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Agricultural Area

The swampy conditions remained at the Bay until the foreshores were reclaimed in the latter stages of the 19th century, but the native rushes gave way to cultivated crops following the alienation of the land. An area of forty acres, extending south in a wedge-shaped parcel from the shoreline at Rushcutters Bay to the Old South Head Road (formed by 1811) was granted to William Thomas in 1817. The low lying portion of Thomas's grant proved an ideal location for market gardening, being well watered by the drainage of a network of streams, which ran through the Vale of Lacrosia - as the steep area above the Bay was once known before emptying into the harbour below.

By the 1830s, contemporary accounts show that the land in this vicinity supported crops as diverse as tobacco, maize, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. In 1833, John Eyre Manning, Registrar of the Supreme Court, established a vineyard at Rushcutters Bay, the gapes from which are believed to have supplemented those from the Vaucluse House vineyard in the winemaking venture which operated from Wentworth's large cellars.

While market gardening was pioneered by several European families, the leases were gradually taken over by Chinese, and by the 1860s most of the land adjacent to Rushcutters Bay was under intense cultivation. Indeed, it has been claimed that the Paddington market gardens eventually produced the main vegetable supply to the city area.

Since the lands adjoining the Bay remained dedicated to agricultural purposes, no substantial structures were established in the locality. Indeed, it is these acres which provide the areas of open space for present day Edgecliff and Paddington - albeit some of it, such as the Weigall Playing Fields and the White City Tennis Complex, in private ownership.

Early Memories

Arthur Dowling, describing the area from his boyhood memories (in a paper presented to the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1925) recalled:

From Rushcutters Bay to Double Bay there were a few ramshackle buildings, two or three of stone or brick but none of any pretensions, the only notable ones being the old White Conduit House ... an hotel of questionable reputation.

Dowling (1850-1928) the son of His Honour James Sheen Dowling and his wife Katharine (nee Laidley) of Brougham, was generally dismissive of the Rushcutters Bay locality calling it unsightly and unhealthy prior to the reclamation:

When the tide was out the whole of the surface right up to the foreshore was exposed, and became one large swampy waste made up of muddy, dirty and unsightly sand banks, interspersed with aquatic plants, particularly weeds and reeds, growing all round the edges of it, where cattle and horses were allowed to graze. This caused an unhealthy miasma to arise, giving the locality a bad reputation, which has happily now disappeared with the completion of its reclamation. (Op. Cite.)

Bentley's Bridge

The New South Head Road had been constructed in the early 1830s, and during 1838-9, Bentley's Bridge was built to replace the wooden trestle bridge which in 1832 had carried the New South Head Road across the Rushcutters Bay Creek as the road work progressed. The solid, stone arch bridge, although known for Lieutenant A.C.D Bentley of the 50th Regiment (who supervised its construction) owed more to its designer David Lennox. Appointed Superintendent of Bridges in 1833, Lennox was responsible for a number of notable bridges of stone construction in the colony, many of which survive today. Bentley's Bridge, however, did not. Dowling, writing in 1925, notes that an ordinary level wooden roadway bridge had replaced the former stone construction, which possibly did not survive the widening of the New South Head Road, a process begun by the South Head Roads Trust in the 1890s.

Reclamation Works

Dowling was not alone in his assessment. In November, 1875 a deputation visited the then Minister for Lands, Thomas Garrett, armed with a petition signed by 500 people requesting the reclamation of the Bay. In 1878 the Rushcutters Bay Resumption Act brought this section of foreshore into public ownership, and allowed the reclamation work to proceed.

Reclaiming the Rushcutters Bay shoreline solved only some of the problems facing residents of nearby areas and the authorities which served them. The market gardens persisted until the late 19th century, and resentment towards the so-called stinking paddock and those who tended it, grew and found concerted voice during the 1880s. At worst the anti-Chinese sentiment found outlet in regular visits from Paddington-based larrikin gangs, who tormented the Chinese and destroyed their crops. In its more organised form, the resentment generated correspondence to the Sydney Newspapers of the time, and a series of public meetings, deputations and petitions to the Minister for Mines, urging the resumption of the land. The Chinese presence remained, however, until the early twentieth century.

Storm water posed a different and more hazardous nuisance. At times, the creek which flowed under Bentley Bridge was strong enough to wash straying stock, and humans, into the harbour. The construction of Boundary Street by the City Council in 1886 did much to alleviate the problems of surface water drainage since it incorporated a sewer, and a Water Board drain today carries the waters of the former Rushcutters Bay Creek safely underground for the final stage of its journey into the harbour.

These various works "tamed" a locality once considered unfit for human occupation into an area which is today well-used as a place of leisure.