Sydney in the 1880s
The Garden Palace burned to the ground in about forty minutes early on the morning of 22 September 1882. Nobody has ever established how the fire started.
It had stood for three years. James Barnet designed it and John Young built it in eight months for the Sydney International Exhibition, which opened on 17 September 1879: a cruciform hall of iron, glass and timber under a central dome, standing on the Domain side of the Botanic Gardens and costing something near £192,000. When the exhibition closed in April 1880 the building stayed and the colony filled it up — an auditorium, a gallery, the first mining and technological museum, government offices, and in the basement the official records, the 1881 census among them. What was in the basement is simply gone.
What went up in its place, in spirit if not on the same ground, was built to last. James Barnet's Colonial Secretary's Office rose at Macquarie and Bridge Streets through these same years, with allegorical figures of Mercy, Justice and Wisdom over its Macquarie Street front. Not every corner got that budget: on Castlereagh Street a timber shopfront under a conical sheet-metal roof still traded as "Pottie / Veterinary Surgeon", the condemned buildings beside it waiting to come down.
Elsewhere the 1880s are a colony at its most pleased with itself. Sydney turned a hundred in 1888 and had itself drawn from the air for the occasion, bird's-eye views that fit every street, wharf and steeple into one sheet. Barnet's General Post Office stands in George Street with no clock tower on it — that was not finished until September 1891, when it became the tallest thing in Sydney. Mort's Dock was repairing ships at Balmain in 1887, sailing vessels still crowd Darling Harbour, and Thomas Woolner's bronze Captain Cook had stood at the top of Hyde Park since February 1879.
Not everything filed under this decade is of the city at all: a multi-masted schooner under full sail, no land in sight, is here because it came out of a marine insurer's records rather than because it shows Sydney.
The Garden Palace's dome sits on the skyline of the wider views, and whether it is there or missing is the quickest way to tell which side of that September morning they were taken.
