What nine in ten tenants at Barangaroo South are staying for

Barangaroo was cremated with her fishing gear beside her. More than two centuries later, nine in ten office tenants making future commitments in the precinct that carries her name chose to stay. She was a Camaraygal woman from the north side of Sydney Harbour, a master fisherwoman and, by one account, the main food provider for her people. The smallpox epidemic of 1789 killed her husband and two of her children. When British officers began recording her name in 1790, she was married to Bennelong, and Watkin Tench described her as ‘fierce and unsubmissive’. She died in 1791, shortly after giving birth to a daughter, and Bennelong buried her ashes in the gardens of First Government House.

Her name now belongs to a precinct of towers, lanes and waterfront on Gadigal Country, at the western edge of the Sydney CBD. In February 2024, Lendlease reported that about 90 per cent of Barangaroo South tenants had chosen to recommit to the precinct. KPMG was among the tenants that stayed, renewing its 14 floors in Tower Three until 2034.

Barangaroo Reserve and the newly completed International Towers, seen from the headland looking toward the Sydney CBD. Photograph courtesy State Library of New South Wales.

The tenants explained their decisions in the language of place. KPMG’s NSW chairman, Doug Ferguson, said the precinct had ‘transformed into a thriving community’ and that ‘our staff feel genuinely proud to bring their families and friends and show them where they work’. Vanessa Hicks of TPG Telecom, a new tenant, called the move ‘a hit with our employees’, with ‘around 1,000 more people a month coming into our office’. Lendlease’s Vanessa Orth described Barangaroo as ‘a community that has its own identity, personality’.

Any precinct can build a food hall, a gym and a childcare centre. None can build the history of its own site; it can only find and embed it.

Pride of that kind attaches to a place, and a place’s identity has to come from somewhere. At Barangaroo South a significant part of it comes from history. It is in the name on every address in the precinct, the name of a woman who fed her people from this harbour. It is in Esme Timbery and Jonathan Jones’s shellwall 2015, a seven-storey wall of shells at the entrance to Wulugul Walk. And it is in the waterfront itself, open to the public after generations as a restricted working port.

That port is still close to the surface. From the nineteenth century, this edge of the harbour was wharves, shipyards and goods handling, and Hickson Road, which still runs past the towers, was the Hungry Mile, named for the waterside workers who went along it looking for a day’s hire. In 2018, excavations for the new Metro station just north of the precinct uncovered late-nineteenth-century seawalls, steps into the harbour and the foundations of Dibbs Wharf, used for shipbuilding in the 1890s.

Any precinct can build a food hall, a gym and a childcare centre. None can build the history of its own site; it can only find and embed it. A project’s identity is set early, in its masterplan, its public domain, its names, its art – and history can shape those decisions if someone has found and understood it before they are made. Applied later, it can be written onto a place but not built into it.

That is the work of Site Intelligence: archival and documentary research commissioned at acquisition or early feasibility, which establishes what a site has been, what it still carries, and where its opportunities and risks lie. Placemaking Strategy takes those findings into the public domain, so the history of a site becomes part of the place its tenants choose to stay in. At Barangaroo South, nine in ten of them did.

Sources

1. Nicole Cama, ‘Barangaroo’, Dictionary of Sydney blog, 2017, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/blog/barangaroo.

2. Lendlease, ‘Strong momentum at Barangaroo as KPMG renews lease’, media release, 13 February 2024, https://www.lendlease.com/siteassets/lendlease/shared/media-centre/media-releases/2024/02/230213_mr_strong-momentum-at-barangaroo-as-kpmg-renews-lease.pdf.

3. State Library of New South Wales, ‘Looking to learn’, Food of the colony learning resource, 2021, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/learning/food-colony/looking-learn.

4. Property Council of Australia, Office Market Report, January 2024 (chartbook), https://www.propertycouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OMR241-Chartbook.pdf.

5. ‘“Beyond a building”: the flight to quality office space continues’, Property Australia, 28 February 2024, https://www.propertycouncil.com.au/property-australia/beyond-a-building-the-flight-to-quality-office-space-continues.

6. Barangaroo, ‘shellwall 2015’, https://www.barangaroo.com/see-do-stay/shell-wall-2015.

7. Philip Thalis, ‘In retrospect: lessons from the international design competition for Barangaroo’, Urban Design Review, 20 March 2024, https://urbandesignreview.com/in-retrospect-lessons-from-the-international-design-competition-for-barangaroo/.

8. Sydney Metro, ‘Maritime history from the 1800s uncovered at Barangaroo’, 2 November 2018, https://www.sydneymetro.info/article/maritime-history-1800s-uncovered-barangaroo.