Sophisticated sewerage reticulation as a means of disposing of human wastes is today regarded as essential, a basic mark of civilisation. It was not always thus. In the Maitland of the late 1800s, hundreds of out-houses, tiny buildings outside dwellings, drained wastes into the soil and eventually they percolated to the Hunter River.
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Often there were wells adjacent to the cesspits, a contamination liability and a risk to public health especially in the more densely-populated areas occupied by low-income people living in hovels. Unpleasant smells were constants in the poorer areas, and deaths occurred from typhoid, diphtheria, cholera and dysentery.
Domestic 'slops' disposed of in back yards, streets and creeks added to the unpleasantness and the risk to health. In clay-soil areas above the floodplains, the problem of sewage buried in backyards was a problem because it did not seep away quickly.
In the wealthier areas with their substantial houses, indoor lavatories (water closets, in the language of the times) were flushed from roof tanks. Eventually the contents of outdoor 'dunnies' were dealt with via the 'pan' system, waste collected weekly by men at night and tipped into tanks on horse-drawn carts and in later times trucks. 'Dan the pan man' featured in this activity: the Dans were employed by West Maitland, East Maitland and Morpeth councils. The tanks' contents were taken to areas on the edges of the built-up areas - in East Maitland's case to a paddock at Rathluba - and ploughed in.
In Newcastle, nightsoil was taken out to sea on punts and dumped, but some went to the foreshore or into disused mine shafts. Many disposal methods were used, most of them unsatisfactory from environmental and health standpoints.
The story of 'modern' sewerage reticulation in the Maitland area started in 1897, when the Maitland Borough Council asked the colonial government to provide a sewerage system. A scheme was designed by the Public Works Department but implementing it was problematic thanks to its high cost. The Hunter District Water Supply and Sewerage Board declared the existing sanitary arrangements in Maitland to be obsolete and unsatisfactory. Financial assistance to build the scheme was sought from the Commonwealth government. Work began in 1935 with the passage of the Maitland District Sewerage Act and an unemployment relief vote being instituted to pay for the construction.
In 1939, the Board took over the management of the Maitland scheme which eventually covered the built-up area. The treatment works, to which later suburban developments were connected, were outside Morpeth with provision for Morpeth itself to be connected "should the township ever be sewered." It was. The scheme was amplified as necessary to serve the expanding built-up areas and new suburbs of Maitland. In the early years of the scheme, established areas were retrofitted with sewerage infrastructure. Later the reticulation occurred as new subdivisions were developed. People moved into new homes with indoor lavatories the norm. Sewerage and other services like electricity, telephone lines and in recent times NBN connections already provided along with kerbs and gutters, footpaths and sealed streets.
