1806 - 1891

Bondi’s landscape is awash with references to the Dickson family – parks, houses and streets – whose history extends back to the earliest days of settlement.

Joseph Dickson, his wife Mary Gee and three of their children (they later had six more children) were early residents in what became Waverley after arriving in Sydney as free settlers in 1833. Joseph was recorded as a saddler at 505 George St, Sydney, until 1867.

By then he had become a landowner at Bondi, paying £25 each for four portions of land in 1845, along the then unnamed Government Road, later Waverley Street and now Bondi Road. Two of the blocks faced Bondi Road and two fronted Birrell Street and extended from Bennett Street to midway between Ocean and Watson Streets.

Before the municipality was established in 1859, Dickson ran a soap factory and ‘boiling down’ works fronting Bondi Road, but complaints forced its closure. He then set up a timber business, but it too made way for Bondi’s suburban expansion.

Joseph was one of the signatories to Waverley Council’s establishment, was one of its first elected councillors and a treasurer. Other family members followed him into civic affairs.

Joseph seconded a resolution to have a road built from ‘the South Head Road, near Belle Vue, to the shores of the Pacific at Bondi, and round the Bay from the headland of Ben Buckler to the Recreation Ground’.

In 1863, he moved a resolution to seek a land grant to establish a cemetery for Waverley.

In the 1870s, Joseph’s grant land included Dickson's Paddock, a field stretching down towards McKenzie's dairy on Denham Street. Part of the paddock was occupied by a market gardener named Duffy, who owned stone cottages at Charing Cross.

The Dicksons lived in a two-storey house facing the ocean on the corner of Bennett and Ewell Streets, flanked with two landmark Norfolk Island pine trees removed in 1929. A fine orchard of peaches, pears and quinces grew at the front.

In 1892, the year after Joseph died, the family’s land was put up for sale in the Dickson Estate subdivision.

Courtesy the Dickson family.