Daytime corner view from the street showing the long arcaded front, stacked corner statues, mansard dormers and green dome with a flag. Blue sky; slightly wide-angle.

Chief Secretary’s Building

121 Macquarie Street, Sydney

James Barnet; dome and mansard by Walter Liberty Vernon. 1873 to 1881, raised in the 1890s. Sandstone.

Size
Five levels. No height found, so the drawing is estimated
Material
Sandstone walls, copper dome, slate and copper mansards
Status
State Heritage Register, 1999. The Industrial Relations Commission moved out to Parramatta in 2019; the Governor has also kept an office here

Barnet’s palace for the Colonial Secretary took the best site in Bridge Street, between Parliament House and Government House. He based it on Michelangelo’s Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The bills ran away from him, with an estimate of £60,000 becoming £81,558 by 1880, and its design reflected the tastes of Sir Henry Parkes, its first Colonial Secretary.

Within a decade every department inside was complaining of overcrowding. A Phillip Street wing went on in the early 1890s, and Vernon raised the roof with a mansard and a central dome in a Second Empire manner. Barnet resented it, because it spoiled his composition. The dome was first covered in aluminium in 1895 to 1896, one of the metal’s earliest uses on a building anywhere.

The building was meant to speak. Each of its three street entrances names its purpose in stone, among them “Public Entrance” on Bridge Street, with sandstone allegories beside them. Mercy, Justice and Wisdom stand at the Macquarie Street corner, and Art, Science and Labour at Phillip Street. The Executive Council Chamber upstairs hosted meetings that led to Federation, including the 1891 convention. It later housed divorce courts and the Opera House Trust.

The stone

Achille Simonetti, who was born in Rome and had a studio at Balmain, carved the six outside statues. By the 1980s the stone needed major work, and the Bicentennial restoration, budgeted at $1 million, finished in 1990 at about twice that. No source consulted names the quarry.

Read about Sydney Sandstone

Sources

  1. Chief Secretary's Building, Wikipedia (incorporates NSW State Heritage Inventory text)
  2. Ceremonial sitting to mark the occasion of the move to new premises at Parramatta, remarks by Chief Commissioner Kite, 5 February 2019, Industrial Relations Commission of NSW
  3. NSWNMA slams relocation of IRC to Parramatta, NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association