Plans were approved in 1971 for the first stage of a new satellite city at Menai.
Sutherland Shire Council said Menai would be a ‘‘unique’’ area, criss-crossed by cycle and walking paths and endowed with extensive community facilities.
But owners of the semi-rural land were concerned their holdings would be acquired compulsorily without fair compensation.
It would take till the latter part of the decade before developers completed subdivisions, and home sites went on sale.
Alfords Point Bridge, which was completed in 1973, helped open up the area, but access from the Sutherland side was by limited by the one-lane, wooden bridge that was in place at Woronora until 1980.
The state government released enough land for 10,000 building blocks, of which about one-third was Crown land and subsequently offered by ballot.
‘‘Menai will be a far better place to live in than any other part of the shire,’’ shire president Ray Thorburn said.
‘‘It is a very beautiful area, and if it goes ahead the way we anticipate its development, it will be quite a revolution.’’
A front page report in the Leader, accompanied by a photo of Menai’s existing “humble post office”’, revealed home sites were likely to cost an average of about $18,000.
Recent sales at Woronora River had averaged $10,000 a block ‘‘and it was nowhere near the quality of the Menai land’’.
A ‘‘radical’’ feature of the new district was to be ‘‘the segregation as far as possible of pedestrian and vehicular traffic’’ through new cycle-walk paths.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY
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