Episode 5: In which we summon the ghosts of garbage past

Question: what do this city (top right) and this 1930s garbage incinerator (bottom right) have in common?

Answer: their designer.

Yes, the same husband and wife architect team that designed Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, also designed the garbage incinerator that was constructed at Pyrmont in Sydney in the 1930s to solve a mounting and very smelly problem.

Let’s go back a few years …

The earliest garbage tip in Sydney was Moore Park: to be precise, the current playing fields of Sydney Boys’ High. The debris and detritus of the growing urban area was dumped at Moore Park, periodically burnt to control odour and vermin, and was largely out of sight and out of mind. Unless you happened to live or work in the vicinity. In about 1900 an outbreak of bubonic plague meant the City of Sydney administrators suddenly needed to improve the city’s sanitation in a big hurry.

The first step to help contain the growing problem of waste disposal was an incinerator at the Moore Park tip. Garbage was also loaded on to flat barges and punted through the Heads and out to sea. Officially, it was supposed to go five miles out to sea before being dumped overboard, but this was virtually impossible to police and by the time World War I started in 1914, the practice of dumping waste at sea had become a cause of a lot of public unrest in Sydney. After the war, however, the practice continued right through the 1920s.

The final incident that snapped the patience of the public happened in the Spring of 1929, when high tides washed in several loads of garbage, including dead rats and butchers’ offal, depositing them on the beaches.  The law that prohibited daytime bathing on Sydney’s beaches was lifted in 1902 and by the 1920s bathing was a popular pastime and the beaches were being used widely for recreation. A couple of loads of dead rats and rotting offal did not enhance their appeal and the practice of dumping garbage at sea was promptly and finally ceased.

This left the city administrators with a very large problem. The tip at Moore Park was simply not big enough and it was decided to build a new incinerator. Moore Park seemed like the obvious location, but by this time it was in the middle of a residential area, and here we have possibly the first example of NIMBY action in Australia when the residents of the Moore Park area complained that their health and amenity would be negatively affected by a new incinerator.

Pyrmont, on the other hand, was on the other side of the city and was an industrial area. A quarry had already pushed back the natural shoreline where, until the 1830s Aboriginal people had camped and gathered cockles (hence Cockle Bay) and oysters, and wharves and other industrial activities, including the power station, meant that the area was more suited to the location of a waste incinerator. The cost of transporting waste all the way from Sydney to Pyrmont was an issue, but the fact that it was already dirty and polluted (and presumably the Pyrmont and Glebe residents’ views were of lesser importance than those on the other side of the city) gave it the edge.

Enter the Griffins. The Great Depression had meant the end of a lot of commissions for the celebrated architects and the incinerator for Pyrmont spelled income. The result was an ultra modern facility described as a ‘cubist’ building, bearing intricate detail on its exterior in the fashion of Aztec motifs. It was state-of-the-art for the time, and the Griffins themselves believed that it was a significant contribution to both the city and to architecture generally. Over time it was described as ‘brilliant’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘of international significance’. How many of our modern waste management facilities can make those claims?

The Pyrmont incinerator was in use until 1971, by which time its operation contravened the Clean Air Act (1961) and it was decommissioned. Waste from the city centre started to be transported to the outer suburbs for disposal in landfill. In 1976 the chimney stack was deemed to be unsafe and was taken down. The facility then stood in disrepair, crumbling and decaying while the City administrators and National Trust argued over its fate.

It gained registration by the National Trust, but this listing carried no legal weight and there was no conservation order. While it clearly had heritage value and value as an architectural work, it seemed no one was interested in bearing the cost of its restoration.

Finally, after much wrangling and debate, in 1992 an order was given for its demolition. It was gone within 24 hours. A Meriton apartment now stands on the site.

Sydney historian, Shirley Fitzgerald, in her books Sydney 1842-1992 and Pyrmont and Ultimo under Seige details the pivotal role that this waste facility played in improving the urban sanitation of the rapidly growing Sydney of the mid-20^th Century, and its ultimate fate. She suggests that had it been built in any area other than Pyrmont it would have been saved.

Personally I think that had it been a facility for anything other than waste it would have been saved regardless of location. In a culture where we regard waste as transient, to restore and preserve a building constructed for the purpose of reducing waste to ash, regardless of the architectural significance of that building, is socially counterintuitive. The building, thus, goes the same way as the waste. Away.