Wool Store Fires
Wool stores were extremely vulnerable to fire, not only because of wool bales: wooden floors were saturated with lanolin. Fire brigades trained in managing these emergencies, and wool store managers took great pains to employ guards with up-to-date fire-fighting equipment. These precautions paid off, when arsonists set two fires in the sixth floor of the Country Produce Selling Company: two watchmen with chemical emergency equipment extinguished the blazes before any damage was done. Their swift action saved the company an estimated £500,000. (Cairns Post, Wyalong Advocate, 31 March 1922)
Of the many wool store fires, the biggest and most revealing destroyed the Goldsbrough Mort building in September 1935. A coroner was amazed that “within half an hour a building eight stories high and 300ft. by 100ft. should be just a mass of flame.” The building was destroyed, and the wool smouldered for days. The best that the fire brigade could do – and it was an achievement – was to contain the fire. That limited the loss to £750.000, and saved millions. No cause was identified, but a specialist in these fires suspected a cigarette butt igniting a bag, which then ignited the lanolin-saturated floor.
When a five-story New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company wool store on Bulwara Road burned out on August 22, 1946, flames were visible from the lower Blue Mountains.
Wool stores posed problems especially when they were abandoned. In March 1978 an old wool store in Bulwara Road Ultimo burned out. 300 people living nearby had to be evacuated. Rats were not so lucky: a witness was “shocked and frightened: at a “heavy mass of rats” trying to escape, and “sickened by a dreadful smell of burning flesh.” That blaze also re-ignited a fierce debate about the future of these abandoned palaces. (Errol Simper in Canberra Times, 11 April 1978). As they stood, they were fire-traps, menacing whole residential blocks. Should they be torn down and replaced with commercial or residential buildings – or repurposed as apartments?
The State and the City were not yet ready to tackle that problem, so empty wool stores survived, often providing accommodation for squatters, and playgrounds for children. A great blaze in 1992, however, was impossible to ignore. The eight-story Australian Mercantile Land & Finance Co building was heritage-listed but long abandoned when it caught fire. 800 people had to be evacuated and100 fire-fighters from 20 stations could not save it: after it began to collapse, it had to be demolished. As always, this fire attracted huge crowds and initiated an argument about responsibility. Fire fighters suspected careless squatters: squatters suspected developers. Eventually the site was rebuilt as the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre.
