Amalgamation plans for North Sydney were big
The history of local government in Sydney has been one of parochialism – a limited, narrow outlook – with occasional bouts of expansive thinking, which have often manifested in wide-ranging plans or amalgamations.
Parochialism puts a focus on those things that relate immediately to oneself. In the case of government, parochialism is most apparent in the tier of representation that manages a person’s locality: ‘rates, rubbish and roads.’ Libraries, swimming pools and parks are also included.
The Municipalities Act of 1858 established the first of what we would recognise as elected local councils, sometimes called boroughs. Thereafter unrepresented property owners petitioned for the formation of municipalities based upon shared issues, interests and identities.
On the lower north shore, the East St Leonards Borough was created around Kirribilli in 1860. North Willoughby was established in 1865. St Leonards Borough, which took in everything from present-day Wollstonecraft in the west, to Mosman in the east up to Cammeray, was established in 1867. There followed tiny Victoria huddled around Lavender Bay in 1871. Manly Municipality was created in 1877 and the Borough of Lane Cove in 1895. Further north, Hornsby, Ku-ring-gai and Warringah followed in 1906.
In the meantime, Victoria, St Leonards and East St Leonards had amalgamated to form North Sydney Council in 1890 and, three years later, the easterly residents of that body seceded to create Mosman Council. Expansions and contractions occurred because of local issues unresolved or new identities forged.
A 100 years ago, in 1925, there was another brief bout of expansive thinking with consideration of a Greater North Sydney. It began at a Lane Cove Council meeting and found support across the neighbouring municipalities. One catalyst was the perceived threat from the Greater Sydney Movement begun more than a decade earlier, with the intent to centralise planning for the whole of the growing metropolis.
The delayed reaction was likely related to the commencement of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – then generally called the North Shore Bridge – in 1924. The Bridge would connect north to south with implicit threats of domination by the other side, but would also deliver growth northward and with that the promise of a new identity. That sentiment underpinned the desire to cut a second ‘north shore ribbon’ at the opening of the bridge on 19 March, 1932.
In 1926 North Sydney alderman JG Atlee-Hunt stated bluntly that ‘the interests of the north and south sides of the harbour were divorced.’ He went on to suggest that the North Shore could be the Brooklyn of Sydney. It was a comparison that placed implicit emphasis on the waterfront and with that the likelihood that the control of a Greater North Sydney would likely be in North Sydney.
Yet council incomes, populations and areas varied greatly from the lower to the upper North Shore. North Sydney was less than 2% of the size of the area controlled by Warringah Council but, with over 50,000 people, it had nearly five times the population. With such divergent municipal profiles, the issue quickly subsided to be revived at times over the following decades. A ‘Greater North Sydney,’ however, remained unrealised. Indeed several councils fought State Government pressure to amalgamate in 2016.
Ironically, perhaps, a so-called North District, which approximates the imagined ‘Greater North Sydney’ of the 1920s, was created by the Greater Sydney Commission in 2018.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council
