Australia's first deep drainage in Adelaide from 1881, with sewage farm at Islington; typhoid almost gone
The workforce in about 1880 at Candler & McNamee, plumbing contractors for Adelaide's deep drainage and sewage work, based in Wakefield Street, Adelaide, east of St Andrew's Church, later Willard Hall.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
In the late 1880s, a stream of distinguished overseas and interstate visitors came to admire Adelaide’s Australian first – a deep drainage and sewerage scheme. They included the mayors of Sydney and Melbourne, the Victoria royal sanitary commission and the Medical congress of Victoria.
More crucially, Adelaide’s rate of mortality dropped from 23.5 in 1000 in 1881, when the scheme came into use, to 14.3 per 1000 five years later. Typhoid was almost completely eliminated in urban areas.
The South Australian parliament’s two houses had almost unanimously approved in 1878 An Act for the Better Sewerage and Cleansing of the City of Adelaide and Suburbs Thereof, with work to be overseen by the new young head of the government’s hydraulics engineer’s department, Oswald Brown, backed by an intelligent commissioner for works in G.C. Hawker (1877-81) who paved the way for ministerial responsibility and accepting the advice of astute department heads.
The plumbing contract for the drainage and sewage work was given to Candler & McNamee of Wakefield Street, Adelaide. The work at first had a smell problem from its ventilators that pipe technology gradually fixed.
Brown’s vision extended deep drainage to suburbs beyond the city and North Adelaide, kicking up costs. Kensington and Norwood Council even rejected deep drainage for its area until premier Thomas Playford II ordered it to happen in 1888.
The other major construction aspect of the scheme was the 470-acres sewage farm at Tam O’Shanter Belt, later Islington (site of the future railway workshops, and chosen over Findon). The main sewers, chiefly cement concrete in oviform section, were complete by John Styles and the firm of Walker, Swan and Styles. On January 7, 1881, the whole of the sewage previously running into the River Torrens was taken along the main sewer to the sewage farm.
The farm grew luxuriant crops but its orchard and dairy had to be abandoned because of prejudice against its product. By 1888, with a view to fatterning stock, lucerne, Italian rye grass, marigolds, sorghum, wheat, barley, vines and wattles were all grown and the cheese room and drairies converted into silos. Pig breeding was profitable and the farm had its own smokehouse.