Mortlake & Breakfast Point

 

Captain John Hunter led the first British exploration of the Parramatta River in February 1788. On the 5th February, while having breakfast he made the first contact with local Aboriginals of the Wangal Clan. The location is referred to as Breakfast Point on the survey map of 1799. The Wangal called the area Booridiow-o-gule. The adjacent point was variously known as Bachelors Point, Pleasant Point and Green Point but eventually became known as Mortlake Point, named after a town along the Thames River in Britain.

Mortlake was long dominated by the significant AGL (Australian Gas Light Co.) industrial site which was developed from 1884 to produce gas for domestic and industrial use in Sydney.

The 32 hectare site includes several buildings of historical interest from an industrial perspective.

Today the land is being rehabilitated and developed as a residential area known as Breakfast Point.

 

Similar Posts

  • The House of the Future

    At the Australasian Science Congress held in Hobart in January 1902, John Sulman, an English architect living in Sydney, read a paper entitled “A Twentieth Century House with suggestions on the solution of the Servant Problem”. He said:  “It is probable that many middle-class households will, in the future, have to dispense with servants altogether,…

  • Discord at Concord

    MAYOR DEFIED – A WOMAN INTRUDES A stormy scene developed at Concord Council last night in sharp contrast to the usually peaceful meetings of the municipality. The Mayor (Alderman Lee) left the chair and broke up the council meeting after having been defied by an alderman, and the police were called in to eject the offender….

  • Goddard’s Camerated Concrete Construction

    Camerated concrete construction is hardly a conversation stopper at a barbeque, but this method of building houses attracted worldwide attention at the start of the twentieth century. In 1905 Concord builder, Henry Arthur Goddard, patented a method of using aerated reinforced concrete that was less dense than regular concrete, but retained its structural strength. This…

  • Buying a Car – a Retrospect

    Nowadays there’s no mystery about motor cars. They infest every road and are driven with varying degrees of competence by teenagers and grandmothers. When it comes to buying a car, schoolboys can usually give their fathers all the performance figures of the leading makes but back at the dawn of motoring things were very different indeed. Between fifty and sixty years ago the tempo of…

Add your first comment to this post