Last weekend I was at the Marrickville Festival and ended up chatting with one of the members of the local heritage society. For a while I’ve been fascinated by all of the old local councils that used to exist in Sydney prior to the Labor government’s massive round of amalgamations in 1948/9.
The Marrickville council area used to be covered by Marrickville, St Peters and Petersham councils, and part of the modern LGA was also covered by Newtown municipality.
Similar stories have taken place in other areas. The City of Sydney absorbed at least eight other local councils in 1948/9, in addition to Camperdown municipality forty years earlier.
The local heritage society gave me a name for an old company of mapmakers who made maps of local government boundaries (including ward boundaries) in the 1880s.
The City of Sydney archives has a copy of most of the Higinbotham and Robinson maps available online.
They are quite fascinating for anyone interested in local government and the political and demographic evolution of Sydney over the last 150 years.
Some of these councils largely reflect modern boundaries – Kogarah, Waverley and Randwick appear to have not changed at all, and North Sydney and Mosman were created in their modern form around 1890 out of the former St Leonards council.
At some point in the future I am interested in making maps of Sydney showing the evolution of Sydney’s local government boundaries over the past 120 years. I wouldn’t try and do this for all of NSW, but it is probably achievable to do this for the Sydney area.
In the meantime, go and have a look at these maps – they are fascinating for anyone interested in the history of Sydney or political geography more generally.
Sadly many Councils with Aboriginal names were lost when mass amalgations took place in Victoria in 1994. I believed that one council could include another so we keep the history continuing such as City of Prahran in Melbourne which is now the City of Stonnington. As a former Councillor at the Shire of Barrabool I am appalled that the Coat of Arms have been removed and now we have tacky corporate looking logos.
I wonder if this has happened in NSW and Qld too?
In many cases the old Town Halls for the former councils still exist – the Petersham Town Hall is a beautiful dance venue.
Good luck. It is certainly interesting how many micro-councils there were.
I’m still with your long-ago post that NSW should amalgamate many councils in the interest of efficiency and services (though I understand that this may not be in line with much broad-left sentiment, perhaps broad community sentiment).
I certainly could easily draw a map of the boundaries as of the late 1880s, and most of the changes since then are easy to chart, but unfortunately there were further changes between the 1890s and 1940s which I can’t find maps for.
Eg. in 1919 St Peters Council extended westward into Marrickville, but I can’t find a map showing where it went.
Yes, most of the old town halls still exist. Indeed when Petersham and Marrickville merged, Petersham TH was newer so the council moved its operations to Petersham, despite having the Marrickville name. Marrickville Council’s headquarters are still in Petersham.
@Adrian,
The major wave of amalgamations in Sydney took place in 1949. Since then the only changes have been the merger of Concord and Drummoyne into Canada Bay in 2000, and apart from that a bunch of different changes to the City of Sydney and neighbouring councils, including:
-Loss of Newtown to Marrickville, Glebe to Leichhardt and Paddington to Woollahra, and the entire southern half to Northcott/South Sydney council in 1968.
-Amalgamation of Sydney and South Sydney in 1982.
-Breakup of Sydney and South Sydney in 1988.
-Expansion of City of Sydney to take Glebe from Leichhardt and some South Sydney territory in 2003.
-Amalgamation of Sydney and South Sydney in 2004.
In every case I know of from the mergers in 1949, the new council continued with the name of one of the old councils it replaced.
There have been more substantial amalgamations in regional areas in the early 2000s but it becomes an impossible task to follow once you go outside of Sydney.
In Queensland, Brisbane became a single city in the early 20th century, and regional amalgamations largely happened in the late 2000s.
Somewhere here at home, though I can’t put my finger on where atm, I have an early 1920s street directory. I shall be sure to dig it up and see if it has any information of use – it’s sorted by Suburb rather than continuous pages we might be more familiar with, and includes locality information
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