Wetherill Park, New South Wales
Encyclopedia
Wetherill Park is a suburb
of south western Sydney
, in the state of New South Wales
, Australia
. Wetherill Park is located 34 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district
, in the local government area of the City of Fairfield
and is part of the Greater Western Sydney
region.
The 2006 census records Wetherill Park as having a resident population of 6,126 (of whom around half were born outside Australia) and an area of 11.2 sq km.
Most residents live in the south-east corner, the larger portion of the suburb being an industrial area.
Wetherill Park sits on the southern border of Prospect Reservoir
. Neighbouring suburbs include Bossley Park
, Horsley Park
, Prospect
, Smithfield
and Prairiewood
.
Waterworks, a local storekeeper, Samuel Booth, made available a section of his land for a school, free of charge. The school, called 'Macquarie Park', stood on what is now The Horsley Drive, just west of Maugham Crescent. It opened in May 1882 with 8 children but it was changed in June 1882 to 'Boothtown' for Samuel Booth’s involvement in the establishment of the school. In 1884 it became Reservoir Public School and in 1896, it became the Wetherill Park Public School . In 1986, the school relocated down the road to Lily Street and was renamed William Stimson Public School, in honour of the first mayor of the City of Fairfield
.
A characteristic of Wetherill Park is that all the streets are named after famous writers. Some examples include: Vidal Street (for Gore Vidal
), Shakespeare Street (for William Shakespeare
), Stevenson Street (for Robert Louis Stevenson
), Locke Street (for John Locke
), Gogol Place (for Nikolai Gogol
), Swinburne Crescent (for Richard Swinburne
), Homer Place (for Homer
), Emerson Street (for Ralph Waldo Emerson
), Wordsworth Street (for William Wordsworth
), Dickens Road (for Charles Dickens
), Longfellow Street (for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
), Chaucer Street (for Geoffrey Chaucer
), Ainsworth Crescent (for William Harrison Ainsworth
), Coleridge Road (for Samuel Taylor Coleridge
), Frost Close (for Robert Frost
), Gissing Street (for George Gissing
), Maugham Crescent for Somerset Maugham and Langland Street (for William Langland
).
Wetherill Park is a major shopping centre
in the area and features one of Australia's largest cinema complexes owned by Hoyts
. The shopping centre opened in 1983 and in recent years, underwent major renovations.
Wetherill Park Shopping Centre (now known as Market Town) opened in the early 1980s on the corner of The Horsley Drive and Rossetti Street, adjacent to Emerson Street Reserve tennis courts. It originally featured approximately 25 specialty shops, including a Franklins supermarket. In recent years, the shopping centre underwent renovations which saw the shopping complex completely reformed, and the rear parking lot expanded. Today, the complex also features a bowling centre.
Wetherill Park is home to the largest industrial estate in the Southern Hemisphere, with companies such as Jaguar, BMW
, Subaru
and Mercedes-Benz
situated in the area. Despite the heavy industrial presence, the suburb maintains a coppice environment dominated by eucaluptus trees.
Sydney Orbital motorway . The Horsley Drive is the major road which runs through Wetherill Park. Other major roads include Polding Street and Victoria Street.
.
Suburb
The word suburb mostly refers to a residential area, either existing as part of a city or as a separate residential community within commuting distance of a city . Some suburbs have a degree of administrative autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods...
of south western Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, in the state of New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. Wetherill Park is located 34 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district
Sydney central business district
The Sydney central business district is the main commercial centre of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It extends southwards for about 3 kilometres from Sydney Cove, the point of first European settlement. Its north–south axis runs from Circular Quay in the north to Central railway station in...
, in the local government area of the City of Fairfield
City of Fairfield
The City of Fairfield is a Local Government Area in the south-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia.- Suburbs in the local government area :Suburbs in the City of Fairfield are:* Abbotsbury* Bonnyrigg* Bonnyrigg Heights* Bossley Park...
and is part of the Greater Western Sydney
Greater Western Sydney
Greater Western Sydney is a term used to describe the western region of the metropolitan area of Sydney, Australia. The University of Western Sydney defines Greater Western Sydney as comprising 14 local government areas...
region.
The 2006 census records Wetherill Park as having a resident population of 6,126 (of whom around half were born outside Australia) and an area of 11.2 sq km.
Most residents live in the south-east corner, the larger portion of the suburb being an industrial area.
Wetherill Park sits on the southern border of Prospect Reservoir
Prospect reservoir
Prospect Reservoir is a water storage reservoir located at the headwaters of Prospect Creek in the Greater Western Sydney suburb of Prospect, in New South Wales, Australia. The dam wall is known as Prospect Dam.-History of the site:...
. Neighbouring suburbs include Bossley Park
Bossley Park, New South Wales
Bossley Park is a suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Bossley Park is located 36 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Fairfield...
, Horsley Park
Horsley Park, New South Wales
Horsley Park is a suburb of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Horsley Park is located 39 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Fairfield. Horsley Park is part of the Greater Western Sydney region...
, Prospect
Prospect, New South Wales
Prospect is a suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Prospect is located 32 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Blacktown and is part of the Greater Western Sydney region....
, Smithfield
Smithfield, New South Wales
* Highest Recorded Temperature: 44.2 °C* Lowest Recorded Temperature: -2.3 °C* Warmest Month: January* Coolest Month: July* Highest Precipitation: February* Lowest Precipitation: August-Demographics:...
and Prairiewood
Prairiewood, New South Wales
Prairiewood is a suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Prairiewood is located 34 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Fairfield and is part of the Greater Western Sydney region.Prairiewood is primarily a...
.
Aboriginal culture
Aboriginal people from the Cabrogal clan of the Gandangara tribe, have lived in the area for more than 30,000 years.European settlement
Wetherill Park was named after a businessman who offered 21 acres (84,984.1 m²) of his property to the State government as a park. The offer was accepted and the park was named after the donor. The first settlers in set up their homes north of the present school site at Wetherill Park. One hundred years ago, there were not enough homes in this suburb to need a school. With the commencement of the Prospect ReservoirProspect reservoir
Prospect Reservoir is a water storage reservoir located at the headwaters of Prospect Creek in the Greater Western Sydney suburb of Prospect, in New South Wales, Australia. The dam wall is known as Prospect Dam.-History of the site:...
Waterworks, a local storekeeper, Samuel Booth, made available a section of his land for a school, free of charge. The school, called 'Macquarie Park', stood on what is now The Horsley Drive, just west of Maugham Crescent. It opened in May 1882 with 8 children but it was changed in June 1882 to 'Boothtown' for Samuel Booth’s involvement in the establishment of the school. In 1884 it became Reservoir Public School and in 1896, it became the Wetherill Park Public School . In 1986, the school relocated down the road to Lily Street and was renamed William Stimson Public School, in honour of the first mayor of the City of Fairfield
City of Fairfield
The City of Fairfield is a Local Government Area in the south-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia.- Suburbs in the local government area :Suburbs in the City of Fairfield are:* Abbotsbury* Bonnyrigg* Bonnyrigg Heights* Bossley Park...
.
A characteristic of Wetherill Park is that all the streets are named after famous writers. Some examples include: Vidal Street (for Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
), Shakespeare Street (for William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
), Stevenson Street (for Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
), Locke Street (for John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
), Gogol Place (for Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...
), Swinburne Crescent (for Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
), Homer Place (for Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
), Emerson Street (for Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
), Wordsworth Street (for William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
), Dickens Road (for Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
), Longfellow Street (for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
), Chaucer Street (for Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
), Ainsworth Crescent (for William Harrison Ainsworth
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Harrison Ainsworth was an English historical novelist born in Manchester. He trained as a lawyer, but the legal profession held no attraction for him. While completing his legal studies in London he met the publisher John Ebers, at that time manager of the King's Theatre, Haymarket...
), Coleridge Road (for Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
), Frost Close (for Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
), Gissing Street (for George Gissing
George Gissing
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era.-Early life:...
), Maugham Crescent for Somerset Maugham and Langland Street (for William Langland
William Langland
William Langland is the conjectured author of the 14th-century English dream-vision Piers Plowman.- Life :The attribution of Piers to Langland rests principally on the evidence of a manuscript held at Trinity College, Dublin...
).
Commercial areas
StocklandStockland (company)
Stockland is a diversified Australian property development company.Founded in 1952 as a residential developer, it listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1957 and diversified into commercial developments in the 1960s.Its current activities include:...
Wetherill Park is a major shopping centre
Shopping mall
A shopping mall, shopping centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct or simply mall is one or more buildings forming a complex of shops representing merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a parking area — a modern, indoor version...
in the area and features one of Australia's largest cinema complexes owned by Hoyts
Hoyts
The Hoyts Group is an Australian company consisting of Hoyts Exhibition, Hoyts Distribution and Val Morgan.Hoyts Exhibition manages 450 screens across 40 Australian and 10 New Zealand cinema complexes; making it Australia's second largest cinema chain. Val Morgan, the cinema advertising arm of the...
. The shopping centre opened in 1983 and in recent years, underwent major renovations.
Wetherill Park Shopping Centre (now known as Market Town) opened in the early 1980s on the corner of The Horsley Drive and Rossetti Street, adjacent to Emerson Street Reserve tennis courts. It originally featured approximately 25 specialty shops, including a Franklins supermarket. In recent years, the shopping centre underwent renovations which saw the shopping complex completely reformed, and the rear parking lot expanded. Today, the complex also features a bowling centre.
Wetherill Park is home to the largest industrial estate in the Southern Hemisphere, with companies such as Jaguar, BMW
BMW
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG is a German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1916. It also owns and produces the Mini marque, and is the parent company of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. BMW produces motorcycles under BMW Motorrad and Husqvarna brands...
, Subaru
Subaru
; is the automobile manufacturing division of Japanese transportation conglomerate Fuji Heavy Industries .Subaru is internationally known for their use of the boxer engine layout popularized in cars by the Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche 911, in most of their vehicles above 1500 cc as well as...
and Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz is a German manufacturer of automobiles, buses, coaches, and trucks. Mercedes-Benz is a division of its parent company, Daimler AG...
situated in the area. Despite the heavy industrial presence, the suburb maintains a coppice environment dominated by eucaluptus trees.
Transport
The T-Way bus route opened in 2003 and runs partly through Wetherill Park. It is also located close to the Westlink M7Westlink M7
Westlink M7 - formerly Western Sydney Orbital - is one of Sydney, Australia's urban motorways and a part of Metroad 7 and the Sydney Orbital Network. It connects three Metroads: M5 at Prestons, M4 at Eastern Creek and M2 at Baulkham Hills...
Sydney Orbital motorway . The Horsley Drive is the major road which runs through Wetherill Park. Other major roads include Polding Street and Victoria Street.
Schools
- Wetherill Park TAFE college.
- William Stimson Public School.
- Prairiewood High School
Parks and recreation
As part of Fairfield City Council's Parks Improvement Program, Shakespeare Park was upgraded in 2006. Its design was developed with help from the Occupational Therapy Unit of Fairfield Health Services, students from William Stimson Public School and suggestions from the community.Places of worship
Wetherill Park is home to a large Buddhist temple which was visited by Prince Charles in the mid 1990s.Notable residents
Wetherill Park was once home to famous Italian footballer, Christian VieriChristian Vieri
Christian Vieri is a retired Italian footballer who played as a centre forward.Vieri was named in the FIFA 100, a list of the 125 greatest living footballers selected by Pelé as a part of FIFA's centenary celebrations...
.