A decade ago, developers would have had to pay people to live in houses built on top of this wasteland. Olympic mapmakers forgot to include the Lidcombe Waste Treatment Plant located here. Every year Lidcombe takes in thousands of tons of industrial waste and belches out fumes laced with carcinogens. Tests of waste dug up at Newington revealed dioxin levels 1,540 times what the U.S. EPA deems safe. The name Kronos Hill was meant to lend, one presumes, a poetic whiff of the eternal to this prettified hummock of pestilential sludge, known previously as Bradshaw's Mountain in honor of the waste company that created it.
Drains collect some of the poisonous runoff.
The rest seeps into the groundwater. Platypuses like Syd are river-dwelling creatures, but you won't find any swimming or fishing in Haslam's Creek. Three years ago, barrels of dioxin were found buried in the creek's bank, just yards from the Olympic Village. Homebush Bay, into which the creek flows, is one of the most polluted waterways in the world. The cleanup has yet to begin.