What was once dumped into Sydney’s Harbour and off beaches as raw sewage now holds Sydney’s secrets. We take a trip through the sewer in the latest installment in our series The Sydney we don’t talk about.
A torrent of raw sewage rages past at a rate of 1800 litres per second just below the grate we’re standing on. Fifty metres above us lies Bondi’s golf greens and salt-scoured air. Down here, the stench stings your eyes.
“When COVID hit us and people couldn’t get toilet paper they used everything else that they could possibly find,” says Rebecca Yianakis, a production manager at the plant. “Bed sheets to flannelette shirts to towels … you name it, it was coming through.”There are tennis balls, goldfish corpses, Barbie body parts, fatberg-forming wet wipes and once, according to legend, a severed pinky finger.
Fifty metres below Bondi’s “poo pipe” lies Bondi Wastewater Treatment Centre. The tower allows fresh air to funnel through the facility.In 1990, water scientist Dr Ian Wright plunged into the surf for a race he’d never forget. On the ocean rocks outside the plant, the engineers point out the source of the waste that plagued Australia’s most iconic beach for decades: a small pipe dribbling into the surf that sent “Bondi cigars” and “brown-eyed mullets” bobbing past surfers.
A 2018 Sydney Water pollution report estimated 2000 people use the water contaminated by the outfalls for swimming, diving and spearfishing. Some consume seafood from the area including abalone and crayfish. The report characterised the public health consequences of these outfalls as “critical” and noted that on some days, a “visible plume” of sewage spreads 100 metres from the coastline.But, on balance, the wastewater system has vastly improved the water quality of Sydney’s rivers and ocean.
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