Balmain realty

Before European settlement, the land that became Balmain was inhabited by the Gadigal and Wangal people. Early settlers in the area told stories of how the local Aboriginal people hunted kangaroo, driving the animals through the bushy peninsula and down the hill, killing them at Peacock Point at the east end.

The suburb sits on a peninsula in Port Jackson, two kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, with Iron Cove to the west, White Bay to the south-east and Mort Bay to the north-east. The neighbouring suburbs are Birchgrove to the north-west, Rozelle to the south-west, and Balmain East to the east.

In 1800, Governor John Hunter granted 220 hectares to the colonial surgeon William Balmain, and the land that is now Balmain formed part of that grant. A year later, Balmain handed his entire holding to John Borthwick Gilchrist to settle a debt and returned to Scotland. Balmain's descendants challenged the transfer, made for five shillings, and no further building on the land went ahead.

The place came to be known as Gilchrist's place, though the court papers called it the Balmain Estate. While the dispute ran, the land was let for farming and grazing cattle. In 1814 the neighbouring Birchgrove homestead went to Roland Warpole Loane, a merchant, and a hundred acres on the Balmain estate were leased to him.

In 1833 Gilchrist gave power of attorney to Frederick Parbury. Loane's lease ended in 1836 and the estate passed back. Parbury asked the surveyor John Armstrong to divide the land into six parcels, and three of them were sold in 1837. The peninsula was carved up quickly through the 1840s; by 1861 it held a well populated eastern suburb and a sparsely settled western area, known as Balmain West, that reached the gates of Callan Park.

The peninsula changed fast in the nineteenth century and became one of Sydney's leading industrial centres. Shipbuilding, a metal foundry, engineering and boilermaking gathered around Mort Bay, along with the works of the Mort's Dock & Engineering Company, which opened in 1855. The dock closed in 1958, and the site is now Mort Bay Park.

Increasing industrialisation at Balmain created a need for cheap housing. Dock owners sold small parcels of land to entrepreneurs, who put up tiny cottages and let them to workers. Lever Brothers opened a factory on the peninsula in 1895, and the Balmain Reservoir was built in 1915. The factory belonged to its British parent company.

A coal mine opened next to the site of today's Birchgrove Public School in 1897, run by an English company. Its winding engine was said to be the biggest in the southern hemisphere; Sydney Collieries Limited took over after years of labour disputes. A new shaft was sunk in 1904, and a decline from the bottom of the shafts led down to a seam of coal beneath the harbour, between Ballast Point and Goat Island.

The coal beneath the harbour helped bring Balmain Power Station, which was built in stages from 1909. The 1920s brought more disputes, and in 1928 some shareholders wanted the mine closed. The year after 1928, 299 miners still worked the colliery. By 1930 the owners had given up, and the Balmain Coal Contracting Company, set up by the Miner's Federation, took the pit over, but the disputes went on. That October the Miners' Lodge declared the mine "blacked" and demanded the dismissal of the manager. The colliery closed in 1931.

One local waterman did well out of the mine. He bought a small tug and barge and won the contract to carry away the mine's tailings, which he sold on to local councils as fill. That trade grew into an industrial group, and by 1924 his family was living on Louisa Road.

Trams reached Balmain in the 1920s, and the suburb gained a name as a rough working-class part of Sydney. A large arrival of immigrants lifted the population in the 1950s. Older residents once called a trip into the city centre "going to Sydney", a habit that lasted until the 1970s. Phrases about the place and its people have been used, among them "Balmain boys don't cry".

Gentrification arrived in the 1960s as industry declined. The waterfront and the short distance to the city centre helped make the suburb appealing to the middle class, and the Balmain Association began in 1965. Pressure for redevelopment had been building in the years before 1971. Rising property values and waterfront building pushed the remaining industry out.

In 1996 the Lever Brothers site was turned into a group of apartments, a handful of the original buildings kept. The power station went in 1998, and apartments followed. Heritage listing now protects many traces of the industrial past, among them the Mort's Dock site and the Waterview Wharf Workshops on Nicholson Street.