Macdonaldtown: The phantom Sydney suburb with just a train station

It has its own train station and blog, but does this poorly defined neighbourhood in Sydney’s inner west deserve official suburb status?

The answer: it depends who you ask. 

This author lived on Wilson Street near the train station for several years in the 2000s and often heard neighbours refer to the leafy, tucked-away area – which occupies the north-east corner of Newtown – as Macdonaldtown.

Few Sydneysiders realise that the term “Macdonaldtown” once referred to a much larger portion of the inner west. Photo: Wade Laube

But few Sydneysiders realise that the term “Macdonaldtown” once referred to a much larger portion of the inner west – most of which is now referred to as Erskineville.

According to Matt Murphy, the station commander of Newtown Fire Station and a keen historian, Macdonaldtown became a council area in 1872. “But even then, parts of Macdonaldtown were known as Erskineville in reference to a local resident, Reverend George Erskine,” he says.

“Then, a couple of years later, Erskineville school and Erskineville railway station were constructed.”

The entrance to MacDonaldtown Railway Station in 1968 Photo: Bob (Robert) Rice/Fairfax Media

Almost as soon as Macdonaldtown had been born, locals began agitating for a name change to better reflect the settler heritage of the area. Then a gruesome event occurred.

In 1892, workmen discovered several baby corpses in the backyard of John and Sarah Makin, a couple who had been making money as ‘baby farmers’ by raising the illegitimate children of young mothers, for a weekly sum.

“The locals at the time believed those murders led to the push to change the name,” says Michael Halloran, a tax consultant and the author of the Macdonaldtown Bicycle Club history blog.

Leamington St, photographed in 1992. At the time Macfonaldown and the inner-west of Sydney was considered far less desirable. Photo: Greg White/Fairfax Media

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“But my research shows that there was talk of changing the name to Erskineville even before those horrible murders occurred. The deaths simply added momentum.”

During the 1800s, much of the land around Macdonaldtown station was owned by Nicholas Devine, who came to Australia on the Second Fleet. When he died, Devine’s chief servant, a man called Bernard Rochford, decided to make a land grab.

“Rochford assumed control of the property and proceeded to sell it off to various people, including the Lord Mayor of Sydney, the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and other wealthy people – but he really had no right to do so,” says Murphy.

Leamington St today. Photo: Google Street View

When Devine’s relatives in Ireland eventually got wind of the events, they travelled to Australia and began court proceedings to reclaim the land from its most recent owners. 

“It was the largest court case that the colony had ever seen,” says Murphy. “It went on for eight years.”

The case – which is detailed in Murphy’s book Weight of Evidence – was big news in Sydney, and discouraged others from purchasing land around Devine’s original holding, in case those properties too became contested.

A terrace in MacDonaldtown, photographed in 1982. Photo: Paul Matthews/Fairfax Media

The case was finally settled around the time that Macdonaldtown became Erskineville, but the bias towards the area near the station remained. For several years, according to Murphy, buyers avoided much of the land in the vicinity. The suburb borderline between Newtown and Erskineville firmed up. Then, in the early 1900s, local real estate agents decided to revive the Macdonaldtown name.

“The current-day perception of Macdonaldtown being around the station and North Newtown arises from early-1900s real-estate posters,” says Halloran. “They wanted a romantic name for the area.”

But the “Macdonaldtown” revival didn’t last long – it seemed that Sydneysiders had formed entrenched negative views about the name which persisted for much of the 20th century.

“In 1982, the findings of a survey by the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University were released, in which it interviewed 357 people, including 101 real estate agents, asking them to rate a list of 480 Sydney suburbs in terms of perceived social status,” says Murphy.

“Despite not existing as a suburb since 1893, a fact that the survey itself acknowledged, Macdonaldtown came in at 480th.”

And according to LJ Hooker Newtown agent Nick Moraitis, “We don’t call the area around the train station Macdonaldtown any more. It’s either North Newtown or Erskineville.”

However, residents of the quiet streets on the border between north Newtown and Erskineville seem to have lately revived the term as a way of distinguishing their neighbourhood from the more boisterous areas around it.

In some corners, there is a uniformity of residential construction which creates a tight-knit feel. The old Pines Estate, a parcel of land off Wilson Street that was subdivided into 146 terraced houses in the late 1880s, is “a little community all by itself,” according to Murphy.

As for the station? It continues to operate (despite having low foot traffic), thanks in part to its location alongside several of Cityrail’s carriage storage areas.

Halloran believes the secluded area’s rich history might yet lead to a broader revival of the Macdonaldtown moniker. “There are still plenty of rabbit holes for historians to go down,” he says.