It is hard to imagine now, but in days gone by, the township of Camden was the centre of a large district. The Camden district became the centre of people’s daily lives for over a century and the basis of their sense of place and community identity.
Map of the Camden district in 1939 showing the extent of the area with Camden in the east. The silver mining centre of Yerranderie is in the west. (I Willis, 1996)
The Camden district ran from the Main Southern Railway around the estate village of Menangle into the gorges of the Burragorang Valley in the west. The southern boundary was the Razorback Ridge, and in the north, it faded out at Bringelly and Leppington.
The district grew to about 1200 square kilometres with a population of more than 5000 by the 1930s through farming and mining. Farming started with cereal cropping and sheep, which turned to dairying and mixed farming by the end of the 19th century. Silver mining started in the late 1890s in the Burragorang Valley, and coal mining from the 1930s.
Burragorang Valley (Sydneywater)
The district was centred on Camden, and there were several villages, including Cobbitty, Narellan, The Oaks, Oakdale, Yerranderie, Mt Hunter, Orangeville and Bringelly. The region comprised four local government areas – Camden Municipal Council, Wollondilly Shire Council, the southern end of Nepean Shire and the south-western edge of Campbelltown Municipality.
Cows and more
Before the Camden district was even an idea, the area was the home of ancient Aboriginal culture based on Dreamtime stories. The land of the Dharawal, Gundangara and the Dharug.
The Europeans turned up in their sailing ships. They brought new technologies, new ideas and new ways of doing things. The First Fleet cows did not think much of their new home in Sydney. They escaped and found heaven on the Indigenous-managed pastures of the Nepean River floodplain.
Map of Cowpastures SMH 13 August 1932
On discovering the cows, an inquisitive Governor Hunter visited the area and called it the Cow Pasture Plains. The Europeans seized the territory, allocated land grants, and displaced the Indigenous occupants. They created new land in their own vision of the world. A countryside comprised of large pseudo-English-style estates, an English-style common called The Cowpasture Reserve and English government men to work it called convicts. The foundations of the Camden district were set.
A river
The Nepean River was at the centre of the Cowpastures and the gatekeeper for the wild cattle. The Nepean River, which has an Aboriginal name of Yandha, was named by Governor Arthur Phillip in 1789 in honour of Evan Nepean, a British politician.
The Nepean River rises in the ancient sandstone country west of the Illawarra Escarpment and Mittagong Range around Robertson. The shallow V-shaped valleys were ideal locations for the Upper Nepean Scheme dams built on the tributaries to the Nepean, the Cordeaux, Avon, and Cataract.
View upon the Nepean River, at the Cow Pastures New South Wales Drawn and engraved by Joseph Lycett from his Views of Australia 1824-1825 (SLV)
The river’s catchment drains northerly and cuts through deep gorges in the Douglas Park area. It then emerges out of the sandstone country and onto the floodplain around the village of Menangle. The river continues in a northerly direction downstream to Camden, then Cobbitty, before re-entering the sandstone gorge country around Bents Basin, west of Bringelly.
The river floodplain and the surrounding hills provided ideal conditions for the woodland of ironbarks, grey box, wattles and a ground cover of native grasses and herbs. The woodland ecology loved the clays of Wianamatta shales that are generally away from the floodplain.
The ever-changing mood of the river has shaped the local landscape. People forget that the river could be an angry, raging, flooded torrent on a destructive course. Flooding shaped the settlement pattern in the eastern part of the district.
The RAAF Base Camden was located on the Nepean River floodplain. One of the hazards was flooding, as shown here in 1943. The town of Camden is shown on the far side of the flooded river. (Camden Museum)
A village is born
The river ford at the Nepean River crossing provided the location of the new village of Camden established by the Macarthur brothers, James and William. They planned the settlement on their estate of Camden Park in the 1830s and sold the first township lots in 1840. The village became the transport node for the district and developed into the area’s leading commercial and financial centre.
Vista of St. Johns Church from the Nepean River Floodplain 1910 Postcard (Camden Images)
Rural activity was concentrated in the new village of Camden. There were weekly livestock auctions, the annual agricultural show and the provision of a wide range of services. The town was the centre of law enforcement, health, education, communications and other services.
The voluntary community sector started under the direction of mentor James Macarthur. His family also determined the moral tone of the village by sponsoring local churches and endowing the villagers with parkland.
Camden’s Macarthur Park was endowed to the residents of Camden by Sibella Macarthur Onslow in the early 20th century (I Willis, 2016)
Manufacturing had a presence with a milk factory, a timber mill and a tweed mill on Edward Street that burnt down. Bakers and general merchants had customers as far away as the Burragorang Valley, Picton and Leppington, and the town was the publishing centre for weekly newspapers.
Macarthur Bridge View from Nepean River Floodplain 2015 IWillis
The Hume Highway, formerly the Great South Road, ran through the town from the 1920s and brought the outside forces of modernism, consumerism, motoring, movies and the new-fangled-flying machines to the airfield. This reinforced the market town’s centrality as the district’s commercial capital.
Burragorang Valley
In the district’s western extremities, the rugged mountains made up the picturesque Burragorang Valley. Its deep gorges carried the Coxes, Wollondilly and Warragamba Rivers.
The majestic cliffs and Gothic beauty of the Burragorang Valley on the edges of the Wollondilly River in 1910 (WHP)
Access was always difficult from the time that the Europeans discovered its majestic beauty. The Jump Up at Nattai was infamous when Macquarie visited in 1815. The valley became an economic driver of the district, supplying silver and coal hidden in the dark recesses of the gorges. The Gothic landscape attracted tourists who stayed in one of the many guesthouses to sup the valley’s hypnotic beauty.
Guesthouses were very popular with tourists to the Burragorang Valley before the valley was flooded after the construction of Warragamba Dam. Here showing Burragorang Valley House in the 1920s (The Oaks Historical Society)
The outside world was linked to the valley through the Camden railhead and the daily Camden mail coach from the 1890s. Later replaced by a mail car and bus.
Romancing the landscape
The district landscape was romanticised by writers, artists, poets and others over the decades. The area’s Englishness was first recognised in the 1820s. The district was branded as a ‘Little England’ most famously during the 1927 visit of the Duchess of York when she compared the area to her home.
The valley was popular with writers. In the 1950s, one old timer, an original Burragoranger, Claude N Lee, wrote about the valley in ‘An Old-Timer at Burragorang Look-out’. He wrote:
Yes. this is a good lookout. mate,
What memories it recalls …
For all those miles of water.
Sure he doesn’t care a damn;
He sees the same old valley still,
Through eyes now moist and dim
The lovely fertile valley
That, for years, was home to him.
St Johns Church at the top of John Street overlooking the village of Camden around 1895 C Kerry (Camden Images)
By the 1980s, the Sydney urban octopus had started to strangle the country town and some yearned for the old days. They created a country town idyll. In 2007 local singer song-writer Jessie Fairweather penned ‘Still My Country Home’. She wrote:
When I wake up,
I find myself at ease,
As I walk outside I hear the birds,
They’re singing in the trees.
Any then maybe
Just another day
But to me I can’t have it any other way,
Cause no matter when I roam
I know that Camden’s still my country home.
The end of a district and the birth of a region
The seeds of the destruction of the Camden district were laid as early as the 1940s with the decision to flood the valley with the construction of the Warragamba Dam. The Camden railhead was closed in the early 1960s, and the Hume Highway moved out of the town centre in the early 1970s.
Macarthur Regional Tourist Promotion by Camden and Campbelltown Councils
A new regionalism was born in the late 1940s with the creation of the federal electorate of Macarthur, then strengthened by a new regional weekly newspaper, The Macarthur Advertiser, in the 1950s. The government-sponsored and ill-fated Macarthur Growth Centre of the early 1970s aided regional growth and heralded the arrival of Sydney’s rural-urban fringe.
Today Macarthur regionalism is entrenched with government and business branding in an area defined by the Camden, Campbelltown and Wollondilly Local Government Areas. The Camden district has become a distant memory, with remnants dotting the landscape and reminding us of the past.
The museum has a collection of fully operational letterpress printing presses and equipment from the 1860s to the 1970s. It is part of the living history movement that is so popular with tourists in North America, Europe and increasingly Australia.
The printing equipment includes linotype machines, flat-bed printing presses of various types and platen presses. There is also a substantial collection of hand-set type.
During the History Week visit the operation of the different presses was explained by retired tradesmen who had been printers and compositors. They kick started the presses and linotype machines and demonstrated their capabilities.
Here a museum volunteer and former operator demonstrates and explains the operation of a linotype machine at the Penrith Museum of Printing. This is a hot metal typesetting system that casts blocks of metal type for individual uses. The machine creates lines of type for the compositor to set-up a page for printing a newspaper. Hot lead was used to create the letters and was heated to over 500 degrees C. These machines were used across the world to set print for newspapers, magazines and posters for large metropolitan dailies to small local country newspapers up to the 1980s. This machine is belt driven and in the late 19th or early 20th century a printery would have had a steam engine and boiler to drive the equipment. (I Willis, 2018)
The museum is setup like a 1940s printing shop and the visitor gets the experience of the noise of the press and linotype machines and the smell of the ink. It is the authentic real deal.
Linotype machines were introduced to replace hand-compositing of pages for printing. Hand setting was very slow. What would take a compositor hours to set in a page would take minutes with a linotype machine.
The printing museum is also a site for the demonstration of the traditional trades of the printer and compositor.
The printing museum give a real demonstration of how the local newspapers of the Macarthur region were produced before the current era of off-set printing. The processes for printing the local paper were labour-intensive despite the introduction of these pieces of equipment.
This is a demonstration of the hand-operated Albion Press by a volunteer and former printer at the Penrith Museum of Printing. The museum website states ‘This beautiful old Albion Press was manufactured in London in 1860 is a magnificent example of 19th Century printing press design and craftsmanship’. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences states that ‘Albion printing presses continued to be manufactured, in a range of sizes, right up until the 1930s. They were used for commercial book-printing until the middle of the nineteenth century and after that mainly for jobbing work and by private presses. The arrival of small hand printing presses enabled the publication of newspapers in country regions.’ (I Willis)
This type of equipment had a profound influence on the production of local newspapers across the world.
It is interesting how much of the terminology used in computer word processing derives from the smell and noise of the print shop and the lives of the printers and compositors.
The Macarthur region newspaper printeries
The Sidmans in the early 20th century introduced the latest equipment at the principal printery located in the building that houses the Camden News office and printery at 145 Argyle Street Camden.
This image shows the Camden News printery in the 1920s at the rear of the building and office occupied by the newspaper at 145 Argyle Street, Camden. From the left are N Bean, printer, Charles Sidman, linotype operator. The Penrith Museum of Printing states that this is likely to be a Payne’s Wharfedale Cylinder Printing Machine and sheets of newsprint were hand fed into the press by the operator. (Camden News, 22 October 1980)
The Richardsons had the latest equipment at their headquarters and printery at 315 Queen Street Campbelltown for the Macarthur Advertiser and other newspapers.
The story of the Museum begins with Alan Connell, the founder of the museum who had a desire back in 1987 to develop a “working museum” of letterpress printing machinery and equipment.
As the story goes, many years had to pass before Alan’s dream was able to be fully realised via a Commonwealth Government Federation Fund Grant. The Penrith Museum of Printing was officially opened on the 2 June, 2001 by Ms Jackie Kelly, M.P. for Lindsay, the then Minister for Sport and Tourism.
A large proportion of the machinery and equipment on display originally started its working life in the Nepean Times Newspaper in Penrith, NSW Australia, while many other items have been donated by present and or past printing establishments.
To experience the smell and noise of the local newspaper printery a visit is a must to the Penrith Museum of Printing.
Tour group enjoy their visit to the Penrith Museum of Printing. Visitors are watching a demonstration and explanation of the equipment by museum volunteers who were former compositors and printers. (PMoP)
One of the Australia’s most important provincial newspapers, the Illawarra Mercury has been defined by parochialism and localism since its foundation in October 1855 by Thomas Garrett (1830–91).
Initially a weekly, the Mercury cost sixpence, and had a print run of 200. Garrett had pooled his resources with W.F. Cahill, who left after three months, to be replaced in 1856 by Thomas’s father, John, a Primitive Methodist. By 1856 the Mercury had become a six-column broadsheet and was distributed to Dapto, Jamberoo, Kiama and Shoalhaven by express coach.
Involvement in community affairs and politics has characterised Mercury proprietors. John Garrett was elected Wollongong’s first mayor in 1859 and the editor, John Curr, was elected Wollongong’s first town clerk. Garret’s son, Thomas, was also a politician.
Thomas took over the paper in 1862, and soon formed a partnership with Archibald Campbell, before selling out to Joseph Hart in 1867. Campbell was the sole owner from 1883 until his death in 1903; he was elected Member for Illawarra in 1891.
In 1888 the Mercury was a tri-weekly of four pages, which featured a weekly serial. By 1901, it was published twice weekly. On Campbell’s death in 1903, his wife, Margaret, assumed control until Shellharbour local Edward Allen purchased the paper in 1905 and improved the news content. He was elected the Member for Illawarra in 1904, continuing a trend.
An Irishman, Standish R. Musgrave, bought the Mercury from Allen in 1911 and ran it until his death in 1943. He assumed the editorship, increased sports coverage and published an edition each Friday. Soon after becoming managing director of the newly formed Illawarra Newspapers Co. Ltd in 1919, Musgrave also purchased the Bulli Times and established the Port Kembla Pilot. By 1932 the Mercury had competition from 2WL, established in 1931. Wilfrid S. Musgrave succeeded his father as managing director and editor. In 1950 he converted the Mercury to a daily, a mark of modernity for a provincial centre, and changed the masthead to the Illawarra Daily Mercury.
The Musgraves were active members of the New South Wales Country Press Association for over 40 years. They mixed with the barons of the country press who sought to restrict competition, and had sympathies with the New England New State Movement and the Old Guard.
However, the Mercury was making substantial losses when it was purchased by R.A.G. Henderson, the managing director of John Fairfax & Sons, in 1959. During the next decade, circulation doubled to over 25,000. In 1968, the Henderson family merged the Mercury with its main opposition, the South Coast Times, and appointed John Richardson executive editor. The following year Fairfax became the major shareholder for a cost of $2.4 million. Under David Lonsdale’s editorship, the newspaper became less parochial and more inclined to take on major community issues.
Peter Newell became editor in 1976, then executive editor in 1978 and finally general manager in 1985. Illawarra Newspapers Holdings Pty Ltd launched a new weekly, the Wollongong-Shellharbour Advertiser, in 1982. The Mercury introduced computer-based story-composition, and in 1986 pioneered the use of colour in daily newspapers in Australia.
Journalists Bill Simpson and Carol Johnstone won Walkley Awards in 1986–87. However, the Mercury was labelled a ‘screaming red-top tabloid’ by James Hooke, Fairfax’s managing director of NSW operations, and in the early 1990s was regularly pilloried by ABC television’s Media Watch.
Innovation continued, with the Mercury producing its first electronically assembled editorial page composed by computer in 1994, and being printed on state-of-the-art printing presses alongside the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review at Chullora from 1999. The Mercury was awarded PANPA Newspaper of the Year in 2006 and Walkley Awards were won by Mercury journalists in 2003, 2008 and 2010 and photographers in in 2008–09. The Mercury’s circulation in 2013 was 18,229.
Local historian Dr Ian Willis wrote a review of a new regional masthead that appeared in the Camden Local Government Area in 2016. The review appeared in the Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter No 90, December, 2016, p.11.
The review
Launch of a new regional newspaper The Independent South-West
From Ian Willis at Camden: This week a new masthead appeared in the Camden Local Government Area called The Independent South-West published by King Media Regional based in Bowral NSW. It was launched at Camden’s annual Light Up Festival. Editor Jane King and other staff handed out copies of the free monthly to families and friends who had come to see Santa, watch the fireworks and see the Christmas lights on the town’s Christmas tree.
The 20pp tabloid is printed in colour on glossy paper and is sure to give the other three free Camden weeklies, the Macarthur Chronicle, Camden Narellan Advertiser and The District Reporter, a run for their money. King states in Issue 1 that it ‘is an exciting new title…family owned and managed business’. She states that the paper will serve the local community and employ local people.
The first issue certainly lives up to these promises by reporting the proceedings of the Moss Vale Local Court. Two matters dealt with involved Camden identities. Local court matters are now heard in Moss Vale since the closure of Camden and Picton court houses. The robust reporting of local court proceedings has largely disappeared from the other three Camden weeklies.
A feature page, ‘Ark’ Up, is written by journalist Juliet Arkwright who in another life was a councillor on Wollondilly Shire Council. This edition profiles the Acting President of the Camden Chamber of Commerce Maryann Strickling. The chamber states ‘we look forward to working with a truly independent newspaper’.
The first edition also has copy provided by the local federal member, a photo feature of a fashion launch at Campbelltown, and content shared from the newspaper’s stablemate LatteLife Wingecarribee, which claims to be the ‘Heartbeat of the Southern Highlands’.
King Media also publishes City Circular which, according to Miranda Ward at Mumbrella, replaced a void left by the closure of News Corps mX in 2015 and is distributed at railway stations. The first newspaper published by King Media group was the masthead LatteLife Sydney which started life in the Eastern Suburbs in 2010. King Media then expanded to publishing The Southern Highlands edition in 2014.
The Independent’s print run of 10,000 will be distributed across localities from Cawdor to Leppington through local retailers, surgeries, real estate officers and other outlets. The print run is modest by comparison to its competitors in the Camden LGA and the publisher’s promises seem ambitious. King Media will support the print edition by managing a Facebook page.
The conservative reporting of local matters by The Independent’s three Camden competitors certainly leaves a niche in the market place if controversies surrounding Camden Council continue as they have done in recent months. King has promised to ‘hold the Council to task’ and take it up to other local papers. If she sticks to her promises The Independent South-West will fit in well with Camden’s fierce parochialism and localism.
Historian Dr Ian Willis is presenting a conference paper on the role local newspapers of the Picton, Camden and Campbelltown area during the First World War. He will show how these small provincial newspapers acted as an archive for the stories from the First World War on the homefront. Community wartime activities will be placed in the context of the international setting of the war.
The conference is organised by the International Society for First World Studies and is called Recording, Narrating and Archiving the First World War. The conference is being held in Melbourne at the Deakin Downtown Melbourne CBD University Campus between 9-11 July 2018.
The abstract for Dr Willis’s paper is:
Small rural communities are an often overlooked part of the wartime landscape of the First World War at home. Local newspapers, or community newspapers, recorded ‘the doings’ of their communities in inordinate detail. Their reportage extended from the local to the provincial and the international by owner/editors who were local identities.
Country newspapers provide an archive record of the First World War that is identifiably different from the large metropolitan daily newspapers of the war period. The local newspaper has a number of differences that are related to their localness and parochialism, their relationship to their readership, their promotion of the community and their approach to the news of the war.
The local newspaper recorded the subtleties of local patriotism and wartime voluntarism and fundraising, the personal in soldier’s letters, the progress of the war and a host of other issues. For the astute researcher country newspapers provide glimpses into wartime issues around gender, class, sectarianism, and other aspects of rural life. All coloured by local sensibilities and personalities. The local newspaper was a mirror to its community and central to the construction of place making and community identity in small towns, villages and hamlets.
These characteristics are not unique to rural Australia and are shared by rural and regional newspapers of other English speaking countries. Recent developments in archival research like Trove provide invaluable access to these resources across Australia. Country newspapers provide a different story of the war at home from an often forgotten sector of society.
The local newspapers that will be used as a case study for this conference paper include:
The Camden News
The Picton Post
The Campbelltown Herald
Local and provincial newspapers are an understudied area of the First World War and this conference paper will address this gap in the historical literature.
Learn moreabout local newspapers in the Macarthur region and elsewhere:
Oran Park Raceway was doomed in 2008 to be part of history when it was covered with houses in a new suburb with the same name. It was also the name of a former pastoral property that was part of the story of the settler society within the Cowpastures. The locality is the site of hope and loss for locals and new arrivals.
The suburb of Oran Park is on Sydney’s southwestern urban fringe just east of the history, and picturesque village of Cobbitty, and the relatively new suburb of Harrington Park is to the south.
Signage at the entry to the Oran Park land release area (I Willis, 2018)
Oran Park Raceway was a glorious thing
The Oran Park Motor Racing Circuit was located in the southwestern and western part of the original Oran Park pastoral estate. The main Grand Prix circuit was 2.6 km long with a mixture of slow, technical and fast sweeping corners and elevation changes around the track.
The primary circuit was broken into two parts: the south circuit, the original track built in 1962 by the Singer Car Club and consisted of the main straight, pit lane garages and a constant radius of 180-degree turns at the end.
The north circuit was added in 1973 and was an 800-metre figure-8. Apart from the primary racing circuit, there were several subsidiary activities, and they included two dirt circuits, two four-wheel training venues, a skid pan, and a go-kart circuit.
Oran Park Raceway was a popular motorsport venue in the Sydney area. This image is from 1997, showing open-wheelers racing at the circuit. (Camden Images)
The racing circuit has been used for various motorsport, including club motorkhanas, touring cars, sports sedans, production cars, open-wheelers, motocross and truck racing. In 2008 several organisations used the circuit for driver training, including advanced driving, defensive driving, high performance, and off-road driving.
The track hosted its first Australian Touring Car Championship in 1971, a battle between racing legends Bob Jane and Allan Moffat. The December 2008 V8 Supercar event was the 38th time a championship was held at the track. Sadly for some, the track will go the way of other suburban raceways of the past. It turned into just a passing memory when it closed in 2010.
The Daily Telegraph noted that several other Sydney tracks that have been silenced. They have included Amaroo Park, Warwick Farm, Mt Druitt, Sydney Showground, Liverpool and Westmead speedways. The public relations spokesman for Oran Park, Fred Tsioras, has said that a few notable drivers have raced at the circuit including Kevin Bartlett, Fred Gibson, Ian Luff, Alan Moffat, Peter Brock, Mark Weber, and others.
Innovations introduced at the Oran Park Raceway included night, truck, and NASCAR racing. Tsioras claims the track was a crowd favourite because they could see the entire circuit.
Oran Park Raceway Control Tower
An integral part of the Oran Park Raceway was the control tower. It had offices for the Clerk of the Course, timekeepers, the VIP suite, the press box, and general administration.
Control Tower Oran Park Raceway 1997 (Camden Historical Society)
In the early days, the facilities at the circuit were pretty basic, including the control tower. The circuit was a glorified paddock, and race organisers held mainly basic club events. The track surface was pretty rough, and there was a make-do attitude among racing enthusiasts.
The control facilities in the early days at the track were very rudimentary. The first control tower used in 1962 by the members of the Singer Car Club, who established the track, was a double-decker bus. Race officials and timekeepers sat in the open air under a canvas awning on the top of the bus at club race meetings.
The Rothmans tobacco company funded a new control tower, built around 1980. The Rothmans company was a major sponsor of motorsports in Australia then. Tobacco sponsorship of motorsports was seen as an efficient marketing strategy to reach boys and young men.
Tobacco & cigarette advertisements were banned on TV and radio in September 1976. While other tobacco advertising was banned from all locally produced print media — this left the only cinema, billboard and sponsorship advertising as the only forms of direct tobacco advertising banned in December 1989.
Motorsport projected an image of style, excitement, thrills and spills that drew men and boys to the sport. Motorsport has been symbolized by bravery, strength, competitiveness, and masculinity. This imagery is still portrayed in motorsport like Formula One racing.
According to Will Hagan, the influence of the tower’s design was the El Caballo Blanco Complex at Narellan, which opened in 1979 and was a major tourist attraction. The control tower, like El Caballo Blanco, was constructed in a Spanish Mission architectural style (or Hollywood Spanish Mission) like the Paramount cinema in Elizabeth Street (1933) or Cooks Garage in Argyle Street (1935) Camden.
Cooks Service Station and Garage at the corner of Argyle and Elizabeth Streets Camden in the mid-1930s. This establishment was an expression of Camden’s Interwar modernism. (Camden Images)
The Spanish Mission building style emerged during the Inter-war period (1919-1939). It was characterised by terracotta roof tiles, front loggia, rendering of brickwork and shaped parapets.
The Spanish Mission building style was inspired by the American west coast influences and the relationship between the automobile, rampant consumerism and the romance promoted by the motion pictures from Hollywood.
According to Ian Kirk and Megan Martin from their survey of interwar service stations, the Spanish Mission building style was popular with service stations in the late 1920s and early 1930s, particularly in the Sydney area. Their survey discovered more than 120 original service stations surviving in New South Wales from the interwar years.
Some examples of Interwar garages included the Broadway Garage and Service Station in Bellevue Hill, the former Seymour’s Service Station in Roseville, Malcolm Motors in King Street, Newtown and the Pyrmont Bridge Service Station in Pyrmont. Kirk and Martin have maintained that, unlike the United States, early service stations in Australia were privately owned and did not have to be designed according to an oil company’s in-house style.
Motorsports became popular in the Interwar period and were associated with the glamour and excitement of the cars. The interwar period (1918-1939) is interesting in the history of Australia. It was a time that contrasted the imperial loyalties of the British Empire with the rampant consumerism and industrialisation of American culture and influence.
The interwar period was one in which country towns and the city were increasingly dominated by motor vehicles. It was a time when the fast and new, the exotic and sensual came to shape the style of a new age of modernism and competed with the traditional and conservative, the old and slow, and changes to social and cultural traditions.
There were many motor car brands competing for consumers’ attention, and the aspirations and desires of a new generation were wrapped up in youth, glamour, fantasy, and fun.
This was reflected in the growth of elegant and glamorous car showrooms and the appearance of service stations and garages to serve the increasing number of motor car owners.
In Camden, this period of modernism generated Cooks Garage at the corner of Argyle and Elizabeth Street, not far from the new slick and exciting movie palace, the Paramount Movie Theatre. In central Camden, the Dunk commercial building at 58-60 Argyle Street was a shiny new car showroom displaying Chevrolet motor cars from the USA. Advertisement boasted that the cars were:
Beautiful new Chevrolet is completely new. New arresting beauty of style; new riding comfort and seating; …with more comfort.
The buyer had the choice of car models from commercial roadster to sports roader, tourer, coupe and sedan, which sold for the value price of £345.
In New South Wales, motor vehicles increased from 22,000 in 1920 to over 200,000 in 1938. There was an increasing interest in motorsports in Sydney by enthusiasts of all kinds.
Dreams and development on the raceway site
In 1983 the Oran Park Raceway track was owned by Bill Cleary, and he stated to the Macarthur Advertiser that his family had owned the property for 38 years. In 1976 he put together a proposal to create a sports and recreation centre for the raceway area. The proposal was raised again in 1981 and included a themed entertainment park, an equestrian centre, a dude ranch, a motel, a health and fitness centre, a model farm and cycling, hiking and bridle trails. But it all came to nothing.
An aerial view of the former Oran Park Raceway in 2008 shows the track and its surroundings. Now all are covered by housing. (P Mylrea/Camden Images)
The current track was purchased in the mid-1980s by Leppington Pastoral Company (owned by the Perich family) and in 2004, was rezoned for housing. It was estimated at the time that there would be 21,000 houses. Tony Perich stated in 2007 to the Sydney Morning Herald that he planned to build almost one-fifth of the 11,500 dwellings in Oran Park and Turner Road in a joint venture with Landcom. Mr Perich’s company spokesman, Greenfields Development Corporation, stated that the first houses would be on the larger lots.
Oran Park 2008 planned housing development
In 2008 Oran Park is part of the South West Growth Centre area, which is the responsibility of the New South Wales Government’s Growth Centres Commission, which was eventually planned to accommodate 295,000 people by 2031. The Oran Park and Turner Road Development were expected in 2008 to house 33,000 people.
In an area east of the raceway, it is planned that an aged care facility will be developed for elderly and retired citizens with work starting in 2011. The project will consist of independent living villas and apartments, assisted living units, a daycare centre and a high and low-care aged facility with a dementia unit.
Oran Park display homes near the town centre in 2012. (OPTC)
In 2008 the raceway made way for 8000 homes to house 35,000 people, complete with the town centre, commercial precinct, and entertainment facilities. It was planned to include primary schools, two high schools, a court, a police station, and a community centre. The suburb, Raceway Hill, was planned to have streets named after the old track.
The colonial history of Oran Park
In the colonial days of early New South Wales, Oran Park was initially made up of two principal land grants, one of 2,000 acres, Harrington Park, granted to William Campbell in 1815 and another to George Molle in 1817, Netherbyes, of 1600 acres which ran between South Creek and the Northern Road. According to John Wrigley, the name Oran Park appears on the pre-1827 map as part of Harrington Park, Campbell’s grant. Campbell arrived on the brig Harrington, in 1803 as a master.
The New South Wales State Heritage Register states that the Oran Park portion was subdivided from the Harrington Park estate in 1829 and acquired by Henry William Johnston in 1852. The Oran Park estate is representative of the layout of a country manor estate, with views afforded to and from the manor over the landscape and to the critical access points of the estate. These were representative of the design philosophies of the time.
The image clearly shows the hilltop locality of Oran Park House, typical of gentry estate houses across the Cowpastures. This landscape drew on the influence of the philosophy of Scot JC Loudon and Englishman Capability Brown (early 20thc, Camden Images)
Oran Park House was located in a picturesque Arcadian pastoral scene by using the best of European farming practices and produced an English-style landscape of a park, pleasure grounds and gardens. The house was located in a ‘sublime landscape’ with the integration of aspect, orientation, and design, drawing on influences of Scotsman JC Loudon, Englishman Capability Brown and Sydney nurseryman Thomas Shepherd.
Oran Park House
The two-story Georgian-style house was built in c.1857 and is described as having a roof with a simple colonial hipped form, windows with shutters, an added portico and a bridge to the two-story original servant’s wing at the rear. There are detailed cedar joinery and panelling on the interior. The house is located on a knoll creating an imposing composition set amongst landscaped grounds with a panoramic view of the surrounding area.
Oran Park House in 1995 in a photograph taken by John Kooyman (Camden Images)
According to the NSW State Heritage Register, the house is an example of the Summit Model of a homestead sited on a hilltop with the homestead complex. The entrance to Oran Park is on an axis with the house’s southern façade, with a carriage loop with mature plantings in front of the house.
Oran Park house was acquired by Thomas Barker (of Maryland and Orielton), who sold it to Campbelltown grazier Edward Lomas Moore (of Badgally) in 1871. The property was leased and subsequently owned by Atwill George Kendrick, who had a clearing sale on the site in 1900. The house had alterations, possibly under the direction of Leslie Wilkinson (professor of architecture, University of Sydney) in the 1930s.
The Moore family sold the Oran Park House, and land to B Robbins and Mr Smith operated a golf course with trotting facilities. It was sold in 1945 for £28,000; in 1963, 361 acres were purchased by ER Smith and J Hyland, farmers. The homestead and stables were sold in 1969 by John and Peggy Cole and purchased by the Dawson-Damers, members of the English aristocracy. The Dawson-Damers undertook restoration guided by architect Richard Mann. John ‘DD’ Dawson-Damer was an Old Etonian and car collector.
John Dawson-Damer was a prominent motor racing identity and was killed in an accident while driving his Lotus 63 at a race meeting at Goodwood, West Sussex, in 2000. Dawson-Damer was the managing director of Austral Engineering Supplies Pty Ltd and was involved with the International Automobile Federation and the Historic Sports Racing Car Association of New South Wales. Ashley Dawson-Damer, his wife and socialite, was a member of the council of governors of the Opera Australia Capital Fund and a board member of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation.
After her husband’s death, she sold the house, with its historic gardens and 107 hectares of pasture, in 2006 for $19 million to Valad Property Group. The State Heritage Register describes the house and surrounding estate as an outstanding example of the mid-nineteenth-century cultural landscape with a largely intact homestead complex and gardens within an intact rural setting.
Oran Park House was renamed Catherine Park House
Oran Park was renamed Catherine Park House in 2013 by the developers of the new housing release Harrington Estates Pty Ltd (Mac Chronicle 10 Oct 2013). The name change was agreed upon by Camden Council and celebrated Catherine Molle, the wife of George Molle.
In 1815 Molle was allocated a grant of 550 acres which he called Catherine Fields after his wife Catherine Molle, on the northern bank of South Creek opposite his grant of Netherbyres.
In 1816 George Molle was granted Netherbyres, of 1,600 acres (647.5 hectares) which ran between South Creek and the Northern Road on the south bank of South Creek. In 1817 he was granted Molles, Maine, 1550 acres east of the Great South Road.
George Molle was baptized in Mains, Berwickshire, Scotland, on 6 March 1773. George joined the Scots Brigade (94th Regiment) as an ensign and served in Gibraltar, The Cape of Good Hope, India, Egypt and Spain. He was promoted to Colonel and served at Gibraltar before transferring as the Colonel of the 46th Regiment of Foot when ordered to serve in the Colony of New South Wales.
On 20 March 1814, he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, second in command to Governor Macquarie.
George and his wife played an active part in the public life of the colony of New South Wales, patron of the Female Orphan School and a member of the committee for the Civilization, Care and Education of Aborigines.
The suburb of Catherine Park was planned in 2013 to contain 3100 with 9500 residents. (Mac Chronicle 15 Oct 2013)
Oran Park, in recent times
In early 2018 the developer Greenfields and Landcom reported in their newsletter that construction of the new Camden Council Library building is progressing well. A new off-leash dog area was under construction in the new release areas around the new high school. It is the second area developed in the land release.
Oran Park Public School at the opening in 2014 (OPPS)
The newsletter detailed the road construction for Dick Johnson Drive, one of the many roads named after motor-racing greats. The street will connect with The Northern Road in 2019. Works are progressing on the latest release areas around Oran Park Public School and on earthworks associated with Peter Brock Drive. The school opened in 2014 with new staff and students adjacent to Oran Park Podium shopping centre. The shopping centre was opened by New South Wales Premier Mike Baird in late 2014 with 28 speciality shops.
Oran Park Town Centre has been used as the land sales office since the first land release in 2013 (OPTC)
New parkland was opened in a recent release area in 2018, and new traffic lights were operational at Peter Brock Drive and Central Avenue.
A new free monthly 20pp A4 newspaper, the Oran Park Gazette, appeared in the suburb in 2015. It is published by the Flynnko Group based at Glenmore Park. The Gazette started with a circulation of 3500 and is part of a stable of five mastheads distributed across the Western Sydney region.
Camden Council transferred an administrative function to the new office building in 2016. An open day inviting residents to inspect the new facilities was a huge success.
Hidden in plain sight in Auburn Street, Goulburn’s main street, several Interwar buildings are amongst this imposing Victorian grandeur.
One of these buildings in the office and printer of The Goulburn Evening Penny Post at 199 Auburn Street Goulburn was built in 1935.
The newspaper office reflected confidence in the future of Goulburn. A statement about the town.
The new 1935 newspaper office of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post in Art-Deco styling showing the beacon with the lamp on top above the newspaper signage (I Willis, 2018)
Country newspaper barons
The Daniels family, who owned the Penny Post, were part of the country press barons who ruled their rural media empires with an iron fist.
Families liked the Sommerlads of New England, the Sidmans of the Macarthur region, the Shakespeare family of the mid-west, the Robinsons in the Hunter, the Parkers of the mid-west, the Musgraves of Wollongong, the Motts of Albury and a host of others.
The newspaper landscape in Goulburn
Goulburn was a vibrant colonial newspaper landscape reflecting a prosperous colonial pastoral economy. While the Goulburn had a literate population, it was still a frontier town. Publishers were self-made men and editors as well. Colonial New South Wales was a rugged and robust publishing environment – a boom and bust cycle.
The first newspaper in the town was the Goulburn Herald in 1848. By the 1920s, 21 separate newspaper mastheads had come and gone in Goulburn.
The Interwar period appears to have been a prosperous time for the New South Wales country press. According to Rod Kirkpatrick’s Country Conscience, 238 titles were published in 1920, only slightly reduced to 221 in 1930.
The front entrance of the Art-Deco style 1935 newspaper building shows the chromium and Carrara glass of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post (I Willis, 2018)
The first issue of the Penny Post in 1870 was produced under the cumbersome masthead of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post and Southern Counties General Advertiser as a short tabloid (11 x 14 inches) of 4pp. By 1930 the Goulburn Evening Penny Post was the last standing.
Goulburn society was driven by its religious zeal; the city even had 3 publications. They were: The Goulburn Banner (1848 – Presbyterian), the Monthly Paper (1893 – Church of England) and Our Cathedral Chimes (1920s – Roman Catholic).
A special edition celebrates the new newspaper office building
The December 1935 edition of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post celebrated the opening of the new office building. The edition was 36pp, with most of the editorial space taken over by recounting the history of the Goulburn township and area.
At the time, the Post was a daily, Monday to Friday, incorporating The Goulburn Daily Herald with a cover price of one penny.
A special edition of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post for 18 December 1935 celebrating the opening of the new Art-Deco style newspaper office. (NLA)
Staff photographs
Goulburn Evening Post Staff 1935 (GEP, 1935) (Image supplied by Paul Titheradge )
Goulburn Evening Post 1965 Staff Photo of Management, Editorial and Production Staff. Amongst the staff are Reg Martin, Mark Collier (Linotype Operators), Paul Titheradge (supplied image), Vern Daniel, and Col Daniel. (GEP, 1965)
Architect LP Burns
The anniversary edition ran an article titled ‘Inside A Modern Country Newspaper Office’. The Sydney architect LP Burns designed an office building described as a ‘fine, modern building’ of ‘distinction’ in a ‘modern’ style.
Burns also designed Goulburn’s Elmslea Chambers at 17 Montague Street in 1934. It is described as one of the first buildings in Australia to use coloured polychrome terracotta in its façade, which features a fine relief of birds, flowers, leaves and typical Art Deco sunbursts under the windows.
The building was designed for wealthy pastoralist FG Leahy.
Goulburn’s Elmslea Chambers at 17 Montague Street Goulburn was designed by Sydney architect LP Burns in 1934 (Pinterest)
The front of Goulburn’s Elmslea Chambers was Wunderlich terra cotta polychrome panels. The Building Magazine claimed that ‘Goulburn [had] never before seen a block of offices of such a lavish and commodious nature’.
The building interior had Silky Oak panelling with Tasmanian Oak inlay, chromium light fittings, and frosted green glass. The builders were Armstrong and Stidwell.
The newspaper building design
The new Goulburn Evening Penny Post building was an example of sleek Art-Deco styling. A stripped-back minimalism of the realities of the commercial world – a no-nonsense, business-like, functional and matter-of-fact. Just like the owners and editors.
The shop front of the 1935 newspaper office building for the Goulburn Evening Penny Post shows the Art-Deco styling of chromium and Carrara glass windows (I Willis, 2018)
Art-deco styling was an expression of modernism – sleek, fast, stripped back, not frilly like the Victorian frippery, not tizzy – reminiscent of the world of the railways, movies, motor cars, ocean liners, aeroplanes, consumerism, fashions, and wireless. The influences coming down the Hume Highway to Goulburn. The building conveys a powerful statement about the Interwar period in Goulburn.
The Penny Post article on the newspaper office mentioned the beacon with the lamp on top, which made it different from other commercial buildings and with the shopfront Carrara glass. The journalist writing the story was keen to assure the readers that the Carrara glass front was ‘pleasing and harmonious’ and emphasised that this type of glass could give a ‘creeping appearance of extravagance’.
Carrara Glass was developed in the USA. It was a high-strength coloured glass used globally in Art Deco and Streamline Moderne buildings. Carrara glass was usually white or blue-grey, which resembled the high-quality Carrara marble from Tuscany in Italy. The pigmented glass was an acceptable low-cost alternative building material.
The interior public foyer area of the 1935 newspaper office of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post with timber panelling probably Silky Oak which was popular at the time (I Willis, 2018)
According to the 1935 press reports, the building frontage was marked by its ‘judicious display’ and ‘would attract attention in any of Sydney’s busiest streets’. The first floor of the building contained the newspaper’s editorial offices and a large, strong room where the newspaper archives were kept.
The report continued stating that the building was centrally heated by steam, including the composing and machinery rooms. This would, it was maintained, be greatly appreciated by the newspaper’s employees.
The printing presses were at the rear of the building and the newsroom in the centre, while the retail shopfront area dealt with advertisers and local folk buying the newspaper.
There was a staff of over 20 journalists, compositors, printers, editors, clerical and retail support. These staff were witnesses to the town’s daily life as it passed through the doors of the newspaper office.
History in plain sight
Today the Goulburn Post building is evocative of a time when print media was king. Walking into the 1935 Penny Post office is like stepping back into the past. Into a world that has disappeared, best illustrated currently by the US movie The Post.
The movie explores the buzz of the newsroom at the Washington Post and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers during the heyday of the Vietnam War. When print was king.
While the Goulburn Evening Penny Post was not a large metro daily, it is easy to visualize the hive of activity in the newsroom and printing shop. The approaching print deadlines and the smoke-filled rooms amongst the evocative timber-panelled rooms throughout the building.
The interior public foyer area of the 1935 newspaper office of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post shows the Art-Deco style light fittings and timber panelling which is throughout the building (I Willis, 2018)
The fabric of the building is still largely intact and retains its integrity, charm and character. The building reveals the layers of history to those who care to take a look. The building has escaped any major renovations, and the structure is as it was in 1935. If these walls could talk, they would tell many great yarns of hard-bitten country press barons, editors and journos.
It is easy to imagine the smell of the printers’ ink; the whir of the printing presses; the buzz of the newsroom; the clacking of typewriters; and the babble of conversations at the front desk with advertisers, stock and station agents, and wool merchants. The newspaper was the town’s heartbeat, and the ink and newsprint flowed through the arteries and veins of the community.
The 1993 commemorative plaque on the front of the 1935 newspaper office of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post was opened by the local member of parliament. (I Willis, 2018)
Today’s newspaper
The current Goulburn Post, the offspring of the Goulburn Evening Penny Post, is still in the 1935 building. It is the hub for 10 mastheads within Fairfax Media. Goulburn Post editor Ainsleigh Sheridan says the newspaper is about creating community history.
She would concur with the former president and publisher of the Washington Post, Phillip Graham, who is credited with saying that ‘journalism is the first rough draft of history’ in 1997.
The Goulburn Post is a tri-weekly masthead and is just one of the Fairfax Media group that is produced in the building. The Post is coordinated in the Auburn Street office and sent online to Canberra for printing. In the past, printing was done on-site in the back of the Auburn Street building.
The current building has issues with fire regulations that did not exist in 1935, and the upstairs area is not currently in use.
Walking the ground
There is nothing quite like experiencing history in the field to gather a feel for a place. Walking the ground provides a perspective for historians that cannot be gained by staying in the archive. Such is my experience of Goulburn.
A street view of the central business of Goulburn in Auburn Street showing the Victorian grandeur of the Goulburn Post Office built 1880-1881 (I Willis, 2018)
The inland city of Goulburn was one of the most important rural centres in 19th-century New South Wales.
Modernism and a country newspaper office
Modernism in the 20th century is represented by the CML building and the small office of the local newspaper, Goulburn Evening Penny Post.
The world seems to have passed the town by with its eclectic collection of building styles – Victorian, Edwardian, Interwar and post-war.
Tucked around every corner is a new surprise – Catholic and Anglican Cathedrals, the imposing railway station, a grand Victorian post office and an imposing courthouse that would have made a statement about law and order in 19th-century Goulburn.
Another world away from the present.
Updated 3 July 2023. Originally posted on 5 February 2018 as ‘Modernism and a country newspaper office’.
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