celebrity and 1930s Dongbei martial strongman Marshal Zhang (“the younger”). The artistic facelift of the old industrial complex on Chaoyang Street is a refreshing innovation in Shenyang, but one for which the city has precedents, eg, Shenyang’s 1905 Cultural and Creative Park taps into that same artistic and aesthetic potential for transforming a depressed industrial wasteland.

Marshal Zhang Mansion (Shaoshuaifu Alley, off Chaoyang Street)

Marshal Mansion, located off Chaoyang Street, is the former residence of the “Two Zhangs”, Northeast warlords from the Chinese Republic era – father Zhang Zuolin and son Zhang Xueliang. The mansion now a museum comprises several buildings connected by courtyards. The main building, the family mansion itself, is neo-Gothic in style and is fronted by a body of large stones which have a prehistoric resemblance. The other buildings include an amalgam of different architectural styles (eg, traditional Siheyuan buildings, South China pavilions and Chinese-Western mixed styles). There’s lots of military stuff and a good collection of material and photos from the younger Zhang’s life after his fall from power and emigration to Hawaii. Other items of interest at the museum include the Zhang family carriage used to ferry the Zhang kids to school, and one of China’s very earliest motor vehicles. Admission is ¥60 adult and ¥30 concession.

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※ a former name for Shenyang

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part II

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧

See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I

By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)

Overreach and eventual decline

Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach

(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧

Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall

In addition to the instability of taking on too much concurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].

⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)

Eclipsed by the advance of rail transport

The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].

Ultimately though Cobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoria ceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to its Bathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the Charleville Coach Plant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.

⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/)

Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches

Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].

Air mail anyone?

The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].

Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].

⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)

⇩ Artransa Studios, French’s Forest (Photo: www.abctvgorehill.com.au)

PostScript: The Cobb & Co Museum
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)

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💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt

♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa Park Studios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop

✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]

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