Balaclava

Balaclava Plains and the land sale

In the Society’s June 2019 newsletter, historian Linda Emery explains how Balaclava’s street names refer to the Crimean War and the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade. The pattern gives a reason to look at streets together, rather than treat each road name as an isolated label. It is a historical association in the naming, not a date for the village’s foundation.^[6]

A Balaclava Plains subdivision plan dated 7 January 1882 is listed in the State Library of NSW’s Mittagong plans, reference Z/TP/M4/18. The catalogue lists Balaclava Road, Great Southern Road, Crane, Beresford, Wilson and Clariville streets, Veteran Road and Inckerman Road. The plan is a useful starting point for examining how land was offered and streets were named; a subdivision plan alone does not prove every lot was built on or occupied at that date.^[9]

In 1882, Watkin and Watkin offered allotments near Rush’s Platform, with frontages to the Great Southern Road and the planned internal streets. Their advertisements invited Sydney residents to imagine a summer retreat in the Highlands and described a special train for the auction. One surviving plan promoted the estate as “The Sanitorium of the South” - a memorable glimpse of how the locality was presented to prospective buyers.^[12][13][9]

Brickmaking and the northern villages

Brickmaking linked Balaclava to construction elsewhere in the district. Linda Emery’s account of the Marist Brothers’ Hermitage says its novitiate building, begun in 1906, used bricks from a local works at Balaclava. The Society’s Rowes Hill cemetery compilation reproduces an obituary describing Sydney Cornwell learning brickmaking from E. Griffiths at Balaclava and later carrying on the trade. The Hermitage account spells the brickmaker’s name Cornwall; the relationship between these references should be checked in contemporary records.^[10][11]

Balaclava is closely connected with Mittagong, Braemar and Aylmerton. Council’s 2007 village access plan describes that local network, while the Society’s Streets of Mittagong project includes Balaclava in its research into the origins of district street names. Subdivision plans and the booklet offer a route from the broad naming theme to particular streets and blocks.^[7][8]