Volunteer Susan Barisic brings a personal touch to the historic Coal Loader tours
To many, the Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability site at Waverton is a place where they can take a historical tour, walk around the markets and enjoy recreational space around the harbour. But for Neutral Bay local Susan Barisic, who is a volunteer historical tour guide there, her childhood memories of it as a working industrial site where coal was loaded on and off ships are clear.
“My parents migrated out here from the United Kingdom in the very early 1950s with my two brothers and sister,” Susan says. Her father, Wilf Brogden, was offered a job as an assistant manager at the Coal Loader, a position which came with a house on Balls Head Road. Susan was born at Royal North Shore Hospital and remembers her early years as a ‘tiny child going there and sitting in his office and playing around the area.’
Her father worked at the site until he retired in the late 1980s, making his way up to chief engineer. “Today it’s a very different site than I remember as a child,” Susan says. “It was a coal loader, it was dirty.” Susan explains that coal would come down from Newcastle on colliers (cargo ships), and then be unloaded at the Coal Loader where it would be either poured into trucks for local use, or put on a ship to be taken along the east coast of Australia. “In the old days when a ship came in, they would work right through the night until they had loaded,” she explains. A curfew was brought in around the 1960s due to noise complaints.
Susan, a retired school principal, recalls her brother riding on the back of coal trolleys and has fond memories of picking chrysanthemums from the on-site manager’s garden on mother’s day, details she brings into her tours today.
The Coal Loader closed in 1992 and has been reformed in the years since. “The local residents of Waverton got together and really fought, along with North Sydney Council, to help get it (dedicated) for public use,” Susan says. “Lots of effort (went in to) clean it up, make it an area for sustainability, to make it a place to visit and to tell wonderful stories about what happened in the past.”
She adds that the area is now ‘beautiful’ and ‘clean.’ “Lots of the old buildings have been retrofitted – they’ve kept the character of them. You can feel the past there,” Susan says.
Five years ago Susan answered an advertisement by North Sydney Council calling for volunteers, and she along with four other historical tour guides have remained a team ever since.
“It’s great to be able to talk about where my father worked and I know he’d be very proud of what it is now,” Susan says. “People are fascinated with the history of what went on in the early days.”
Free historical tours of the Coal Loader run on the first and third Saturdays of each month. For more information, visit: northsydney.nsw.gov.au/coal-loader-1/tour-coal-loader