Como real estate

The Tharawal and the river

Como lies on the southern bank of the Georges River in southern Sydney, on the traditional land of the Tharawal (Dharawal) people. The Tharawal-speaking people are recognised by Sutherland Shire Council as the area's traditional custodians. Long before it carried the name Como, the locality was known as Woronora.

Bonnet Bay, Scylla Bay and Carina Bay lie along the shoreline, and the Woronora River bounds Como West to the west. That postal locality was created in 1939 from within the greater Como area. Como itself sits 27 kilometres from the Sydney central business district, in the Sutherland Shire.

A railway camp at Woronora

Circa early 1883, a small building of weatherboard and iron went up: the Woronora Hotel, put there by its proprietor, Thomas Hanley. He was responding to the railway workers' camp that had grown beside the planned crossing of the Georges River, where the Illawarra railway line was to be extended over a new bridge. The Woronora Post Office opened next to the hotel on 16 May 1883.

On 5 May 1883, the Evening News carried a government notice setting out a plan for a public school at Worinora, on the Georges River. On 25 September 1883 the government of New South Wales awarded R.G. Troughton the contract to build the school in timber, for £199 4s. The Worinora School opened on 16 April 1884, just south of Scylla Bay.

The Australian Town & Country Journal noted on 14 June 1884 that Hanley had made one room of his hotel bigger, so it could serve as an assembly hall and a theatre, while hundreds of women and children were camped close by. That paper also reported that the grounds of the Como Public School were soon to be improved.

How Como got its name

In 1884 and 1885, newspapers and periodicals gave the name "Lake Como" to the wider stretch of the Georges River east of Murphy's Pleasure Grounds. In 1922, Woronora's postal locality took the name Como, on a suggestion from James Frederick Murphy, who managed the Holt-Sutherland Co. and looked after the affairs of Thomas Holt. Holt had owned a large stretch of land from Sutherland to Cronulla.

Murphy saw a likeness to Italy, comparing the area with Lake Como and the mountains around it. Italian names also run through the suburb's streets, among them Pavia Road, Cremona Road, Novara Crescent, Genoa Street, Verona Range, Tivoli Esplanade, Ortona Parade and Loretta Avenue, originally written Loretto, a misspelling of Loreto in Italy.

The pleasure grounds and the Como Hotel

Murphy's Pleasure Grounds was managed by James Murphy with his brothers John Francis and Michael Vincent. They fenced off a small promontory east of the boathouse, to the annoyance of many locals, and built a rotunda lookout and a flag mast on the highest viewing point, known locally as Como Mountain. Visitors paid a small fee for access. The grounds were later reclaimed for public use and today carry the name Como Pleasure Grounds. Como House, which Murphy built, burnt down in 1969, and his estate later funded agricultural science scholarships at St John's College in Sydney and the Hawkesbury Agricultural College.

George Agnew's Como Hotel first appeared in January 1887 as a presumed small building, most likely on the same site as the larger ones that followed, and it had no liquor licence. It lasted about two years. Tenders for a 20-room hotel at Como were called in March 1888, with the master building contractor Robert Fielding acting for Agnew. By then most of the temporary railway workers and their families had begun moving south with the extension of the Illawarra line, and Agnew was building a grander hotel for a shrinking population.

By 9 July 1890 the leasing agent W.H. Tulloh had the "Como Hotel" advertised for purchase or lease. There were no takers, with the 1890 Depression under way, and Agnew applied for a publican's licence himself. He sold the hotel to Daniel Sullivan in September 1891, and by 1894 he was still in financial difficulty and was forced to sell his household furniture and effects.

Trouble for the hotel's successive owners went on for years, as the slowly re-growing population and the economic effects of WW1, the 1930s Depression and WW2 took their toll. The Australian poet Henry Lawson lived at Como in the early 1900s and was a regular at the hotel. A local story tells of him rowing across to the hotel, reciting or selling his poems in exchange for beer.

Fires and rebuilding

In 1939 the Como West Post Office opened, and the new Como West Public School took its first classes. In 1994 bushfires severely affected Como West and burnt down upwards of 70 houses. Como West Public School was destroyed as well, and a new school went up on the same land.

The Como Hotel burned. A blaze that began with an electrical fault in the hotel's restaurant kitchen destroyed the second version of the building on 3 November 1996. Five years later, in 2001, a third version was completed on the same site, in a sympathetic style.