In 1930 the sanitary tip for Perth was in Learoyd Street Mt Lawley, but as housing was building up in the area,
it was obvious, to most, that the tip would have to be moved …

Text below, taken from the Perth Mirror Saturday 15 February 1930 (trove.nla.gov.au): 

“The dispute between the City Council and the Perth Road Board is a long-standing one. The Council has an offensive sanitary tip in Mount Lawley, a smellful atrocity that is hampering the extension of settlement. Despite repeated protests, a Government order and a Health Department fine it has consistently failed to find an alternative depot.” 

  … and so began the Battle of Learoyd Street and as the headline of the Perth Mirror read “The Charge of the Night Brigade”. To stop the sewerage night carts from getting to the depot the Road Board started ‘drainage work’ and started digging trenches into the road. But the Council wasn’t to be outdone “the Council forces paraded on the battlefront. While the opposing army wasn't looking they dashed to the trenches and working with feverish haste tilled them in with sand and metal. Round one to the Council!”

This continued for days with both sides ‘upping the ante’ with use of barbed wire and plank barricades.

Sadly, the horses pulling the cars were the ones suffering as they “floundered through the heavy sand hauling the huge lumbering carts that do the Council’s dirty work”.

This newspaper article finished with news that the Council was going to consider moving to a new site on Herdsman’s Lake at its next meeting.

This full article is well worth a read, if not for the history of our area, then definitely for the use of the English language in our newspapers of that time !