Fire cleared slum woolstores in Ultimo and made way for museums and swimming pools

GREAT walls of fire that illuminated the city’s western skyline 24 years ago, destroying a heritage-listed monument to Sydney’s maritime past, were the watershed in Ultimo’s pending transformation.

May Street, Ultimo, looking south. Picture: Sam Hood circa 1906.

GREAT walls of fire that illuminated the city’s western skyline 24 years ago, destroying a heritage-listed monument to Sydney’s maritime past, were the watershed in Ultimo’s pending transformation.

Another chapter in the suburb’s history closed yesterday when NSW Premier Mike Baird banned greyhound racing — a fixture at Wentworth Park since 1938.

The park, built around Ultimo’s Blackwattle Creek where noxious industry was cleared from reclaimed swamps in the 1870s, was set aside as “a cricket and quoit ground”. Opening on 13ha in September 1882, a 2.4ha cricket oval was also used for rugby from 1883. From 1928 until 1936, Wentworth Park was also a car and motorcycle speedway.

Ultimo’s gentrification put dollar signs in the eyes of property developers when 800 people were evacuated as lanolin-soaked timbers in the disused Australian Mercantile Land & Finance Co woolstore exploded into flames around midday on July 6, 1992.

The disused Australian Mercantile Land & Finance Co woolstore exploded into flames around midday on July 6, 1992.

Eight-storey walls collapsed onto parked cars, leaving a 400m-long section later razed for the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre. Flames regularly engulfed woolstores across Ultimo and neighbouring Pyrmont after R. Goldsbrough & Co opened Sydney’s first wool store in 1882, near railway goods lines at Darling Harbour. About 20 massive warehouses eventually housed millions of wool bales for Dalgety Co, Winchcombe Carson and Co Ltd and Pitt Son and Badgery Ltd.

Rafters smouldered for two weeks after fire destroyed Goldsbrough’s woolstore No 1 on Pyrmont St, Ultimo, on September 25, 1935. And a cordon extended for almost 1km around a New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company woolstore on Bulwarra Road on August 22, 1946, “as huge brick walls continued to crash on to the streets”. Flames racing up five floors were visible from the lower Blue Mountains.

Firemen at the scene of the burnt out shell of an old woolstore in Ultimo on March 19, 1978.

Debris at the scene of the blaze at the old woolstore in Ultimo on March 19, 1978.

The fire that crashed walls down on 20 houses around Bulwarra Rd and Jones St on March 19, 1978, was the third around Ultimo in two weeks. Starting at 3am, flames destroyed costumes and sets for 25 Australian Opera productions, including The Merry Widow, stored in the woolstore. TAB head Eric Cole, based in an adjoining building, said all tickets and stores for NSW were lost, causing $1 million damage. Falling bricks flattened 12 outhouses and laundries, leaving terraces uninhabitable.

The first colonial land grant on Cadigal Aboriginal land west of Cockle Bay (Darling Harbour), already pockmarked with small quarries, was 22ha to NSW Corps Private Thomas Jones in 1795. Jones sold his rocky grant in 1796 to Sergeant Obadiah Ikin, who exchanged it for £10 worth of rum from entrepreneur John Macarthur in 1799, as Jones and his wife were convicted of murdering missionary Samuel Clode. Clode was stabbed and had his throat cut at Cockle Bay brickfields after coming to collect money owed by Jones. On July 6, 1799, Jones was hanged on the site of his house, demolished to make way for gallows. The body of his wife, also hanged for her part in the murder, was given for surgical dissection.

A painting of magistrate John Harris’s two-storey villa, Ultimo, in 1814.

Governor Philip Gidley King rewarded surgeon and magistrate John Harris for his support in limiting the rum trade with a 13.8ha grant in the area in December 1803. Harris had been court-martialled in 1803, while presiding in Captain Anthony Kemp’s court martial over pamphlets denouncing King’s intervention in brandy imports.

Kemp was saved when Major George Johnston ordered Harris’ arrest for allegedly revealing the voting of officers in an earlier court martial. Harris was exonerated when charges dated the alleged offence “ultimo”, meaning the previous month, instead of “instant”. Harris recognised his good fortune by naming his estate, largely used to graze imported Indian deer, Ultimo.

A cottage he built in 1804 was expanded into a two-storey villa in 1814, after Harris met convict architect Francis Greenway. Harris owned 94ha by 1818 as Cockle Bay developed into a busy maritime district. In 1821 businessman Edward Riley leased Ultimo House, where he hosted dinner for 240 guests over three sittings.

Midget car racing at Wentworth Park Speedway, circa 1930s.

Woolbroker James Wallach was resident in 1855 when local quarries provided sandstone for Sydney landmarks. The area’s biggest quarrymaster, Quarryman’s Arms hotel licensee Charles Saunders, employed 22 men at Pyrmont’s Paradise quarry by 1858 to cut sandstone for the University of Sydney. Stone at his Purgatory and Hellhole quarries in Ultimo was deeper and harder to cut.

But market gardens and dairies prevailed when Harris’ nephew George subdivided Ultimo estate in the early 1890s, selling a large portion to the Board of Technical Education in 1891 for a technical college, technical museum and two high schools. The Technical College acquired Ultimo House, demolished in 1933, and gardens in 1910.

The Colonial Sugar Refinery, at Pyrmont since 1877, added a distillery in 1901. When Ultimo Power Station opened in 1902 to power electric trams, residents inhaled the “sour smell of milk from dairies, the sweet smell of molasses from Colonial Sugar Refinery, the stench of soot from power stations”.

Residents of Owen St, Ultimo. Picture: Sam Hood circa 1906.

The slums and open sewers in Little Chambers Street, Ultimo. Picture: Sam Hood circa 1906.

A city health inspector described houses along Ultimo’s Blackwattle Lane as among “the most offensive cesspits it has ever been my lot to come across” in May 1890, long before slum clearances reached Athlone Place in 1906, when 400 dwellings and a maze of lanes were demolished, along with a nearby Cyclorama, a circular painted panorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, opened in 1889.

Developer Malcolm Edward’s Essington property group paid about $30 million for the AML&F woolstores in 1988 to build a $200 million, 210-room hotel, shopping complex, offices and 150 residential units. Approval lapsed months before the 1992 fire. Edwards was declared bankrupt in 1993, with creditors, including media magnate Kerry Packer, owed $25 million.