Plumber Bass Hill, NSW 2197
Bass Hill straddles the Hume Highway between Yagoona and Villawood, a post-war suburb of fibro and brick cottages on generous blocks with a busy commercial strip along the highway and Bass Hill Plaza at its centre. It has no station of its own, relying on Chester Hill and Yagoona, and its streets slope gently toward Prospect Creek and the Georges River near Bankstown Airport. Like its neighbours, it is filling in with duplexes and granny flats on original pipework.
What usually goes wrong in Bass Hill
- Earthenware sewers under 1950s cottages cracked on clay and blocked with roots from camphor laurels and gums
- Galvanised water lines in the oldest fibro corroding through, with rusty water and pressure fading to a trickle
- Granny flats and duplexes tied into original sewer lines that were laid for one post-war cottage
- Stormwater pooling and gullies surcharging in the low streets that drain toward Prospect Creek and the Georges River
- Grease and blocked drains in the takeaway shops, car yards and workshops strung along the Hume Highway
Local notes from the plumbers
Bass Hill has the same bones as the rest of the post-war belt along the Hume Highway: fibro and brick cottages from the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, on Cumberland Plain clay, with earthenware sewers and, in the earliest streets, galvanised water lines. Sixty or seventy years on, the clay has moved through enough wet winters and dry summers to open the sewer joints, and the camphor laurels, gums and jacarandas that make the streets pleasant are the same trees filling the drains. Galvanised lines here are often corroded to a trickle, and copper from the 1960s houses is at pinhole age. The blocks are wide, and that has made Bass Hill a suburb of granny flats and duplexes, most of them plumbed straight into the original sewer line; a drain that held up for one family often cannot cope with a second kitchen and bathroom. The land falls gently toward Prospect Creek on the west and the Georges River flats near Bankstown Airport to the south, and in a summer thunderstorm the low streets see gullies surcharge and water pool against the slab.
Housing in Bass Hill
Post-war fibro and brick cottages from the late 1940s to the 1960s on wide blocks either side of the Hume Highway, some larger 1970s brick veneer toward Georges Hall, a few walk-up unit blocks, commercial and industrial premises along the highway, and a growing share of duplexes and granny flats.
