Camden Dreamtime

The Camden Progress Association and a search for a utopia

Camden is like many country towns across Australia. The civic fathers from the town's foundation in 1840 sought progress and development for the community. There was a desire for constant improvement.

The Camden News had numerous references to the town's progress, and the civic fathers founded the Camden Progress Association.  The association held the first meeting in November 1896 with the aim of town improvements. The association was still active in the early 20th century.

The notion of progress assumes that you are going somewhere or working towards some type of endpoint, a goal. What were the Camden's civic fathers working towards in the 1890s? 

One view of the Camden Progress Association was that they searched for a desired or perfect state of their world. It could be argued that they were in search of mythical utopia where everything was in a perfect or desired state.

Nepean River at Camden at a spot called Little Sandy. (CIPP)

This view of the world dates from the time of the Enlightenment and assumes that time is linear and irreversible. Ancients thought differently about the world. The Ancient Greeks and others thought the time was cyclical based around decay and rebirth.

The Camden civic fathers were from a British cultural tradition that viewed time as a linear progression. In what became known as the Whig interpretation of history, especially in the Victorian and Edwardian times,  human history was seen as the progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science.

Wikipedia states:

Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress.

Underpinning these notions was an accompanying cultural tradition that that world was constructed in terms of binary oppositions, for example, good/evil, black/white, big/small, dark/light, on/off, hot/cold, ugly/beautiful, right/wrong, chaos/order, life/death, love/hate, male/female, hero/coward, young/old, confinement/freedom, and others. 

One of the first to argue over life in this fashion was ancient Greek philosopher Plato and much later in the 19th-century German philosopher GWF Hegel. Here is the concept was called dialectics.

All cultures have some version of binary opposition and in Chinese philosophy and religion yin is represented by negative, dark, feminine and yang by positive, bright, masculine. 

American historian Christopher Lasch that the ideological twin of progress was nostalgia. Nostalgia involves 'the pastoral' is an idea dating from the Ancient Greeks and in literature is relates to the idyll of rural life and usually involves shepherds herding flocks of sheep in open paddocks.

In his book Hunters and Collectors, Australian historian Tom Griffiths argues there have been nostalgia wave in Australia in the 1850s, 1890s, 1930s, 1970s prompted by 'loss, depression or disruption'. In each of these waves of nostalgia, people were searching for a past.

characterised by popular yearnings for the intimate world of early colonial beginnings for lost rural places.  (Griffiths: p.197

In the 1930s the Camden community searched for the Englishness of their past, as they were in the 1840s and 1890s. Nostalgia re-appeared in Camden in the 1980s when increased urbanisation sent the Camden community in search of their own lost rural Arcadia. 

 'A Country Town Idyll' at Camden

Sydney’s urban expansion into the local area has challenged the community’s identity and threatened to suffocate Camden’s sense of place. In the face of this onslaught, many in Camden yearn for a lost past when Sydney was further away, times were simpler, and life was slower. A type of rural Arcadia, which I have called ‘a country town idyll’.

Camden John Street with a view of St John Church in the 1890s. This view was taken by Charles Kerry (CIPP)

 The ‘country town idyll’ is an idealised version of a country town from an imagined past that uses history to construct imagery based on Camden’s heritage buildings and other material fabric.


At the heart of the idyll is the view that Camden should retain its iconic imagery of a picturesque country town with the church on the hill, surrounded by a rustic rural landscape made up of the landed estates of the colonial gentry.


Its supporters created the idyll to isolate Camden, like an island, in the sea of urbanisation and development that has enveloped the town.





Curran's Hill housing development in the 1990s (Camden Images)

 These are the values that the supporters of Camden’s ‘country town idyll’ have encouraged and then expressed in the language they used to describe it.


They talk about retaining Camden’s ‘country town atmosphere’, or retaining ‘Camden’s country charm’, or ‘country town character’. They describe the town as being ‘picturesque’, or having ‘charming cottages’.


Camden is a working country town’, or is simply ‘my country town’. These elements evoke an emotional attachment to a place that existed in the past when Camden was a small quiet country town that relied on farming for its existence.



Argyle Street Camden 1938 (Camden Images)

The origins of the ‘country town idyll’ are to be found in the rural ethos that is drawn from within the nineteenth-century rural traditions brought from Great Britain, where there was a romantic view of the country, that had an ordered, stable, comfortable organic small community in harmony with the natural surroundings.


Elements of this rural culture have been variously described as 'countrymindedness', 'rural ideology', 'rural ethos', 'ruralism', and a 'rural idyll'. They have been a preoccupation of many scholars, including contemporary writers, like the Australian poet Les Murray.


Within this tradition, there is an Arcadian notion of a romantic view of rural life. There is a distinction drawn between the metropolis and the village, commonly known as the town/country divide.


This was the essence of pre-war Camden (a town of around 2000) where rural culture provided the stability of a closed community that was suspicious of outsiders, especially those from the city, with life ordered by social rank, personal contacts familial links. It was confined by conservatism, patriarchy and an Anglo-centric view of the world.

Updated 17 January 2021. Originally posted 18 November 2013.

Jacarandas Removed in Central Camden

Protesters from the Camden Community Alliance express their objection to the removal of jacarandas in Argyle Street Camden on 12 August 2015. Members of the Alliance have ramped up their protests in recent weeks. The protesters are standing on the corner of Oxley and Argyle Streets. This is one of several street protests that the Alliance members have conducted in recent weeks.

Camden Council contractors removing the jacarandas at the intersection of Oxley and Argyle Streets in Camden. These works are part of the Town Centre Improvements that the council approved in 2014. The Camden Community Alliance has requested meetings with council and they have been declined. One of the principle objections mounted by the Alliance is the lack of engagement by council over these matters.

The Camden Community Alliance members protested this week over the removal of Jacaranda trees in Argyle Street to make way for traffic lights at the intersection with Oxley Street. 

Earlier the week Alliance members made their presence felt at the meeting of Camden Council. They were expressing their increasing frustration when council staff took questions on notice at the meeting. Mayor Symkowiak adjourned the meeting for 5 minutes, hoping the meeting could be continued, according to the Macarthur Chronicle report.

Later in the meeting local residents called out from the public gallery and the council meeting was adjourned on two more occasions.

A post of the Camden Community Alliance Facebook page maintained that it was 'impossible' for members 'to contain their voices any longer'. The post said that it was sad that it had all come to this and Alliance members looked quite radical over these matters.

The council meeting ended with cries of 'shame' from the gallery.

See Camden Community Alliance Facebook page

Camden's Interwar Heritage 1919-1939

What is the significance of the interwar period in Camden's history? It is one of the hidden parts of the town's past between 1919 and 1939.  It is all around the local community, yet few know much about it.

Royal Hotel demolished in 1973 (CHS/E Kernohan)

  

Interwar Prosperity

The interwar period in Camden was a time of economic development and material progress. The prosperity of the period was driven by the local dairy industry and the emerging coal industry.  

The population of the town grew by over 35 per cent between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, so that in 1939 the town was the centre of a district that covered 455 square miles (1180 square kilometres) and with a population of over 5000.



Administration centre

Camden was one of the most important commercial and administrative centres between Sydney and Goulburn. The town was the centre of the police district, it had the regional hospital, it was the largest population centre, and it was a transport node of a district which spread from Campbelltown to the lower Blue Mountains.

The former Bank of New South Wales building at 121 Argyle Street Camden building in 1938 (I Willis 2009)

Hume Highway

During the interwar period, one of the most important economic arteries of the town was the Hume Highway (until 1928 the Great South Road). Most understood the value of the rail connection to Camden; most obviously because you heard it, smelt it and saw it. 

Yet few understand the significance of the Hume. The highway had run up the town’s main street from colonial times, until 1973 when it was moved to the Camden Bypass, and then moved in 1980 to the freeway.



Cook's Garage, 1936 on Hume Highway Camden, the height of modernism (Camden Images) 

Consumerism and Modernism

The highway and railway were the conduits that brought the international influences of modernism and consumerism to the town and the goods and services that supported them.  

These forces influenced the development of the local motor industry, the establishment of the local cinemas, and the local airfield development. These were all important economic, social and cultural forces for the time. 

‘Locals’ travelled to the city for higher-order retail goods, specialist services and entertainment, while the landed gentry escaped to the cosmopolitan centre of the British Empire, London. Conversely, the Sydney elite experienced the new gentlemanly pastime of flying at the Macquarie Grove Airfield.  

 

Camden Airfield 1930s Macquarie Grove Flying School (Camden Images)

Services

For a country town of its size, the town had modern facilities and was up-to-date with the latest technology. 

The town had two weekly newspapers, Camden News and the Camden Advertiser, there was the opening of the telephone exchange (1910), the installation of reticulated gas (1912), electricity (1929), replacement of gas street lighting with electric lights (1932) and a sewerage system (1939), and by 1939 the population has increased to 2394. 

The town’s prosperity allowed the Presbyterians built a new church (1938), while several ‘locals’ built solid brick cottages that reflected their confidence in the town’s future.

Macaria is one of the most important Victorian buildings in the Camden town centre in John Street. (2017, Fairfax)

 Gentry Estates and Dairying

The interwar period's prosperity did not upset the situation where the town still dominated by the colonial gentry and their estates. 

Apart from their convict labour in the early years, they established a class and social relations system that ordered daily life in the town from its foundation until after the Second World War.  

While the townsmen dominated the early period of local government, by Federation the landed gentry had usurped their power and had imposed their political mantra of conservatism on the area. 

The dominance of the Macarthur’s Camden Park over the local economy during the interwar period was characterised by the Camden Vale milk processing factory (1926) adjacent to the railway. 

The company developed TB free milk and marketed it through the Camden Vale Milk Bar, a retail outlet on the Hume Highway (1939); complete with a drive-through. 

The motor car

The interwar was a period of transition, and increasingly the motor car replaced the horse in town, and on the farm, the horse was replaced by the tractor, all of which supported the growing number of garages in the town. 

The interwar landscape was characterised by personalised service, along with home and farm deliveries by both horse and cart and motor cars.  
 

Argyle Street Camden, Hume Highway 1940 (Camden Images)

Bucolic charm

The layout and shape of interwar Camden have changed little from the 19^th century, and the town centre has a certain bucolic charm and character that is the basis of the community’s identity and sense of place. 

The strip shopping and mixed land use support the country feel that has become the basis of the modern ‘country town idyll’.   




The entrance to Camden at the northern end of town along Argyle Street (CC)

Rural-urban fringe

In recent years, Camden has been targeted by the New South Wales government as one of the Sydney metropolitan area's growth centres. It has become part of Sydney’s exurbanistion on the rural-urban fringe. 

City types move out of the city looking for places where ‘the country looks like the country’.  This only re-enforced the duality of the love/hate relationship the community had with Sydney, which was part of the rural ideology of the area based on the city and country divide.

A country town idyll

For their part, the ‘locals’ have retreated to nostalgia in the form of an arcadian view of the world through a ‘country town idyll’.  

The idyll's romance is based on the iconic imagery of Camden as a picturesque English village, with the church on the hill, surrounded by rural vistas.  

The idyll has become a defence mechanism against the onslaught from Sydney’s urbanization and the interwar heritage that is part of its iconic landscape.

Many of the stories about the interwar period are told in this book the Pictorial History of Camden and District.

Updated 16 January 2021. Originally posted 12 September 2013.