Sewering Maitland
Sophisticated sewerage reticulation as a means of disposing of human wastes is today regarded as essential, a basic mark of civilisation in urban areas. It was not always thus. Well into the twentieth century, Maitland’s sewage disposal was primitive. Worse, it posed a serious health hazard.
Disposal methods of the past
In the Maitland of the late 1800s hundreds of out-houses (tiny buildings outside dwellings and located in tiny backyards) drained wastes into the soil. Eventually the wastes percolated to the Hunter River. Often there were wells adjacent to the cesspits, a contamination liability and a risk to public health especially in the more densely-populated areas occupied by low-income people living in very basic housing in areas like Irishtown and Horseshoe Bend. Unpleasant smells were constants in these areas and, more importantly, deaths occurred from typhoid, diphtheria, cholera and dysentery.
Domestic ‘slops’ disposed of in back yards, streets and creeks added to the unpleasantness and the risk to health. In clay-soil areas above the floodplains, wastes buried in backyards were a particular problem because they did not seep away as quickly as in areas built on alluvial soils.
In the wealthier areas with their substantial houses, indoor lavatories (water closets, in the language of the times) were flushed from roof tanks into septic tanks located beneath lawns. The grass, it was said, was always greener over the septic tanks.
Maitland in 1898 had 1400 cesspits. These were gradually closed down by public order, and the contents of outdoor ‘dunnies’ were dealt with instead via the ‘pan’ system, waste collected weekly by men at night and tipped into tanks on horse-drawn carts and in later times trucks. ‘Dan the pan man’, pan on his shoulder, was central to this activity: the Dans were employed by the councils of West Maitland, East Maitland and Morpeth. The contents of the tanks were taken to areas on the edges of the built-up areas – in East Maitland’s case some of it to a paddock at Rathluba – and ploughed in.
A pan or ‘dunny can’, about 1940s
Some almost certainly went to the several market gardens operated around Maitland by Chinese farmers especially in the Louth Park-South Maitland area. In China, nightsoil had been used for millennia to fertilise areas used for growing vegetables.
By 1912, as the pan system spread, there were only 300 cesspits remaining in Maitland. This was an improvement on what had gone before: wastes were being removed from residential areas.
In Newcastle before pans, nightsoil had been taken out to sea on punts and dumped, went to the foreshore, into disused mine shafts (as presumably happened at Maitland as well) or was buried at the racecourse at Hamilton. Amazingly, some was buried in sand within 50 metres of the Newcastle Hospital. These disposal methods were unsatisfactory from environmental and health standpoints, and the institution of the pan system again represented improvement on the traditional methods. But pans too were to be superseded in due course by something better.
The development of the modern sewerage system
The development of ‘modern’ sewerage reticulation in the Maitland area can be said to have begun in 1897, when the Maitland Borough Council asked the colonial government to provide a better system to dispose of wastes. A scheme was designed by the Public Works Department but implementing it was problematic because of its high cost. The Hunter District Water Supply and Sewerage Board nevertheless declared the existing sanitary arrangements in Maitland to be obsolete, unsatisfactory and in need of change.
Eventually, financial assistance to build the Maitland scheme was sought from the Commonwealth government. Plans were completed by 1928 and work began in 1935 with the passage of the Maitland District Sewerage Act and an unemployment relief vote being instituted to pay for the construction. Hundreds of men were employed in the work, part of the widespread effort to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression which saw many thrown out of employment.
In 1939, the Water Supply and Sewerage Board (which had been established in 1892) took over the management of the Maitland scheme which by 1940 had provided sewerage for the entire built-up areas of West Maitland and East Maitland as they then existed. Difficulties, especially in West Maitland, resulted from the low elevation of some of the housing.
The treatment works, to which later suburban developments were to be connected, were outside Morpeth with provision for Morpeth itself to be connected ‘should the township ever be sewered’. Fortunately, it was. The scheme was amplified as necessary to serve the expanding built-up areas and new suburbs of the growing City of Maitland. Effluent, once treated, was discharged into the Hunter River.
Part of the waste water treatment works outside Morpeth
In the early years of the scheme, established areas were retrofitted with sewerage infrastructure. Later the reticulation occurred as new subdivisions were developed. Increasingly, people thus moved into new homes with indoor lavatories the norm and with sewerage and other services like electricity, telephone lines and in recent times NBN connections already provided along with kerbs and gutters, footpaths and sealed streets. Undoubtedly, this represented progress.
References
Armstrong, JW , Pipelines and People: the Hunter District Water Board, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1967.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: outdoor dunnies and pans – a job on the nose’, Maitland Mercury, 13 October 2023
