A new horizon on Sydney's urban frontier: the St Elmo land releases

The paper examines a series of land releases by land developer Neil McLean on his farm St Elmo at Campbelltown between 1949 and 1961, which eventually formed a concentric ring around the old town centre. McLean was prescient in his understanding of the needs of Sydney's growth well before the Cumberland County Council designated Campbelltown as a satellite city in 1960. His vision and foresight put into action what the founders of the county plan envisaged as part of Sydney's metropolitan rural-urban fringe well before it happened on the city's urban frontier.