At the tail end of the decade that the Haberfield model suburb (1901) made its appearance, the southern Sydney suburb of Daceyville was on the cusp of undergoing a comparable urban planning experiment. Like Haberfield, Dacey Model Suburb drew inspiration and impetus from the British Garden City and Arts and Crafts Movement which advocated new urban centres with an emphasis on better and genuinely innovative planning to create self-contained communities comprising ‘greenbelt’ areas (farming one’s own crops, community beautification programs, aesthetically designed formal gardens and so on)✱.

Whereas the creative and financial impetus driving the Haberfield project [see ‘Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW’] was private enterprise and it was targeted at a market of middle class clients, the Dacey “Model Suburb” was a government-funded program, public planning aimed at improving the lot of the working class. Both though were born out of a desire to provide a social reform model to planners to avoid the trap of overcrowded, slum suburbs which were plaguing Sydney’s inner city at the turn of the 20th century.
⍐ Dacey Model Suburb (Sydney), map circa 1920

JR Dacey MLA, catalyst for change
State Labor MLA (Member for Legislative Assembly) for Botany John Rowland Dacey worked tirelessly for much of his parliamentary term to create a low-cost housing community for the working class in his electorate. Dacey urged that Sydney adopt the British Garden City model introduced in Letchworth in the West Midlands✥. In 1909 there was a Royal Commission “for the improvement of Sydney” which pointed the way, the following year’s election of the first NSW Labor Government clinched it! In 1912 the newly created NSW Housing Board’s⍟ first task was to construct a new, model suburb seven kilometres south of the city. Unfortunately it occurred too late for Dacey to see its completion, the MP died that in April of that year, posthumously the suburb was named Daceyville in recognition of Dacey’s efforts to make it a reality [Sinnayah, Samantha, ‘Daceyville’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2011, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/daceyville, viewed 25 Jul 2018].

⍐ The land allocated for the Garden City prior to the project’s commencement

⍗ Solander Road, DGS (www.records.nsw.gov.au)

Dacey Garden Suburb
Dacey Garden Suburb was Australia’s first (low-cost) public housing scheme, promising to free those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder from the spectre of exorbitantly high rents and woefully sub-standard accommodation, giving members of the working class a better quality of life. Not everyone in public life approved of the Daceyville project…the conservative forces in state parliament labelled it ‘Audaciousville’, arguing, predictably, that government should not be in the public rental market. Led by Charles Wade, the outgoing premier and leader of the NSW Liberal Reform Party, the dissenters vigorously but unsuccessfully opposed the 1912 Housing Bill that brought the Daceyville estate into being [ibid.].

As a new and novel planning project Dacey Garden Suburb (DGS) was ambitious and broad in its scale…intended to occupy 443 acres with a density of seven cottages per acre. It was to be a self-contained residential unit and made provision for shops, schools, churches, amusement halls, police and fire stations and a technical college. A tram line was connected to Daceyville in 1913. Industrial and manufacturing activity was to be excluded from the site [‘Federation-House – Dacey Garden Suburb’, https://federationhouse.wikispaces.com/].

The first task facing the government and its contractors was preparing the land which proved a surmountable task but one that was particularly formidable. Sand dunes and sandy scrub soil had first to be removed before work could commence on shaping the streets into an orderly pattern. Constructing a giant stormwater drain was also a preliminary step. After these obstacles were overcome, things went ahead with some 67 houses finished by June 1913 [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, NSW Anzac Centenary, www.nswanzaccentenary.records.nsw.gov.au

A prescriptive suburb
The first families to move in were selected by ballot. The Housing Board, with JD (Jack) Fitzgerald directing the bureaucratic wheels, determined that the Garden Suburb would adhere to certain, strict principles (somewhat analogous to Richard Stanton’s ‘covenant’ for his Haberfield estates): some heterogeneity in cottage designs and room sizes and arrangements but no front fences were permitted (facilitating a merging of private and public green space), residential streets were to be curved to create vistas, no back lanes or pubs – which were “synonymous with slums” [‘Dacey Garden Suburb: a report for Daceyville Heritage Conservation Area within its historical context’, (Susan Jackson-Stepowski, Botany Bay Council – 2002), www.botanybaycouncil.nsw.gov.au]

Financial encumbrances to work
House production in the estate experienced a slowdown after 1915 however due to a lack of funds available for the project. Rising building costs partly accounted for this, but officially the government cited the existence of an “acute financial position” as a result of the national commitment required for the war effort in Europe [‘Daceyville – The Creation of a Garden Suburb’, op.cit.; Sinnayah, op.cit.]

The new ‘deserving’ for Dacey’s low-cost housing
The onset of the Great War eventually led to a shift in Dacey Garden Suburb’s raison d’être from workers to war veterans. It started in 1916 when 50 war widows were provided housing in the new estate…three years later resettling returning WWI servicemen became the overriding imperative in housing policy❆, relegating the needs of the working class to a secondary status [Sinnayah, ibid.]. The naming policy for the estate’s streets also reflected this trend – when the project started in 1912 DGS streets were mostly named after famous explorers (or the ships of famous explorers) from the past…there was Wills Crescent, Burke Crescent, Banks Avenue, Solander Road. After the Australian experience in Gallipoli, the street names chosen gave tribute to military figures from the campaign…Captain Jacka Crescent, Sargeant Larkin Crescent, and so on [Anzac Centenary, ibid.].

Banks Ave ⍗

A quantitative shortfall!
The difficulties (production costs, etc) meant that when the Daceyville Estate’s last rental property was finished in June 1920, only 315 out of the planned 1,473 cottages had been built. Construction of the amenities and infrastructure for the Dacey Garden Suburb also fell well short of what had been planned [Sinnayah, op.cit.].

Later Nationalist governments in NSW (forerunner of the Liberal-Country Party) did their best to undermine the Daceyville scheme by introducing private ownership in the model suburb (eg, the southern part of Daceyville, now in Pagewood, was subdivided and offered for sale to the public). Other ongoing threats came from government proposals in the 1960s to bulldoze the estate to make way for the Eastern Suburbs railway route through Kingsford, and from developers seeking to transform the suburb’s character by flooding it with high-rise, high-density buildings [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

DGS’s legacy
Despite the setbacks and checks placed on it, the Dacey Garden Suburb site has survived substantially in government hands (eg, only a tiny proportion of residents accepted the government’s offer in 1965 to buy their properties). The estate’s future character and use is protected by a strict Development Control Plan (administered by Housing NSW) and its heritage listing safeguards it from the bulldozers [Sinnayah, op.cit.].

⍗ Public housing, Gen. Bridges Cres.

DGS’s achievements were limited and the experiment failed to grow beyond its initial (Daceyville) area size and it failed to become self-sufficient (a British Garden City imperative). As well its early low-density advantages were somewhat undermined by subsequent subdivisions. However the experiment managed to achieve a number of pioneering advances in construction and urban planning…innovative building materials and techniques were employed, especially in the early cottages which incorporated tuck-pointed brick work, roughcast rendered walls, tiles roofs and local federation style joinery details. Over time, as the project’s finances ebbed, the size and quality of the houses diminished♦. Colonel Braund Crescent is one of the more innovative street features of DGS – being Australia’s first planned cul-de-sac [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

The garden suburb’s centrepiece
The very deliberate planning of DGS from the start resulted in the creation of a large garden park which formed a “central gateway’, a focal point off which the main avenues of the suburb fanned out to form a curved grid triangle. The park and other communal open spaces helped to foster a sense of civic identity among the Daceyvillites. The suburb’s commercial use facilities were grouped together near this hub to clearly separate them from the residential sector. John Sulman’s street layout reflected the architect’s predilection for wide, sweeping boulevards à la Paris. All roads were asphalted and footpaths were concreted and turfed. The public domain reserves and parks were all landscaped to match the street symmetry⊡ [ibid.].

The early residents benefitted tangibly from the delivery of services – such as sewerage connection, water, gas and electricity, curb and guttering of streets – these boons of modernity reached the Daceyville estate well before they got to many other parts of Sydney. Moreover, large verandahs and attractive backyard gardens gave residents access to fresh air and natural sunlight houses.

A win for the working class?
Dacey Garden Suburb was “a test case for state intervention in the real estate market” and it did demonstrate that the government could be “an effective provider of housing” [ibid.]. How much however individual working class families benefitted from the opening-up of DGS, is a matter of conjecture. To be eligible to participate in the ballot that determined the lucky beneficiaries of low-rent and low-density accommodation in the suburb, the sole stipulation was that applicants did not own land with a dwelling on it…being wealthy was not a barrier, the process was sorely lacking a “means test” to satisfy the criteria of financial hardship and genuine need! Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the practice after 1918 changed to one of allocating houses to war veterans and their families in preference to workers.

PostScript 1: Dacey model suburb theatre
Photo (above) (NSW Archives and Records Office) Dacey Garden Suburb had its own theatre, Daceyville ‘Little Tivoli Theatre’, General Bridges Crescent…initially it showed silent films, but later it provided ‘live’ performances of Vaudevillian style (Music Hall) entertainment with a variety of stage acts – including comedy skits, acrobats and jugglers, magic acts, kids and animals acts, musical performances and so on – as the billboard below indicates. The theatre burnt down in 1985.

Top of the bill at the Little Tivoli – tuning up for Broadway!

PostScript 2: Earlier, unsuccessful Sydney attempts at “forward-thinking” estates and subdivisions
In the late 1880s there were several attempts, both within Sydney and outside, to create a garden suburb – including San Souci (1887) (advertised to attract middle class families as “safe from the horrors of city living” (ie, the inner city slums!), Harcourt (1888) (Canterbury, NSW) and Kensington Model Suburb (1889) (which promised to combine the benefits of rural and urban life). All of these ventures came to zilch due to the prevailing conditions of (the 1890s) depression, drought and labour unrest [ibid].

︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺︺
✱ the Garden City Movement in Britain itself tapped to some extent into the contemporary City Beautiful Movement (CBM), a 1890s North American reform movement in architecture and urban planning. CBM, characterised by urban beautification and monumental grandeur, aimed at boosting quality of life in the cities and promoting a harmonious social order [‘City beautiful movement’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
✥ when the green light was eventually given for the Dacey model suburb, the scheme sought to faithfully adopt the Letchworth template – an overabundance of green spaces, a happy mix of town and country
⍟ forerunner of the later Housing Commission of NSW (now called Housing NSW)
❂ having several individual architects taking charge at different periods resulted in considerable variety in dwellings – free-standing cottages, attached, semi-detached, some two-storey houses, etc.
❆ already in 1916 a 40 acre soldier settlement had been established at nearby Matraville
♦ the estate’s houses reflect the range of architectural styles in use at the time – “Arts and Crafts” cottages, Californian bungalows and the adaptation of some local Federation style designs
⊡ all of which no doubt contributed to Sulman’s fulsome assessment of Daceyville as “an exemplar of what a Garden Suburb should be”