About Pyrmont
Across Darling Harbour from the City Centre, Pyrmont and Ultimo have been shaped by the City’s needs. In the 1790s, John Harris and John Macarthur planned country estates, but the outcome was more modest. Pyrmont was well placed for industries that were essential to the City but unattractive to its citizens. Boat-building, iron foundries and abattoirs flourished; then sandstone was quarried on an immense scale. Deep water attracted wharves and railways. The peninsula became the noisy, smelly, crowded home for workers in these industries, and especially sugar refining and its by-products. In the 1930s the Burley Griffins built a world class incinerator to replace the rubbish dumps that spilled out of old quarries.
As industries expanded, the population declined from the 1890s. A century later, heavy industries also moved out. The area was still handy for the City, so factories and cottages were replaced by media and IT firms and high-rise apartments. Once a by-word for squalor, Pyrmont became a poster-child for urban renewal. This website describes this transformation and its effects on society.
As Pyrmont society formed in the nineteenth century, it was based on three pillars. Trade unions formed early and enjoyed massive support among working men. Churches were filled with loyal congregations. And the Labor Party ruled for decades. These pillars crumbled only in the late twentieth century when heavy industry wound down and the population dwindled. The New Pyrmont Society is forming on very different bases.
Pyrmont had no council to negotiate with the state, the City, or the giant companies that built businesses here. Society evolved largely in response to forces outside the peninsula. For the first decades of the nineteenth century, ‘society’ comprised two great landowners, their employees and retainers, and Gommerigal who camped, fished and hunted without much interruption. The maritime industries on the shoreline did not employ large numbers, even after Pyrmont Bridge opened.
When the population did increase, especially from the 1870s, most residents were managers of the quarries and companies, or their employees. It is not surprising that trade unions (of stonemasons and waterside workers) were among the earliest forms of social solidarity. Union membership and sometimes militancy were the hallmarks of Pyrmont society for nearly a century. Labor Party leaders and union officials banked on unionists’ support, but working men were often more militant than their leaders, as in the 1890 Maritime Strike and the General Strike of 1917.
Pyrmont was a decidedly macho society. Working men would resist authority in several domains: from the 1890s to the 1940s, waterside union members fought pitched battles against non-unionists (scabs or snipers) for jobs on the docks. They insisted on their right to bet their wages on two-up or prize fights. And wharfies compensated for dreadful working conditions and low wages, by appropriating goods that surprisingly often fell off the back of trucks. Among laws that offended working men were liquor laws, justifying extensive sly grog consumption – including, by some accounts, the police themselves.
The men’s sisters, wives and daughters saw matters in a different light, and often found moral and material support in the churches. Almost all families attended church services, and (mainly women) members of the congregations organised Pyrmont’s social events – dances, tea parties, concerts and picnics. Most children attended church schools as well as Sunday school. Four congregations flourished in the 1900s: church membership continued to be important, especially for women, even as a shrinking population could support only one – St Bede’s, the great survivor. Closely related to people’s attachment to churches was the great extent of charity work. All churches organised support for their members, and for others who fell on hard times. In the same spirit, trade unions supported unemployed members – and extended their support to seamen and other visitors who fell foul of their employers.
Then there was the Labor Party. Party leaders fought ferocious factional and ideological brawls at State and Federal forums, but they dared not forget the practical needs of their constituents. During the 1930s, for example, Labor was outflanked by the Communist Party, which came to the aid of tenants evicted as industry expanded. The Pyrmont branch of the Labor Party operated as an employment agency and organised the first paid jobs for members’ sons, usually as City Council employees. Pyrmont did not elect a non-Labor member for eighty years.
Pyrmont Society organised itself successfully around unions, churches and ALP until Pyrmont itself faded away. Heavy industry closed, shedding a large work force. As the population shrank, so did the churches. Fewer people meant fewer voters and less political patronage. In the 1990s, the State government began to plan a new Pyrmont of hi-tech companies, high-rise apartments, and well-to-do residents. The old Pyrmont Society was no more, and the new Society will organise itself on new foundations.
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