To the east of Farm Cove the contours of Sydney Harbour’s south shore pass several peninsulas that traverse through the scenic and exclusive Eastern Suburbs. The most affluent of these small peninsula suburbs are probably Point Piper (home of the most recent Australian prime minister to be deposed by his party) and Darling Point. Personifying Point Piper’s claim to suburban exclusivity is Wolseley Road, envied by realty obsessives for being the most expensive street or road for residential property in Australia, its status stands to those who care about such things as “the nation’s ultimate address” (sixteen of Sydney’s top 100 most expensive houses are located on this road) [‘Point Piper’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Darling Point (McKell’s) occasional wharf⇓
Neighbouring Darling Point✲ rates almost as highly as ‘PP’ in the affluential stakes and has a history that is even more illustrious! The suburb retains many fine mansions from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is a mansion that is no more, that is the focus of this blog. The serene little, two-tiered park at the northern tip of Yarranabbe Point✤, McKell Park (named after a former state premier and governor-general) is the picturesque site that once housed Canonbury, a well-presented Gothic style mansion.
Canonbury (above), built in 1904 on the site of an earlier residence, Lansdowne, is a short 9-iron from another celebrated mansion, Lindesay – a villa in the Gothic Revival style named after a little known acting governor of the early colony and still standing. Lansdowne and (subsequently) Canonbury passed through many hands after the original grant of 6.9 hectare of land to James Holt in 1833.
Among the notable resident/owners of the properties at Yarranabbe Point have been Thomas Mitchell (explorer, colonial surveyor-general, 1820s-1830s), Charles Nicholson (statesman and early provost of Sydney University) and Harry Rickards (Vaudevillian theatre entrepreneur). Rickards gave the mansion the name ‘Canonbury’ after the suburb in North London where he had lived before emigrating to Sydney.
One of the many heritage-listed Yarranabbe gateposts⇓
In 1919 Canonbury was purchased by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) which charitably turned the property into a convalescent hospital for returning servicemen from the Great War. This theme continued during WWII when it was used as a naval hospital. After the war Canonbury was acquired by the NSW Government and became an annexe of the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Surry Hills.
By the end of the Seventies, with the annexe now surplus to Crown Street’s needs, the government decided to sell the site for redevelopment. The decision met with strong opposition from locals and after an earnest debate over its fate, custodianship of Canonbury was transferred to the Woollahra Municipal Council in 1983. Canonbury was demolished❂ and in 1985 the site remade as a public park with neat, box-shaped hedges and terraced lawns falling away to the shoreline [Jacobsen, Patricia, ‘McKell Park’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2016, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/mckell_park, viewed 28 Feb 2019]
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✲ named to honour the wife of the NSW colony’s 7th governor Ralph Darling…in the 19th century it was tagged as the “Mayfair of Australia”, [Anne-Maree Whitaker, ‘Darling Point: The Mayfair of Australia’ (unpublished MA Thesis, University of Sydney, 1983), 50, 51]
✤ pre-European settlement, the traditional owners of the peninsula were the Birrabirrgal people
❂ the small, on-site historic cottage (formerly the caretaker’s quarters) was preserved, along with archaeological remnants of Canonbury’s and Lansdowne’s foundations
The further I delved into my “war-ravaged” copy of Wilson’s 1922 Authentic Director of Sydney and Suburbs, the more snippets of hitherto unearthed information, little gems of Sydney’s yesterday, I stumbled upon.
Among the minutiae of miscellaneous info contained in the directory’s index, one item that got my attention was a list of the consuls and overseas government agents in Sydney in 1922. Interesting to see that at that time there were consulate offices established in Sydney for tiny international entities like Latvia, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia and the Czechoslovak Republic, but being not yet four years after the cessation of the hostilities of WWI, no consulates for the countries deemed by the victors to be the “guilty parties”, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. So much for moving on!!!…and we all know where that path catastrophically led!
Another curio I discovered was that among the State and Commonwealth government departments listed in the index, there were several with city addresses in Richmond Tce, The Domain. The questionably named Aborigines (spelt ‘Aborogines’) Protection Board, the Pharmacy Board of NSW, the Dental Board of NSW, the Medical Board of NSW, the Metropolitan Meat Industry Board and the Inspector-General of the Insane(sic) were all located in this east side of the city street…interesting in that this street, Richmond Terrace no longer exists!
Ad for the Orient Line
A total of forty-six shipping line companies were recorded as having offices in Sydney’s CBD. These included British-India SN Co, China-Australia Mail SS Line, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the Adelaide Steamship Company, New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands (Line), the White Star Line✲ and the more contemporarily familiar P & O Line. Only one of the 46 placed a (full-paged and quite detailed) ad in the directory, the Australia to Britain Orient Line.
Royal Autos in ‘Wilson’s’
City clubs and buildings of interest
In a section of the index Wilson’s lists the various clubs, chambers, banks and arcades that formed part of the cityscape in 1922. The more ‘highbrow’ of the clubs, predominately “Gentlemen’s” establishments, tended to congregate ‘uptown’ (the end closer to Circular Quay) considered to be the smarter and more affluent part of the city. The clubs included the Australian Club (corner of Bent and Macquarie Sts)[¹], the Automobile Club of Australia (132 Phillip St)[²], the Country Club (17 Castlereagh St), the Catholic Club (107 Castlereagh St ), Masonic Club (216 Pitt St)[³], the N.S.W. Club (Bligh St)[⁴], the Soldiers’ Club (426 George St), the Union Club (2 Bligh St)[⁵], the Warrigal Club (145 Macquarie St). Also in the city were clubs associated with the sport (and business) of horse racing – these three used to be situated in the CBD, the Australian Jockey Club (now the Australian Turf Club) (8 Bligh St), the Canterbury Park Race Club (15 Castlereagh St) and the Rosehill Racing Club (32 Elizabeth St). Another city club intricately linked to horse racing is Tattersall’s Club (202-204 Pitt St). Traditionally the haunt of old style bookmakers, “City Tatts” as it is better known, still stands and operates on its original land, 123 years after its foundation.
The 1922 city’s chambers are a predictable lot with numerous entities bearing largely homogenous Anglo-(Saxon)Celtic names scattered around Phillip Street, the traditional law hub of the city. That equally upstanding and status quo affirming pillar of society in that day, the banks, are spread over a wide radius of the CBD. The only point of note about them is discovering that in the 1920s Australia financial climate, with regulation of the sector very tight, two foreign banks had Sydney branches and were allowed to trade here at that time… the French National d’Escompté de Paris, a forerunner of Banque National de Paris? (24 Hunter St) and even more surprisingly, the Japanese Bank (Falmouth Chambers, 117 Pitt St).
The original (1907) Challis House
One of the city buildings identified in Wilson’s Director with a busy and interesting history is Challis House, N⍛ 4-10 Martin Place. Eponymously named after merchant and University of Sydney benefactor John Henry Challis, the House has a long association with the University as well as many financial tenants over the decades. During WWI it was used as the recruiting campaign headquarters for New South Wales. The office building at the time of Wilson’s publication was in its original Victorian architectural state…in the Thirties it received a new (Art Deco) facade and later in 1993 it underwent major renovations [‘Challis House’, Sydney Architecture, www.sydneyarchitecture.com]
Blue Mountains – a “Tourist’s Guide”
Although it’s a street directory whose ambit is Sydney and suburbs, the Wilson’s directory ends with an extensive section (73pp) on the Blue Mountains. The entry even encompasses the town of Lithgow (also called ‘Eskbank’ in 1922) which is 15 miles west of the Blue Mountains. The book has lots of detailed information on the BM suburbs, each suburb has an entry on accommodation and the scenic natural highlights of the Mountains with select maps indicating points of interest.
The “Half-way House” of Blue Mts
The directory gives a picture of Springwood, the largest of the Lower Mountains towns✥, that suggests a warm place in an otherwise cold region – “sheltered by its westerly walls from the cooler air of the higher altitudes…pleasant sunshine all year round…in winter the climate is so equable that many families make Springwood a permanent residence”. An opinion echoed by Springwood house and land agent R.F. Harvey’s ad extolling “The Best Winter Climate in the World”. For day visitors to Springwood, the Hotel ‘Oriental’ awaits their patronage (ad, right).
Katoomba, the “largest of the mountain tourist resorts” with its “wide choice of charming and picturesque views”. Despite being 68 miles from Sydney, “horses and vehicles are always obtainable” – as this advertisement (left) on page 706 offering trips to the famous Jenolan Caves in luxury Buicks testifies.
Nearby Leura is “celebrated for the beauty of its great showpiece – the Leura Falls…in themselves alone worth the trip to the mountains”. With unfettered enthusiasm the writer goes on to laud the town in extravagant terms: “the place has been so well laid out as a tourist resort that it offers a perfect kaleidoscope of the views”. The object of Wilson’s Director is clearly to sell the Mountains to visitors from Sydney which synergises nicely with the numerous accommodation ads (funny that!) that appear such as this one (right) for Leura’s Hotel Alexandria (still in business in 2018).
The spa town of Medlow Bath, is “a pretty little village, rising rapidly in tourist favour”. The tiny Upper Mountains town is famous for its Hydro-Majestic hotel resort where in the day the better-off citizens of Sydney would periodically retreat to benefit from its therapeutic mineral waters and clean mountain air. Built by retailer Mark Foy (Jr) as a hydropathic sanatorium, the “Hydro-Maje” in the Twenties was where the cream of Sydney’s elite flocked on the weekends to socialise.
Jenolan tourer (Blackheath)
One station further west, the mountains tourist resort of Blackheath, had the writer reaching for new superlatives! The bush trails and valleys (the “Valley of the Grose” as he calls it) lead to “world-famous Govett’s Leap (waterfall), a stream which plunges headlong over a perpendicular wall of dark-tinted rock on to a mass of boulders, some 520 feet below”. Mermaid’s Cave is “like a glimpse of a fairyland…a more picturesque scene cannot be imagined”, etc. The other attraction of Blackheath in 1922 was that “there is every probability of its having a permanent water supply in the near future”. The accommodation ad below is for Blackheath’s ‘Ivanhoe Hotel’, replaced in 1938 by the now quite old-looking ‘New Ivanhoe Hotel’. Mt Victoria, 79 miles by paved road❂ from Sydney, the highest point of the Blue Mountains (the guide gives it at 3,424 feet above sea-level)⍍, is praised for the scenic countryside surrounding the town dotted with charmingly named spots like Fern Cave, Fairy Bower, Fern Tree Gully and Witch’s Glen, for the walker to explore.
Upper Blue Mts map (‘Wilson’s’)
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[¹] the Australian Club (still at the same address, 165 Macquarie St), is the oldest men-only club in the country, dating from 1838
[²] the Automobile Club changed both its name to the Royal Automobile Club of Australia (RACA), and its location to Castlereagh St North, in the year of the directory’s publication (1922)
[³] the Masonic Club still exists but the premises relocated to a new building at 169-171 Castlereagh St in 1927
[⁴] the N.S.W. Club House is still in existence at 25-31 Bligh St, but the Club itself amalgamated with the Australian Club in 1969 and the building has had a series of commercial tenants since (currently occupied by the Lowy Institute for International Affairs)
[⁵] still in operation (since 1857), these days at 25 Bent St and now called the Union, University and Schools Club
✲ of Titanic fame, White Star Line merged with Cunard in 1934 as White-Cunard, before eventually becoming defunct
✥ Blaxland and Glenbrook, two other Lower BM towns, get very short shrift from Wilson’s, relegated to brief, passing mentions only
❂ the Great Western Highway, which bisects the Blue Mountains, was still called Bathurst Road in 1922
⍍ although according to markers on the spot, One Tree Hill on the south side of Mt Victoria, is the highest point in the Blue Mountains at 3,654 feet
To the east of Farm Cove the contours of Sydney Harbour’s south shore pass several peninsulas that traverse through the scenic and exclusive Eastern Suburbs. The most affluent of these small peninsula suburbs are probably Point Piper (home of the most recent Australian prime minister to be deposed by his party) and Darling Point. Personifying Point Piper’s claim to suburban exclusivity is Wolseley Road, envied by realty obsessives for being the most expensive street or road for residential property in Australia, its status stands to those who care about such things as “the nation’s ultimate address” (sixteen of Sydney’s top 100 most expensive houses are located on this road) [‘Point Piper’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Neighbouring Darling Point✲ rates almost as highly as ‘PP’ in the affluential stakes and has a history that is even more illustrious! The suburb retains many fine mansions from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is a mansion that is no more, that is the focus of this blog. The serene little, two-tiered park at the northern tip of Yarranabbe Point✤, McKell Park (named after a former state premier and governor-general) is the picturesque site that once housed Canonbury, a well-presented Gothic style mansion.
Canonbury (above), built in 1904 on the site of an earlier residence, Lansdowne, is a short 9-iron from another celebrated mansion, Lindesay – a villa in the Gothic Revival style named after a little known acting governor of the early colony and still standing. Lansdowne and (subsequently) Canonbury passed through many hands after the original grant of 6.9 hectare of land to James Holt in 1833.
Among the notable resident/owners of the properties at Yarranabbe Point have been Thomas Mitchell (explorer, colonial surveyor-general, 1820s-1830s), Charles Nicholson (statesman and early provost of Sydney University) and Harry Rickards (Vaudevillian theatre entrepreneur). Rickards gave the mansion the name ‘Canonbury’ after the suburb in North London where he had lived before emigrating to Sydney.
In 1919 Canonbury was purchased by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) which charitably turned the property into a convalescent hospital for returning servicemen from the Great War. This theme continued during WWII when it was used as a naval hospital. After the war Canonbury was acquired by the NSW Government and became an annexe of the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Surry Hills.
