Sydney in the 1950s
In 1948 a county council barely a year old published a plan for the whole of Sydney. The County of Cumberland Planning Scheme zoned land use across the metropolitan area, reserved open space, and drew a green belt running from the Hawkesbury in the north through Prospect to the Royal National Park in the south. It was gazetted in 1951, and it is still the most complete statement any Australian city has made about the shape it meant to take.
The decade then spent itself outgrowing the plan. Sydney counted 1,863,217 people at the 1954 census and 2,183,231 by 1961, and the arrival of the difference is visible from the air: gridded streets at Punchbowl with cleared paddocks still lying between the houses, a hospital and its rail corridor at Lewisham, factories wedged hard against terrace rows at Camperdown. The maps of the decade are road maps. Gregory's *Sydney & Suburbs* runs from Palm Beach and Mona Vale down to Cronulla and Port Hacking, which is not a convenience — it is a definition of the city, and a new one.
The Main Roads Department supplied the plan's expressway network: five radial routes out of the centre and a ring road around it. A 1952 sheet has them ruled over inner Sydney and the eastern suburbs in hard straight lines, through Paddington and Moore Park and out towards Waverley and Kingsford. Most were never built. The few that were are why those suburbs look the way they do.
None of that stopped the city filling its own streets. For the Jubilee of Federation in January 1951 the crowds came in their hundreds of thousands to watch the floats go by — the Boy Scouts on theirs promising "Happy Healthy Citizens" — and they are photographed from above, packed right to the kerb. At the edges, something older is finishing. A four-engined flying boat still lies at its moorings off Rose Bay with a launch tied alongside the pontoon and a man in a suit out on the jetty; the last Qantas service left there at midnight on 16 August 1955. And on any hot Saturday the whole apparatus empties onto the sand at Bondi and Coogee, which is, in the end, what the expressways were for.
