Rhodes is a suburb of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, located on the Parramatta River about 15km west of the central business district. It is about 3 km from the Telstra Stadium, (home of the 2000 Summer Olympics), Sydney International Aquatic Centre, Bicentennial Park and Millennium Parklands. The suburb has a railway link direct to the Sydney CBD (about 30 minutes) and is situated near major North-South East-West road links. Rhodes is very close to the geographical centre of Sydney.
During the period from about 1930 to the mid-1980s the western third (between Homebush Bay and the Railway line) of this small suburb was taken up by chemical manufacturing. The main manufacturers were Berger Paints, CSR Chemicals (Australia's major manufacturer of phthlates later taken over by Orica Chemicals, then a subsidiary of ICI), Union Carbide now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company which made Agent Orange, used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War at its Rhodes plant, and Allied Feeds, a grain and stock feeds company which sat on a site which had been substantially reclaimed from the Parramatta River by Union Carbide who used the reclamation area as a dumping ground for its contaminated industrial waste, contaminating land and sediments with dioxin.
These former industrial sites are being remediated and converted to high density residential, major retail and office blocks. The remediation of the former Union Carbide site, the former Allied Feeds site and a strip of heavily dioxin contaminated sediments in Homebush Bay have been the subject of extensive analysis, investigations and community activism.
The redeveloped area will have a full length foreshore path and cycleway linking in with the extensive network of foreshore parks in Sydney. The other half of the Suburb is in two sections, one between the railway line and Concord Road and the other section East of Concord Road. There are a number of foreshore parks in the Eastern part of the suburb, including the Kokoda track a memorial to those killed in Papua New Guinea on the Kokoda Track during World War II.
