Sydney’s Canterbury Sugar Works apartment complex is one of Australia’s oldest industrial buildings

YOU would never know this apartment complex in Sydney’s West is in one of Australia’s oldest industrial buildings.

YOU would never know this Canterbury apartment complex is in one of Australia’s oldest industrial buildings.

Canterbury Sugar Works, sitting on the banks of the Cooks River, is one of the oldest industrial complexes in the state, if not Australia.

The Georgian structure was built in 1840 and is one of the area’s well-hidden gems and a fine example of early sandstone buildings.

Historian Colin Beacroft outside the Canterbury Sugar Works building. Picture: Craig Wilson

It’s also one of only two privately-built pre-gold rush industrial buildings still standing in Sydney.

Myths abound, however, with the building often incorrectly labelled as the Canterbury Sugar Mill.

In fact, it was a sugar refinery where raw sugar imported from the Philippines was processed to produce white sugar, under what was then known as the Australian Sugar Company.

Canterbury Sugar Works in 1986. Picture: Supplied

The site regularly churned out loaf sugar and molasses and a small village of slab huts began to populate its periphery.

In the 1840s, that company dissolved to become the Australasian Sugar Company and later reformed in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining company.

Since 2004, the building has been an apartment complex.

The Sugar Works flourished at a time when Canterbury as a region was beginning to grow.

“In the mid-1800s, Canterbury began to bustle — in the 1880s it was the fastest growing suburb in Sydney,” said historian Colin Beacroft.

“It was a good place to live. It wasn’t polluted, it was (a) semi-rural … healthy environment.”

Yet troubled times came for the Sugarworks.

Labour shortages during the gold rush, coupled with poor management, resulted in the refinery being moved to Chippendale.

Sugar Works circa 1920s: the refinery processed white sugar to produce loaf sugar and molasses. Picture: Supplied

The site remained vacant until 1884, from which point it was used as a heavy engineering factory and bacon factory, among other uses.

The site has been an apartment complex since 2004.

FACTS:

■ The Canterbury Sugar Works was built in 1840, and is one of only two privately-built pre-gold rush industrial buildings in Sydney

■ Raw sugar was processed to produce loaf sugar and molasses, but labour shortages during the gold rush, poor management and moving the refinery led to the factory’s vacancy in 1854

■ It is often incorrectly known as the Canterbury Sugar Mill