Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Sir Thomas Mort - Auctioneer And Builder -

 



Thomas Mort


He was born in 1816



His father died in 1834 
He Noticed something no one else did

He was 21 Years Old when he arrived in Feb  1838. 















in September 1843 he set up as an auctioneer on his own account. He Pioneered The Sydney Wool Auctions. 


by 1850 he was the Premier Auctioneer in Sydney 

He had married St Christchurch St Lawrence. 


He moved into Greenoaks at Darling Point. 




he was not Satisfied with Auctions. 
Mort wanted to create a Manufacturing Country
Captain Thomas Rowntreee walked into his Office in 1853
they formed the Dry Dock Company in 1853
Cockatoo Island had been at it since 1847


It Opened in 1855


The 1866 upgrade was massive. 


the Ship Painters And Dockers Union was conceived 



by the late 1860's Mort thought it was not enough. 


He wanted Sydney to stop importing British Machinery. 


By the 1870's it The Largest private Firm in the country. The first steam Locomotive Built in NSW. 



Built and Assembed in Balmain. 


the Pumping Engines for the Crown Street and Waverly Reservoirs. 


If something needed to be made in iron in Sydney. 








Picture this. Tuesday the 20th of January, 1942.
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1:35 in the afternoon.
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Tropical sea off Ba'athist Island, 90 km northwest of Darwin.
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A small Australian corvette is steaming through the heat haze when her Azic operator picks up a contact. 6 weeks
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earlier, Pearl Harbor. Days from now, the fall of Singapore. The Japanese submarine I124 fires a spread of torpedoes at the corvette and misses.
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The corvette turns hard and drops depth charges. Oil rises. Air bubbles rise. 80
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Japanese submariners go down with their boat. The corvette is HMS Delerain.
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She was launched 6 months earlier in a Sydney dry dock. That dock lies buried under a park lawn in Balain. How does
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Australia's first completed dry dock, the works that built the corvette that sank a Japanese submarine, end up under
1 minute, 3 seconds
park grass? This is the story of where it all went.
1 minute, 9 seconds
Chapter 1. The Lanasher Auctioneer, Thomas Sutcliffe.
1 minute, 15 seconds
Mort was not a ship builder. He was not an engineer. He never swung a hammer. He was a cler who became an auctioneer who
1 minute, 23 seconds
became almost by accident one of the most ambitious industrial dreamers in 19th century Australia. He was born on
1 minute, 30 seconds
the 23rd of December 1816 at Bolton in the cotton country of Lanasher, the second son of Jonathan Mort and Mary Nay
1 minute, 38 seconds
Sutcliffe. The family had aspiring middle-class ideals and a comfortable Manchester upbringing. Then the father
1 minute, 46 seconds
died in 1834, leaving an estate that could not properly launch his sons into the world. Thomas Mort was 21 years old
1 minute, 55 seconds
when he arrived in Sydney in February 1838 aboard the Superb.
2 minutes
He went to work as a clark at Aspenol Brown and Company, a small Sydney trading house. He learned the trade. He
2 minutes, 8 seconds
watched the wool sales. He noticed something nobody else seemed to. The colony had no proper auction system for
2 minutes, 15 seconds
its own wool. In September 1843, Mort set up as an auctioneer on his own account. He pioneered the Sydney wool
2 minutes, 24 seconds
auction system. Regular sales of wool alone with proper cataloges, proper bidding, proper conditions.
2 minutes, 33 seconds
By 1850, he was the premier auctioneer in Sydney.
2 minutes, 38 seconds
He had married Theresa Sheped at Christ Church St. Lawrence on the 27th of October 1841.
2 minutes, 46 seconds
He was a strong high churchman, an Anglican of the most committed kind. He gave the land for and funded St. Marks at Darling Point. He helped pay for St.
2 minutes, 56 seconds
Andrews Cathedral and St. Paul's College. He moved into a Gothic mansion he called Green Oaks at Darling Point.
3 minutes, 4 seconds
He built it with a public art gallery so working Sydney siders could see fine paintings on weekends. He kept gardens that became famous in their own right.
3 minutes, 14 seconds
He was by the standards of mid-century Sydney a very rich man with a deep streak of public mission.
3 minutes, 22 seconds
Here's the thing about Mort. He was not satisfied with auctions. He wanted to make Sydney into a manufacturing city.
3 minutes, 30 seconds
He wanted Sydney to build its own ships, its own engines, its own locomotives, its own future. He was a dreamer with money, a dangerous combination.
3 minutes, 40 seconds
Then in 1853, a former steamship captain walked into his office with a problem nobody else wanted to solve.
3 minutes, 50 seconds
Chapter 2. Waterview Bay. Before any of this happened, the country around the bay had owners. The Balain Peninsula was
3 minutes, 59 seconds
Wangal country, part of the Eora nation in the Darug language group. The Wangal called the peninsula Baludari after the
4 minutes, 8 seconds
leather jacket fish that ran in the harbor. They fished from bark canoes called nui. They gathered oysters from the rock shelves at low tide.
4 minutes, 18 seconds
They herded kangaroos along the ridge to the eastern tip where the harbor pinched off any escape.
4 minutes, 25 seconds
The small pox introduced by the early colonizers killed approximately 90% of the local Gatagle and Wangle population before 1850.
4 minutes, 35 seconds
By the time Mort syndicate arrived at Waterview Bay, the original people who had lived here for thousands of years had been broken, displaced, and largely
4 minutes, 45 seconds
silenced. We mention this because the physical record of their occupation at this specific site has not survived
4 minutes, 52 seconds
industrial development. Acknowledge it, then continue. The man who walked into Mort's office in 1853 was Captain Thomas Stevenson Roundtree, a master mariner.
5 minutes, 4 seconds
He had arrived in New South Wales the year before. He had built a sailing ship he called the Lizzy Weber to carry gold rush passengers up and down the coast.
5 minutes, 13 seconds
To finance the dry dock, Ronree sold his own ship. Read that again. He sold the Lizzy Weber to fund the venture. That is how he met Mort.
5 minutes, 23 seconds
The sale was handled by the auctioneer who already wanted to build a manufacturing colony.
5 minutes, 29 seconds
Ronree had bought part of the Straththeian estate on the northern side of the Balain Peninsula fronting Waterview Bay. He had identified the
5 minutes, 38 seconds
geography correctly. Deep calm water close to the city with sandstone bedrock you could quarry into a graving dock.
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Mort brought in a third partner, the Sydney merchant James S. Mitchell. They formed the Waterview Bay Dry Dock Company in 1853.
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Construction took roughly one year. Mort personally laid a foundation stone for one of the peers. The dock was built by
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free labor. Across the harbor, Cockatu Island was building its Fitzroy dock with convict labor and had been at it since 1847.
6 minutes, 16 seconds
Mort offered a sweetener his rivals could not match.
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Workers who completed their contract were promised a freehold block of land on the Balain Peninsula.
6 minutes, 28 seconds
The settlement that grew up around the dock was a workingclass freehold suburb seeded by Mort's promise populated by
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men who would later send their grandsons back through the dock gates with apprentice papers.
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On the 1st of January 1855, Australia got its first completed dry dock and it beat Cockatu Island by two and a half years.
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Chapter 3. The first dock.
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The dimensions matter because credibility lives in dimensions. The dry dock at Waterview Bay was 123 m long by
7 minutes, 5 seconds
15 m wide, 404 ftx 49.
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cut by hand into the sandstone bedrock of the Balain foreshore. It opened on the 1st of January 1855.
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The first steamer to enter the dock did so on the 12th of February 1855.
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She was the SS Hunter, a Sydney to Newcastle male steamer. She sat down on the dock blocks, the gates closed, the water was pumped out.
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For the first time in Australian history, a working ship was lifted out of the harbor into a purpose-built basin
7 minutes, 43 seconds
on Australian soil by an Australian company. The early years were rough. Rentree quit the partnership in 1861.
7 minutes, 53 seconds
He was furious. Across the harbor at Cockatu Island, the Fitzroy dock had been promised to government work only.
8 minutes, 1 second
Then the colonial government quietly let Fitzroy take commercial repairs in direct competition with the private dock that had opened 2 and 1/2 years earlier.
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Ronree saw it as a breach of faith and walked out. Mort brought in a working partner, the marine engineer Thomas
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MacArthur. The firm renamed itself MacArthur and Company. MacArthur died in 1869.
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Mort took full control of the dock in 1866 when MacArthur was already failing.
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He needed a manager who would not die or quit. He found one. The dock manager from this period was James Peter
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Frankie. Frankie ran the operations of Mortzock for 50 years. Read that again.
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50 years. He retired in 1922, by which point he had personally watched four generations of Balman shipwrites walk
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through the gates. The 1866 expansion was massive. Mort added iron foundaries,
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brass foundaries, a patent slip, boiler making shops, blacksmithing, full engineering facilities.
9 minutes, 13 seconds
The dock was no longer just a basin in the sandstone. It was an industrial city block with smoke and steam and the
9 minutes, 21 seconds
constant clang of iron being beaten into shape. The ship painters and dockers union was established on this site in
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1872 in a shed inside the gates. The dock would seed the unions that ran Sydney's waterfront for the next hundred
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years. By the late 1860s, Mort was looking at his dock and thinking it was not enough.
9 minutes, 45 seconds
He wanted his works to build engines as well as repair ships. He wanted to build locomotives.
9 minutes, 53 seconds
He wanted Sydney to stop importing British machinery.
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By 1870, they would build something nobody else in the colony could build, a locomotive.
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Chapter 4. The largest private firm in the colony.
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On a Saturday morning in mid August 1870, a Sydney Morning Herald reporter stood inside Mort's dock works at Balain.
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In front of him sat a steam locomotive, the first one wholly produced in the colony of New South Wales.
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The Herald story ran on the 15th of August 1870 under the headline Messes Morton Company's locomotive and ship building establishment.
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The locomotive was the first of four road numbers 36 to 39 of what later became the M36 class for the New South Wales government railways.
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A small 042 tank engine on standard gauge of 4'8 1/2 in built and assembled in Balain.
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The whole thing was wheeled out of the works under its own steam.
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We have to be careful here. The strict claim is not that this was the first locomotive ever built in Australia.
11 minutes, 10 seconds
Other firms competed. The defensible claim is that this was the first locomotive wholly produced in the colony of New South Wales.
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The engineering audience will respect the precision. The headline figure is still extraordinary.
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By the 1870s, Mortstock had become the colony's largest private firm.
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a number of employees. It was second only to the New South Wales railways.
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The works built the iron work for the Sydney General Post Office, the pumping engines for the Crown Street and Waverly
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reservoirs, the full mechanical fit out for Sydney's water and sewage systems, the manly ferry contracts started.
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The pattern was set.
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If something needed to be made in iron in Sydney, you went to the dock at the head of Waterview Bay. In 1872,
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Mort floated the dock as a public company called Mort's Dock and Engineering Company. He attached an early worker share ownership scheme to
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the float. Workers could buy stock in their own employer at favored rates. It was one of the earliest experiments in
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labor capital cooperation in Australian history.
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The experiment was sincere. It also did not last.
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Thomas Sutcliffe Mort died on the 9th of May 1878 at his Bedilla estate on the New South Wales South Coast.
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Plur pneumonia. He was 61 years old.
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We need to clear up something the textbooks sometimes garble.
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Mort did not die in debt. His probate goods were valued at £200,000.
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The cash distributions from his estate eventually totaled around £600,000, an enormous fortune for the time.
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What is true is that his grandest industrial ventures, including the dock itself and his refrigeration experiments, mostly lost him money.
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The Australian dictionary of biography says the dock was grossly overc capitalized.
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Mort treated industrial investment as a community service paid for by the auctioneering fortune behind it. When he
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died, the dock kept running. But the man who had loved it as his civic mission was gone.
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The mayor of Balain, James Macdonald, persuaded his council to rename Waterview Bay as Mort Bay in his honor.
13 minutes, 48 seconds
The Mort statue sculpted by Pierce Connelly went a coin went up in Mcquaryy Place in the center of Sydney.
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It is reportedly the first statue erected to an Australian citizen.
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He never lived to see what his doc would build for the next world war. Chapter 5.
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Manly fairies and government house apprentices.
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The dock did not slow down after Mort died. If anything, it accelerated.
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On the 4th of December 1901, Mort's dock opened its second graving dock at Woolwitch on the Lane Cove
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River. When it opened, the Woolwitch dock was the largest dry dock in Australia,
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188 m long by 27 m wide. The contractor W. Solomon and Sons excavated 85,000 cub
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m of sandstone to make it. It was a feat of late colonial engineering on the same scale as the Hawkbury River Railway Bridge, which had opened up the line from Sydney to Brisbane in 1889.
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Both projects belonged to the same generation of engineers who believed Australia could build at the largest
15 minutes, 2 seconds
possible scale. By 1917, by Engineering Heritage Australia's count, Mortstock
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had built 39 steam ships and seven manly feries. The Manly Ferry contracts produced some of the most beloved
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vessels ever to cross Sydney Harbor. The Bengara class double-ended screw steamers designed by Mortstock's own naval architect, Andrew Christi.
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Bengara in 1905, Bora Bra in 1908.
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Belubber in 1910, Belgla in 1912, Baron Joey in 1913,
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and the most famous of them, Barraula, launched at the Balain Yard on the 14th of February, 1922.
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Mort's own executives later admitted the fairies were built more for prestige than for profit. The board wanted Sydney
15 minutes, 59 seconds
to see their name on the harbor every day. The men who built those fairies were Balain men. Apprentices walked
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through the gates at 14 and 15 on the strength of fathers who had walked through before them.
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In 1906, an apprentice boiler maker named William John Mccel signed on at Mortstock.
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Mckel later wrote that boiler making was the hardest, the dirtiest, and the most dangerous trade he ever knew.
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He stayed 5 years.
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In 1911, after a dispute over apprentice treatment, Mccel organized his fellow apprentices in protest and walked off to pool and steals. He went into politics.
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He became premier of New South Wales from 1941 to 1947.
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Then on the 11th of March 1947, Hen was sworn in as governor general of Australia. The boiler maker from Balain
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ended up in government house. The Australian Labour Party itself was founded in 1891 by Balain Unionists,
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many of them Mortz Dock men. Another Mortz Doc apprentice, John Story, became premier of New South Wales in 1920.
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Two of the men who learned their trade in the foundry of this dock would go on to govern the state and one of them, the nation. Two of the doc's apprentices
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would end up running the country. The doc that trained them was already running out of time. Chapter 6. The dark
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side. Every triumph of Mortzock had a cost. We need to count it honestly.
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Boiler making in the era Mccuel described killed men slowly. Deafness from the constant hammering inside iron
17 minutes, 48 seconds
boilers. Lung damage from the coal dust and the metal filings.
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burns from the rivets that came out of the furnace at white heat and were caught in tongs by men who sometimes missed.
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The mortality data for 19th century iron workers across Australia is patchy, but the patterns are not in dispute.
18 minutes, 9 seconds
The dock paid better than most of the alternative trades on the harbor. The men who worked it paid back in their bodies. The dock was a stronghold of the
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Federated Iron Workers Association. The Balain branch of the FIA was famously militant and famously independent. It
18 minutes, 27 seconds
distrusted both employers and central party officials. That distrust would matter 20 years later when the dock went
18 minutes, 35 seconds
to war with itself. Mort's worker share ownership scheme, the freedom dividend he had launched in 1872 also gradually evaporated.
18 minutes, 45 seconds
The capital structure of the listed company favored outside shareholders.
18 minutes, 50 seconds
By the early 20th century, the experiment in labor capital cooperation was a memory. The brass plates Mort had
18 minutes, 58 seconds
handed out to share buying workers were curios in the boiler makaker's lockers.
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The Mort statue in Mcquaryy Place, the one reportedly the first statue to an Australian citizen, stayed in place.
19 minutes, 10 seconds
Mort was honored in bronze in the center of the city he had tried to industrialize.
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The dock that bore his name had never made him a profit.
19 minutes, 21 seconds
We mention this to keep the record straight. The man in the bronze made his real money in wool. His grand industrial
19 minutes, 29 seconds
monument paid him in civic pride and in losses. The first world war came and went.
19 minutes, 37 seconds
We need to be careful here. There is no verified evidence that Mortz dock built warships for the Royal Australian Navy
19 minutes, 44 seconds
during the 1914 to 1918 war. The Woolwitch dock handled ship repairs and the conversion of passenger liners into
19 minutes, 52 seconds
troop ships. The Balman works kept producing engines and rolling stock. The cumulative 39 steam ships and seven fies
20 minutes, 1 second
by 1917 counts the work done across the war. But no commissioned warship is on the record from this dock during this
20 minutes, 8 seconds
conflict. In August 1917 the great strike began at the Evely railway workshops. Balain was a center of
20 minutes, 16 seconds
suburbwide protest processions, marches up Darling Street, public meetings outside the dock gates. The actual works
20 minutes, 24 seconds
inside Mort's dock did not down tools in a documented stoppage during the Great Strike, but the suburb around the dock was in revolt for weeks.
20 minutes, 33 seconds
The dock would mend the ships of one war. It would build the warships of the next. Chapter 7. The warships. Between
20 minutes, 42 seconds
1940 and 1945, Mortz Dock built 14 of the 60 Ba'athist class corvettes, four of the 12
20 minutes, 50 seconds
Riverclass frigots, and 1,000 ton floating dock. By VJ day, the works was
20 minutes, 57 seconds
second only to Cockatu Island dockyard in the number of naval vessels produced for the Royal Australian Navy. We are talking about an Australian shipyard
21 minutes, 6 seconds
that inside 5 years became one of the two most important builders of warships in the southern hemisphere.
21 minutes, 13 seconds
The Corvette that opens this video had a build history. HMAS Delerain was laid down at Mortstock on the 19th of March 1941.
21 minutes, 24 seconds
650 tons standard displacement, 186 ft long, single shaft triple
21 minutes, 32 seconds
expansion steam engine driving her at 15 knots.
21 minutes, 36 seconds
She was launched at Balain on the 26th of July 1941 by Dame Mary Hughes, wife of the Minister for the Navy. The
21 minutes, 45 seconds
managing director of Mortz Dotock at her launch was a Mr. T. Silk. Her commanding officer when she sailed for war was
21 minutes, 52 seconds
Lieutenant Commander Desmond A. Menlov of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve.
21 minutes, 58 seconds
She was commissioned on the 22nd of November 1941, 2 weeks before Pearl Harbor. Less than 2 months later on the
22 minutes, 8 seconds
20th of January 1942, Delerain was steaming off Ba'athist Island when the Japanese submarine I124 fired at her and
22 minutes, 16 seconds
missed. At 1:35 in the afternoon, her AIC gear locked on. She rolled depth
22 minutes, 23 seconds
charges off her stern. Sister Corvettes HMAS Katumba and HMS Lithgo, also Australianbuilt, joined the attack.
22 minutes, 33 seconds
The American destroyer USS Edsaw arrived and added more depth charges.
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The kill of the I124 is jointly credited across all four vessels.
22 minutes, 45 seconds
It was the first enemy submarine sunk in Australian waters.
22 minutes, 51 seconds
80 Japanese submariners went down with their boat. On the 19th of February 1942, Delerrain was at Darwin during the
22 minutes, 59 seconds
first Japanese bombing of mainland Australia. She came through unscathed. Mortz docks four riverclass frigots. Hm.
23 minutes, 7 seconds
Moss Gascoin launched on the 20th of February 1943 by Lady Wakeurst the wife of the governor of New South Wales. Hmas Hawkbury laid down in August 1942.
23 minutes, 20 seconds
Hmas Luckland launched on the 25th of March 1944 by Sarah Mcnamara Scullan the wife of former Prime Minister James
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Scullan. Hmos McQuary, the last of the four, commissioned on the 7th of December, 1945.
23 minutes, 36 seconds
At the peak of the war, the Balain foreshore held 29 separate yards and shops working on Allied shipping.
23 minutes, 45 seconds
Almost 8,000 metal workers were employed across those yards. Mort's Dock was the largest of them.
23 minutes, 54 seconds
The works ran 24 hours a day.
23 minutes, 57 seconds
Welding arcs glowed at 3:00 in the morning.
24 minutes, 1 second
Apprentices became foreman inside 2 years because the men they were learning from were dying of overwork.
24 minutes, 9 seconds
By VJ day, Mortstock was second only to Cockatu Island in naval ships built.
24 minutes, 16 seconds
Inside 20 years, it would be rubble. Chapter 8. The wagon mound.
24 minutes, 25 seconds
The post-war period was a strange, slow death. Ship building contracts dried up.
24 minutes, 31 seconds
Engineering leases inside the works fell as firms relocated to cheaper land in Western Sydney.
24 minutes, 38 seconds
The men who had ridden the World War II boom found themselves competing for a shrinking pile of work. The unions,
24 minutes, 45 seconds
ground by years of 7-day weeks, lashed out.
24 minutes, 49 seconds
On the 16th of April 1945, 3 weeks before victory in Europe day in Europe, the boiler shop at Mortstock walked off
24 minutes, 57 seconds
the job. The trigger was the removal of their elected FIA delegate, a Troskyist boiler maker named Nick Origlass, who
25 minutes, 6 seconds
had started at the dock in 1939 and been elected delegate in 1942.
25 minutes, 12 seconds
The strike spread across 23 waterfront shops, including Cockatu Island, and pulled in roughly 3,000 workers before
25 minutes, 21 seconds
management caved and reinstated Oraglass. He later became mayor of Lyheart.
25 minutes, 27 seconds
Orglass Park on Darling Street in Balain is named for him.
25 minutes, 33 seconds
6 years later on the 30th of October 1951, the SS Wagon Mound, a tanker operated by
25 minutes, 41 seconds
overseas tank ship UK Limited, was bunkering at the Calteex Warf just down the harbor.
25 minutes, 48 seconds
Her crew negligently spilled fuel oil into Sydney harour.
25 minutes, 54 seconds
The oil drifted approximately 600 ft across the water on the tide. It reached the sheer legs wararf at Mort's dock by the morning of the 1st of November 1951.
26 minutes, 7 seconds
Welding sparks from the dock's repair work ignited the oil film floating on the harbor surface. The sheer legs
26 minutes, 14 seconds
wararf, a 400 ft timber pier burned. The vessel Coruml alongside the warf was
26 minutes, 21 seconds
severely damaged. What happened next is in every common law school in the world.
26 minutes, 28 seconds
Mortz Dock sued overseas tankship for negligence.
26 minutes, 33 seconds
The case wound its way through the New South Wales courts and then to the Privy Council in London. On the 18th of
26 minutes, 40 seconds
January 1961, the Privy Council delivered its judgment in overseas tank UK Limited Vmorts Dock and Engineering
26 minutes, 49 seconds
Company. The case known forever after as the wagon mound number one. The Privy Council ruled that the spiller could
26 minutes, 57 seconds
only be liable for damage that was reasonably foreseeable, not for every consequence of the original act. It
27 minutes, 4 seconds
rewrote the foundations of negligence law across the British Empire and the Commonwealth. Here is the kicker. Every
27 minutes, 12 seconds
Australian law student knows the name Wagon Mound. Almost none of them know it happened here. The case stands.
27 minutes, 21 seconds
The dock that sued is buried under park grass.
27 minutes, 26 seconds
Container shipping was introduced through the late 1950s.
27 minutes, 30 seconds
Standardized steel boxes lifted off ships by gantry crane sent direct to road and rail. It eliminated almost the
27 minutes, 39 seconds
entire reason for a city warfike mort with its riveted gangs and its slow handfitted cargo handling. On the 12th
27 minutes, 48 seconds
of November 1958, the 700 men of Mortstock walked into the office and
27 minutes, 54 seconds
found out they had a week. Chapter 9. A week's notice.
28 minutes
The closure came as a memo. Some accounts say it came at the morning shift change. Others say it came as men
28 minutes, 8 seconds
were being paid out at the cashier's window. The dates and the documents are not in dispute. Mort's Dock closed on the 12th of November 1958.
28 minutes, 19 seconds
The financial losses for the trading year 1957 to 1958 were 266,45.
28 minutes, 29 seconds
The board cited a collapse in ship building revenue and rising labor costs.
28 minutes, 35 seconds
The workforce had stood at about 1,000 men at the start of 1957.
28 minutes, 41 seconds
The closure notice gave more than 700 remaining men one week's pay and a handshake.
28 minutes, 48 seconds
The Sydney Morning Herald in its coverage on the 17th of January 1959 recorded what made the closure especially brutal.
28 minutes, 57 seconds
Many of the dismissed employees had worked at the dock for up to 50 years.
29 minutes, 3 seconds
Apprentices who signed on in the 1908 intake. Foremen who had ridden the Corvette boom and the postwar collapse.
29 minutes, 12 seconds
Men whose fathers and grandfathers had worked the same dock floor. Sent home with seven days.
29 minutes, 20 seconds
There is a channel pattern in this we have seen before. Newcastle Steel 50 km north was in its own time another single
29 minutes, 28 seconds
industry town. A foreignowned consortium pulled the plug. A workforce dispersed.
29 minutes, 34 seconds
The town never quite recovered. Yaluan in Victoria was a state electricity commission company town demolished above
29 minutes, 43 seconds
its own coal seam. The same pattern, the same private agony.
29 minutes, 50 seconds
Single industry towns absorb single industry closures the same way, slowly, painfully, permanently.
30 minutes, 1 second
On the 16th of January 1959, the company's liquidators sold the site. The buyer of most of the land, excluding the iron foundry, was a man named Albert G.
30 minutes, 12 seconds
Sims. Sims had migrated from England in 1913.
30 minutes, 18 seconds
He had pawned his wife's wedding ring in 1917 to start collecting scrap metal by bicycle around Sydney. By the late
30 minutes, 26 seconds
1950s, his firm, Albert G. Sims Limited was one of the largest scrap metal recyclers in Australia.
30 minutes, 34 seconds
He bought Mortz Dock for his scrap business. We need to be honest about Sims.
30 minutes, 41 seconds
He was not a foreign corporate raider.
30 minutes, 43 seconds
There is no BP equivalent here. No London board calling the shots.
30 minutes, 49 seconds
Sims was an Australian who had built a real business out of nothing. He was, however, a scrap metalman buying a
30 minutes, 57 seconds
heritage site. He had no use for the buildings except to break them. The man who built a business by saving wedding rings was about to demolish a piece of
31 minutes, 6 seconds
national history. In March 1963, uh I can see the Australian National
31 minutes, 13 seconds
Line announced plans to use part of the foreshore to build a new Tasmania ferry service. NL purchased part of the
31 minutes, 21 seconds
waterfront from Sims. By the mid 1960s, the dock site sat half abandoned with weeds growing through the cobbled workyards.
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1967.
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Sims sent in the wrecking crews. Chapter 10. Into the grave. What happened in
31 minutes, 39 seconds
1967 is not in dispute. The Dictionary of Sydney records it in one short, devastating sentence. With scant regard
31 minutes, 48 seconds
for its heritage, Sims demolished the main buildings and had the debris bulldozed into the dock. Read that again.
31 minutes, 57 seconds
The buildings that built the corvette that sank the I124 were demolished. The rubble was then pushed into the dry dock itself.
32 minutes, 6 seconds
The dock that had been the first completed dry dock in Australia became its own grave, filled with the broken bricks of its own buildings.
32 minutes, 17 seconds
Between 1968 and 1969, the site was completely paved with bumenumen. The foreshore became a flat
32 minutes, 25 seconds
black square of asphalt. The Maritime Services Board, the government authority that controlled Sydney Harbor foreshore
32 minutes, 32 seconds
use, had drawn up a 10-year plan in 1966 for new container births at Balain. The transition was on paper rational.
32 minutes, 44 seconds
Container shipping was coming. Sydney needed births.
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Here's the problem. Lyard Council had refused an application for a container warf at this site in 1965.
32 minutes, 57 seconds
The local government, the level of government closest to the people who actually lived in Belman said no. The
33 minutes, 5 seconds
Maritime Services Board by statute had the power to override local decisions on foreshore use. It used that power. The
33 minutes, 15 seconds
container warf opened at Mort Bay in 1969.
33 minutes, 18 seconds
It operated for 20 years. This is the political enabler. The maritime services board overrode local democracy and made the demolition possible.
33 minutes, 30 seconds
Sims was the wrecker. The MSB cleared his path.
33 minutes, 37 seconds
Across the harbor, Cockatu Island was protected by its federal naval ownership and continued to operate as a dockyard into the 1990s.
33 minutes, 48 seconds
The rival across the water survived because the federal government wanted it. The dock that built the first locomotive and the first Corvette went
33 minutes, 57 seconds
under the bulldozer because the state government did not want it.
34 minutes, 2 seconds
We have seen this pattern before. The Belleview Hotel in Brisbane was demolished in 1979 at 4 in the morning
34 minutes, 9 seconds
by the Dean Brothers wrecking crew under the Biela Peterson government.
34 minutes, 14 seconds
The Wheel and the Wrecker firm took out three quarters of historic Melbourne between 1892 and 1992.
34 minutes, 23 seconds
Mortz Dock is the New South Wales chapter of the same national story.
34 minutes, 28 seconds
Different villain, same outcome, different city, same flat asphalt where the buildings used to stand.
34 minutes, 35 seconds
The Balain Association formed in 1965, the same year Lyard Council made its refusal. It was already too late. By
34 minutes, 45 seconds
1975, resident protests against cargo trucking from Mort Bay had become loud enough that the operations gradually wound
34 minutes, 53 seconds
down. By the early 1980s, container handling for Sydney had shifted to Botney Bay. The Mort Bay container warf
35 minutes, 1 second
was on borrowed time. In 1980, the New South Wales government designated the waterfront for parkland and public housing.
35 minutes, 11 seconds
The plan was controversial in its own right. The Department of Planning announced 211 housing commission flats
35 minutes, 18 seconds
with parkland and a harborside prominard.
35 minutes, 22 seconds
Local property owners opposed the public housing proposal vigorously.
35 minutes, 27 seconds
The argument was bitter. The public housing was ultimately built. The government delivered around 210
35 minutes, 34 seconds
dwellings on 3 1/2 hectares with 3.8 hectares set aside as open space.
35 minutes, 41 seconds
In 1985, the final remaining buildings on the site were demolished. In 1986, the first stage of Mort Bay Park opened.
35 minutes, 51 seconds
The container terminal officially closed in 1989.
35 minutes, 56 seconds
The sum year 1989, heritage protection finally arrived for the buried dock. The state heritage register listing
36 minutes, 4 seconds
recognized what survived underneath the bumenumen and the new lawn, the queson on the foreshore, the bllards and the
36 minutes, 11 seconds
cutstone walls of the dry dock itself sealed beneath ANL's container terminal fill. The Bignell Heritage Report
36 minutes, 19 seconds
prepared for the Heritage Council of New South Wales in 1984 by the Heritage Consultant Elign Biggnull became the underlying document.
36 minutes, 28 seconds
Australia had taken 34 years from the closure to the formal protection.
36 minutes, 34 seconds
It had taken 22 years from the demolition.
36 minutes, 38 seconds
By the time the last buildings came down, the dock had been gone 20 years, and almost nobody remembered it had ever
36 minutes, 46 seconds
existed. A story now largely forgotten. Chapter 11.
36 minutes, 54 seconds
What Mort Bay lost.
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I am standing on the central lawn of Mort Bay Park on a Saturday afternoon.
37 minutes, 2 seconds
The grass is green and well-kept. A small child runs across the lawn after a ball to my right. Low sandstone walls trace a rectangle in the grass.
37 minutes, 14 seconds
123 m x 15.
37 minutes, 17 seconds
The outline of the dry dock that opened on the 1st of January 1855.
37 minutes, 23 seconds
The walls are knee high, weather stained, easy to walk past without noticing.
37 minutes, 29 seconds
Beyond them, on the foreshore, the original Queson and several bolards from the dock survive in place.
37 minutes, 36 seconds
Across the water, half a kilometer away, Cockatu Island rises out of the harbor, low and brown. The Fitzroy dock still cut into its eastern face.
37 minutes, 47 seconds
The rival across the water outlived us.
37 minutes, 51 seconds
Up the hill at 22 Cameron Street, the Drydock Hotel still pours pints. The PUB
37 minutes, 59 seconds
stands roughly where the original dock gates opened onto Cameron Street in 1855.
38 minutes, 5 seconds
The pub remembers, the lawn does not.
38 minutes, 9 seconds
Lesson one, industry builds cities, then cities berry industry. Mort's Dock built
38 minutes, 16 seconds
Australia's first completed dry dock in 1855.
38 minutes, 20 seconds
It built the first locomotive wholly produced in the colony of New South Wales in 1870.
38 minutes, 26 seconds
It built the manly feries that carried Sydney siders to the beach for half a century. It built 14 Ba'athist class
38 minutes, 34 seconds
corvettes including HMS Delerain which jointly sank the first enemy submarine in Australian waters at 1:35 in the afternoon on the 20th of January 1942.
38 minutes, 47 seconds
Sydney buried it under park grass and residential apartments. We always forget the dirty work that built the clean view. The smelter funded the cathedral.
38 minutes, 58 seconds
The iron works paid for the parliament.
39 minutes, 1 second
The boiler's son became governor general.
39 minutes, 5 seconds
We poor bumenumen over the foundations and call it progress. The cost of forgetting is not a heritage cost. It is
39 minutes, 12 seconds
a civic cost. A city that does not know what built it cannot tell its own children how it got here. Lesson two.
39 minutes, 21 seconds
The state will always override the suburb. Lyart council refused an application for a container warf at the Mort's dock site in 1965.
39 minutes, 31 seconds
The maritime services board overrode that refusal in 1966 and issued its own 10-year plan.
39 minutes, 39 seconds
The container warf was forced onto the foreshore. The buildings came down in 1967.
39 minutes, 45 seconds
The dry dock was bulldozed into in 1968.
39 minutes, 50 seconds
The terminal that all of this destruction was meant to serve closed in 1989 after 20 years. Read that sequence
39 minutes, 57 seconds
again. Local democracy said no. State power said yes. Two decades later, the
40 minutes, 5 seconds
state's chosen project failed and was abandoned. The buildings cannot be unbuilt. The dock cannot be unburied.
40 minutes, 13 seconds
The container terminal, which was the entire stated reason for the destruction, lasted barely longer than a working career.
40 minutes, 21 seconds
Every time you read a planning notice in your local paper that says a state authority has overridden a council refusal, remember the rectangle of stone in the grass at Mort Bay Park.
40 minutes, 33 seconds
Lesson three. A buried place is still a place.
40 minutes, 39 seconds
The dock is still down there under the lawn under the kids playing on a Saturday afternoon.
40 minutes, 46 seconds
Heritage Protection came to the site in 1989, the same year the container terminal closed. A state heritage plaque
40 minutes, 54 seconds
was unveiled at the former dry dock on the 22nd of May 2011. The dry dock walls, the queson, the bolards on the
41 minutes, 2 seconds
foreshore are now protected. They are also invisible to anyone not specifically looking for them.
41 minutes, 10 seconds
There is a strange comfort in that. The maritime services board could fill the dry dock. It could not unmake it.
41 minutes, 19 seconds
Underneath the bumen and underneath the grass, the stone walls Mortzfree workforce cut in 1854 still stand.
41 minutes, 27 seconds
Buried is not gone. The dock is waiting.
41 minutes, 34 seconds
200 years from now, if Sydney ever has reason to dig it out again, it will still be there.
41 minutes, 41 seconds
A buried place is still a place.
41 minutes, 45 seconds
And the city that buries its industrial origins may yet one day decide to dig them back up.
41 minutes, 53 seconds
The same logic applies to the people.
41 minutes, 56 seconds
William John Mccel, the boiler maker who became governor general, is remembered on a plaque at St. Mary's Cathedral in
42 minutes, 3 seconds
Sydney where he was sworn in. Nick Oglass, the striker who became mayor, has a small park named for him further
42 minutes, 12 seconds
up Darling Street. The 700 final shiftmen of November 1958 have no memorial at all. Their names sit only in
42 minutes, 22 seconds
dusty pay ledgers in the null Butland archives at the Australian National University.
42 minutes, 28 seconds
They were the last men to work in Australian first. They are also the easiest to forget.
42 minutes, 35 seconds
6 weeks after Pearl Harbor, off the coast of Ba'ist Island, the corvette built in this dock dropped its depth
42 minutes, 41 seconds
charges and 80 Japanese submariners did not come home. I am standing on the grass that used to be the dock floor.
42 minutes, 50 seconds
The child has caught up with the ball and is running back the other way.
42 minutes, 54 seconds
Somewhere under that lawn, the dock that sank the first Japanese submarine in Australian waters is still waiting for now.














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