Greenwich property

The first people of the Greenwich area were the Cammeraygal, a clan among the Dharug-speaking people of the Eora Nation. They lived along the harbour foreshores, hunted in the hinterland and traded with other clans. The land sits on the harbour's northern side, where the Lane Cove River opens.

In 1788 Lieutenant Henry Ball became the first European known to have passed through the area, on his way back from a trip to Middle Harbour. Grants of land started in 1794, and industries appeared in the area over the 1830s. Aboriginal people were still there in the 1820s. Disease and displacement drove them out by the 1860s.

Samuel Lightfoot, a convict, received a grant in 1794, and William Gore, a public servant, received one in 1813. Gore's road linked his Artarmon farm with Gore Cove, and Greenwich Road began as that route. George Green, with his father Amaziah, bought land with harbour access in the 1830s, and, with others, started a shipbuilding industry along the foreshore.

The name Greenwich first appears when Green divided his land in 1840. Green's 20-acre estate gained Greenwich House in 1836, a two-storey Georgian home of sandstone blocks, which still stands where George and St Lawrence Streets meet. In 1853 mortgage holders sold the house to Gother Kerr Mann, and it stayed in his family until 1949.

The suburb's name comes from its namesake Greenwich, on the Thames in London. The Parramatta River had been called the 'Thames of the Antipodes', and nearby suburbs took the names of other Thames places: Putney, Woolwich and Henley. The eastern tip of the suburb is Manns Point, named for Gother Kerr Mann, who lived from 1809 to 1899. Mann held three posts: he built Fitzroy Dock, was Superintendent of convicts at Cockatoo Island, and became the first Chief Commissioner for Railways.

Greenwich Point had a school, a general store and a post office by the early 1880s, alongside around 16 houses. Upper Greenwich grew more slowly, and most of it stayed bush. Better roads on the north shore and more subdivision in upper Greenwich brought grander houses near River Road, and new estates were cut up as Greenwich turned into a commuter suburb.

Families named Anderson, Hogan, Mather and Clarke ran dairies in Greenwich from the 1880s to the 1940s. Boats carried Anderson's milk along the Lane Cove River and out to Cockatoo Island's residents. Hogan's dairy, at Chisholm Street, kept 300 cows and closed in 1928. Clarke's dairy stood where the golf course is now.

The Patent Asphaltum Company refined bitumen and made building materials, and other light industry lined the foreshores: shipbuilding, brickmaking and quarrying. Shell's terminal at Gore Bay, opened in 1901, imported and distributed petroleum products. Over the years it expanded to take in the Patent Asphaltum works, a number of wharves, and the shale oil refining works run by John Fell & Co. More than 500 people worked at the Shell site by the late 1930s, and fuel landed at Gore Bay now travels by pipe underground to the Clyde Refinery.

The first tunnel beneath Sydney Harbour had its northern portal in Greenwich. The New South Wales Government Railways dug it through to Birchgrove, so that electricity could reach the north shore tram network from the Pyrmont Power Station. Cables laid earlier on the harbour floor had been damaged when ships dragged their anchors. Work started in 1913, was done by hand, and the tunnel was finished in 1924.

Part of the tunnel ran through river silt, so pumping went on constantly until 1930, when it was allowed to flood; it stood abandoned from 1969. Nearly all of the digging happened on the Greenwich side, because residents at Long Nose Point in Balmain, now Birchgrove, objected successfully to the compressor noise that drove the pneumatic drills. The tunnel threads between the harbour floor and the Balmain coal mine beneath it, cut through Hawkesbury sandstone, and drops to 236 feet (72 metres) below sea level at its lowest point.

Several places in Greenwich are heritage-listed, among them Pallister at 95 River Road, Greenwich Infants School and the Sydney Harbour railway electricity tunnel.