The State Government recently called for community consultation on its Berrys Bay Masterplan in anticipation of using waterfront land there during the construction of the Western Harbour Tunnel.
That there are three significant sites within a relatively small area – the former BP oil terminal, Woodley’s boat yard and a Quarantine Station – is an indication of the business of North Sydney’s former working waterfront.
Despite the remnant infrastructure, that history is easily overlooked – so dramatic has been the transformation of the harbourfront since the 1980s. Decommissioned work sites have become residential developments or parkland, and water views and waterside walks are the most desirable characteristics of suburbs which once resonated with the sound of industry and ship’s horns.
Of course, waterside work did not arrive with the Europeans in 1788. Aboriginal people – the Cammeraygal in the case of North Sydney – fabricated canoes and gathered seafood on the shoreline for millennia before that. But their lifestyle prioritised cultural activities and leisure over hard labour.
The economy, mindset and ever- increasing population brought by the British created working waterfronts based upon regimented time and securing profits and wages. North Sydney developed more slowly than the southern shore, but the harbour’s first locally built steam ferry was slipped in Neutral Bay in 1831. By the end of the 19th century, boatyards could be found around to Berrys Bay.
In between there were sprinkled small intense industrial sites. Balls Head Bay hosted a sugar works then a kerosene factory, and a tin smelter was established in Berrys Bay. John Eaton’s timber yard say next to Ford’s boat yard there. At the end of the 1870s the North Shore Gas Company established its huge gas works in Neutral Bay with two gasometers which rose and fell depending on their fill of fuel. The Company opened another gas works in Balls Head Bay during World War I.
The local progress association, made up of residents who had bought nearby lots in the salubrious Berry and Sugar Works Estates, were less than impressed but were powerless to stop it. Their annoyance was a sign of things to come and some locals in Waverton, no doubt, sighed with relief when the Coal Loader stopped working in 1992 and black dust no longer spoiled their washing. There is some nostalgia for the old working harbour but the upside to the change is improved public access to foreshores.
The Coal Loader at Balls Head survives as a remarkable heritage site – possibly the best preserved of all the harbour’s once myriad working waterfronts. But next time you are in a foreshore park, look for signage or relics that indicate what was once there. It may well surprise you.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council.