Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 52
Rosette
Edmunds
Right
You…and the County Plan
Information booklet, Cumberland County
Council, 1946
City of Sydney Archives
Left
Miss Rosette Edmunds, new Civic Survey
Officer for the County of Cumberland
Council (detail)
Frank Burke, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1946
1900-1956
First professional
woman planner
In 4 years with the Cumberland County Council
(CCC), Rosette Edmunds played a key role in the
post war planning of Sydney.
Inaugurated under the NSW Local Government
(Town and Country Planning) Amendment Act,
1945 during a period of post war idealism and
reconstruction, CCC’s purpose was to create
a city plan to manage Sydney’s growth.
Edmunds was appointed Civic Survey Officer
in 1946 and was the sole woman in such a role.
She focused on the plan’s demolition of inner city
slum areas where 40,000 substandard homes
needed replacing. To her, they were poorly
designed environments—built in haste during
the Industrial Revolution—which by the
20th century had left entire communities mired
in neglect and disease.
“She had a distinguished
academic and professional
career and held important
public posts besides practising
privately.”
Edmunds had earlier worked in private practice
and during WWII, for the Department of the
Interior, planning naval defences. The first woman
in Australia to write a book on architecture and
the first woman in NSW to be made a Fellow
of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects,
Edmunds relocated to Canberra, where she died
suddenly in 1956.
‘Distinguished Woman Architect Dies’,
The Catholic Weekly, 10 May 1956, p. 6
architecture & planning
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