River Dreams: The people and landscape of the Cooks River

By Ian Tyrrell

River Dreams reveals the complex history of the Cooks River in south-eastern Sydney—a river renowned as Australia's most altered and polluted. While nineteenth century developers called it "improvement," the sugar mill, tanneries, and factories that lined the banks of Sydney's Cooks River had drastic consequences for the health of the river. While much of the river has been rehabilitated in recent decades by passionate local groups and through government initiatives, it continues to be a source of controversy with rapid apartment development placing new stresses on the region. River Dreams is a timely reminder of the need to tread cautiously in seeking to dominate, or ignore, our environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781742244150

Ian Tyrrell

Ian Tyrrell is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth Century America (1986), and Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (1991).

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IAN TYRRELL retired as Scientia Professor of History at UNSW in 2012 and is now Emeritus Professor of History. Born in Brisbane, he was educated at the University of Queensland and Duke University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and James B Duke Fellow. His teaching and research interests include American history, environmental history and historiography.

To the ‘Valley People’

A UNSW Press book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Ian Tyrrell 2018

First published 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN   9781742235745 (paperback)

9781741144150 (ebook)

9781742248578 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork

Front cover image Botany fisherman and their boats, moored near the mouth of the Cooks River, January 1938. These men were descendants of the first families of Fishing Town. City of Botany Bay Library, Bayside Council

Back cover image Bayview Avenue, Tempe. Looking downriver towards the apartment construction site at Discovery Point. Emma Hutchinson

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

UNSW Press Literary Fund wishes to acknowledge the generous support of its donors.

Contents

Maps

The Cooks River original catchment area

The Cooks River modern catchment area

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

1The shape of the river

2Arcadian landscapes and moral discipline

3The people and the river in the 19th century

4Pollution, ecological change and the spaces of filth

5Late Victorian dreams

6The Canal Plan and a concrete future

7Industrial nightmares

8The dream of green

9The river that (nearly) died of shame

10 Mimicking nature

Note on sources

Notes

Index

Abbreviations

Preface

I grew up with rivers, though I did not live next to one. My mother’s aged relatives told me in stark and frightening terms about the power of the Brisbane River, which had in 1893 invaded the city’s central business district and swept away the bridge linking the south side of the river with the north. ‘Never build a house near the river’, I was sternly informed, as if the edict had the force of Matthew 7:24, later interpreted as ‘build on the rock, but not upon the sand’.

As an 18-year-old my daily trips to university took me across what locals parochially thought of as a mighty river. Coming home late at night, I watched the lights from the dredges that, in the deep darkness of the water, scooped up the gravel needed for Brisbane’s industries. It did not occur to me to question their appetite for stone. As an adult I encountered many a mightier river. I also came to love rivers of a much smaller scale. At Oxford I spent a year crossing the charming River Cherwell on the way to work and could stroll along the Thames Valley towpaths at my leisure.

I did not know of the Cooks River in the inner west of Sydney until the late 1980s. It was the moment of near-death for that particular watercourse, due to pollution – or so the newspaper headlines shouted. Since that time the Cooks River has become a personal obsession. This book is the result of my intellectual and emotional entanglement with rivers in general, and this one in particular.

The Cooks is a peculiar river. It could never ‘stand’ for all rivers any more than others could. Each has an individual history, and that is part of the attraction. A river has a beginning and an end, and its course resembles a life story in its twists and turns. Recon-noitring a river – as Henry David Thoreau realised of the Concord and the Merrimack – could be a vehicle to consider all manner of things historical and philosophical, or to tell the story of a journey. The river considered as journey fits this geographical feature into the most important human way of seeing the world, the narrative.

Even as the Cooks River story is unique, it is indeed every river in the sense that humans have manipulated rivers for thousands of years, and changed them in the process. The polluted and altered state of the Cooks River is merely an extreme case of the fate encountered by so many rivers, and perhaps eventually all – to serve humankind. If it is not all rivers in microcosm, it at least provides a template for the engagement of colonial settler society and its successor nation with the strange and wonderful environment of Australia.

But the Cooks River was not very good at bending to human will. I toyed with the idea of calling this book The River that Died of Shame, or The Cooks River: An Unnatural History. Such titles cap-ture important truths, but not the river’s essence. That lies in the visions humans had for it, and for all nature – expectations that repeatedly made it a river of dreams, albeit ones repeatedly dashed or modified. For the river’s history is a story of a human interac-tion with ‘nature’ that is fundamentally eco-historical. That is, its history is partly ecological, and its ecology is partly historical. It is not a story of a fall from Eden. Such a narrative of unrelenting decline does not take account of the Aboriginal occupation, or successive attempts to rectify the damage humans have done. Rather, the ironies of river ‘improvement’ present a mixed result of trial and error, success (in human terms) and failure. It is both the river of dreams, and, with its tensions between culture and nature, the river of unanticipated and hybrid results.

I have benefitted from research by other historians, including those who write local history and gather the stories of our forebears. Among these is the late Lesley Muir, a leader in that field in Sydney, and the pioneer in writing on this particular river online, in suburb histories and in pamphlets. I have equally been inspired by the botanical work of Doug Benson, Danie Ondinea and Virginia Bear, in Missing Jigsaw Pieces: The Bushplants of the Cooks River Valley. Neither Muir’s work nor that of Benson and associates is a comprehensive history, nor can mine be. Many things will go unnoticed in what follows. The material I have encountered is so rich that it could support a dozen histories. Bringing the historical micro-scope into play to examine a small place has not, for me, reduced the complexity of interpretation but increased it. To get around this problem I have focused on key human interactions with the river, though one cannot do so without comprehending the broader history of the valley and Botany Bay region. For this reason, I accept a water-catchment approach. Not everything going on in the valley can be discussed, only those elements of the catchment’s history that impinge upon the river and the dreams of those who worked and lived along its course. In what follows, both ‘Cook’s River’ and ‘the Cooks River’ are used, the former as a specific, historical appella-tion, and the latter representing present usage.

Taking the (printed) advice of the eminent Australian historian the late Sir Keith Hancock, I have walked the river and its tributaries wherever accessible, and regard its physical evidence as a set of important documents opening windows upon its past. In a more conventional sense I am indebted to the Mitchell Library for its sources on Australian history and the Cooks River Valley Association. I am grateful to Matthew Stafford, whose contribution to my understanding of his grandfather’s work for the river has been key. John Butcher and Peter Munro generously answered many queries. Peter, Richard Blair, David Miller, David Harris and Paul Irish read sections, and corrected errors. Gavin Gatenby, Mary Barthelemy-Reason, Catherine Norman, Judy Finlason and Chris Giles granted interviews, provided sources or gave encouragement. Chrys Meader shared her fascinating knowledge of the area’s history. Marie McKenzie provided excellent research assistance a decade ago. Jeff Angel kindly gave access to the Total Environment Centre Records. At Sydney Water, I thank Jeanette Komli for sources, and Dan Cunningham, whose current work for the river is vital, and the Cooks River Alliance, for a Freshwater Creek Wetland inspection. My partner Diane Collins shared memories of a Cooks River childhood, a crucial insight, and Michael Thompson read the entire manuscript with characteristic intelligence and fairness. Canterbury Council Library (now Campsie Library) was valuable for Cooks River Valley Association Records: thanks to Kristin Cox. I salute Anna-Bella Silva’s help in locating Marrickville Council records. Marrickville Heritage Society members amply rewarded a presentation to them with their enthusiasm and questions. Emily O’Gorman graciously facilitated feedback by organising a seminar on my work, at Macquarie University in 2016. Nancy Cushing helpfully gave a written commentary, and I thank all participants for their insights. I also express appreciation to Elspeth Menzies, who had faith in this project, and to copy-editor Tricia Dearborn and project editor Emma Hutchinson. To my family, Diane, Jessica and Ellen, I cannot thank you enough. I deeply appreciate the assistance of those listed above, and those I may have unintentionally omitted.

Introduction

The Cooks River is a place for stories. For Sidney George Perrott and his family, terror and sadness were the dominant emotions. Tucked into its Monday morning news on 3 March 1930, the Sydney Morning Herald contained a tragic tale. A 13-year-old Campsie schoolboy had drowned in the Cooks River on Saturday afternoon. The story was told matter-of-factly. Drowning was common in the state’s rivers, but this event was frantic, dramatic and revealing of the river. Swimming at Croydon Park with other boys, Sidney plunged into a pool of deep water. Horrified when he did not resurface, his friends literally screamed for help. Bystanders came running. For half an hour, grown men ‘dived into the muddy stream time after time gallantly risking their own lives to find the lad’. Perrott was eventually located, with his head stuck in the ‘slimy ooze’, held firmly down ‘by thick reeds growing on the river bed’. Ambulance officers raced to the river, but failed to revive him. Two hundred and fifty people witnessed the ‘grim drama’, women sobbed, and Sidney’s parents ran over a mile to the scene, disconsolate.¹

The environmentalist, the modern resident of the valley, the novelist and the historian could find many different stories here. How interesting to learn that it had a ‘natural’ bottom with river reeds, as in precolonial days; how remarkable that so many people were near a riverbank so deserted just a decade or two later. How tragic for family members who, perhaps for years afterwards, crossed the river at Burwood Road knowing that nearby was the site of a cherished youngster’s death. By no means all the river stories were so mournful; many told of joyous times along the stream, picnicking, playing, fishing and swimming. Some were ennobling, unexpected and funny, sometimes all at once.

But the historian must also step back to ask for explanations: why was the river in this condition, choked in parts with reeds and slimy ooze? In what sense was it ‘natural’? Mud, ooze and messy reeds also provide a metaphor for the river’s tangled history and the long and difficult human struggle to make it a place of beauty or utility, or both. But whatever the questions asked of its past, the Cooks River is more than a mark upon a map; more than a space. It is a place invested with memories. It has been given cultural, environmental and political significance by the people who tried to shape its history, yet necessarily learned that the river has its own history as an environment that has influenced human responses.²

From obscure origins at Graf Park, Yagoona, in the south-western suburbs of Sydney, the river runs roughly east in an arc to empty into Botany Bay at Sydney International Airport. Barely 23 kilometres (14 miles) long, it is of no apparent national, let alone global, significance. In effect, it is a tidal watercourse and storm-water drain today. It cannot be navigated, except in very small boats, and then only at high tide to Canterbury Road. Though the river’s catchment encompassed 13 municipal councils in 2016, it covers just 11 per cent of the area from which water enters into Botany Bay. (The relevant councils as of September 2017, after council amalgamation, are: Inner West, City of Sydney, Burwood, Strathfield, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland, Randwick and Bayside.)³ The Georges River to the south is a bigger contributor of water. At first glance, the Cooks River seems one of the least significant waterways in the Sydney region, behind even the Parramatta River at the western head of Sydney Harbour in catchment area and water volume.⁴ Better points of comparison lie interstate. Like the Cooks River, the bigger and more menacing Brisbane River was dredged extensively from the late colonial period. Melbourne’s Yarra River provides a parallel as a modified, urban waterway, but it is much longer. Yet neither length nor water volume is everything. No other river is so closely associated with the nation’s colonial (dis)possession, the Federation era’s emerging nationalism, and 20th-century ordeals related to water pollution in Australia.⁵ No other Australian river had been ‘manufactured’ in the way the Cooks has, yet continued to flow and to defy its appropriation for human needs.

After ‘discovering’ Botany Bay in 1770, Captain James Cook reported the north-western part as having fresh water suitable for a British settlement, but in 1788 the site was spurned in favour of Sydney Harbour, and Europeans did not even name the river for a further ten years.⁶ Ultimately, the much larger Nepean– Hawkesbury river system some 80 kilometres to the west turned out to be the answer to Sydney’s potable drinking needs. The Cooks River Valley served mostly to display social aspirations in the early colonial years. Its farms were expected to comply with the standards of a garden landscape that a would-be gentry demanded. The area promised to be an exclusive part of the settlement. Yet, by 1880, the river was increasingly considered a convenient dumping ground for unwanted industries. River of filth, stream of stench. Putrid pariah among waterways.

At the heart of the troubles to follow was the Victorian notion of ‘improvement’. A dam built from 1839 to 1840 close to the present day Princes Highway at Tempe was the first fateful measure. Partly a move to open land for settlement to the south by the road that would go across its top, the dam was also expected to augment Sydney Town’s water supply at a time of drought. Picture Bishop William Broughton in the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1841 extolling the virtues of government infrastructure spending. In the depths of an economic depression, the haughty bishop wanted to instruct fellow members with a tale of European civilisation’s advance in Australia: ‘go to Cook’s River and think what it was when that illustrious navigator first set his foot on these shores, and then look at its dam’. Attracted by the prospect of abundant stored water, entrepreneurs had already begun building a sugar refinery upstream. The ‘whole country’ was ‘open to similar improvements’, the bishop rejoiced.⁷ While for him the dam was a key model for colonial progress, this piece of public works uncooperatively bequeathed hydrological, ecological and economic problems that plagued the area by 1880.

Thereafter, ‘improvement’ meant further river adaptation to compensate for past mistakes. Middle-class residents battled on behalf of the river, and their attachment to it reflected an attempt to reshape it for human health and social amenity. Ironically, the crusade to clean it up served to exaggerate its failings, and raised a generalised alarm over its condition that did not reflect the complex ecology and the different zones of environmental change in the valley. These zones corresponded more or less to the lower, middle and upper sections of the river, demarcated by the Tempe dam and the weir near Canterbury Road erected in 1842–43. (Fords appear to have existed at or near these points in the precolonial era.)⁸ Partly created by these structures, different ecological conditions in these three areas meant that the river could be praised and reviled by different people, or by the same people, in different places along the river. Perceptions of the river may therefore vary according to the section concerned, and historians and modern commentators have missed this point. It could not be fairly typecast as either polluted or formerly ‘pristine’, even as people seeking its ‘improvement’ frequently asserted the river’s systematic deterioration under the impact of urban growth.

Such a rhetoric of decline served residents’ practical purposes for river modification.⁹ In the name of a middle-class vision of a purified stream, a large section was eventually turned into a concrete drain, thus making explicit in engineering terms what was already obvious in social and economic functions. The river itself was resculpted to aid the draining and, by the late 1940s, brutally rerouted for the expansion of Sydney Airport. By this time the middle class had lost control of its particular ambition for the Cooks River Valley. Their idea of a suburban garden paradise was undermined by the heroic materialism of modernist engineering.

Over time, the river became severely compromised, with many ecosystems damaged or destroyed. In this process of becoming almost unrecognisable as a river, the airport contributed significantly by restricting access to the riverbanks, and severing the larger western section of the catchment from its former eastern section in present day Botany and Randwick. (The latter watercourse stretched as far north as Centennial Park and, from those eastern swamps, Sydney Town’s first major water supply came in 1827.) At the other end of the river, a golf course, railway lines, concrete, bitumen and factories obscure the headwaters, making them seem as hard to find as the source of the Nile for 19th-century explorers. A few hectares of bushland have been regenerated near the river’s source, but Chullora’s Freshwater Creek Wetland is completely fenced off and padlocked. No outsider would know it was there, nor see it except as part of a specially arranged tour. A privileged visitor could write in 2002: ‘It is a virtual secret – only four people hold the key to the gate – which has protected the highly sensitive environment from unwanted visitors and vandalism’.¹⁰

Thus the river lacks a definite beginning as well as end. It is deprived of narrative continuity, and hence a clear identity. An unbroken human connection is lost. Even today, the extension of bike paths along the river has only partly overcome this truncated state. Very few boaters attempt to navigate the lower reaches beyond the Princes Highway Bridge, and access is primarily by the paths. On these, one has to leave the riverbank and later rejoin it, travel-ling the last section – mostly away from water – towards the river mouth past Barton Park and Muddy Creek, part of it in an area where the river never flowed until the 1950s. This West Botany section was central to what people conceived of as the Cooks River Valley before that time. Bayside Council has a fifth of the total catchment area, but this section hardly figures at all in the contemporary thinking of upriver residents on the future of the river.

The result of the airport expansion has been to erase actual physical spaces that the river occupied. Places that were part of the recreational history of Sydney for nearly a century, where people sailed, swam, rowed and fished, such as Booralee fishing village and McCrea Point, have either entirely disappeared or left few physical traces. They are mostly under the tarmac or port development. European names such as Puck’s Wharf, Forest Hill, Starkey’s Corner and Nobbs Flat, let alone a host of Indigenous names, are forgotten. Without human attachment, there can be no place, only space, but without the physical space, attachment is reduced to tenuous memory that only the historian can hope to retrieve – imperfectly. Landscape change has removed ‘the intense particularities of place-specific language’ present in the precolonial and early colonial eras.¹¹

In the later 19th and early 20th centuries the river was often in the headlines, if for unseemly reasons, because of the powerful odours it exuded. What was to be done with this river that had gone so wrong? That was the subtext of the reports of those times. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the city’s media largely ignored the river. Suburbanisation’s epicentre had long moved on. For most people in Sydney the river became the aquatic equivalent of terra incognita.

The problem was not the Cooks itself, which was a perfectly good little river, just meandering along, but the people who observed and exploited it after the coming of James Cook. These early encounters were important because they set the tone for what was to follow. Despite the fact that Cook is said to have praised it, few historians of early Australia mention the waterway. To the extent that the river and the bay are considered in the history books, it is as a failure to live up to the expectations of the nation’s first white colonisers. The river was not the ‘fine stream’ that Cook apparently noticed, but a turgid and episodic thing almost unde-serving of the title ‘river’ in European parlance. Mudflats and ‘swamps’ abounded, making the hinterland a disappointment, too, not the ‘fine meadow’ that Cook imagined.¹² After taking a quick look in January 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip ordered the First Fleet and its convict cargo a few kilometres up the coast to the magnificent Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour). This became the site of the fledgling penal colony, and of the European bridgehead that thrived by the mid-19th century. Sydney Harbour was everything that Botany Bay wasn’t. The grandeur of the former never ceases to impress; the shortcomings of the latter likewise.

Phillip’s encounter is crucial to the subsequent history, since it set up a false dichotomy between two imagined spaces. In The Road to Botany Bay, Paul Carter explains that Cook’s reference to a ‘fine meadow’ was given a more positive slant in the published version at the behest of his editor John Hawkesworth.¹³ This is an important clue, since it focuses our attention on the tendency of the river to become a place in which a series of unrealistic Euro-Australian dreams were invested. These dreams began far from Australia. Imaginative conceptions have coloured public opinion of the river, affecting its ecology and entire physical structure. The problem started with the dreams of discovery and white settlement, though these were not identical.

The choice of the Cooks River as a study may seem strange in view of its apparent deficiencies. It was in many ways a river of perpetual disappointment. Its physical characteristics meant that the dams built upon it did not serve the human population sat-isfactorily, and neither did they sustain the ecology of the river.¹⁴ They mostly compounded other errors of human settlement. If in some ways the river was uninteresting for its failures in European terms, the rough treatment given to it was also very common-place. It was not the only river drastically altered or abused under Euro-Australian settlement, nor unique in the western world for its pollution. Its engineering in the aid of flood control had parallels elsewhere, as shown for the Los Angeles River in a later chapter.¹⁵ The Cooks River is in some ways emblematic of the ‘industrialised’ or ‘urban’ river as a site for human abuse of the natural world. The heavily modified urban-industrial river is a well-known type in world environmental and cultural history. In an urbanising process, certain river spaces are socially produced and typecast as waste or inferior territory.¹⁶ What distinguishes the Cooks River is its reputation as Australia’s most altered and polluted urban stream.¹⁷

At the same time, it had a preindustrial, rural history. Its fate was closely tied to the patterns of European settlers’ remaking of the land, and to a symbolic significance it attained as ‘Cook’s River’, named in the possessive form for the (white) ‘discoverer’ of eastern Australia. This cultural significance for a settler society in the process of nation-building makes ‘the Cooks River’, as it is now known,¹⁸ intensely interesting and complex as a case of changing environmental sensibilities and aesthetics, and for the unique qualities of place that the history and heritage of the river encompass.¹⁹

This study considers the Cooks River as both cultural and environmental history. In the process it considers what historian Erica Nathan calls ‘social flows’. That is, to develop a sense of ‘how our values have shaped particular waterscapes’, but also how these encounters have shaped the history of the valley and its people.²⁰ Europeans brought to this process strong conceptions of ideal river-scapes.²¹ We know a great deal about these prior experiences. Many books have been written on the rivers of the world. Perhaps the river that should have influenced early Australian perceptions most was the Thames, but the entire history of the British Isles for hundreds of years was tied up with river management. Rivers had been channelled and diverted, with flood-control works introduced, works that transformed the rivers of Britain into the managed watercourses and adjacent landscapes that we think today are natural. There was nothing purely ‘natural’ about the Thames and Cherwell at Oxford, for example, by the end of the 18th century; their modification for transport and to provide sustenance for food crops and pastoral activities, as well as for primitive manufactures, had been undertaken since mediaeval times.²² The Thames River also presented an ominous warning about future abuse of waterways in the Australian colonies, because its inhabitants had for centuries dumped their refuse in it.²³ The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw even more altering of land and water, since canals were cut, thousands of miles of them, across Britain as means of transport. Many of these canals reshaped or codified pre-existing channels. The mental experience of inhabiting such agriculturally rich and well-watered river catchments as those in the English countryside was part of the baggage that colonial officials and free settlers brought to the Great South Land. No wonder the Cooks River dismayed those who sought to settle there in 1788.

Many Australian rivers do not conform to our understand-ings of European rivers. Some rivers peter out in the hot, dry land. Though not in the arid zone, the Cooks River had its own inde-terminate state from the start. In its upper course no more than a set of waterholes, the river was never impressive as a continu-ously flowing body of water. Nor was it easy to define its path, or its banks. Rather than a river as conventionally conceived, it was from a human perspective a waterscape or perhaps more precisely a riparian landscape or ‘riverscape’, where water both percolated into and travelled unevenly across a floodplain and associated wetlands.²⁴ Of course other rivers may be so considered to some degree, but, like many Australian rivers, the Cooks was disconcerting to Europeans in the uncertain demarcation between the stream itself and the riverine plain. Its flow was also baffling in its variability, in terms not of the seasons alone, but the longer oscillations of climate as well.

If the river failed in the utilitarian stakes of water volume or reliability, it also lost out in the emotional stakes because it lacked the cultural significance for white Australians that the rivers of Europe contained. For Aboriginal people, to be sure, the river retained meaning as a giver of physical sustenance from its waters and as part of creation stories known as the Dreaming, discussed in chapter 1.²⁵ The closest the river’s European advocates came to such a positive cultural valuation was the way they conjured up an Anglo-Saxon settler tradition and attempted to make that heritage a foundational myth for Australian nationalism. Such a strategy did not prevail, due to demographic and economic change that increasingly turned the river into an ethnic, immigrant and working-class heartland in the mid-20th century. Jobs and industry became more important than environment, and political clout for environmental protection shifted to areas either more wealthy, or more hotly contested between the major political parties.

White Australians could not project upon the river the religious emphasis