Location
Newtown, a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, is located approximately four kilometres south-west of the Sydney central business district, straddling the local government areas of the City of Sydney and Inner West Council in the state of New South Wales, Australia.
King Street is the main street of Newtown and centre of commercial and entertainment activity. The street follows the spine of a long ridge that rises up near Sydney University and extends to the south, becoming the Princes Highway at its southern end.
Enmore Road branches off King Street towards the suburb of Enmore at Newtown Bridge, where the road passes over the railway line at Newtown Station. Enmore Road and King Street together comprise 9.1 kilometres of over 600 shopfronts. The main shopping strip of Newtown is the longest and most complete commercial precinct of the late Victorian and Federation period in Australia. King Street is often referred to as “Eat Street” in the media due to the large number of cafés, pubs and restaurants of various cultures. Cafés, restaurants and galleries can also be found in the streets surrounding King Street.
Newtown’s rugby league club competed in the NSWRFL Premiership from its foundation in 1908 until 1983. (wikipedia)
History
Aboriginal history
The area we now know as Newtown was part of a broader area where Cadigal tribe of the Eora people, who ranged across the entire area from the southern shores of Sydney Harbour to Botany Bay in the south-east and Petersham in the inner-west.
The first indigenous Australian to receive a Christian burial was Tommy, an 11-year-old boy who died of bronchitis in the Sydney Infirmary. He was buried in Camperdown Cemetery, in a section now located outside the wall. The cemetery also contains a sandstone obelisk erected in 1944 by the Rangers League of NSW, in memory of Tommy and three other indigenous Australians buried there: Mogo, William Perry and Wandelina Cabrorigirel, although their graves are no longer identifiable. When the names were transcribed from the records onto the monument, there was an error in deciphering the flowing hand in which many of the original burial dockets were written. It is now known that the fourth name was not Wandelina Cabrorigirel, but Mandelina (Aboriginal).
King street, Newtown’s main street, reputedly follows an Aboriginal track that branched out from the main western track, now beneath Broadway and Parramatta Road, and which continued all the way to the coastal plains around Botany Bay. This conflicts with other claims that the main western track was a barrier which divided the land.
19th century
Newtown was established as a residential and farming area in the early 19th century. The area took its name from a grocery store opened there by John and Margaret Webster in 1832, at a site close to where the Newtown railway station stands today. They placed a sign atop their store that read “New Town Stores”. Captain Sylvester John Browne, father of Thomas Alexander Browne (“Rolf Boldrewood”), built “Newtown House” in the area around the same time, which has also been cited as the source of the name. The name New Town was adopted, at first unofficially, with the space disappearing to form the name Newtown.
The part of Newtown lying south of King Street was a portion of the two estates granted by Governor Arthur Phillip to the Superintendent of Convicts, Nicholas Devine, in 1794 and 1799. Erskineville and much of Macdonaldtown were also once part of Devine’s grant. In 1827, when Devine was aged about 90, this land was acquired from him by a convict, Bernard Rochford, who sold it to many of Sydney’s wealthiest and most influential inhabitants, including the mayor. Devine’s heir, John Devine, a coachbuilder of Birmingham, challenged the will, which was blatantly fraudulent. The “Newtown Ejectment Case” was eventually settled out of court by the payment to Devine of an unknown sum of money said to have been “considerable”. The land was further divided into the housing that is now evidenced by the rows of terrace houses and commercial and industrial premises.
Part of the area now falling within the present boundaries of Newtown, north of King Street, was originally part of Camperdown. This area was named by Governor William Bligh, who received it as a land grant in 1806 and passed it to his daughter and son-in-law on his return to England in 1810. In 1848 part of this land was acquired by the Sydney Church of England Cemetery Company to create a general cemetery beyond the boundary of the City of Sydney. Camperdown Cemetery, just one block away from King Street, was to become significant in the life of the suburb. Between its consecration in 1849 and its closure to further sales in 1868 it saw 15,000 burials of people from all over Sydney. Of that number, approximately half were paupers buried in unmarked and often communal graves, sometimes as many as 12 in a day during a measles epidemic. Camperdown Cemetery remains, though much reduced in size, as a rare example of mid-19th-century cemetery landscaping. It retains the Cemetery Lodge and huge fig tree dating from 1848, as well as a number of oak trees of the same date. It survived to become the main green space of Newtown. Among the notables buried in the cemetery are explorer-surveyor Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, Major Edmund Lockyer and Mary, Lady Jamison (widow of the colonial pioneer landowner, physician, constitutional reformer and “knight of the realm”, Sir John Jamison). The cemetery also holds the remains of many of the victims of the wreck of the Dunbar in 1857.
From 1845, when the first Anglican church was built on the site of the present Community Centre on Stephen Street, by Edmund Blacket, a number of churches were established, including St Joseph’s Roman Catholic church in the 1850s, the Methodist church on King Street, now Newtown Mission, and the Baptist church in Church Street. The present St Stephen’s Anglican church, a fine example of Victorian Gothic architecture, was designed, like its predecessor, by Blacket, and built in the grounds of cemetery between 1871 and 1880. Both it and the cemetery are on the National Trust register of buildings of national significance. Its Mears and Stainbank carillon is unique in Australia, while its Walker and Sons organ of 1874 is regarded as one of the finest in New South Wales.
On 12 December 1862 the Municipality of Newtown was incorporated and divided into three wards: O’Connell, Kingston and Enmore, covering 480 acres (194.25 ha). In 1893 a plan was discussed to rename the council area “South Sydney” (as three municipalities North of Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) had merged to form North Sydney three years earlier), but nothing came of it.
Housing
Although there are a few earlier buildings in Newtown, the most rapid development came in the late 19th century, with many former farms and other large properties being subdivided and developed as row-houses, known popularly as “terrace houses”. With their predominance of Victorian-era houses with stuccoed facades, balconies of iron lace and moulded architectural ornaments, many Newtown streets are similar to those of other well-known inner-city suburbs like Glebe, Paddington and Balmain.
From about 1870 onwards, a large proportion of Newtown’s residents lived in terrace houses of the cheapest possible construction. Many of these terraces were “two-up two-down”, with rear kitchen, some having adjoining walls only one brick thick and a continuous shared roofspace. Hundreds of these terrace houses still remain, generally 4 metres wide. It was not uncommon for speculative builders to build a row of these small houses terminating in a house of 1½ width at the corner of the street, this last being a commercial premises, or “corner store”. During the Federation period, single-storey row houses became increasingly common.
This preponderance of small houses is indicative of the working-class employment of most Newtown residents, many of whom worked in the city or at local shops, factories, warehouses, brickyards and at the nearby Eveleigh Railway Workshops. Retail and service trades dominated the suburb increasingly throughout this period, with tradesmen and shopkeepers together accounting for 70-75% of the working population. During the late 19th century and early 20th century, Newtown prospered, so much so that in the Jubilee Souvenir of the Municipality of Newtown, published in 1912, it was described as “one of the most wealthy suburbs around Sydney”.
A number of imposing Victorian mansions were also built on larger estates, as well as rows of larger and more stylish terrace houses in certain areas such as Brown Street in North Newtown and Holmwood Street in South Newtown. As in many other historic areas of Sydney, some of the largest and most important houses, such as “Erskine Villa” (formerly on Erskineville Road, and which gave its name to the suburb of Erskineville), were demolished and the estates subdivided. Another loss was the home of Mary Reibey in Station Street, which was acquired by the NSW Department of Housing in 1964, demolished in 1967, and replaced by a public housing apartment block. Only the cottage of Reibey’s dairyman survives, a little further down the street.
One of the most impressive surviving sets of 19th-century housing in Newtown is the imposing terrace of five elegant five-storey mansions running along Warren Ball Avenue in North Newtown, facing onto Hollis Park.
From the late 19th century onwards, the Newtown area became a major commercial and industrial centre. King Street developed into a thriving retail precinct and the area was soon dotted with factories, workshops, warehouses and commercial and retail premises of all kinds and sizes. Several major industries were established in the greater Newtown area from the late 19th century, including the Eveleigh rail workshops, the IXL jam and preserves factory in North Newtown/Darlington, the St Peters brickworks and the Fowler Potteries in Camperdown.
Early 20th century
Although it prospered in the late 19th century, during the first half of the 20th century, and especially during the Depression, like many inner-city Sydney suburbs such as Glebe and Paddington, the area became increasingly run down as wealthy Sydneysiders preferred to settle in newer and more prestigious areas. In 1949, Newtown was incorporated into the City of Sydney. (wikipedia)
Places of Interest
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