Abstract
Richard Seymour was appointed the first Inspector of
Nuisances in Sydney in 1884. His work approving and
inspecting opium dens, privies, abattoirs and tanneries
contained many of the elements we now call health impact
assessment (HIA). Indeed the entire corpus of planning and
environmental protection legislation and the building codes
have encoded provisions which are a distillation of the
accumulated wisdom and prejudice formed in doing these
assessments. In this article I have attempted to distil some
of the lessons learned in the commissioning and conduct
of environmental health impact assessments in NSW since
1990, in the hope that some of these at least will be of direct
relevance to the conduct of HIA in other settings.
