Sydney’s journey from the dim light of convict campfires to electric lamps

Sydney’s Vivid festival lights up the city at night like no other time of the year, but there was a time when Sydney was a much darker place

Angel Place, Sydney, at night in the 1920s. The dimly lit lane was even darker before the coming of electric light in 1904. Picture: Sam Hood/State Library of NSW.

Tomorrow night the lights of Sydney’s Vivid festival will be switched on, drawing millions of people to see the city in all its glowing glory. But there was a time when the only lights Sydneysiders saw at night were the moon, stars and perhaps the flickering of campfires

For millennia the indigenous inhabitants put up with just the soft orange-red glow of a fire to cast light into the gloom after the sun had gone down.

Even when the First Fleet arrived in 1788 the British interlopers didn’t bring light to brighten the night. On the first night ashore in Sydney Cove numerous campfires glowed, but they did bring a supply of candles and lamps, which were fuelled mostly by fats or vegetable oils. These could be carried by soldiers or convicts selected to keep the night’s watch, but they still didn’t cast much light.

Despite the growth of the colony, streets were still dim places at night, lit by the occasional fires in braziers, either hung from poles or fixed to the ground. These would have been originally tended by convicts whose job it was to light them at dusk and keep them burning through the night. But the Sydney Foot Police later took on that role.

Early sketch of NSW Governor Ralph Darling.

Many tavern owners lit fires in front of their premises to “deter riotous hordes of villains seen prowling around in every other part of town where the obscurity of the night afforded shelter”.

Governor Ralph Darling was fond of celebrating great public occasions with lighting displays. In April 1826 he held a party for the King’s Birthday, and on the roof of Government House he had a huge display of lamps and native flora, evoking a scene like some kind of fairyland.

That same year Sydney residents were given a chance to make requests of the governor and many asked Darling for better street lighting as a cheaper way to “repress rapine and nocturnal disorders” than employing more night watchmen. The rise of the whaling industry in Australian waters provided Sydney with a new, cleaner, more efficient form of fuel for lamps — whale oil.

Australia’s first street lamp, burning whale oil, was lit in Macquarie Place, Sydney, on April 7, 1826. It was the only street light for about a year until more lamps were unveiled across the city.

Two beautiful gas lights sit outside the Australian Gas Light Company’s showroom in Haymarket in the late 1800s.

The work of installing the lamps, maintaining them and keeping them lit was left to contractors. But in 1832 Governor Richard Bourke expressed in a minute to the Legislative Council that there was a need for an elected body “for the repairing, cleansing and lighting of the streets”. Legislation would eventually pass in 1842 incorporating Sydney and establishing a Sydney Municipal Council.

By then whale oil lamps had been outmoded by technology that had been used to light cities and towns in London since 1807 — gas light. The new Sydney council inherited a growing network of gas lamps, the first of which were installed in 1841 and were supplied by the Australian Gas Light Company, founded in 1837.

But even as Sydney basked in the glow of its gas lamps, spreading its lamps even into the dark reaches of Hyde Park in 1855, there was already a new technology casting away the darkness. In 1841, Paris had experimented with electric arc lighting for its streets.

Sydney had its first public display of an arc lamp in June 1863, when one sparked up on Observatory Hill to celebrate the news of the marriage of the Prince of Wales. The lamp, designed and made by Gustavus Adolphus Kopsch, was also lit for various other special occasions over subsequent years.

Gas lamps in Carrington St, Sydney, circa 1890. Picture courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum.

The last gas lamp is removed by workmen at Ryde in 1937.

Sydney Town Hall is lit up in 1901 to celebrate Federation.

As the reliability of electric lighting increased it was used in more places. In 1878 Sydney imported generators from England so workmen could extend the hours spent working on the Garden Palace for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. The exhibition featured electricity in its many uses, heralding a new era.

However, Sydney took its time installing permanent electric street lights. Los Angeles in the US had four arc lamps installed as street lamps in 1876, Paris and London lined entire avenues with them in 1878. In 1879 Newcastle upon Tyne, England, was the first city to use incandescent lights.

Even in Australia other cities beat Sydney to the punch. In 1888 Tamworth became the first Australian city to light its streets with street lights powered by a municipal power plant. Legislation was passed to “enable the Municipal Council of Sydney to light the streets” in 1896. But it took several years for it to become reality.

Just after dusk, on July 8, 1904, Mrs Olive Lees, the wife of Sydney Lord Mayor Samuel Lees, turned a golden switch-key, announcing “I have much pleasure in switching on the electric light for the city of Sydney”.

The lights were lit by a power station at Pyrmont (it was demolished in 1994 and redeveloped as the Star casino).