I have lived the past 6 months on and off in Balmain. This is far longer than my long suffering host had expected.
I have put in job applications and I am waiting for responses. In the meantime I will be riding to Canberra and beyond. If I can’t secure a job within a reasonable time, Plan B is a career change. More about that later.
For those that don’t know, Balmain is a suburb in the inner west of Sydney. It is situated on the harbour with all points less than 10 klms from the Sydney CBD. My first encounter with the suburb was in 1988 when I started working for Caltex Oil as an Auditor. Caltex owned and operated a lubricant blending plant on Ballast Point. The plant was built in 1930 and produced all of the Caltex lubricants and provided bunkering services to the Sydney Ferry fleet and other shipping, including overseas liners in the harbour.
The Caltex plant was just one of many industrial operations in Balmain. Others included the Colgate Soap Factory and the White Bay Power Works. The suburb was industrial and the residents primarily working class. The majority of the houses were small timber or brick workman’s cottages. Most the population worked in the local factories or on the wharfs. There were many pubs. Most of these were ‘blood houses’. This referred to the many fights related to excess consumption of beer between the time the workers finished work, and six o’clock, when the pubs closed. This was known as the ‘six o’clock swill’. The suburb was known to breed tough characters. One former resident, Neville Wran a long Labor Party Premier, famously said: “Balmain boys don’t cry”.
By the mid 1980’s Balmain, had started to become gentrified, with professionals moving in the take advantage of the proximity to the city and the improving transport links, including the building of the ANZAC Bridge. This gentrification included the tarting up of the pubs. One of the first to receive this treatment was the Dry Dock Hotel, which was not far from the Caltex site. Others to be gentrified were The London and the Royal Oak.
My first visit to the Caltex plant was huge shock. It was like walking into an industrial museum. It appeared that very little had changed since it was built back in the 1930’s. The feedstocks for the lubricates were held tanks on the highest point of the site. The various stages of the production process were performed at levels down slope, essentially a cliff, to the water’s edge. The blending, was done in huge copper tanks. The bottling was done on amazingly basic equipment, with a lot of manual input. Most the accounting and monitoring of the process was done on manual records, with only the final product being recorded on the Caltex mainframe computer system.
One seemingly bizarre aspect of the process was that the Chief Chemist, held the recipes for the lubricants on a very cheap Commodore 64 computer that he had to buy himself. Seeing the place in operation was surreal. This particularly the case when you looked at the marketing of the ‘hi tech’ lubricants, including the advertisements and sponsoring of the car races such as the Bathurst 1000. by the mid 1980’s, most of the staff were over 50 years old and had expected to have retired or been made redundant for many years.
A task I had to perform as an Auditor was to dip the storage tanks as part of a surprise stock-take. I performed one of these stock-takes after having lunch at the Dry Dock Hotel. It was one for the first pubs to serve Redback beer, the latest trendy boutique wheat beer. I chatted to the Storeman doing the tank dip about the lunch and the pub. I made the comment that the pub was pretty good. The response was: “The pubs are being ‘f**ked’. You can’t by a beer without some silly bugger putting a lemon in it”.
It transpired that the reason Caltex didn’t invest in the equipment in the plant was that they wanted to have the site rezoned as residential. The plan was to either sell it, or re-develop it in a joint venture. They did this with a site in Hong Kong (another story). They also transported the feedstock by truck through the Balmain streets, rather than by barge. This was designed to upset the locals and get them to support the rezoning.
The site was eventually sold the Walker Corporation, a property developer. This was contentious to say the least. If you are interested, do an internet search. In the end the NSW Government acquired the site for public land. It was decided to develop a public park on the site. The development was managed by, what was to become, the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA).
I worked for the SHFA from 2003 to 2005. I had some minor involvement in the contracts for the development of the Ballast Point Park. Late in 2005, I was asked if I would attend a lunch for an ex-Caltex employee that had been employed by SHFA after the government had acquired the site. I was told that he had been employed because of his knowledge of the site and it was necessary to continue the bunkering service for a period after the acquisition of the site. He managed these services. The lunch was to celebrate his retirement from SHFA.
The lunch was held at the Royal Oak pub. I walked in the pub and has introduced to the Chief Chemist. His comment was “I feel I have seen a ghost”. It was a great lunch, lots of reminisces about the history of the Caltex plant. We both drank Redback Wheat Beer with a lemon in it.
The Ballast Point Park was completed in July 2009. It is great example of well designed public space. The architects have cleverly retained some of the relics of the old Caltex plant including the frames of the storage tanks. It highlights what a great loss the use of the site for private residential buildings would have caused. Now everyone, rather than a privileged few, can enjoy the site with its views of the harbour and the city.
It has been great to live in Balmain for the past months. The place simply gets better and better. More comments on the place to follow.
billrider2013 