Cumberland County, New South Wales

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For other places with the same name, see Cumberland County.

Cumberland County is a county in the State of New South Wales, Australia. Most of the Sydney metropolitan area is located within the County of Cumberland.

The County of Cumberland stretches from Broken Bay to the north, the Hawkesbury River to the north-west, the Nepean River to the west, the Cataract River to the south-west and the northern suburbs of Wollongong to the south. It includes the area of the Cumberland Plain. The county was used since the start of the colony, as shown with the key on a 1789 map describing Port Jackson as being within the county of Cumberland.

The name Cumberland was conferred by Governor Phillip in honour of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hanover, at a gathering to celebrate the birthday of his father King George III, on 4 June 1788.^[1]

New South Wales is divided up into 141 counties, for the purposes of surveying and the registration of land titles. Few Australian counties have ever had any government or administrative function. However, the County of Cumberland did have a county government, the Cumberland County Council, from 1945 to 1964. Its responsibilities were primarily limited to town planning on the metropolitan scale. The Cumberland County Council was not elected by the people, but rather was elected by councillors of the various local governments within the County. In 1951 the Council ratified the Cumberland County Council Planning Scheme which boldly reformed town planning throughout metropolitan Sydney. Though not all of the plan was implemented, much of it was, radically altering the urban form of Sydney and its suburbs.

The objectives of the County Council were often in conflict with the aims of many State Government departments. For instance, the County Council's plans called for a green belt to encircle metropolitan Sydney, while the NSW Housing Commission wished to use much of this land to build new low-density public housing estates in areas such as Blacktown and Liverpool. As a result, the Cumberland County Council was dissolved in 1964.

Its metropolitan planning functions were taken over by a new body, the State Planning Authority, which has since been superseded by a succession of state government departments. As of 2006 this government department is the New South Wales Department of Planning.

[edit] Hundreds

Map of Cumberland County in 1840, showing 13 hundreds and 53 parishes

There were thirteen hundreds in Cumberland County, which were published in a government gazette in May 27, 1835, but repealed on January 21, 1888. Unlike South Australia, the hundreds were never adopted anywhere else in New South Wales. The hundreds:

Bringelly
Campbelltown
Dundas
Evan
Hardinge
Liverpool
Packenham
Parramatta
Richmond
Southend
Sydney
Windsor
Woronora (shown as Heathcote on some maps)

[edit] Parishes

Parishes of Cumberland County

Cumberland County was subdivided into 53 (according to the 1840 map) or 57 (according to [1]) parishes. Many of the links below link to the modern suburb which is usually in part of the same area as the original parish, but not necessarily the same. (The parishes are much larger than the modern day suburbs.) The parishes of St. John, St. Luke, St. Peter and St. Matthew, in the Parramatta, Liverpool, Campbelltown and Windsor areas respectively, have Anglican churches which bear the same saints names; St John's in Parramatta (opened 1803); St.Luke's in Liverpool (building began 1818); St.Peter's in Campbelltown (opened 1823, the third oldest Anglican church in Australia); and St. Matthew's in Windsor (consecrated in 1822)