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Darling Harbour History
History
Darling Harbour was originally part of the commercial port of Sydney. The Harbour was named so after Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling who was Governor of New South Wales from 1825 to 1831. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the original inhabitants of the regions around the Sydney Cove, the Cadigals, called the Darling Harbour Timbalong meaning the “place where seafood is found.” When Sydney was founded in 1788, the unusual length of the bay earned for itself the name “Long Cove.” Later on the area came to be known as Cockle Bay because of the shell middens, a leftover from the Cadigals who had inhabited the area for generations. It was in 1826 that the bay was officially named Darling Harbour in recognition of Governor Ralph Darling’s services.
Commissioned by Governor Macquarie in 1812, Darling Harbour had grown from a busy marketplace to an area of major industrial premises. By the mid 1970s, the area had become a picture of neglect and non-use with abandoned warehouses, wharves, and train lines. In 1984, the NSW State Government under Labor Premier Neville Wran, proposed redevelopment of the area in order to “return it to the people of Sydney after 150 years of industrial use.” During Great Depression, a large population of the workers on the waterside had become unemployed and East Darling Harbour for a long time had come to be known as the Hungry Mile. The area had become so run down and neglected that the government of New South Wales proposed redevelopment of the Harbour as a tourist hot spot under the initiative of the then Minister for Public Works, Laurie Brereton.
