Hunter Connection
Posted: October 23, 2021 Filed under: Shops, Sydney City, Underground, Underground Sydney | Tags: Hunter Connection, sydney city, wynyard 7 CommentsThe Hunter Street entrance to the Hunter Connection shopping arcade is a canopy of mirrored tiles and neon lights, like the entrance to a 1980s nightclub. The mirror panels reflect the street and the people walking past, the angles and edges scrambling and distorting the scene below. Go under the mirrors and inside and you’ll find that the mall’s irregular shape, each floor slightly different, and the narrow stairs and escalators that lead between them, give it a maze-like quality.
Hunter Connection opened in 1982, positioning it, in the history of Sydney city shopping arcades, between the 70s excesses of Centrepoint and the postmodernism of the late-80s Skygarden. Despite the travertine marble floors and the 150 metres of skylights noted in the newspaper articles heralding its arrival, its main drawcard was its efficiency as a thoroughfare: “Soon we will be a city of hedgehogs!” wrote the Richardson and Wrench real estate news, weirdly, in 1981, “the Hunter Connection – a pedestrian refuge and mall… will provide undercover links directly from Wynyard Station through to Hunter, Pitt and George Streets.”
There’s a satisfaction which comes from navigating the city underground through its subterranean shopping malls, an experience arising from the combination of the underground railway and later 20th century high-rise developments. Picking up on this potential, the early 1970s a Wynyard Pedestrian Network had been planned, an integrated system of walkways extending out from Wynyard station. The plan proposed that navigating the network should be “a visually interesting experience for the pedestrian. Walkways should not be barren or dull; they should be full of interesting things to look at as the pedestrian walks through – changing wall and floor textures – varied spaces – differing character and atmosphere.”
This has indeed occurred, though not in the way intended by the Wynyard Pedestrian Network. The Network never came to be, but walkways were eventually built, with Hunter Connection in the 1980s, and more recently the walkway on the west side of the station linking it with Barangaroo. On the Hunter side a change in atmosphere was brought about by the refurbishment of Wynyard station, which produced a jarring underground transition between the updated sections (wide, grey, slick shopfronts) and the original underground arcade (low-ceiling, mirrors and marble).
Across the concourse from the ticket barriers there had once been steps down to a stretch of arcade which housed niche businesses such as Odette’s Perfumery and the Wynyard Coin Centre. This part of the walkway is gone, but follow the new tunnel along and you soon find yourself back in time at the Hunter Arcade.
In this section I’ve always enjoyed the infinite regress effect of the facing mirrors, and the retro, pill-shaped signs.
Hunter Arcade flows on into Hunter Connection, joining up with the lowest of its three levels. Down here the shops are of the kind that deal in minor improvements: alterations, shoe repair, nail salons, and barbers, and Wayne Massage with its window display of enthusiastic endorsements, printouts from online reviews: ‘Sir Wayne “massage” king is da “miracle” worker.’ The alterations places have displays of face masks, made of fabric offcuts or novelty prints: unicorns, chickens, kittens wearing Santa hats.
It is just over a week since lockdown lifted and some of the stores still have their shutters down or are only tentatively open. A tiny watchmaker and jeweller’s store is open but has the grille pulled across. Inside at a trestle table a man sits on a stool, bending over a repair, holding the green rubber balloon of a dust blower in one hand, a watch in the other. Handwritten signs announce that the shop is closing soon, after being in business since 1972.
From this lower level I follow the escalators upwards. There’s another wing of the arcade here, which extends out to Pitt Street. It too once had a mirrored disco entrance, although it has now been replaced with a more contemporary design: perforated beige panelling that looks like the breathable panels of an athletic shoe. Instead of heading towards Pitt Street I linger outside an alterations business (their fabric face masks include one of an illustration of a chicken, divided up into cuts of meat), looking towards the escalators that lead up to the food court on the top level. On the wall beside the escalators is a feature wall of vertical lengths of silver and smoky-tinted mirror tiles, which reflect the menu boards of the restaurants. It’s hardly the most lavish wall feature, but there’s something Tetris-like about it that pleases me.
The food court level is the busiest, and with its mirrored ceiling and gold handrails it is reminiscent of one of the Chinatown malls (a cross between Dixon House and the Sussex Centre food court, perhaps). My favourite part of this food court is the narrow terrace, just wide enough for a row of six tables, where you can sit and overlook the street as you eat your lunch. It has a view over Hunter Street, where the road dips down and then angles up again, following the declivity which marks the path of the Tank Stream as it flows towards Warrane.
Sitting at one of the tables on the terrace, I watch the clouds drift over the patch of sky in between two buildings, and listen to the city, its roar of traffic, air conditioning units, and the crunch and clang of construction.
The city continues to be torn up for the Metro, which has claimed numerous city blocks. The Hunter Connection will not escape. It is slated for demolition too, to be replaced by a station, and already some of the businesses have relocated. Handwritten signs are taped to their shutters, some noting their new addresses, others just offering thanks and farewell.
On the foot court level is the walkway that leads to George Street, another stretch of marble tiles and gold handrails. I could follow it out to the third of Hunter Connection’s street entrances, across from the George Street entrance to Wynyard Station. If you enter this way you have the choice of going up, via the walkway, or going down, on the path that leads down to the lowest level. The downward path, with the intersecting angles of the three buildings surrounding it, has an unusual geometry, the red bridge of the walkway in conversation with the textured concrete wall it faces.
Instead of going out to George Street I stop halfway along the red walkway and follow another set of escalators up, following the signs for the GPO Box Centre. Unless you rent a GPO box, or you have engaged in a thorough investigation of the Hunter Connection, you likely wouldn’t know that this is where the General Post Office Boxes are located, instead of, say, the actual General Post Office (now a hotel). Upstairs from the post boxes is the Post Restante counter, the staffing of which must surely have been the quietest job in Australia Post over the last few months.
I like it in here with the GPO Boxes. It’s calming, this open space with plants in tall pots and buzzing fluoro lights overhead. Walls of post office boxes extend and follow corners which lead into hallways with more rows of post office boxes. Walking through here the theme song from Get Smart plays in my head, and I imagine I’m here on some kind of secret spy business. That I know which, out of the 7119 post boxes that wait above the Hunter Connection, is the one that holds the message for me inside it.
Living Postcard
Posted: December 13, 2018 Filed under: Infrastructure, Sydney City, Sydney Harbour, The Edge of the City | Tags: cahill expresway, cahill walk, circular quay, ferries, gadigal land, sydney city, sydney cove, sydney harbour, warrane 25 CommentsThe train emerges from the tunnel towards Circular Quay station and the darkness outside the windows is replaced by a long, thin panorama, a horizontal slice of sky and water bracketed by the Harbour Bridge and Opera House. It’s a living postcard, animated by the ferries and the clouds, watched by those waiting on the platform. People lean against the glass barriers to take photos of the harbour, or just gaze out, watching the ever-moving scene in front of them.
I join the throng clogging the top of the steps that lead down to the concourse. I hang back, not in a hurry, and wait until I’m the last to descend. As I walk down, I look above the stairs to where, set high up into the wall, there are ornamental grilles decorated by bronze fish. They have a stranded look to them, a little bit dusty, but with their rainbow sheen still visible.
I always look for them, one of the few decorative features of this station which, since its opening in 1956, has been relentlessly condemned as ugly, interrupting the view of the harbour from the city, and the city from the harbour. The construction of the station and the Cahill Expressway above it was a drawn out and unpopular process. Things came to a head at the 1958 opening of the Cahill Expressway, when despite the premier’s announcement that this was “a striking symbol of Sydney’s growth and maturity”, things did not go as planned.
Sydney Morning Herald, March 25, 1958
If Circular Quay station is maligned, the Cahill Expressway is even more so. The railway line and the road above it forms a thick line that cuts across the view, as if it’s a low, wide belt keeping the city in check. There has often been talk of the expressway’s demolition: in 1994 Prime Minister Paul Keating even offered the NSW state government the funds to remove it. Yet it remains, visually intrusive, loved by no one, but not entirely without allure. A side-effect of maligned places is that people avoid them, which can, sometimes, twist their atmosphere into something unusual and interesting.
The Cahill Walk is a good example of this. To get to it I move quickly along the Circular Quay promenade, past people munching through pancakes at City Extra and passengers coming off the Manly ferry. Details flash up: a man wearing a t-shirt that says “winter is not coming”; the round bronze discs set into the pavement that commemorate famous writers. I step over A.D. Hope, Barry Humphries, and Kenneth Slessor, until I’m at a grove of palm trees hemmed in by concrete, that surround a glass elevator clamped to the side of the railway line and road above.
I press the elevator call button and soon the doors open in front of me, puffing out a cold, air-conditioned breath in welcome. I step inside, the doors seal me in, and the noise of the quay recedes. I’m inside a bubble, ascending, above the tops of the palm trees now, the view of the Harbour Bridge coming clear the higher up the lift rises.
At the top, the doors behind me open and I turn to face the four lanes of traffic on the expressway. A long, concrete walkway extends beside it like a grey ribbon.
Never, in all the times I’ve been up here, has there been many other people here. It’s one day of popularity is New Year’s Eve: a ballot operates for tickets to watch the fireworks from here. At other times, you might very well have it to yourself. This morning there’s almost no one else but me, apart from an occasional runner jogging by. It’s only a slight change of perspective from the Quay below, but has a completely different mood. If it weren’t for the incessant traffic, and the way the path trembles underfoot when heavy vehicles go by, it would be a tranquil, pleasurable place to be, rather than the exposed and sometimes slightly eerie experience it is to walk here.
The traffic speeds by, having just come off the Harbour Bridge. I watch the intent expressions of people behind the wheels of their cars, notice a man on his motorbike singing as he rides along, and feel the path shudder when a demolition truck goes by, the word CHOMP in orange across the front. On the other side is Warrane, the bay dominated by a gargantuan cruise ship with a steaming funnel like a kettle just come off the boil. The poisonous smell of the diesel fuel drifts across. On the front of the cruise ship is a man in overalls, tethered to a railing above, holding a paint roller on a stick, repainting the ship’s nose. The expanse of fresh white paint follows him as he moves slowly along.
Walking up here, alongside the expressway, is to have a feeling of floating mid-air, looking into the thicket of city buildings to one side and the harbour’s expanse on the other.
Below where I am on the Cahill Walk, the crowds of Circular Quay mill and disperse. Up here I’m alone, with traffic and jackhammering and construction noise filling the air as I look towards the building sites on the city’s edge. Behind them are dozens of office buildings, thousands of windows, each framing a view of the harbour. Anyone looking out of them at this moment would be moving their eyes over the same scene as me, watching the harbour, the ferries, the shifting clouds, that familiar scene, slowly changing.
***
Thank you dear readers for following Mirror Sydney in 2018, a busy year for me, with the book out in the world. It was a delight to meet some of you when I had launches and talks, and I look forward to more in 2019.
A Peep at Peapes
Posted: August 25, 2017 Filed under: ghost signs, Signs, Sydney City | Tags: ghost signs, menswear, peapes, sydney city, wynyard 23 CommentsTo emerge from the tunnel that leads out of Wynyard Station onto George Street is to enter a sonic mess of construction noise. There are bursts of deep, jarring reverberations and the sounds of metal against concrete, as the demolition of the buildings above the station continues.
As the buildings – the Menzies Hotel, and the 1960s office block Thakral House – have been demolished, the walls of the adjacent buildings have come to light for the first time in 50 years. As Thakral House came down, sunrays appeared at the top of the side wall of the building on the north side, Beneficial House. Then a creature, a dog with a bushy tail, inside a red shield. And then, underneath it, the word PEAPES. At first the hoardings were too high to see much of the sign from street level, but as the demolition continued, the full breadth of the Peapes sign was revealed.
Peapes was a men’s clothing and tailoring department store, which operated out of Beneficial House from when the building was erected in 1923, until the close of the business in February 1971. Its advertising emphasised the “lofty and spacious departments, where a leisurely peace reigns”. The showrooms were fitted out in polished maple, with Doric columns supporting the ceiling and a circular light well at the centre. It was an elegant place, in-keeping with the quality of Peapes’ goods, which were stressed to be of the highest degree.
Photo from Flickr: Steve Terrill (cropped)
Peapes’ slogan was “for men AND their sons” (the AND was in upper case, to stress the importance of intergeneration consistency in men’s style) and it was the place to shop if you needed any kind of gentleman’s outfit, from necessities to luxuries: jackets, shirts, hats, shoes, “an unusually smart shirt with tie”, “a distinctive overcoat”, “superior flannel trousers”. Clothes could be bought off the rack or made to measure. Peapes sales representatives also travelled to country towns across Australia to conduct fittings, booking out rooms in hotels, advertising in local papers, for men to come and have their measurements taken for suits.
The store had two tradmarks. The first was the Warrigal – a dingo, Warrigal being the Dharug word for dingo – the one pictured at the top of the wall sign. The second was diarist Samuel Pepys, an ancestor of one the firm’s founders, George Peapes. On the third floor of the department store was the Pepys Room, a common room of sorts, “a room of restful atmosphere…for reading, writing, smoking, or keeping appointments”. The bewigged Samuel Pepys also appeared on the labels of their garments.
Peapes had been operating on George Street since 1866. In 1912, the wealthy businessman W.J. Miles became one of the directors. These days his name may not be a familiar one, but his daughter, Bea, was one of mid-twentieth century Sydney’s most well known characters. Her distinctive figure, in long coat and tennis hat, was a common sight in the city and suburbs, seen climbing in and out of the taxis for which she never paid the fare, or quoting Shakespeare on demand for a fee of sixpence.
The royal blue of the Peapes sign is a bright window into a past Sydney. Thousands of people walk past it daily, and for those who look up and notice it, the texture of the changing city is revealed, its layers and traces. Soon the demolition will be complete. A new building will be constructed, covering over the Peapes name, the sunburst, and the Warrigal dog. But, for this brief moment, it is back in the light.
With thanks to David Lever for Peapes memories and investigations.
A Tour of the Sirius Building
Posted: March 28, 2017 Filed under: Brutalism, concrete, Favourite Buildings, Sydney City | Tags: green bans, harbour bridge, millers point, save our sirius, sirius building, social housing, sydney city, tao gofers, the rocks 4 CommentsApproaching the Sirius building I can see the group I am to join already assembled outside, waiting for the tour. They gather in the forecourt, a brick-paved area with circular garden beds, in which grow banksia trees and jade plants, and a hibiscus flowering with pink blooms. Among the people waiting there moves a tall man wearing a purple shirt. He is handing out flyers, talking with verve as he does so. This is Tao Gofers, the architect who, in 1976, designed the Sirius building, and has been working with the Save Our Sirius group to protect the building from demolition.
The Sirius is one of Sydney’s most iconic buildings, instantly recognisable due to its striking modular design and its prominent position beside the Harbour Bridge. Its stepped shape of concrete blocks and roof gardens with purple funnels rise up alongside the Bridge. It seems almost close enough to be able to reach out from the Harbour Bridge walkway to touch them. At least this is what I imagined as a child, as I, like generations of Sydney residents, wondered what it would be like to live there and explore on the rooftop gardens, looking out over the city.
The Sirius is a building that gives much to the imagination. It’s a people’s building, both because it was designed as social housing and operated successfully as such for four decades, and because it has such a strong physical presence in the cityscape. It’s a building that’s embedded in the city’s collective consciousness, as important and as controversial as it was when it opened in the late 1970s.
Illustration of the Sirius from 1970s Housing Commission brochure, image courtesy of Tao Gofers.
We are taken back to 1976 as Tao Gofers describes the process of designing the Sirius. At that time there had already been demolition of social housing properties and relocation of residents in the area. A condition of lifting the green ban that had been imposed on area by the Builders Labourers Federation was that that there be provisions for the working class community who had been living in the area for generations to remain in The Rocks. Until the Ban was lifted, the government could make no changes to their existing properties in The Rocks, and they were eager for the stalemate to be resolved.
The Sirius was the key factor in the lifting of the green ban. It all happened quickly: there was only 10 days between Gofers first hearing of the project to his presentation to the stakeholders. He describes the scene, the government officials in double-breasted suits, and the Rocks residents “like us”, people in their everyday clothes, who had gathered to see his proposals. He first showed a design for a small development of 14 terrace houses, which was unacceptable to the government. Next he showed a proposal for a 20 storey building with 8 apartments per floor, which was unacceptable to the residents. A third proposal, for a standard tower block of 80 units was also rejected for being aesthetically displeasing. Then Gofers presented the proposal for the Sirius. The design was presented as a compromise between two extremes, but it was the one that Gofers believed in, and the one that came to be built.
Tao Gofers describes the Sirius building planning process.
Sirius was based on The Laurels, an earlier apartment development Gofers had designed in Sans Souci. The model for The Laurels had been made with Revlon eyeshadow boxes, which had the right kind of dimensions for the windows that filled the ends of each concrete module. The Sirius was an expanded version of this design, which combined 1,2,3 and 4 bedroom apartments, as well as apartments specifically designed for the elderly and people with disabilities.
We walk around the building, looking up at the apartments as Tao describes how of the 79 units, 74 have access to a balcony, terrace or roof garden. “If you have just little boxes,” he says “people aren’t going to be happy.” His designs were made with people’s emotional bond to their homes in mind. These were not purely functional spaces, although their simple design made them adaptable to the multi-level site. It included numerous communal areas, including the Heritage Room on the 8th floor, designed as a common area for older residents, and the Phillip Room on the ground floor, with red patterned carpet, wood-panelled walls, and dramatic beams of raw concrete.
The wooden figures that decorate the walls of the Phillip Room.
We cannot even glimpse into the Phillip Room now. The windows are completely blocked off with black plastic, for no other reason but to prevent us looking inside. All we can see is our own reflections moving by. The group is big, around a hundred people. We stand at the back of the building, staring up at the apartment balconies where succulents grow wild and unpruned from the planter boxes. Almost every one of these apartment is empty. The government has been moving residents out since 2014, with the intent to sell the building and have it demolished. Despite the recommendations of its own Heritage Council, heritage listing was refused, and it is this decision Save Our Sirius campaign is working to fight.
Accompanied by security guards, we crowd into the foyer, and then go in small groups in the lift up to level 10 for a look inside Myra’s apartment. Myra, who is 90 years old and has lived in this neighbourhood for almost 60 years, has become the face of the Sirius building. Myra is blind, and has no wish to move away from the familiar apartment and area she has been a part of for so long. This morning she is at the front of the building, sitting in the forecourt with a drawing group assembled around her, sketching her on their notepads. Upstairs, groups of people stand in her living room, looking around. It is the homely environment of an elderly person, with its teaspoon collection hanging on the wall, framed photos and knicknacks arranged on the shelves, and a horseshoe hung up in the hallway as a luck charm. The windows fill the entire of the eastern wall and through them is a view across the harbour.
The SOS lights (for Save Our Sirius) in Myra’s bedroom window.
This, Tao says a number of times during the tour, is a sticking point – the idea of people who are not privileged, not wealthy, living with this harbour view. Standing in Myra’s living room, looking out at the clouds moving across the sky and their reflection in the steel-grey water, it is indeed beautiful. No one could deny it, and anyone living with such a scene as part of their daily lives is lucky. But luck and beauty should not be the exclusive province of the wealthy. A city where money and privilege dominates pales even the most glorious view. From its inception the Sirius has been symbolic of the city and the harbour being available to all, and it is even more so now as the majority of its apartments lie empty, and the fight to save it continues.
**
Follow the Save Our Sirius campaign here with links to details of future tours and campaign events.
The Campbell Street Horse
Posted: August 1, 2016 Filed under: Favourite Buildings, Sydney City | Tags: campbell street, chinatown, haymarket, horse, horses birthday, sydney animals, sydney city, sydney mysteries 6 CommentsThe row of 19th century buildings at the start of Campbell Street are surrounded by more recent, taller buildings, like a piece has been cut out of the modern city to reveal a past version.
The row is a miscellany, each building different. On street level there is a string of Thai groceries with displays of pickled grapes and dried bananas, and posters for the grand opening of a new Crocodile Junior restaurant (Crocodile Senior is around the corner on George Street). Number 14 Campbell Street is a butchery, with cuts of meat laid out in the window. If you find yourself here, stand back and look up, above the butchery and the two levels of barred windows on the upper storeys. The building is painted a liverish red, with white details. It is further decorated by three entwined letters – PRL – in a crest and, at the very top, a wild-eyed horse.
The Campbell Street Horse is captured in motion, ears alert, nostrils flaring, mane tossed by the wind. Its eyes are spirals of black paint against the pale, verdigris green, and it watches the city around it warily. It looks over at the outlines of the claw machines inside Purikura Photoland across the street. The horse has seen plenty of amusement fads come and go. Beside Photoland is the Capitol Theatre, a building the horse would have known in its days first as a market, and then a Hippodrome in the 1910s. Under a retractable stage the Hippodrome, run by Wirth’s Circus, had a concrete pool for aquatic shows, sometimes featuring seals and polar bears, other times King Neptune and his attendants.
Powerhouse Museum: 2012/104/1-3/61 Photographic print, b&w, internal view of the Hippodrome building, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, during a performance of Wirths’ Circus, unknown photographer, used by Wirths’ Circus family, Australia, c. 1920
The horse’s presence on 14 Campbell Street is something of a mystery. Myself and fellow Sydney scrutineer David Lever have puzzled over it again anew in the past few weeks, wondering what could have led it to be the mascot of this building. We followed the building’s previous identities, beginning around 1888 as a pub called the New Haymarket Hotel, then becoming the Nottingham Castle and then the Capitol Hotel. I found plenty of stories of interest, none of which were about horses. There were various accounts of woe and misfortune that took place at the hotel over the years: a man’s death after a fire caused by him smoking in bed, the death of a lion tamer named James Lindo, the arrests of swindlers and rogues. The heritage report on the row of terraces has plenty of information, describing Number 14 as “highly unusual” with “no comparable examples within the City of Sydney”. As compelling as this is, there is still no mention of the horse.
The initials in the crest were of the man who’d had the buildings constructed, P.R. Larkin. Larkin was known as a publican and liquor wholesaler on George Street. There are plenty of cheerful turn of the century descriptions of the “huge casks filled with spirits fit for the gods” at Larkin’s, but no mention of horses. In those days, though, horses were everyday creatures. The streets were full of horses and carts, people travelled by horse bus, and “block boys” had the dangerous and unenviable job of dashing out into the busy streets to sweep up the horse manure. They would have been busy: at the peak of Australia’s horse population there was one horse for every two people.
![Horses and carts outnumbering motor cars at Paddy's Markets on Quay Street, Sydney, ca, 1920s [Source: NLA]](https://mirrorsydney.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/nla-obj-163090445-1.jpg?w=590)
Horses and carts outnumbering motor cars at Paddy’s Markets on Quay Street, Sydney, ca, 1920s [Source: NLA]
Look up at the corner of King and Castlereagh Streets!
But back to Campbell Street, and our mystery horse. Campbell was once one of the boundary streets of the market district of Haymarket. In 1929, a newspaper article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in which a man named Mr Alfred Byrne remembered the days in the 1850s when wild horses would be brought in for auction. Alfred would join the crowds who clustered around to watch the men trying to catch the horses, especially if it were rainy, and “the men holding on to the horses would be dragged ingloriously through thick mud”.
So perhaps the Campbell Street Horse is the last of Sydney’s wild horses, captured in perpetual vigour, turning a fierce eye to the ever-growing city.
A City Sun
Posted: November 17, 2015 Filed under: Sydney City | Tags: 1920s, martin place, sun building, sun newspapers, sydney city 3 CommentsThe sun rises above the office buildings at the corner of Elizabeth Street and Martin Place. It is an urban sun, spherical and grey and held up by four columns, mounted on the rooftop of a gothic office building.
I didn’t recognise it as a sun at first. I was loitering at the barrier above where the Martin Place Shopping Circle, an arcade of small shops, is visible below the level of the street. As mundane as the view into the Martin Place Shopping Circle is – a baguette cafe, a McDonalds – I like it for its view into the underground world, like a circle of street has been lifted off to reveal what lies beneath.
Today, though, rather than look down, I was looking up. Even the most casual of suburban explorers knows that there are rich rewards for those who look up as they walk around the city. There’s a whole archive up above street level: ghost signs, architectural details, weird adornments.
Although I have a keen eye for all things gothic I’d not noticed the building across Elizabeth Street before, with its pointed arches and decorative columns. My eye travelled up the facade until it reached the top, where it stopped at the large grey sphere above the central tower.
The Sun Building c. 1930. Photo: NLA.
In 1929, this sphere was painted gold, as it was the symbol of the palatial new Sun Newspaper building at 60 Elizabeth Street. The 1920s was a busy and competitive time for newspapers in Sydney. There were four morning newspapers, two afternoon ones, and four Sunday papers, all with a large range of staff from the reporters to the printers to the drivers of the delivery vans.
Two men looking at newspapers straight out of the press machinery at the Sun Newspaper, 1930s. Photo: NLA.
The opening of the Sun Building in October 1929 was a lavish occasion, with the Governor (who had the unusual name of Sir Dudley de Chair) being presented with a golden master key, and the Sun’s chairman announcing the history of the Sun newspaper as “one of the romances of the newspaper world”.
In 1929 the Sun Building was a striking addition to Elizabeth street, at ten stories high with its gold sphere catching the sunlight on top. The Melbourne Argus reported the sun to be “visible for several miles”. Exactly how long the sun shone for before receiving its coat of grey paint, I’m not sure. The Sun newspaper was acquired by Fairfax in 1953 and the building sold for $1.1 million the year after, to become the offices of GIO insurance.
Now it’s a building of mixed offices, like so many others in Sydney. On the ground floor there’s a For Lease sign for the shop on the left hand side, and on the other side is the showroom for Percy Marks jewellers. This seems fitting, what with the sun ten storeys up, set into the roof of the building like an immense, grey pearl.
Five Sydney Open Highlights
Posted: November 3, 2015 Filed under: Sydney City | Tags: lands department building, lucy osburn nightingale museum, martin place, st james church, sydney city, sydney hospital, sydney living museums, Sydney Open 4 CommentsSunday was Sydney Living Museums’ annual Sydney Open, a one day festival when buildings not usually accessible to the public are open for exploration. It’s always a highlight of the year for me, someone who spends a lot of her time wondering: what is that and what’s in there? This year I spent most of my time in the northern part of the city; here are five favourites from my day.
This was the building I was most eager to investigate for a number of reasons: its immense, sandstone grandeur, the curious rectangular dome with oval windows like a rooftop jewellery box, and the fact it (and its sandstone neighbour, the Education building) has been sold by the government and is soon to converted from offices to a hotel.
Lands Department Building in the 1890s, State Library of NSW.
It is a striking and imposing structure, taking up a whole city block, and must have appeared even more so when it was built in the 1870s. Inside this largest of public buildings was the latest in office technology at the time – speaking tubes, pneumatic bells – as well as the more standard late 19th century inclusions, spiral stairs, a mosaic of Queen Victoria’s coat of arms at the entrance.
The jewellery box room is the eastern dome, accessed by a steep set of stairs from the offices below. Inside is warm and airy and it is easy to imagine it as the map-drying room, which was once its purpose. The oval windows which surround the room frame views of the harbour and the city.
Once the maps were dried they went into the plan room, which once held around a million plans and property records. We stepped in through the heavy, fireproof (very much on people’s minds after the 1882 Garden Palace fire destroyed many government records) metal door, into a room with a domed ceiling and walls lined with the cardboard tubes that would have once held plans and records.
Inside the Lands Department Building I could imagine it how it might have been in its early years, a busy office building with clerks ascending the spiral stairs or surveyors calibrating their equipment in the hallway along the Surveyor’s Baseline set into the marble floor, before setting out on a survey.
Surveying for Central Station in 1900, State Library of NSW.
2. 48 Martin Place (Government Savings Bank of NSW): the vault
Of all the Sydney Open buildings this was one of the most popular, with lines stretching around the corner down Martin Place. This isn’t surprising: it’s a wealthy and powerful building which is simultaneously of the past, present and future, with a neoclassical, Beaux Arts banking floor from the 1920s, and on the office levels above vistas of glass and light accessed by a cylindrical glass elevator.
Once inside, after marvelling at the ornate interior, there was a choice: the roof or the vault? The roof journey included a trip in the glass cylinder from the lavish surrounds of the ground floor through the futuristic-office-scape, but I decided to go underground, to the vault.
We descended the staircase into a sombre, marble room, to peer through the bars at the door of the vault. It is a cinematic moment staring through at the round metal door, 7 feet high and said to weigh 30 tonnes, knowing that behind it are the safety deposit boxes with their mysterious contents. It’s a place of high security and high secrecy. There were no photographs in the vault, but here is a photograph from the National Library of Australia from the vault’s early days (hand on right hand side for scale).
A description from the Sydney Morning Herald, 1929.
.3. St James Church
St James Church is the oldest church in Sydney, designed by Francis Greenway, built by convict labour and consecrated in 1824. The interior was redesigned in the early 20th century, and it is here that I found one of my favourite Sydney Open details. One of the pleasures of being able to investigate these buildings is to have the chance to notice things up above and the things underfoot, such as ghostly strength.
The Children’s Chapel, painted in the late 1920s by the Turramurra Painters (a group of women in the 1920s who painted murals in city and rural churches), based on the carol “I Saw Three Ships” is beautiful too.
4. Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum
Sent by Florence Nightingale at the request of the premier, Henry Parkes, Lucy Osburn arrived from England in 1868 and set up the Nightingale School of Nursing in a gothic building in the grounds of Sydney Hospital.
Although this resulted in huge reform to nursing and was the foundation of modern Australian nursing, it was a difficult path for a woman to take. One of the information panels included the detail that: “Lucy Osburn’s own father had turned her portrait to face the wall when she entered the Nightingale College of Nursing”.
The museum is a collection of dioramas of nurses’ quarters, collections of nursing equipment, including a large magnetic contraption to remove metal shards from eyes, and two rooms of resin-mounted specimens with what seems like every conceivable body part in some state of disease. There are handkerchiefs embroidered by nurses for soldiers to send to their sweethearts, and a collection of building plaques, collected from the hospital as it has changed. As a lover of small, dedicated museums, this was a wonderful place to discover, even if the specimen room was somewhat disquieting.
.5. Property Council of Australia House
One of the great things about Sydney Open is that it encourages you to visit places you would never even know about otherwise. Every time I go into at least one or two buildings I’ve not noticed before, such as this one, the Property Council of Australia House, which was originally constructed as the Savings Bank of NSW in 1849. The interior has been reconstructed but the leadlight windows remain in the stairwells.
The beehive, symbol of work and industry, and the kingfisher, symbol of prosperity, are fitting emblems for a bank, and for a city. The city is itself a kind of beehive, enclosed and full of activity. Yet here and there are details and moments that flash up like the blue of a kingfisher, and lead to stories and speculations, other times and places and things to discover.
Thank you to Sydney Living Museums for another highly enjoyable Sydney Open in 2015, and I look forward to discovering more next year.
Millers Point Three Years On
Posted: February 26, 2015 Filed under: Sydney City | Tags: barangaroo, gentrification, millers point, sydney city 5 CommentsIn 2012 I wrote a story about Millers Point and mentioned the threats to the community from the surrounding developments and the government’s proposed sale of public housing. Last year it was made official, the houses would be sold and since then residents have been fighting to stay in their homes and keep their community together.
It’s almost three years since I wrote about Millers Point, and High Street has a very different atmosphere. It has changed from one of peaceful community to one of struggle. Banners are hung over balconies, spray painted onto sheets in stencil letters: Millers Point Not 4 Sale; Say No to the Total Sell Off of Public Assets. The street has a stripped feeling, some of the houses already empty, others clinging on.
The building site beneath High Street is busy as the Barangaroo project continues. The construction site makes a mechanical churning, digestive kind of noise, and I imagine this is the sound of it chewing up the past. Already the shape of the land below has been altered from the straight lines of the wharves. Now the curved shoreline is a neatly curated return to a past shape, based on an 1836 map. Blocks of sandstone, each labelled with a barcode for correct placement, have been assembled at the water’s edge. A larger sandstone block than the others has been unveiled on the point, renaming it Barangaroo Point.
Image from the Barangaroo website.
Millers Point is facing disappearance. Some of the houses are now empty, their windows blank and curtainless, the residents moved elsewhere. Other residents are fighting, their houses hung with handmade signs: No One wanted to be here when I came here over 30 years ago, so now should I have to go? Some Millers Point residents have lived here for three or even five generations, and all speak with sadness and anger at the loss of their community. Many are elderly and have been fighting to stay in homes where they have lived for much of their life. Most recently, a petition for Mary Vo to stay in her home for the last few years of her life has been collecting signatures.
The state government says the houses must be sold for reinvestment in the public housing system, although how exactly the money will be invested hasn’t been revealed. The houses are being gradually auctioned anyway, and continual pressure is being put on those remaining in their homes to relocate. People fear that Wooloomooloo will be next, then Glebe, until all the city’s social housing has disappeared.
A 1960s plan for Woolloomooloo. From “Sydney 1842-1992” by Shirley Fitzgerald.
Last year, just after the announcement the houses would be sold, I went to Millers Point one afternoon and spoke to the industrial heritage artist Jane Bennett who was painting the High Street vista, her easel set up near the fence. I looked through her folder of previous work, paintings of industrial landscapes that have disappeared, most of them around the harbour. It was late afternoon and a soft, sunset light was cast over the street. I watched for a little while as she painted and we talked about the Harbour Control Tower at the end of the street, where she was an artist in residence for more than a decade. Now the tower is owned by the Barangaroo corporation and will be demolished. (See Jane’s paintings of Millers Point, and read about her involvement with the suburb here.)
The scene Jane was painting that day, the houses in the lush afternoon light, has already changed. Construction seems to bear down upon it from all sides, Barangaroo down below, roadworks. Last June I went on the tour of the development. Like all the other visitors I was given a branded water bottle, cap and tote bag as I entered and then spent time trekking around the construction zone, asking the same questions everyone else seemed to be asking: what’s going to happen to the tower, and where had the fire been? The barcoded sandstone and reptile petting zoo was meant to distract me, but it didn’t, or at least not in the right way. My eyes drifted to the streets above, and the banners hung over the railing. I didn’t want the carefully arranged development, the park where I could go down to actually touch the harbour water, if I had to look at the rows of Millers Point houses glossed up and made into exclusive residences.
Walking around Millers Point in 2015, I have a grim feeling. For as long as I have known it the suburb has been a gentle place in the city, small, old houses, with miscellaneous window decorations, and always people around, leaning over their front fences, chatting. It was out of step with the cut-throat city surrounding it, and that made it precious.
On Kent Street one house has on its front wall a carefully assembled collection of laminated A4 posters of heroes and villains: Cat memes next to Tony Abbott, Johnny Rotten next to Margaret Thatcher, Clover Moore next to John Howard, amid a storm of laminated monopoly money.
The protests continue. Follow their progress at the Millers Point Community, which has resident’s stories, history and links to other resources. There are also a number of facebook groups, including Save Our Homes.
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