RHODES, NEW SOUTH WALES

'Rhodes' is a suburb in the inner-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Rhodes is located 16 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Canada Bay.
Rhodes sits on a peninsula between Bray Bay and Homebush Bay, on the southern bank of the Parramatta River. It is loacted about 3 kilometres from the Telstra Stadium, Olympic Park (home of the 2000 Summer Olympics), Sydney International Aquatic Centre, Bicentennial Park and Millennium Parklands.

Contents

Transport

History

Development

Commercial Area

Parks

References

External links

Transport

Rhodes railway station is on the Northern line of the CityRail network. The station is about 30 minutes from the Sydney CBD, by rail.
The Ryde Bridge links Rhodes to Ryde, across the Parramatta River.

History

Rhodes was named after the home of an early resident, Thomas walker (1791-1861), which was built on the north-eastern side of the peninsula. Walker named his property Rhodes after his grandmother's home, Rhodes Hall, in Leeds, England. The house was demolished in 1919, when the land was purchased by the John Darling Flour Mills, later owned by Allied Feeds Limited.

Development

During the period from about 1930 to the mid-1980s the western third (between Homebush Bay and the Railway line) of this small suburb was taken up by chemical manufacturing. The main manufacturers were Berger Paints, CSR Chemicals (Australia's major manufacturer of phthalates later taken over by Orica Chemicals, then a subsidiary of ICI), Union Carbide now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company which made Agent Orange, used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War at its Rhodes plant, and Allied Feeds, a grain and stock feeds company which sat on a site which had been substantially reclaimed from the Parramatta River by Union Carbide who used the reclamation area as a dumping ground for its contaminated industrial waste, contaminating land and sediments with dioxin.

Commercial Area

These former industrial sites are being remediated and converted to high density residential, major retail developments such as the Rhodes Shopping Centre (including IKEA) and office blocks. The remediation of the former Union Carbide site, the former Allied Feeds site and a strip of heavily dioxin contaminated sediments in Homebush Bay have been the subject of extensive analysis, investigations and community activism, including by the Rhodes Peninsula Group (http://rhodesnsw.org).

Parks

The redeveloped area will have a full length foreshore path and cycleway linking in with the extensive network of foreshore parks in Sydney. The other half of the suburb is in two sections, one between the railway line and Concord Road and the other section east of Concord Road.
There are a number of foreshore parks in the Eastern part of the suburb, including the Kokoda Track a memorial to those killed in Papua New Guinea on the Kokoda Track during World War II.

References

★ ''The Book of Sydney Suburbs'', Compiled by Frances Pollen, Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1990, Published in Australia ISBN 0-207-14495-8

External links