James Oatley, Keeper of the Town Clock and Pioneering Georges River Landowner

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Biographical, Local history, Natural Environment

Oatley is a prime piece of residential real estate in the southern suburbs of Sydney. The suburb faces on to the Georges River (Tucoerah River in the local indigenous language). Large leafy blocks of land and water views abound in this “north shore” status locality of the south. One of the star attractions in the western fringe of Oatley is the 45-hectare Oatley Park, a dense concentration of natural bushland with Edwardian era baths and sandstone ‘castle’ built during the Great Depression and now encircled by lofty smooth-barked Angophoras Costatas.

If you cross the railway line to the east side of Oatley you can see a tower dedication to the early Sydney settler the suburb is named after – James Oatley. Oatley was yet another  transported felon made good in New South Wales’ formative years.  The Oatley tower in the high street contains a clock face which alerts us to J Oatley Esq’s association with timepieces. Oatley from Staffordshire in the West Midlands got napped for stealing two featherbeds and linen to the value of £16, sentenced to death for his crime but transported instead to Australia in 1814. Oatley put his watch and clock making skills to good use, winning a conditional pardon and a Georges River land grant from Governor Macquarie in 1821. On his Georges River land—stretching from Gungal Bay in the west to Boundary and Hurstville Roads—where he established a farm on his property called “Needwood Forest” after the woodland in his native Warwickshire. Oatley’s Needwood Forest grant included the area of today’s eponymous suburb.

Appointed colonial clockmaker, Oatley plied his trade from a shop in George Street opposite the Sydney Town Hall, with a bit of a flair for constructing grandfather clocks. His best known work was the clock in the turret at the Hyde Park Prisoners’ Barracks built by fellow emancipist Francis Greenway (Oatley’s clock has featured on the Australian $10 note).

Oatley’s work also won favour with later governors who granted him 515 acres in the Hurstville area between 1831 and 1835. The clockmaker died on his residential property ‘Snugburough’ in 1839. The precise location of Snugburough in Sydney is not certain…some sources give it as Canterbury, others Beverley Hills or Pubchbowl. After Snugburough was sold by Oatley’s family, future owners had to accede to a curious condition of sale  – they were required to retain Oatley’s sepulchre and his body on the property. Clockmaking stayed in the family after Oatley’s demise, his third son took over the George Street shop.

 

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Books and sites consulted:

Frances Pollon, The Book of Australian Suburbs  (1988)

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

Oatley, James (1770–1839)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/oatley-james-2514/text3399, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 30 March 2021

Australian Royality, www.australianroyalty.net.au

 

 

The Pioneering Australian Brewery founded by an “Enterprising Rogue and Scoundrel” – James Squire

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Local history

Pyrmont Bridge Road in the inner suburb of Camperdown—no small distance from the now pedestrian only Pyrmont Bridge itself—is where you’ll find the brew house of James Squire, reputedly Sydney’s first brewer. It’s current name, Malt Shovel Brewery, is a yesteryear nod to the “Malting Shovel Tavern”, a pub run by the brewery’s namesake and founder James Squire at Kissing Point (present-day Putney on Sydney’s Parramatta River) commencing ca. 1798. Squire (or possibly ‘Squires’) commenced cultivating hops on the riverside location around 1806. Squire is considered to be the first person to brew beer successfully in Australia, although some claim the title on behalf of one John Boston who made corn beer in Sydney in 1796 with the aid of an encyclopaedia. Boston’s Indian corn-based beer “was so successful that he erected at some expense a building proper for the business” (Iltis).

Squire also was particularly successful at it, so much so that he eventually acquired a vast estate that stretched from Parramatta River to a point north of Victoria Road. Squire’s real estate empire wasn’t exactly down to superior business acumen on the brewer’s part…Squire kickstarted his land holdings monopoly by revelling in decidedly unethical behaviour.

But more of that later, first let’s look at the earlier chapter of Squire’s life, the sequence of events that brought him to Britain’s colony at Port Jackson. From his early years in England Squire found himself on the wrong side of the law, arrested for highway robbery which launched him on a path of recidivism. He was subsequently nabbed for pilfering from somebody else’s hen house and managed to escape the noose through transportation to Botany Bay with the 1788 First Fleet. Being transported didn’t cure Squire of his predilection for thievery however. Stealing hops (an illustrious start to brewing immortality!) got him 300 lashes of the ‘Cat’ (150 immediately and another 150 on “lay-buy” when his back was deemed up to it again).

After winning his freedom Squire was granted a small plot of land which with “a little skillful swindling” from other less diligent emancipist-land grantees he managed to grow into an estate in excess of 1,000-acres (the “unethical behaviour” alluded to above).


Squire’s business was the recipient of government incentivisation a few years later when Governor King began encouraging the brewing of beer as a counter to the pernicious trafficking of rum and corruption perpetrated by the colony’s military. King’s largesse bestowed on the “enterprising rogue” included a cow and the title of Australia’s first brewer.

The brewery and Malting Shovel Tavern at Kissing Point was strategically located, roughly equidistant from the colony’s two arms of settlement (Sydney Cove and Parramatta) …very handy for thirsty passing sailors and boat passengers on the river. By 1820 James Squire was producing a weekly output of 49 hogsheads of beer most of the year long (Walsh).

Squire’s wealth did not rest on the brewery concern. Due to the vagaries of the local grain market and the import trade at the time, it rested on a number of diversified interests which included farming and grazing as well as beer making (Walsh).


Interestingly, the James Squire brewing company of today has, rather than playing it down, whole-heartedly embraced the “scoundrel’s’ legendary ill-repute as a marketing ploy. Convict-related names biographically referencing the exploits and misdemeanours of the man himself resound in the label titles of James Squire beers – “One Fifty Lashes”, “The Swindler”, “Broken Shackles”, “Hop Thief”, “Four Wives” (a reference to JS being married four times) and the like.

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Bibliography

G. P. Walsh, ‘Squire, James (1754–1822)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/squire-james-2688/text3759, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 16 March 2021.

Judith Iltis, ‘Boston, John (?–1804)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/boston-john-1804/text2051, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 16 March 2021.

‘The Incredible (and True) Story of James Squire’, https://www.jamessquire.com.au/

A Shipwreck Graveyard at the Top of the Harbour

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Coastal geology & environment, Local history, Military history, Natural Environment

Rusting and decaying dinosaurs of the sea moored permanently off Sydney Olympic Park

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Walkers and cyclists doing the path section of Sydney Olympic Park that stretches from Bennelong Speedway (oops! I mean Parkway) to the Badu Mangroves that guard the northern edge of Bicentennial Park would be familiar with the sight of half-a-dozen or so shipwrecks sitting calmly in the waters of Homebush Bay.

🔺 HMAS Karangi: once an important contributor in the defence of Darwin against the Japanese attack, now decomposing incrementally in the bay

🔺 the “interpretative and scenic lookout”

ჱჲს A metal plaque on the ground alongside the trail directs the curious passerby to an old wooden viewing platform where you can observe these maritime relics redolent of rotting timber and rusting metal. This spot contains the ship-breaking ramp (or what remains of it) that was used to dismember these ex-naval vessels. Missing is the wooden crane (presumably submerged) and the telescope.

🔺 The ship-breaking dock

ჱჲს The story of how these ships ended up here begins in 1966 when the Maritime Services Board approved the use of land here as a ship-breaking yard for the Port of Sydney. From 1970 till to the early Nineties private companies leased the yard to demolish hulks which had surpassed their use-by-date.

ჱჲს With the passage of time, left to nature and the elements, a number of these ex-ships have experienced an almost complete organic makeover. The dense mangroves of the bay have invaded the vessels, turning them into what one observer described as “a floating mangrove forest” (May Ly) and another, “a floating rusty relic forest” (Ruth Spitzer). The stricken and abandoned vessels are now a haven for local coastal birdlife (at dusk the hovering and nesting white gulls are easy to spot aboard the arboreal hulls).

ჱჲს The most striking example of this process of afforestation of wrecks is the SS Ayrfield. The UK-built steam collier, which ended up in Homebush Bay in 1972 after World War 2 service, is spectacularly overgrown with mangroves, a dense armada of trees literally bursting out of the ship’s disappearing hull and threatening to swallow it whole! High-rise residents in the Wentworth Point estate and people  strolling along the waterfront of the Point are afforded the best views of the organically-refashioned Ayrfield.

ჱჲს Also warranting special mention for a similar makeover courtesy of its biotic vibrancy–albeit much more obscurely located around the bend close to the Waterbird Sanctuary–is the 1924-built SS Heroic. The Heroic, a steam tug boat, saw service in both world wars before being consigned to the Homebush Bay cast-iron graveyard. Hidden behind a cloak of thick mangroves, you need to position yourself right on the muddy edge of the water and crane your neck to get a decent sighter of the nature-engulfed old tug boat. Its predicament, mirrors the Ayrfield’s but in a less advanced stage of arboreal encroachment.

ነሃጣፈነ A curious footnote to the 50 year-presence of the scuttled and abandoned ships in Homebush Bay is that the vessels, despite the egregiously bad state they are in, are ‘protected’ by legislation (under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976).

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Materials referenced:

‘Shipwrecks of Homebush Bay’, (May Ly), 30-Jul-2013, www.weekendnotes.com

‘Graveyards of a different kind at Homebush Bay’, (Ruth Spitzer), 2015, www.ruthspitzer.com

Parramatta Park Peripathetically

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Leisure activities, Local history

 

A journey in time from government domain to “people’s park”

Leaving the fringe of Parramatta CBD at O’Connell Street, we venture west onto the north bank of Parramatta Park… traditionally, before the white colonial takeover, this was Burramatta Darug country. Passing the car park at the front of Bankwest Stadium, we soon arrive at the park’s first slice of colonial history. The sloping grassland running down to the river—now the habitat mainly of ibises and swamp hens—was once Government Farm, the infant Sydney colony’s first successful farm. The early settlers (such as Dodd’s Farm) found the undulating fertile land here more conducive to growing crops¹ than the sandy soil and unreliable water supply at Farm Cove.The colony’s first governor Arthur Phillip gave the Parramatta area its first English name, Rose Hill².

Following the riverside path we come to the Old Kings Oval with its small Doug Walters Pavilion, a reminder that the 60s and 70s star cricketer played for the local Cumberland team when he first came to Sydney. The name of the oval is a clue to the fact that the prestigious independent boys school, the Kings School, occupied the surrounding land for 130 years (to the late 1960s). A sign on the pathway alerts us to another by-gone sporting activity of the park – there was also a (horse)racetrack that snaked around the river in the early colonial days.

If we cross the skimpy narrow metal foot bridge and head back towards O’Connell Street, we can spot the park’s principal building, Old Government House, an impressive grand Georgian mansion with a fascinating life story. Construction commenced in 1799, thus the UNESCO-listed structure is the oldest surviving public building in Australia. For the early governors this was effectively a country retreat for them, a preferred residence because of it’s superior air and distance from the crime-infested, unsanitary conditions of Sydney Town.

From 1910 Government House was leased to the Kings School, giving it another imprint on the park’s history. Till 1965 the former governors’ residence was home to junior boarders of the school. Two years after that the school moved holus-bolus to North Parramatta. Today OGH operates as a National Trust heritage site and the repository of Australia’s best collection of early 1800s colonial furniture.

Leaving OGH and continuing in the direction of Westmead we pass Governor Brisbane’s Roman-style bath house. It fell into a dilapidated state by the late 19th century and was subsequently converted (or reduced) into a (small) bandstand, which is it’s present state of obsolescence.

Just a bit further on from the Bath House we arrive at a curious-looking military monument to the Boer War. Mounted on a high platform supported by thick classical columns is a small 19th century canon on wheels. Menacing positioned at such an elevated vantage-point, you could just imagine it being used to take potshots at pesky Afrikaner farmer-soldiers skulking round the Transvaal veld or on the Rand.

Also near here we happen upon another, very different monument. This represents a tribute to a home-grown aviator pioneer of the Parramatta district, William Ewart Hart. The stone inscription informs us that he was “Parramatta’s Flying Dentist” circa 1912, believed to be the first Australian to fly an aircraft on this continent.

Looping round the path onto Railway Pde we take the road back to O’Connell St and the last stop on our ramble around Parra Park. The George St Gatehouse is one of six such guarding the entrances to the park. Picture-book English Tudor in style, it’s the most iconic, and since it was restored in 2014, the most aesthetically pleasing of the gatehouses.

Map identifying the main physical sections of Parra Park: Mill Race Flat, Pavilion Flat, The Crescent, Cattle Paddock, Salter’s Field, Old Orchard, West Domain.

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¹ the result of indigenous land management methods like the regular burning of grasslands

² the first settlement in Parramatta (1788) was a redoubt built by soldiers at The Crescent, a geological feature comprising flat alluvial ground contained by a bend in the river, situated to the south-west of OGH

Bibliography
‘Rose Hill and Government Farm’, Parramatta Park, www.parrapark.com.au

‘Old Government House’, (Sonya Gellert), Discover Parramatta, www.discoverparramatta.com.au

Levins, Chris, Parramatta Park, Dictionary of Sydney, 2010, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/parramatta_park, viewed 27 Feb 2021

‘The Crescent’, (Michaela Ann Cameron), Dictionary of Sydney, 2015, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/