Macquarie Street

There was a scheme in the 1930s to replace the Macquarie Street precinct in Sydney with a modern building that would loom high over the city. Popular legend says that the razing and rebuilding was repeatedly delayed by an unnamed civil servant, who used standard bureaucratic delaying tactics such as ‘losing’ the file.

Later, World War II made such an ambitious project impossible, and in the peace that followed, old buildings came to be valued more highly. So, luckily, we can still admire the beautiful lines of the Hyde Park Barracks, the New South Wales Parliament, the old ‘Rum Hospital’, and the Mint.

Macquarie Street has always been a street of fine buildings, and is well worth a quiet stroll. Take in the pig outside Sydney Hospital, opposite the top of Martin Place, rub it for luck, and wander on down to the State Library of NSW, or up to the Hyde Park Barracks.

D'Arcy Wentworth, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley paid for the construction of the hospital that stretched from the present state Parliament House to the Mint building. The central section has since been pulled down and replaced, leaving those two wings standing. These gentlemen were businessmen, not philanthropists, and there was method in their kindness.

In exchange for building the hospital, legend has it that they obtained from Governor Lachlan Macquarie an effective three-year monopoly on the colony's rum trade, which explains why the hospital was known as the Rum Hospital. How apt, some people say, that part of the old Rum Hospital is our Parliament House, but we would never agree to that sort of slur. The building has been a medical store, and Assistant Surgeon's quarters, the Sydney Dispensary, and, after gold was found in Australia, a branch of the Royal Mint, stamping out sovereigns. Later, government offices took over the interior.

At some future date, somebody is going to have to allocate the credit for Sydney's Renaissance. Somewhere at the start of the 1980s, we started caring about our buildings and our past, restoring things and creating new museums, but its genesis was probably much earlier than 1980.

As a popular groundswell, it was later than 1934, because in that year, a scheme was mooted to demolish everything from the State Library of NSW up to Hyde Park, without public protest. Or maybe there were people who cared even then. Somehow, that scheme got neatly derailed along the way, so hurrah for whoever managed to keep losing the file.

The modern conservation wave started in or around Macquarie Street. The writer can recall going up to Parliament House in 1980 to give evidence before a Parliamentary committee which was sitting there, and seeing the signs of restoration going on. People were slowly scraping back the paint, to reveal the patterns that had been painted on the walls, and restoring the original colours. It was about then that the Mint was cleared of official people and restored to and for the ordinary people. Now, alas, it is closed once more.

Nearby attractions to Macquarie Street: The Art Gallery of New South Wales can be accessed through a passageway near Porcellino, and there is excellent coffee to be had in an establishment of the same name. Go past that, across the grass of the Domain, through the trees, and you are there.

Then there is the State Library of New South Wales, although people who don't use it often call it the Mitchell Library, which is part of it but not the whole thing. You are also within cooee (that's an Australianism for you) of the home site of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

More to come