Pestilence and Perfection:
Sydney's Municipal Incinerators in the
Early
20th Century
Enok wrote:
>Hilary! Here your fascinating cork story
comes along! Sending this mail
>also to Ian because I, for some reason, think he has, for some reason,
>some special relations to Canberra. Could even be he could help Hugen
>supply your text with a picture .....?
Ian answered:
Yes, I saw the bit on television about harvesting the cork. We have a cork
oak in our garden, but the rate of growth is very slow (eight feet in 15
years) so it won't be me who will be harvesting it's bark. Sorry, Enok, I
don't have any pictures of cork oaks in Canberra. However, I can give you
some text that links with the cork oak story. If I remember correctly, the
television report said that the planting of the cork oak plantation had
been the idea of Walter Burley Griffin, the architect who designed the
street layout of Canberra in the early 20th century. I got to know Walter
Burley Griffin when working on my PhD - below is a little paper I wrote
about early waste management in Sydney and the role of Walter Burley
Griffin. I'm sorry I don't have it in web page form so you could see the
pictures (of rat incinerators and Griffin's designs for incerators).
Ian
Pestilence and Perfection: Sydney's Municipal Incinerators in the Early
20th Century
Australia experienced its first proven case of bubonic plague when a Sydney
wharf-carter employed by the Central Wharf Company fell ill on 19 January
1900. Sydney was then a city ot 460,000 people and in the following
months, 303 people contracted plague, 103 died from it, almost 2,000 people
were taken from their homes and sent to a nearby quarantine station, and
thousands more fled Sydney for the safety of the country. While the role
of rats and rat fleas in the transmission of the disease had been gaining
acceptance for several years, the response of Department of Public Health
was based on both the modern bacteriological theory of disease and the
earlier miasmic theory of disease which held that diseases were transmitted
by the odours of putrefaction. The Department's advice to householders was
a curious mixture of new and old:
"Dead rats found about premises should not be touched until they have been
scalded with boiling water where they lie; they should not be taken up in
the hands, but with tongs; they should be burnt.
"Plague is a fever; like other fevers it is aided in its attacks by filthy
surroundings, and probably the infection is fostered by filthy heaps of
neglected and putrefying material, and by filthy earth."
Wrong headed or not, one consequence of the Department's approach was a
massive clean-up of inner Sydney's dockland area. The area was cordoned
off and, as the report of George McCredie, the consulting engineer who
supervised the clean-up records, 3,000 men:
"...entered and cleaned up every street, lane, house and premises,
sweeping, repairing, washing and renovating good structures, destroying old
and tumbledown premises, clearing out and levelling yards, tearing up old
and laying new drainds and generally doing anthing of the kind that
suggests itself as a means of affecting cleanliness."
One resident complained that 'they had whitewashed everything they could
lay their hands on. One lady assured me tearfully they had even
whitewashed her piano.'
Considering that the clean-up was undertaken by hand labour, horse power
and some steam power over a few months, its achievements are impressive,
even today. A total of 52,030 tons of silt and sewage was removed from
under the wharves, 1,400 dead animals were removed from the water and
burnt, 28,455 tons of garbage was taken out to sea in punts, 25,430 tons of
garbage was burnt in the streets, and 45,000 rats were destroyed.
But as inner Sydney was cleaned up, the plague spread to Moore Park, a town
common two kilometres to the south east of the dockland area. Moore Park
had been used as a garbage tip for many years. Panicked by the death of a
two year old boy who lived in a cottage near the tip, the Sydney City
Council (the local authority responsible for sanitation) decided that all
garbage should be dumped out to sea until a municipal waste incinerator
could be built. Such incinerators had already been installed by the
Leichhardt Municipal Council nearby in 1899 and by the North Sydney
Municipal Council on the other side of Sydney Harbour in 1898. The
Southgate Garbage Destructor Company, capitalising on the popular concerns
about garbage and the plague, invited councillors from the Sydney region in
late March, 1900 to inspect its Leichhardt incinerator, an invitation that
was taken up by 38 councillors from 10 municipal councils.
However, as the graph shows, relatively few councils decided to construct
incinerators. With the extensive wetlands bordering the Harbour on the
south side, and the dissected sandstone topography north of the Harbour,
most councils believed they had areas suitably remote from population for
tipping garbage. Those inner city councils that did not have such areas,
or found incineration too costly, continued to take their garbage out to
sea beyond Sydney's sandy ocean beaches. Unfortunately, this convenient
means of disposal was on a collision course with one of the major social
changes that occurred in Sydney in the early 20th century.
In 1902, Willie Cochrane, a Manly newsagent, defied the local ordinance
against sea bathing during daylight hours. Prosecutions did not deter the
many others who followed suit and, in November 1903, the ordinance was
repealed, although until 1935 all bathers were required to be convered by a
bathing suit from neck to knee. Surfing was to become a national pastime
and by the 1930s was seen as an essential contribution to the vitality of
the growing nation. As a New South Wales parliamentarian said in 1932:
"Surfing is building up a type of young man the physique of whom is not
surpassed by that of men of any other country in the world. Our
life-savers are equal to any in the world. Reference was made to the
importance of physical culture for children in our schools, but they can
have no better physical culture than they can get on the beaches."
With the surfing beaches becoming the gynmasium of the populace, there was
growing concern about the garbage washing onto the beaches. In 1932, the
Mayor of Waverly Municipal Council and parliamentarian, Arthur Moverly,
quoted from a recent report of a surf superintendent to support his call
for ban on ocean dumping.
"On Monday, 19th December, Coogee and Maroubra beaches were littered with
vast quantities of garbage, consisting of pumpkin and other vegetables,
rotten fruit, garden refuse, tins, bottles, etc. Five drayloads of this
matter was removed from in front of the dressing shed at Coogee. On Sunday
morning, 2nd inst., Coogee Beach was again littered from end to end with an
assortment of rotten fruit and vegetables, dead rats, kittens, fowls, on
dog, one duck, butchers' shop offal, garden refuse, and other filth so
thick that early morning bathers refused to enter the surf."
Many of the municipalities adjoining these beaches were already using
incinerators and so felt particularly aggrieved to be receiving the garbage
of other municipalities on their beaches. Ocean dumping was banned by the
Commonwealth Government in December 1932. This, together with a growing
shortage of convenient tipping sites and the relatively high costs of road
transport to more remote sites, led to an increase in the construction of
incinerators in the 1930s.
The demand for incinerators at a time of economic recession was a fortunate
occurrence for a young United States born architect, Walter Burley Griffin.
A native of Chicago and a graduate of the University of Illinois, he worked
for five years as an associate of the famous United States architect, Frank
Lloyd Wright. In 1912, he won the competition for the design of the layout
of Australia's capitol, Canberra, and subsequently settled in Australia.
When the Great Depression reduced the availability of architectural work,
Griffin worked in association with the Reverbatory Incinerator and
Engineering Company (REICo), whose Managing Director, Nisson
Leonard-Kanewsky, aggressively promoted the company's incinerators against
established competition. The successful domination by REICo of the
incineration industry in the 1930s was due to their lower installation and
maintenance costs, the achievement of a waste volume reduction to ten per
cent, compared to twenty-five per cent for the incinerators of competitors
and the Australian patented design of the furnace and its construction from
local materials.
However, the upsurge in municipal incinerator construction in Sydney in the
1930s was not without resistance which had many parallels to modern
nimbyism. Strident protests from residents over existing and proposed
incinerators that were seen as sites for 'flies, cockroaches, rats, smoke
and stench' resulted in a number of government inquiries in the 1930s.
Griffin believed that the problem of finding sites for incinerators could
be overcome if they were placed within aesthetically pleasing buildings
which would be a visual asset in existing public parks. These parks would
then provide a buffer between the incinerator and residential areas. In
Griffin's words:
"The final test of modernism is the replacement of industrial eyesores with
public amenities. During the seven years of the depression whilst
industrial growth had stopped, I fortunately found a field in which the
architect could help allay the suspicious fears and political animosities
sufficiently to enable a dozen municipal authorities to determine upon
sites within their boundaries for replacing dumps and other uneconomic
methods of disposal of public waste matter, with quick incineration in
monumental buildings. It has been intended in these buildings also to
awaken an aversion to the fundamentally uneconomic conditions of industrial
ugliness."
The incinerators required sloping sites so that garbage could be delivered
by trucks at the highest part of the building to a hopper that gravity-fed
to the furnace on the floor below. At the lowest level, below the furnace,
was a floor on which ash could be delivered to trucks for transport, or
tipped further down the slope nearby. While the technology housed by the
building was similar in all the incinerators, Griffin's architectural
solutions ranged from a single enveloping pyramidal form to series of
interlocking buildings cascading down the slope. Many of the incinerators
featured massive reinforced concrete forms carrying unexpectedly delicate
cast embellishments on their faces and corners. Walter Burley Griffin's
involvement with municipal incinerators ended in 1936 when he left
Australia for India after winning a competition for the design of a
library at the University of Lucknow.
With improvements in Sydney's road transport infrastructure, increased
mechanisation of garbage collection, the wider diversity of materials in
municipal waste and tighter air pollution standards, incineration of
municipal waste was gradually replaced by landfills as the incinerators
aged and became uneconomical to repair. Most of the incinerator buildings
fell into disrepair and were demolished. It is fitting that one of the
best preserved of the few Walter Burley Griffin incinerators that remain in
Australia is the Willoughby Incinerator, a National Trust listed building
not far from the Sydney suburb of Castle Crag where Griffin lived while he
was in Australia and which contains a number of houses built to his
visionary designs.
References
In addition to Hansard for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and
various articles in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in the 1930s, the
following sources were used in the compilation of this article:
Thearle, M.J. and Jeffs. D. 1994. The Black Death: an account of plague in
Australia, 1900-1923. Paper presented to the Royal Australasian College of
Physicians Annual Scientific Meeting, Hobart, May 1994.
Johnson, D.L. 1977. The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin. The
Griffin Press, Adelaide.
Coward, D. 1988. Out of Sight... Sydney's Environmental History
1851-1981. Dept Economic History, Australian National University.
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Ian Reeve E-mail address: ireeve@metz.une.edu.au