Iloura Reserve is a heritage-listed public reserve on the site of a former timber yard at 10–20 Weston Street, Balmain East, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Following the resumption of the timber yard for public space in the 1960s, the present reserve was designed and laid out by landscape architect Bruce Mackenzie and constructed in two stages: stage one in 1970 and stage two in 1981. It is also known as Peacock Point and Illoura. The reserve is owned by the Inner West Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 29 November 2013.
History
Peacock Point
The traditional custodians of the peninsula now known as Balmain are the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora language group. There is archaeological evidence of human occupation in the Sydney area dated at least 20,000 years ago. Being among the first to encounter the British the Wangal population was also one of the first to be highly impacted by disease and dispossession. Following the Second World War Aboriginal people began to move back to the cities and settled in the suburbs of Redfern, Alexandria and Balmain.Goodall & Cadzow:173
Prior to 1835 the landscape of Balmain was rocky, with dense tea tree scrub spotted with eucalypts and abundant flora and fauna.Reynolds and Irving: 4 The Sydney Gazette of 1818 shows a grant to William Balmain: an estate consisting of 550 acres at the Northern Boundary known by the name of Balmain's Farm.Reynolds and Flottman: 92 Prior to returning to England, Balmain transferred the land to John Gilchrist. Gilchrist subsequently subdivided the land and in 1836 auctioneer George William Paul purchased Lot 4 and Lot 6 of the first portion to be divided into 22 lots located on the Balmain East end of the peninsula. In 1855 Mort's Dock opened in Waterview Bay and was indicative of the intense maritime industrial expansion on the edges of the peninsula.
The suburban development of Balmain commenced from 1836 and grew slowly until the new industrial development of the 1850s onwards drew an influx of workers and their families to live on the peninsula. A ferry service commenced about this time connecting the suburb to the city bringing workers for the shipyards along the harbour foreshores. As the population increased so did the demand for services – houses, shops, churches, schools, police, a hospital and local government with Balmain Council being formed in 1860. Social institutions also arose at this time and many clubs were formed including rowing, swimming, bowling and cricket. Institutes such as the Balmain Literary Institute, the Balmain Working Men's Institute and Balmain School of Arts were also established.
The lots between Peacock Point and Darling Street and Weston Street which had been laid out in 1836 had a number of owners. Immediately adjacent to Illoura Reserve was 2–8 Weston Street which was purchased in 1840 by shipwright John Bell and on which he built a stone wharf and shipwright's yard. Bell died in 1847 and the shipwright's yard was run by his sons until 1883 when it was sold to J. Fenwick and Co.
The southern end of the peninsula is named after Captain John Jenkins Peacock who purchased the land in 1836. Peacock was the son of a convict and started his days as a farmer with a grant of 250 acres on the Hawkesbury. In 1834 he moved to Market Wharf after a time trading between the Hawkesbury River and Sydney. Peacock was a merchant and owner of ships: he owned the barque Sir William Wallace and other vessels and he traded in New Zealand where he bought wharves and land, he also had land on the Parramatta River and in the Hunter Valley. He was a licensee of the Dundee Arms in Gloucester Street, Sydney in 1840 and in 1842 he was appointed a director of the Union Assurance Co. He was an Alderman on City of Sydney Council from 1842 to 1843. In 1836 Peacock purchased four acres of the first sub-division of Balmain, opposite his Miller's Point wharf. By the 1840s it became evident he had spread his business empire too thin and by September 1843 he was facing insolvency. He sold off his 38 Balmain lots in 1841.(Sydney's Aldermen: http://www.sydneyaldermen.com.au/alderman/john-peacock/)
The 1888 map of Peacock Point shows that there had been land reclamation and a large amount of building construction by this time. The natural shore line is indicated on the map set well back from the reclaimed land edge in all but two locations, the largest of which is opposite William Street. By 1943 the whole foreshore of the site had all been reshaped and extended out into the bay. 1943 aerial photography clearly indicates that the maritime industrial use of the site continued well into the 20th century. Ships can be seen tied up to wharfs, one of which appears to have a crane for loading and unloading ships.
The first Harbour Master was appointed to the Port of Sydney in 1811. Ninety years later the Sydney Harbour Trust took over the administration of the Port of Sydney. In 1936 the Maritime Services Board was formed to take control of all NSW ports with the exception of Port Kembla. The MSB was responsible for ports with jurisdiction over all navigable waters until it was dissolved in 1995 under the Port Corporatisation and Waterways Management Act 1995.
The foreshore land at Weston Street and Peacock Point came under the management of the MSB and was used as a lumber yard until State Planning Authority planners Nigel Ashton and Lindsay Robertson acquired the site along with other harbour side sites for public open space. In 1968 Ashton engaged Bruce Mackenzie to undertake the landscape design which was constructed in two stages: Stage One in 1970 and Stage Two in 1981.Morris, Hericon and Spearitt 123
Iloura Reserve was enlarged in 2008 following Leichhardt Council's acquisition of the adjacent Fenwick & Co Boat Store site.
The Modern Movement in landscape design and its use at Iloura The influence of the Modern Movement in landscape design in Australia was seen early in the 20th century in the works of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. At Castlecrag they demonstrated how buildings could be integrated with the natural environment. After World War II young Australian architects, like Richard Clough, Bruce Rickard, Peter Spooner and Allan Correy, returned from overseas with qualifications in landscape architecture, having been exposed to the Modern Movement. In the 1950s Rex Hazelwood advised Willoughby Municipal Council, planting spotted gums, turpentines and other native trees. Modern architect designed homes of the 1940s and 1950s were set in contrast to a natural setting or were integrated with a natural setting; both approaches relied upon the retention of native trees whilst building.Morris, Hericon and Spearitt 112 In the 1940s and 1950s notable Australian landscape designer Edna Walling had begun to regularly use Australian plants in her designs and advocated for them in her book The Australian Roadside (1952).
The 1960s and the 1970s saw the rise of the Sydney School of architecture. This was an architecture practised within the Sydney region that expressed a natural affiliation with the Australian landscape; it integrated nature and architecture through spatial arrangements and choice of rustic simple materials and the application of craftsmanship. For example, Tocal College received both the Sulman and Blacket medals in 1965 and is credited with firmly establishing the Sydney School idiom: "Expressive structural use of robust and enduring materials seamlessly integrated within its landscape setting was a groundbreaking approach to institutional design."
Meanwhile, public attitudes to the urban environment began to change; by the 1960s and 1970s the environmental movement was on the rise. The publication of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring in 1962, the rise of environmental organisation Greenpeace, reaction in Tasmania to the Lake Pedder and Franklin Dam projects and the rise of the Tasmanian Greens political party were all indicators of the greater public awareness of the natural environment. The use of local plant species in private gardens was being popularised by Thistle Harris in her book Australian Plants for the Garden (1953); Betty Maloney and Jean Walker's books Designing Bush Gardens (1966) and More About Bush Gardens (1967) and Ellis Stones in her book Australian Garden Design (1971).
Likewise landscape practitioners like Bruce Mackenzie rejected the traditional design of urban parks which used introduced plants and formal spaces. Bruce Mackenzie describes this new way of thinking as a "respect for a spirit of place, the land, the genus loci."Mackenzie: 15 Landscape architects began responding directly to the immediate site as well as having an appreciation of the broader landscape. The movement took on the name "Sydney Bush School".
Mackenzie describes the impact and the essential elements of his Sydney Harbour Park designs: "Sydney Harbour Parks turned out to be a somewhat ground breaking realisation using local materials in a direct response to the immediate environment and the elements of the harbour landscape. The ideas had been developing in previous years with prior experience at Commodore Heights, Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, and then current involvement with Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (not documented).
"Plant species, sandstone walls and cliff faces, wharf poles and jetties, combined to be so evocative of the harbour's sense of place. Assembled together in a way that had not been done before, recreating the charms of the Sydney natural bush and sandstone, much-loved harbour side places and childhood bush playgrounds. Another important aspect was that the flow of landscape design responded to the informal thrusts of the existing site, to its vague shapes and levels.
"Human patterns of usage – paths and walks, lookouts, picnic areas and car parks touched a chord of recognition for professionals and public alike – this is our landscape, this can be truer to our character than English parks or French formality, and so many times more pleasurable."Mackenzie: 38
Mackenzie coined a term for these park designs: "Alternative Parkland". Illoura was the first of these harbour side parks or "alternative parklands". Illoura Reserve has been described by the National Trust of Australia (NSW) as a seminal work and is described by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture as a critical contribution to Australian landscape architecture.
Few people in Sydney at that time could identify local plant species and very few nurseries propagated them. The concept had never been tested in public parks, let alone sites which had disturbed and possibly contaminated soil conditions. Finn Thorvaldson, a young architect who assisted Mackenzie on the project, describes how they obtained Casuarina glauca (Swamp Oak) for the project: "the only thing that would grow close to the water, because of the water table, was Swamp Oak, Casuarina glauca, and of course no nursery had Casuarina glauca, it didn't exist in their vocabulary, but Bruce did employ somebody to collect the seed for that and actually grow it, so that was grown in a nursery for a year and then planted out. So it was a slightly different approach to going to buy plants off the shelf as you do now." Over the years Mackenzie was the first to grow and test other local plant species that are commonly used today, including Lomandra longifolia, Westringia fruticosa and Cissus Antarctica.(Buchanan: 154-159)