Sydney Jewish Museum – 148 Darlinghurst Road – Darlinghurst – The Story of Jewish Australia

Walk along Darlinghurst Road from Kings Cross towards Oxford Street and, across from Green Park on the corner of Burton Street, you pass a handsome cream building with tall columns and the words "The N.S.W. Jewish War Memorial" across the top. Most Sydneysiders know it as the Sydney Jewish Museum, but to generations of Jewish Sydney it was "the Macc", the Maccabean Hall, built in 1923. The story inside goes all the way back to the First Fleet, so here's a look at how Jewish people came to Australia, how they made their homes and places of worship in Sydney, and how a group of Holocaust survivors turned an old community hall into one of the most moving museums in the country.

The Sydney Jewish Museum, in the old Maccabean Hall on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Burton Street, photographed in 2009.
Credit: Photo by dunedoo (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Convicts and Free Settlers: The First Jewish Australians

There were Jews in Australia from the very first day of European settlement. The Australian Jewish Historical Society says the First Fleet carried eight Jewish convicts with some certainty, and possibly as many as sixteen. Between 1788 and 1842 about 800 Jewish convicts were sent to New South Wales.

The best known of them is Esther Abrahams. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, she was a milliner sentenced at the Old Bailey in August 1786 to seven years' transportation for trying to steal twenty-four yards of silk lace. Her daughter Rosanna was born in Newgate prison in March 1787, and mother and baby sailed in the Lady Penrhyn. On board, Esther met Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines, and after the landing she became his partner. They had seven children together.

Her life reads like a novel. Johnston was a leader of the Rum Rebellion that overthrew Governor Bligh in 1808 and for a time ran the colony, so the State Library of NSW calls the former convict girl its unofficial first lady. While he was in England standing trial, Esther managed his estates at Annandale and near Bankstown, selling meat and grain to the government stores. They married at Concord in November 1814, with Samuel Marsden officiating. Her last years were sad. After Johnston died, their son Robert went to court in 1829 to have her declared unfit to manage her affairs, and she died at her son David's property, George's Hall, in August 1846. Her remains now lie in the Johnston family vault at Waverley Cemetery.

A portrait believed to be of Esther Johnston, née Abrahams, from an oil painting of about 1830. The State Library holds a later photographic print of the original.
Credit: State Library of New South Wales (PXB 314 2), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Barnett Levey, who arrived in December 1821, is usually named as the colony's first free Jewish settler. A merchant and a dreamer, he built Sydney's first permanent theatre, the Theatre Royal in George Street, and Waverley House, which gave its name to the suburb (I mentioned him in my 10 Things You Didn't Know About Waverley post). In 1828 Phillip Joseph Cohen arrived with the Chief Rabbi's permission to perform Jewish marriages. The first, in 1832, joined Moses Joseph, a convict who became a wealthy trader, and Rosetta Nathan, who had come out from London to marry him.

The first organised Jewish activity in Sydney was caring for the dead. A burial society was formed in 1817, and in 1832 part of the Devonshire Street Cemetery, where Central Station stands today, was consecrated as a Jewish burial ground (I've written about the Sandhills Cemetery before). The same year a formal congregation was set up, with the merchant Joseph Barrow Montefiore as its first president.

Finding a Place to Pray: York Street and the Great Synagogue

For years Sydney's Jews worshipped in private houses and then in a rented room in Bridge Street. As the congregation grew it bought a block of land in York Street, not far from today's Town Hall. The foundation stone was laid on 19 April 1842, and the synagogue was consecrated on 2 April 1844, with music specially written by J. H. Anderson and Isaac Nathan. James Hume designed it in the Egyptian style, and it was paid for by the Jewish community with help from Christian well-wishers and a government grant. It served the community for about thirty-five years, and I wrote about the York Street Synagogue a while back.

The York Street Synagogue, Sydney's first purpose-built synagogue, photographed by John Sharkey in November 1870.
Credit: Royal Australian Historical Society, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1859 a dispute split the congregation, and a breakaway group set up a second synagogue in a former Baptist chapel in Macquarie Street. In the 1870s, under the Reverend Alexander Davis, the two joined forces to build something much grander. A builder, John Solomon, bought land facing Hyde Park for £2,000 in 1871 and held it until the money could be raised. Thomas Rowe won the design competition in 1872, and on 26 January 1875 the foundation stone was laid by Saul Samuel, the colony's first Jewish legislator and, according to the ADB, the first Jew to become a minister of the Crown. The women of the community ran a great bazaar that December to help pay for it.

The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street was consecrated on 4 March 1878, though the decoration wasn't finished until 1883. Its front and towers are Pyrmont sandstone, and inside there's carved timber, stained glass and a midnight-blue ceiling scattered with gold-leaf stars. It seats about a thousand people, and for thirty-five years it was the only synagogue operating in Sydney. The State Heritage Register calls it the mother congregation of Australian Jewry. If you've ever strolled through Hyde Park, you've probably looked straight at it.

The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, seen from Hyde Park, in a photograph from Edward Hungerford's album of Sydney in the 1880s.
Credit: Australian National Maritime Museum, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

Making Their Mark

Sydney's Jewish community was small, around half of one per cent of the population, but it punched well above its weight. Joseph Barrow Montefiore came out in 1829 from a wealthy London Sephardi family and helped found the Bank of Australasia. The depression of the 1840s ruined his Sydney firm, so he started again in Adelaide in 1846. Saul Samuel was later knighted and served as Agent-General in London. The Dictionary of Sydney has a lovely story that in 1917 the Legislative Assembly didn't sit on Yom Kippur, because the Speaker, John J. Cohen, and his deputy, Sir Daniel Levy, were both observant Jews. And in 1930 Ernest S. Marks became Sydney's first Jewish Lord Mayor.

From the 1880s Jews escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia arrived, many settling in Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Paddington and Newtown and bringing Yiddish culture and new ideas such as Zionism. Over the following decades more and more families moved east towards Woollahra, Bondi and Randwick.

Two of the best-known Jewish Australians came from Victoria. Isaac Isaacs was born in Melbourne in 1855, the son of a tailor from Russian Poland, and grew up in the goldfields towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth. A barrister and federationist, he became a High Court judge in 1906 and Chief Justice in 1930, and on 22 January 1931 he was sworn in as Governor-General, the first Australian-born person to hold the job.

Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor-General, about 1930.
Credit: Fairfax Corporation, National Library of Australia, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Sir John Monash was born in West Melbourne in 1865 to a family from Prussian Poland, went to school for a while at Jerilderie in the Riverina and celebrated his bar mitzvah at the East Melbourne synagogue. An engineer and citizen soldier, he commanded a brigade at Gallipoli and a division in France, and in mid-1918 took command of the Australian Corps. After the Battle of Hamel and the great attack of 8 August, King George V knighted him in the field. At least 250,000 people turned out for his state funeral in 1931, and he was buried with Jewish rites.

General Sir John Monash, photographed by Elliott & Fry in London, about 1919.
Credit: Australian War Memorial (A02691), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gold Rush Towns and Country Congregations

The gold rushes brought a new wave of Jewish migrants. The Australian Jewish Historical Society counts 1,887 Jews in Australia in 1851 and 5,486 ten years later. Many went to the diggings, usually not to dig but to run the stores and hotels on the goldfields and in the country towns that grew out of them. Ballarat's congregation was founded in 1855, and the synagogue it built in 1861 is still standing and still used.

Country life could be lonely for Jewish families, though. The Dictionary of Sydney says that in the mid-nineteenth century about 40 per cent of the colony's Jews lived in country New South Wales, but most found it too hard to keep up a Jewish way of life and either drifted from their faith or moved to Sydney. Maitland's little brick synagogue in Church Street was consecrated in 1879, but as the community dwindled it closed in 1898. The building survives as the oldest surviving synagogue in NSW outside Sydney. Down in Tasmania, the Hobart Synagogue of 1845 is the oldest synagogue building in Australia.

The Maccabean Hall, 1923

Sydney's Jewish community had long wanted a proper community centre, and after the First World War that idea came together with plans for a war memorial. A row of houses at 140–148 Darlinghurst Road was pulled down to make room, and the heritage assessment says the whole project was paid for by public subscription. Judge Cohen laid the foundation stone on 28 February 1923. The architect, Gordon Keesing, was himself Jewish, and he gave the building an interwar classical front with tall columns and Ionic capitals. It was named for the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors of ancient times.

Sir John Monash opened it on Armistice Day, 11 November 1923, saying the hall had "the aim of keeping the Jewish people together and preserving the creed, perpetuating the faith". The entrance foyer holds the war memorial itself, with stained-glass windows in the Rising Sun pattern on either side, and the black marble forecourt carries the names of nearly 3,000 Jewish service men and women, including 177 who gave their lives in the two world wars. A plaque to Monash calls him "a great Australian and a worthy Jew".

The "Macc" quickly became the heart of Jewish Sydney, and the museum says that by the early 1940s it hosted more than 90 per cent of the community's activities. After the Second World War it helped refugees and Holocaust survivors find their feet, with English lessons, weddings, Sunday dances, rallies and memorial services, while the Australian Jewish Welfare Society worked from the building to support people who had arrived with nothing. Plenty of Sydney couples met under its ceiling.

A bar mitzvah dinner in the Maccabean Hall, 27 April 1947.
Credit: Photo Sam Hood; State Library of New South Wales (Home and Away 31114), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the community grew, so did the site. In 1965 the architect Henry Epstein added a five-storey Brutalist wing, the Rupert Michaelis Building, whose front carries a four-storey concrete relief of a seven-branched menorah by the sculptor Lyndon Dadswell. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and other community organisations still work from the complex.

Refugees, the Dunera Boys and the Survivors

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jewish families began looking desperately for somewhere to go, and Australia's record is not a proud one. At the Evian conference on refugees in July 1938, Australia's delegate said, "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one". Late that year the government agreed to take 15,000 refugees over three years, but the war cut the scheme short. Even so, the Dictionary of Sydney says about 8,000 Jewish refugees reached Australia before the war, around 5,000 of them settling in Sydney. They founded Temple Emanuel in Woollahra in 1938, the city's first Reform congregation, and along with other European migrants brought a continental flavour to Sydney's art, music, theatre and food.

Then there were the Dunera boys. In 1940, with Britain afraid of invasion, thousands of German and Austrian men there were interned as "enemy aliens", although most were Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis. On 10 July 1940 more than 2,500 detainees were crammed aboard the troopship Dunera at Liverpool. On the voyage the guards beat them and threw their luggage overboard. When the ship reached Sydney on 6 September, the army medical officer who went aboard was so appalled that his report led to a court martial in London. The men were taken by train to camps at Hay, and later Tatura in Victoria, where they ran their own classes, concerts and camp "university" and even printed their own money. Once released, many joined the Australian Army, and just under half of those held at Hay chose to make Australia home, among them men who became leading academics, artists, musicians and scientists.

After the war came the survivors. The Sydney Jewish Museum says about 27,000 Holocaust survivors migrated to Australia, and Australia is often said to have taken in more survivors per head of population than any country except Israel. Most came from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Because the government kept Jewish numbers down with quotas and left them out of the official migration schemes, most were sponsored and supported by Jewish families and organisations already here. By the 1950s, more than 60 per cent of Sydney's Jews had been born overseas. The survivors rebuilt their lives, raised families, started businesses and, years later, decided their stories had to be told.

A crowd outside the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street during the High Holy Days, September 1934.
Credit: Photo Sam Hood; State Library of New South Wales (Home and Away 576), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Museum Is Born, 1992

Through the 1960s and 1970s more survivors felt the need to speak about what they had been through, and they wanted a place where the history of the Holocaust could be kept and taught. The old Maccabean Hall, where many of them had found their first friends in Australia, was the natural home for it.

The driving force was John Saunders AO. Born in Hungary in 1922, he survived the Holocaust, came to Sydney and, with fellow Hungarian Frank Lowy, built up the Westfield shopping centre business. With other survivors, including members of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, he set out to create a museum in the old hall. The architect Michael Bures kept the hall's Art Deco barrel-vaulted ceiling and added a sculptural staircase in the shape of the Star of David, around a central void linking the exhibition levels.

The Governor of New South Wales, Rear Admiral Peter Sinclair, officially opened the Sydney Jewish Museum on 18 November 1992, with hundreds of people looking on. For the survivors it was a dream come true: Sydney finally had a place to remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, where survivors could speak for those who had lost their voice. John Saunders died in December 1997, but his museum is still going strong.

What made the place special was the survivors themselves. From the day it opened, survivors volunteered as guides, walking visitors through the history they had lived and telling their own stories. Eddie Jaku, a founding member who lived to 101, became world famous with his memoir The Happiest Man on Earth, and his message was simple: "as long as I live, I'll teach not to hate."

What's Inside

The museum has grown a lot over the years. The Sanctum of Remembrance opened in 1994, giving families a place to remember loved ones who have no graves, and the Children's Memorial followed in 2002, honouring the one and a half million children who died in the Holocaust, with a sculpture of children's shoes by Elza Pollak called All That Remained.

On the ground floor, Culture and Continuity: Journey through Judaism, opened by Governor-General Quentin Bryce, traces Jewish history from its beginnings in the ancient Near East to Jewish life in Australia today, including the waves of migration that built the community. Serving Australia, opened by General Peter Cosgrove in 2010, tells the stories of Jewish men and women in Australia's armed forces, which fits nicely in a building that began as a war memorial.

The heart of the museum is the Holocaust exhibition. After nearly five years of development, the refurbished exhibition was officially opened by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on 19 March 2017. It traces the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews between 1933 and 1945 through documents, photographs, film, survivors' own belongings and recorded testimony, remembers the other groups the Nazis persecuted, and ends with the new lives survivors built in Australia. The final stage of the refurbishment, The Holocaust and Human Rights, was opened on 15 February 2018 by Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow. One of the first permanent human rights exhibitions in an Australian museum, it asks visitors to think about rights here at home, including those of refugees and asylum seekers, people with disabilities, First Nations people and the LGBTIQ+ community.

The entrance on Darlinghurst Road, with "Maccabean Hall" over the door and "The N.S.W. Jewish War Memorial" across the top, in 2011.
Credit: Photo by Sardaka, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Teaching the Next Generation

Ask most Sydney teachers about the museum and they'll mention the school excursions. Students hear a Holocaust survivor speak, take a guided tour and do workshops linked to History, English, Studies of Religion and Legal Studies. Before the redevelopment the museum was getting about 55,000 visitors a year, some 35,000 of them school students, and it says more than 850,000 students have come through since 1992. One teacher quoted on its website put it simply: "If you haven't taken your students to the Sydney Jewish Museum, you haven't prepared them for life."

With fewer survivors still with us each year, the museum has worked hard to keep their voices. Its collection holds more than 15,000 artefacts and over 1,000 oral histories and testimonies. For its 30th birthday it opened Reverberations, built around recordings of 43 survivors, and it has been making interactive biographies so future visitors can still ask a survivor a question and hear an answer. With Holocaust studies becoming compulsory in NSW schools from 2027, that work matters more than ever.

The museum has also been a place of remembrance in hard times. After the attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025, in which fifteen people were killed, it set up Remembering Bondi, an online space for people to share how the attack affected them. With the USC Shoah Foundation it has been recording the testimony of survivors, witnesses and first responders, and with the Australian Jewish Historical Society it gathered up the cards, toys, candles and flowers left at the beachside memorial so they won't be lost.

The Museum Today and Tomorrow

Right now the museum is going through the biggest change in its history. With support from the community and from both the NSW and federal governments, it is being expanded on its Darlinghurst site to a design by Architectus. The Holocaust museum will stay, and a new museum of contemporary Jewish life with eleven new galleries is being built beside it, with the aim of welcoming 100,000 visitors a year by 2032. The NSW Heritage Council is also considering listing the NSW Jewish War Memorial and Sydney Jewish Museum on the State Heritage Register, in recognition of more than a century of Jewish community life on this corner.

Not bad for an old community hall. From a convict girl on the Lady Penrhyn to a general opening a war memorial on Armistice Day, and from the Dunera boys to survivors talking to a room full of teenagers, it's a very Australian story, and Sydney is lucky to have a place that keeps it alive. While you're in the area, the old Darlinghurst Gaol, now the National Art School, is just down Burton Street, and St John's Church is a short stroll along Darlinghurst Road. Further afield, the Jewish section of Rookwood Necropolis is well worth a visit too.

Visiting (as at October 2026)

As at October 2026, the Sydney Jewish Museum is closed to the general public during the redevelopment, and the museum says it will reopen in mid-2027 with new exhibitions on Jewish life and culture alongside its Holocaust and military history exhibitions. While it's closed there are no public opening hours or admission prices, but school programs continue at a nearby temporary location on weekdays except Fridays. The museum is at 148 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, a short walk from Kings Cross station, and the phone number is (02) 9360 7999. Check the Sydney Jewish Museum website for the latest news before you go.

Sources

• Sydney Jewish Museum: Our Story, History of the Building, Memorials and Exhibitions, The Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, The Happiest Man on Earth, High School Excursions, Learning, Creating a Museum for the Future
• Sydney Jewish Museum news: Sydney Jewish Museum to expand by 2027 (March 2023); Development approval (May 2024); Federal government grant (December 2024); Call-out for Soviet Jewry stories (2026); Bondi Testimony Project (2026)
• Sydney Jewish Museum, "30 Years of the Sydney Jewish Museum" timeline – exhibitions.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au; media release on The Holocaust and Human Rights exhibition (2018) – sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au (PDF)
• Suzanne D. Rutland, "Jews", Dictionary of Sydney, 2008 – dictionaryofsydney.org; Dictionary of Sydney, Waverley
• Australian Dictionary of Biography: Esther Johnston (G. F. J. Bergman), Barnett Levey (G. F. J. Bergman), Joseph Barrow Montefiore (Israel Getzler), Sir Saul Samuel, Sir Isaac Isaacs (Zelman Cowen), Sir John Monash (Geoffrey Serle)
• Australian Jewish Historical Society, "Walks of Jewish Australia" – ajhs.com.au
• State Library of NSW: Esther Johnston and Michael Isaacs, York Street Synagogue, Sydney, The Great Synagogue, NSW Jewish War Memorial; State Library of Victoria, Ergo, The Holocaust
• NSW State Heritage Inventory: Great Synagogue; NSW Jewish War Memorial and Sydney Jewish Museum (under consideration); NSW Government, heritage listing consultation
• NSW War Memorials Register, NSW Jewish War Memorial and Honour Roll
• "Philanthropist retail king dies at 75", Australian Financial Review, 8 December 1997 – afr.com
• Wikipedia (as a cross-check): Sydney Jewish Museum, Great Synagogue (Sydney), HMT Dunera, Dunera boys, History of the Jews in Australia, Ballarat Synagogue, Maitland Synagogue, Hobart Synagogue
• Sydney Jewish Museum, The Maccabean Hall: Jack Meister's second home; History Matters (University of Sydney), The Maccabean Hall: what lay amid the art deco walls (2018); Claims Conference Kavod, Supporting Holocaust survivor guides and volunteers at the Sydney Jewish Museum (2015)
• "Ageing Holocaust survivors in Australia", Medical Journal of Australia, 2011 – mja.com.au; University of Sydney, Holocaust memory: an Australian story? (2020)
• BBC News, Why Sydney is preserving thousands of flowers after deadly Bondi attack; SBS News, Bondi attack stories and memories to be preserved in new digital project
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, from the State Library of NSW, the Royal Australian Historical Society, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and individual photographers credited in the captions

Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court – Forbes Street & Taylor Square – Darlinghurst – NSW

If you've ever waited for a bus at Taylor Square, you've stood right next to two of the oldest public buildings in Sydney. Behind the big sandstone columns of the Darlinghurst Courthouse on Oxford Street, and running down Forbes Street and along Darlinghurst Road, are the high walls of the old Darlinghurst Gaol. These days art students wander in and out with sketchbooks and a coffee, but for more than seventy years this was Sydney's main prison, and around 76 people were hanged here. The courthouse next door has been hearing criminal trials since 1842, and it still does.

I wrote a short piece on the Darlinghurst Gaol back in 2015 and another on the Darlinghurst Courthouse in 2021. This time I wanted the full story: why the gaol was built, how it was built (very slowly), who ended up inside, and some of the famous trials heard next door.

Out With the Old: The George Street Gaol

Before Darlinghurst, Sydney's gaol stood on the corner of George and Essex Streets in The Rocks (I wrote about it in Sydney's Second Jail). By the 1830s it was falling apart and hopelessly overcrowded. When the High Sheriff, Thomas Macquoid, reported on it in 1835, he found 110 men sharing one dormitory 32 feet by 22 feet. In another room, 27 feet by 22 feet, there were 40 women and 10 children. From 1826 the overflow had been put aboard an old prison hulk, the Phoenix.

A new gaol had been on the cards for years. In 1820 Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, sent out from London to report on Macquarie's colony, directed that one be built on a conspicuous site. Governor Brisbane reserved three and a half acres on the high ground above Woolloomooloo, on the edge of town, where a prison could be seen from all over Sydney. That was the point.

Greenway's Walls and the Woolloomooloo Stockade

Francis Greenway pegged out the site in 1821, and convict gangs started on the walls in 1822. The Register of the National Estate says S. L. Harris saw them finished in 1823–24. Then the money ran out, and for about twelve years there was little more than a big walled yard on the hill.

It didn't sit empty, though. The enclosure was used to hold convict gangs working on the roads and other public works, and it became known as the Woolloomooloo Stockade. John Ramsland, writing for the Dictionary of Sydney, describes it as "an elevated area of windswept bush and sand dune", a detention camp for prisoners who couldn't be squeezed into George Street or onto the Phoenix. The name hung around. In 1844 people were still calling the new prison "Woolloomooloo Gaol".

Stone From the Ridge

The sandstone didn't have to travel far. The State Heritage Register says convicts quarried it nearby, around the corner of William and Forbes Streets, and hauled it up the hill, where other gangs dressed the blocks by hand. Some historians say it came from Thomas West's Barcom Glen estate, which was also close by. Ramsland reckons 30,000 tons of stone went into the walls alone.

Each convict cut his own sign into the blocks he'd quarried so his quota could be counted. Once he'd cut his quota, he could be assigned out to a settler. About eighty different marks turn up again and again, and you can still spot plenty of them today, especially high on the Darlinghurst Road wall. The walls are up to eight metres high in places, with watchtowers along them.

Hyde Park, Museum, Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney Grammar School, Burdekin's & Lyons' Terraces, 1842, by John Rae. The new gaol stands on the skyline up on the Darlinghurst ridge.
Credit: John Rae, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mortimer Lewis, George Barney and the Radial Plan

Things got moving again under Governor Bourke. A Select Committee reported on the plans in August 1836, and building started up again that year. The new design came from Mortimer Lewis, who had become Colonial Architect in 1835, and Captain George Barney of the Royal Engineers. According to the Dictionary of Sydney, Barney "radically altered" Lewis's plans. Lewis also suggested building the new courthouse right beside the gaol to save money, and that's why the two still stand side by side.

They came up with a radial plan, following the ideas of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline in London and Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon". The cell blocks were set around a central point so they could all be watched from one place, and Ramsland says the model was the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Seven two-storey wings were planned around a central round building. The government soon changed the plans to fit more people in. Cells meant for one were redesigned for three, and some blocks got six-person cells. The full radial layout was never finished.

In 1836 a chain gang of about eighty convicts lived inside the walls while they built, sleeping at night in portable wooden boxes. Free tradesmen worked there too.

At the centre is the round building, two storeys high with a glassed watchtower on top. Its ground floor was in place by 1847 and was used for a while as a kitchen. It was finally finished as the chapel in 1872, with fittings that could be reversed for Catholic or Protestant services and iron bridges linking it to three of the cell blocks. Henry Lawson even mentions its gilded weathercock in one of his poems.

The March From George Street, 7 June 1841

On 7 June 1841, nearly twenty years after the walls went up, the inmates of the George Street gaol were marched through town and up the hill while crowds jeered. Ramsland says the heavily ironed bushranger Patrick "Paddy" Curran was at the head. Behind him came about fifty women prisoners, veiled and dressed in black. The women went on wearing that drab outfit until 1909.

The place still wasn't finished. Only the porter's lodge, the Governor's Residence and A Wing were complete, D Wing was nearly done, and B and C had only just been started. Building went on for decades. B Wing came in 1849 and C Wing in 1861. In 1864–66 the walls were pushed out to Burton Street, and then a Y-shaped E Wing was added. A new gatehouse and a male hospital followed in 1885, and by 1891 the gaol had sewerage and electricity. The Dictionary of Sydney reckons it took about fifty years to finish.

Darlinghurst Gaol, painted by one of its own prisoners, Henry Louis Bertrand, in 1891. That's the round chapel in the middle, with men cutting stone in the yard.
Credit: Henry Louis Bertrand, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Life Inside the Walls

Life here was meant to be hard. Under the "separate" system borrowed from Philadelphia, some prisoners spent up to nine months in solitary. From 1867 prisoners were sorted into classes A, B and C, and class C covered drunks, harmless lunatics and debtors. By the 1870s Darlinghurst was a "labour gaol". Inmates made mats, shoes and mattresses, and did tin-smithing, blacksmithing, bookbinding and stonemasonry.

It was always crowded. At the end of 1877 there were 596 prisoners (453 men and 143 women), and 8,016 people had come through the gates that year, but there were separate cells for only 348. By 1885 a gaol built for 650 was holding more than 700.

The women were held in D Wing, which is now the Cell Block Theatre. Many of them came back again and again. Margaret Greenwood, in the photo below, came out as a convict in 1833 and was convicted twelve times over the years. Her picture went into the gaol book in 1875. NSW gaols began photographing prisoners in 1871, and those description books are haunting to look through. From 1909 women went to the new State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay instead.

Margaret Greenwood, "an Imperial convict", in the Darlinghurst Gaol photographic description book, 1875.
Credit: NSW State Archives (State Records NSW, NRS 2138), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Owing money could land you in here too, because the gaol had its own debtors' section. When Henry James O'Farrell was charged with shooting Prince Alfred in 1868, his preliminary hearing was held in the debtors' prison. Café NAS now sits in the old debtors' quarters.

Henry Lawson knew the place all too well. Between 1905 and 1909 he was locked up there several times for drunkenness and for not paying maintenance to his wife, and he nicknamed it "Starvinghurst". The National Art School says he wrote "One Hundred and Three" (his prison number) while he was in the debtors' section. It tells you more about the place than any official report:

They shut a man in the four-by-eight, with a six-inch slit for air,
Twenty-three hours of the twenty-four, to brood on his virtues there.

And on the food: "Bread and water and hominy, and a scrag of meat and a spud".

The Gallows

The National Art School counts 76 people hanged at Darlinghurst between 1841 and 1907. The Dictionary of Sydney says 79. (For Sydney's earlier gallows, see my posts on the first execution in the colony and the first public gallows at the Barley Mow.)

At first hangings were public and took place right outside the main gate on Forbes Street. The first man hanged at the new gaol was John Knatchbull, a former Royal Navy captain who'd been transported for theft. In January 1844 he killed a shopkeeper, Ellen Jamieson, with a tomahawk. His barrister, Robert Lowe, argued "moral insanity", which the heritage listing calls a first for a British court. It didn't work. Knatchbull was hanged on 13 February 1844, and Caroline Overington writes that more than 10,000 people came to watch.

"Woolloomooloo Gaol": the crowd outside the gate for the execution of John Knatchbull, 13 February 1844.
Credit: Artist unknown, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The hangman then was Alexander Green, who lived in a hut outside the eastern wall. The last public hanging outside the gaol was on 21 September 1852, when Francis Thomas Green was executed. After that executions moved out of public view, for a time on a gallows over the gate. Then in 1869 a purpose-built gallows went into E Wing. From 1876 to 1904 the hangman was Robert "Nosey Bob" Howard, who hanged 61 men and one woman.

'The Gallows' from the Keep Yard: The Scaffold at Darlinghurst, drawn by a confinee (a prisoner) in the 1800s.
Credit: Unknown prisoner-artist, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry James O'Farrell was hanged on 21 April 1868. Andrew George Scott, the bushranger "Captain Moonlite", went to the gallows on 20 January 1880 alongside Thomas Rogan, one of his gang. The gang had been caught after the siege at Wantabadgery near Wagga Wagga in November 1879, in which Constable Edward Webb-Bowen was fatally shot. On 7 January 1887 four young men were hanged together over the Mount Rennie rape case. The National Art School also records at least four Aboriginal men executed here: Mogo Gar in 1850, John McGrath in 1875, Jimmy Governor in 1901 and Thomas Moore in 1903. The last hanging at Darlinghurst was in October 1907.

The gaol's record sheet for A. G. Scott, "alias Captn Moonlight", photographed on 26 November 1879. The sheet records his sentence: death, executed 20 January 1880.
Credit: NSW State Archives (State Records NSW), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The two best-remembered hangings, Louisa Collins in 1889 and Jimmy Governor in 1901, came after trials in the courthouse next door. I'll come back to both below.

Some Famous Faces Behind the Walls

The gaol's guest list is a fair slice of colonial Sydney. J. F. Archibald and John Haynes, the founders of The Bulletin, did time here. So did Sir George Dibbs, later Premier three times, who was locked up in 1880 for slander. It didn't hurt his political career one bit. Henry Louis Bertrand, convicted over the 1865 murder of Henry Kinder, spent most of his 28-year sentence here and painted the watercolour above. The National Art School's list also includes the woman bushranger Jessie Hickman and Kate Leigh, later the sly grog queen of Surry Hills in the "Razorhurst" years. Her old rival Tilly Devine didn't arrive in Sydney until 1920, after the gaol had closed.

Closing Time, and the War Years

By 1912 there were only 323 prisoners left. The new State Penitentiary at Long Bay was proclaimed on 1 June 1914, and within about six weeks every prisoner was gone. Then war broke out, and Defence took the site over as the Darlinghurst Detention Barracks. From 1914 to 1920 German, Russian and Irish nationals were held there. The army stripped out lead and timber and left bullet marks, and many people expected the place would simply be knocked down.

From Gaol to Art School

Luckily it wasn't. In 1921 Sydney Technical College took over the site as East Sydney Technical College. The idea came from Thomas Mutch, the Minister for Public Instruction, along with James Nangle. The art department moved in in 1922, and by 1924 all of the state's technical art courses had been brought together there.

From 1926 the college offered a five-year Diploma in Art under Samuel Rowe and the sculptor Rayner Hoff, and Hoff's students helped him with the sculptures for the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park. "East Sydney Tech" turned out artists like Margaret Olley, who graduated in 1945, John Olsen, Cressida Campbell and Fiona Hall.

From the air, about 1930. The radial plan and the round chapel are easy to spot, and the courthouse sits at the front with its curved driveway.
Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (as reproduced in a history of St Vincent's Hospital), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1955 Katharine Hepburn, who was touring Australia with Robert Helpmann, announced the Cell Block Theatre project for the old women's wing. She said how fitting it was that a member of the second oldest profession should open a building that had housed women of the oldest profession. The theatre opened in 1957. The National Art School went its own way from TAFE in 1996, became fully independent in 2009, and in 2022 marked a century on the site and two centuries since the walls went up.

The Courthouse on the Hill

When Governor Bourke arrived in 1831, prisoners were still being marched through town to the court in King Street, and he wanted a court beside the new gaol. Ambrose Hallen drew some Grecian plans that went nowhere, and then Mortimer Lewis took over. Convict gangs laid the foundations from 1835, and the building went up from 1836, mostly by private contractors. The Quarter Sessions were sitting there by 1 February 1842, and it was finished in 1844.

It was the first purpose-built courthouse in New South Wales, and for about sixty years it was the template for courthouses across the colony. The Greek Revival portico has fluted Doric columns and a pediment with the royal coat of arms. It's said the fluting stops short of the ground so passing traffic couldn't chip it.

Before it was finished it was used as a church, and in 1840 it hosted the St Patrick's Ball for 300 to 400 guests. Cows grazed among the columns until a fence went up in 1849. James Barnet, the Colonial Architect, added the court pavilions on either side in 1884–88. In 1901 the front columns were rebuilt to match his wings.

Gaol and Court House, Darlinghurst, 1872. You can see the Doric portico, cabs waiting out the front and one of the gaol's watchtowers peeping over the top.
Credit: Charles Percy Pickering, NSW Government Printing Office, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The High Court of Australia sat here from 1903, got its own building on the site in 1923, and didn't move to Canberra until 1980. In 1954 the Royal Commission on Espionage, set up after Vladimir Petrov's defection, sat here, and Dr H. V. Evatt appeared before it. When the Quarter Sessions were abolished in 1973, the District Court took over. Today there are seven courtrooms, and it's one of only two NSW courthouses with a court keeper still living on site. In the old courtrooms you'll find graffiti carved into the timber by people waiting in the dock. (For more on the street out the front, see Oxford Street – Darlinghurst – 1788 Onwards.)

The Tunnel

You'll often hear that a tunnel ran from the gaol to the court, and this time the legend is true. The heritage listing records 434 feet of tunnelling between the two by 1846, built so prisoners could be taken to court without ever seeing the street. Lawson mentions it: "I've seen the remand-yard men go out, by the subway out of the yard". At Jimmy Governor's trial in 1900, the Sydney Morning Herald described him mounting "the staircase leading into the dock". The tunnel's entrance is still in the National Art School's sculpture garden, but it's blocked off now.

Famous Trials at Darlinghurst

For most of its life the courthouse was home to the Central Criminal Court. These are a few of the big trials I've been able to pin down to Darlinghurst.

Louisa Collins, 1888. Louisa Collins of Botany had been married twice, and both husbands, Charles Andrews and Michael Collins, died of arsenic poisoning. She was tried four times in 1888. The first three juries couldn't agree, and in December, before Chief Justice Sir Frederick Darley, she was found guilty of murdering Michael Collins. Women couldn't sit on juries in those days, so 48 men decided her fate across the four trials. Overington says Louisa walked to court through the tunnel. The Governor, Lord Carington, refused to step in. She was hanged on 8 January 1889 by Nosey Bob Howard and his new assistant, and it went badly. The lever jammed, and the pin under the trapdoor had to be knocked out with a mallet. She was the only woman hanged at Darlinghurst and the last woman hanged in New South Wales.

Louisa Collins, photographed in Darlinghurst Gaol on 28 July 1888. She was hanged there on 8 January 1889.
Credit: Museums of History NSW – State Archives Collection, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Jimmy Governor, 1900. In July 1900 Jimmy Governor, a Wiradjuri man, and Jacky Underwood killed members of the Mawbey family and their schoolteacher at Breelong near Gilgandra. Jimmy was declared an outlaw, and the manhunt went on for months. The Herald reported that his trial for the murder of the teacher, Helen Josephine Kerz, opened "at the old court, Darlinghurst" before Mr Justice Owen on 22 November 1900, "punctually as 10 o'clock struck from the neighbouring belfry". His barrister argued that an outlaw couldn't also be tried, but the judge brushed that aside. Jimmy was found guilty and hanged at Darlinghurst on 18 January 1901, aged about 26.

Shirley Beiger, 1954. In August 1954 a young model, Shirley Beiger, shot her former boyfriend Arthur Griffith dead in King Street. On 23 November an all-male jury at the Central Criminal Court, sitting before Justice McClemens, acquitted her. About 150 people in court cheered, and someone in the crowd outside shouted "Good on you, Shirl". In 2025 a play about the case, A Model Murder, was staged in the Darlinghurst Courthouse for Sydney Festival.

Stephen Bradley, 1961. In 1960 eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was kidnapped and murdered just weeks after his family won the first Opera House lottery. Stephen Bradley's trial opened at the Central Criminal Court at Darlinghurst on 20 March 1961 and ran for eight days. It's remembered for its forensic evidence: hairs from the Bradleys' pomeranian, cypress seeds and pink mortar all linked him to the crime. Justice Clancy sentenced him to life.

Bruce Burrell, 2006. The big cases still come here. In June 2006 a Darlinghurst jury found Bruce Burrell guilty of kidnapping and murdering Kerry Whelan.

Heritage

The gaol went onto the Register of the National Estate in 1978 and the NSW State Heritage Register in 2021, which calls it "the oldest surviving early gaol complex in Australia". The courthouse has been on the State Heritage Register since 1999. Around the corner on Forbes and Burton Streets is the old Lunatic Reception House, another part of the same story.

Visiting Today

The National Art School is at 156 Forbes Street, and there's another entrance on Burton Street. The NAS Gallery is free and normally open Monday to Saturday, 11 am to 5 pm. In early October 2026 it was showing Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste, a nice fit since Olley studied here. The gaol and campus tours are unavailable at the moment, so keep an eye on the NAS website. The Open Day and the Grad Shows are good chances to look around, and Café NAS is open to visitors.

Even when the gates are shut, you can walk the outside of the walls along Forbes Street, Burton Street and Darlinghurst Road and look up for those convict marks.

Darlinghurst Courthouse is still a working court, hearing criminal trials. Hearings are generally open to the public, so you can sit quietly in the public gallery. Dress sensibly, switch your phone off and do what the sheriff's officers tell you. You go in from Oxford Street, and access for people with limited mobility is restricted, so check ahead.

One last tip: the Justice & Police Museum isn't here. It's in the old Water Police Court on the corner of Phillip and Albert Streets, near Circular Quay, and it makes a good partner to a walk around Darlinghurst.

Sources

• Dictionary of Sydney, "Darlinghurst Gaol" – dictionaryofsydney.org
• Dictionary of Sydney, "Darlinghurst Courthouse" – dictionaryofsydney.org
• John Ramsland, "Prisons to 1920", Dictionary of Sydney, 2011 – dictionaryofsydney.org
• Dictionary of Sydney, "Darlinghurst" – dictionaryofsydney.org
• NSW State Heritage Register, "National Art School Group, Former Darlinghurst Gaol, Former East Sydney Technical College" (SHR 02048) – apps.environment.nsw.gov.au
• NSW State Heritage Inventory, "Darlinghurst Courthouse and Residence" – apps.environment.nsw.gov.au
• Register of the National Estate, Darlinghurst Gaol (place 2198) – environment.gov.au
• National Art School, "History" – nas.edu.au
• National Art School, "Campus" and "Visit" – nas.edu.au
• NSW Government, "National Art School (old Darlinghurst Gaol)" – nsw.gov.au
• Supreme Court of NSW, "Darlinghurst Courthouse" – supremecourt.nsw.gov.au
• Museums of History NSW, "Convict case study: John Knatchbull" – mhnsw.au
• Caroline Overington, "Where Louisa died: a tour of Darlinghurst Gaol", 2014 – carolineoverington.com
• Mark Tedeschi, Forbes Flyer No. 11, Forbes Society, 2006 – forbessociety.org.au
• Sydney Morning Herald, "The Breelong Tragedy: Trial of the Aboriginal Jimmy Governor", 23 November 1900 (Trove) – trove.nla.gov.au
• Sydney Morning Herald, 24 November 1954, Shirley Beiger verdict (Trove) – trove.nla.gov.au
• Limelight, "A chequered past", 20 December 2024 – limelight-arts.com.au
• Sydney Morning Herald, "National Art School given heritage protection", 11 February 2021 – smh.com.au
• Henry Lawson, "One Hundred and Three" (1908), Wikisource – en.wikisource.org
• Wikipedia, "Darlinghurst Gaol", "Darlinghurst Courthouse", "Louisa Collins", "Jimmy Governor", "Andrew George Scott" and "List of people legally executed in New South Wales" (cross-checks) – en.wikipedia.org
• Wikimedia Commons, Category: Darlinghurst Gaol (images) – commons.wikimedia.org

Sydney Trams – From Horse Trams to Light Rail – A History of Sydney Transport

If you grew up in Sydney before 1961, or if your parents or grandparents did, you've probably heard the stories. The rattle of the old toast-rack trams down George Street, the conductor swinging along the footboard collecting fares, packed trams heading out to the Showground, the races at Randwick or the beach at Bondi and Coogee. For about eighty years trams were simply how Sydney got around. Then, almost overnight it seemed, they were gone, and for a long time all we had left were a few rusty rails poking through the bitumen and the old saying "shoot through like a Bondi tram". Now trams are back in George Street, so I thought it was time to tell the whole story, from the first horse tram in Pitt Street to the new light rail, with a look at the buses, trains and ferries along the way.

The Pitt Street Horse Tram, 1861–1866

Sydney's first tram ran along Pitt Street, between Circular Quay and the railway terminus out at the Cleveland Paddocks, roughly where Prince Alfred Park and the southern end of Central are today. The idea was as much about freight as passengers. The government wanted to haul railway goods wagons through the town to the wharves, and the passenger traffic came along with it.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald of 24 December 1861, the line "was permanently opened for traffic yesterday", so that's 23 December 1861. The first car, pulled by four horses, left Circular Quay at 6.25 in the morning to meet the 6.45 train at Redfern, and covered the mile and three-quarters in less than ten minutes.

It was never a happy line. The rails imported from England turned out to be unsuitable and were laid upside down, so the flanges stuck up above the road surface. Carts and carriages came to grief on them, and the Pitt Street shopkeepers complained almost from the start. Then on 15 January 1864 the composer Isaac Nathan, often called the father of Australian music, was crushed by a tram after getting off at the corner of Pitt and Goulburn Streets, near his home. He is thought to have been the first person killed by a tram in Australia. A parliamentary committee recommended the line be removed when its lease ran out, and it closed at the end of 1866. Horse-drawn omnibuses took over straight away.

Steam Trams and the Garden Palace, 1879

For nearly thirteen years after that, Sydney had no trams at all. What brought them back was the great Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, held in the Garden Palace, the huge timber exhibition building in the Domain that burnt down in 1882. The government needed a way to get crowds from the railway terminus to the exhibition, and a line was hurriedly laid from the station along Elizabeth Street to Hunter Street. Steam tram motors were ordered from the Baldwin works in Philadelphia.

The line opened on 16 September 1879, the day before the exhibition, and the plan was to pull it up again afterwards. People still remembered the Pitt Street fiasco, and nobody expected much. Instead it was a runaway success. The Commissioner for Railways reported that it had carried more than 400,000 passengers by the end of 1879, or about 4,000 a day, and returned a handsome profit on the money spent. The temporary line stayed, and in April 1880 Parliament passed an Act allowing tramways to be built through the city and suburbs.

King and Elizabeth Streets on the first night the first tram ran, 1879, drawn by J. Flynn.
Credit: State Library of New South Wales (call no. SSV / 23), no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

From there it grew fast. The first suburban extension went out to Randwick Racecourse in 1880, the line up Crown Street to Surry Hills opened in 1881, Botany followed in 1882, Coogee in 1883 and Bondi in 1884, and more lines kept coming. The Dictionary of Sydney says the network grew from 2.5 kilometres in 1879 to almost 50 kilometres by 1884. A steam tram was a small engine, or "motor", pulling one or more trailers, some of them double-deckers, with the passengers sitting crosswise and the conductor collecting fares from the footboard. Tramwaymen called a motor with two trailers "two rooms and a kitchen". They were quick and reliable, but noisy, smoky and dusty, and they struggled on steep hills. The Herald remembered in 1961 that drivers on the Surry Hills line liked to race the five-horse omnibus up Crown Street from Oxford Street to the Cleveland Street terminus, whips cracking and throttle wide open, and the tram didn't always win.

A steam tram motor and its trailer at the corner of Market and Elizabeth Streets, about 1885.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records (Digital ID 17420_a014_a0140001142), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Cable Trams for the Steep Bits

Steam motors didn't like hills, and Sydney has plenty of them. Two lines were built as cable tramways instead. A steam winding engine kept an endless steel cable moving in a slot under the road, and the gripman on the open "dummy" car clamped onto it to move off, pulling an enclosed trailer behind.

The first ran up the steep climb from the ferry wharf at Milsons Point to Ridge Street, North Sydney, opening in May 1886, and was later extended to Crows Nest. The second opened on 19 September 1894 and ran from King Street, near the wharves on Darling Harbour, up through Darlinghurst to Ocean Street, Woollahra (Edgecliff), worked from a winding house at Rushcutters Bay. The Herald later recalled that the cable ran at a steady 12 miles an hour, and if a gripman misjudged a curve and stalled, the passengers got out and pushed. The cable trams didn't last long. The North Sydney line went electric in 1900, and cable working in King Street ended in January 1905.

A cable tram climbing King Street towards Queens Square in early 1895, with a crowd gathered outside the Daily Telegraph office to read the latest news.
Credit: Photo H. King; Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.

Horses Again

Horse trams made a short comeback in the 1890s and 1900s, as a cheap stopgap on lines that didn't have the passengers to pay for steam. From December 1894 to July 1898, two little one-horse cars, numbers 198 and 199, ran a shuttle between Newtown and St Peters stations. Over at Manly, the new line to Curl Curl (North Manly) opened with steam in February 1903, but when passenger numbers dropped off it switched to horses that July, and steam didn't come back until October 1907. Car 199 survives in the Powerhouse collection.

Horse car 199 outside Newtown Station, waiting to run the shuttle to St Peters, about 1894.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Electric

Electric trams were what really made Sydney a tram town. There were experiments first: a battery tram at Botany in 1888, and an overhead-wire line on the Waverley to Randwick extension in 1890. The first permanent electric line opened on the North Shore in 1893, running from Ridge Street along Military Road towards Spit Junction and Mosman. The early cars had bamboo trolley poles, and because there weren't enough of them, they sometimes towed a cable trailer behind. An electric line from Rose Bay to Ocean Street, Woollahra, followed in 1898.

The real turning point came on 8 December 1899, when the first electric trams in the city proper began running along George Street, from Circular Quay to the Railway and on to Pyrmont via Harris Street. Power came from the new government power station at Ultimo. The public loved the quiet, clean new cars. According to the Sydney Tramway Museum's journal Trolley Wire, the trams carried 76.4 million passengers in the year to June 1899 and 176.2 million ten years later. By 1909, between 5 and 6.30 on a weekday evening, a tram crossed the corner of George and King Streets every eight seconds.

Most of the steam lines were converted by about 1910, and the steam motors were sent out to the edges of the network. A few lasted much longer on isolated lines. The Kogarah to Sans Souci steam tram ran until 1937, when trolleybuses replaced it, and the privately owned line from Parramatta Park down to the ferry at Redbank Wharf kept going until 1943.

An electric tram for Dulwich Hill passing David Jones on the corner of George and Barrack Streets, about 1909–1910.
Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (PXE 711/369), public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Network at Its Peak

By the early 1920s the network had reached its full size. The Dictionary of Sydney puts the peak at 1922, and the figure usually quoted is about 291 kilometres of street track in 1923. It was the biggest tramway in Australia, and it is often described as the second largest in the British Commonwealth after London. When the trams finished in 1961, the Herald went further and called it the second largest in the world after London. Around 1,600 tramcars were in service at the peak, and the busiest year of all came in 1945, with about 405 million passenger journeys.

Circular Quay was the hub. Lines fanned out to the eastern suburbs and beaches, to Watsons Bay, Bondi, Bronte, Coogee, Clovelly, Maroubra and La Perouse; south to Botany; south-west through Newtown to Cooks River, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury and Earlwood; and west to Glebe, Balmain, Leichhardt, Five Dock, Abbotsford and right out to Ryde. The tramwaymen grouped the western lines as the "red lines", after the colour of their destination symbols, and the south-western lines as the "green lines". Every tram carried a coloured symbol on the front so the signalmen at the big junctions could tell where it was going, and the Herald remembered that every small boy knew them by heart: red and green for Woollahra, two red circles on white for Glebe, a red St George's cross on white for Leichhardt.

The trams left their mark on the map too. Bondi Junction, Maroubra Junction, Spit Junction and Cremorne Junction all take their names from tramway junctions.

Toast Racks and Corridor Cars

From 1905 the trams were sorted into classes by letter. A and B were the steam stock, and the electric cars ran from C to R, roughly in order of size. The early C-class cars were small enclosed saloons, but Sydney soon found that the old steam-tram layout, with crosswise bench seats and the conductor working from the footboard, was the best way to shift big crowds.

The tram everyone remembers is the O class, the "toast rack", named for its rows of cross-bench wooden seats. The first ones came out in the years just before the First World War, and 626 were built. Each car seated 80, part open and part enclosed, and they were often coupled in pairs for the Easter Show crowds and race days at Randwick. They started out in buff and chocolate and were repainted green from 1920. The P class, with concertina doors on its compartments, followed in 1921. Racegoers could even travel first class, with cushions and red carpet, for the Saturday run to the course.

The toast racks were wonderful crowd-swallowers, but they were dangerous for the conductors, who had to edge along the outside of a moving tram to collect fares as the motor traffic grew heavier. By one count there were 282 accidents to conductors on the NSW tramways in 1923, 289 in 1924 and 233 in 1925. The answer was the corridor tram. The first R-class car, number 1738, went into service in September 1933, enclosed, with padded seats and an aisle down the middle. The R1 class followed. A big order for 250 more was placed in the late 1940s, but post-war steel shortages held it up and the order was cut back. The last new R1 car was delivered to North Sydney depot in September 1953, only eight years before the trams finished.

Depots and Workshops

The trams were looked after at depots all over Sydney. The best known was probably Fort Macquarie depot on Bennelong Point. It opened on 10 August 1902 on the site of the old Fort Macquarie and was built to look like a fortress, with castellated walls in honour of the fort it replaced. It had a 12-road car shed with a loop line running right around it, so trams could turn without changing ends. The depot closed in October 1955, and on 18 August 1958 work started on knocking it down "to make way for an Opera House", as Trolley Wire put it at the time. If you walk around the Opera House today you can still spot old rosettes for the overhead wires on the rock wall nearby.

Fort Macquarie Tram Depot on Bennelong Point, with its castellated front and the loop line around it. The Sydney Opera House stands on this spot today. Date unknown.
Credit: NSW Government Railways archives, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Rozelle depot opened on 17 April 1904 and grew to hold 200 trams. It closed on 22 November 1958, went through a long, sad spell of neglect, and reopened in 2016 as the Tramsheds. Dowling Street depot, opened in 1909 near Moore Park, was the largest tram depot in Australia, with 27 tracks. It served Coogee, La Perouse, Maroubra and the southern lines, and it was the last depot to close, on 25 February 1961. Its site is now a shopping centre. The big engineering works were the tramway workshops at King Street, Randwick, set up in 1881 (I wrote about the Randwick Tramway Workshops a while back). Trams were built and overhauled there for eighty years, and it was also where most of them met their end.

Across the Harbour: The North Shore Lines

The North Shore had its own tram system, cut off from the rest until the Bridge was built. Everything started from the ferry wharf at Milsons Point, where passengers stepped off the ferry and onto a tram. From there the lines spread out to Crows Nest, Chatswood, Lane Cove, Neutral Bay, Mosman, The Spit, Balmoral and Taronga Zoo. A second ferry connection from McMahons Point opened in 1909. The hills over there were fierce. At Athol Wharf, near the zoo, runaway trams went down the hill and into the harbour in 1942, 1952 and 1958.

The tram and ferry terminus at Milsons Point in 1906, where North Shore people changed between tram and ferry in the days before the Harbour Bridge.
Credit: Photo by Key, North Sydney; State Library of New South Wales, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge changed all that. Bradfield built it with two tracks on its eastern side, meant one day for a railway to the northern beaches, and in the meantime they carried trams. When the Bridge opened on 19 March 1932, the North Shore trams ran straight across and down into their own underground platforms at Wynyard, the only underground tram terminus in Australia. The NSW State Archives has a photo of the first tram across, dated 9 March 1932. The trams stopped crossing the Bridge when the North Sydney system closed on 28 June 1958. Their tracks became the two eastern road lanes that now lead onto the Cahill Expressway, and the old tram platforms at Wynyard became a car park. That's why Wynyard's railway platforms are still numbered 3 to 6. Platforms 1 and 2 belonged to the trams.

The first tram across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 9 March 1932, ten days before the official opening. It's an O-class "toast rack", with men riding on the footboard.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons.

Manly also had its own separate system, with lines to The Spit, Harbord and Narrabeen. It closed on 1 October 1939, and the Herald recalled that 26 of its trams were floated across The Spit on a punt to go and work at North Sydney.

The Decline, and the Last Tram in 1961

In a way, the trams were victims of their own success. Overcrowded trams running every few minutes down narrow streets got the blame for traffic jams that private cars and buses were making worse. The first closures came in the 1930s. Hurlstone Park to Summer Hill went in 1933, the Woolloomooloo line in 1935 and Manly in 1939. The war held things up, but by the end of it the system was run down after years of short supplies and patchy maintenance.

In 1948 Premier McGirr brought out three transport experts from London, and their 1949 report recommended phasing the trams out by 1960 and replacing them with double-decker buses. The government accepted the idea, and in the early 1950s closure became official policy. People didn't give their trams up quietly. When the Watsons Bay line beyond Rose Bay was closed in 1949, public protest got it reopened in 1950. After that, the government made sure the tracks and wires came out quickly after the last tram on each line, so there would be no going back. Meanwhile the Dictionary of Sydney notes that car trips went from 13 per cent of all trips in Sydney in 1946–47 to 50 per cent by 1960.

The big closures came one after another. The Pitt and Castlereagh Street lines and the south-western lines finished on 27 September 1957. The North Shore went on 28 June 1958, and the George Street lines to Glebe, Balmain, Leichhardt and the west on 22 November 1958. The Bondi and Bronte trams stopped in February 1960. The last of all were the Maroubra and La Perouse lines, on Saturday 25 February 1961. That day the Herald wrote that "the city's most characteristic, most criticised and most loved form of transport will have disappeared for ever", and pointed out that Sydney's trams had died "at the age of exactly 100 years", counting from Pitt Street in 1861. Crowds packed the last trams out to La Perouse. Late that afternoon R1-class car 1995 came back from La Perouse and rolled through the gates of Randwick Workshops, the last tram to run on Sydney's streets.

Crowds on the street on 25 February 1961, the day Sydney's last trams ran.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records (Digital ID 17420_a014_a0140001149), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

What happened next still makes tram lovers wince. Most of the old cars were stripped of anything useful and burnt on a siding at Randwick that the tram men called "burning hill". Some of the R1 cars that went up in smoke were less than eight years old. A few were sold off as sheds, holiday shacks and workers' huts.

What Survived

Thankfully, a few people saw it coming. In 1950 four young enthusiasts, Norm Chinn, Robert Young, Ken McCarthy and Ben Parle, saved L/P-class tram 154, the first Sydney tram to be preserved. That was the start of what became the Sydney Tramway Museum. From 1957 they had a site on the edge of the Royal National Park at Loftus, and they began running trams for the public in 1965. In 1988 the museum moved to its present home beside Loftus station, and since 1993 its trams have run down the old Royal National Park branch line, which makes a lovely day out. The museum has kept at least one of nearly every Sydney electric tram class (only the G, H and M classes are missing), and it is run entirely by volunteers. It's usually open on Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays, but check their website before you go.

Other pieces survive around town. The Powerhouse owns steam tram motor 1A (lately on loan to the museum at Loftus), C-class car 11 from 1898, horse car 199 and a trailer from the King Street cable line, which was found in use as a holiday house at Cronulla. Steam motor 103A runs at the Valley Heights Rail Museum in the Blue Mountains. Car 1995, the last tram of 1961, sits on display at the Tramsheds in Rozelle. If you keep your eyes open, you'll also spot old rosettes for the overhead wires on city buildings, rounded street corners cut back so trams could turn, a short stretch of track left exposed in Glebe Point Road, and the very wide median strip down Anzac Parade where the La Perouse trams once ran.

The Trams Come Back: Light Rail

Trams came back to Sydney on 11 August 1997, when the first stretch of light rail opened from Central to Wentworth Park, mostly along the old Darling Harbour goods line. At Central it uses the old tram loop around the Grand Concourse, which the Circular Quay trams once used. It reached Lilyfield in August 2000 and Dulwich Hill on 27 March 2014, and it's now the L1 Dulwich Hill Line. (I also wrote a while ago about the Sydney Light Rail Project from Circular Quay to Randwick.)

The big moment came on 14 December 2019, when the L2 Randwick Line opened from Circular Quay, down George Street and out through Moore Park. As Trolley Wire pointed out, that was 120 years and one week after the first electric trams ran down George Street, and 61 years after the last old tram left it. When the builders dug up the streets, they kept finding the original tram tracks buried under the road, and rail that could be saved went to the tramway museum. The L3 Kingsford Line opened on 3 April 2020, very quietly, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out west, the Parramatta Light Rail opened on 20 December 2024, running from Westmead through Parramatta to Carlingford, partly along the old Carlingford railway line, and work on a second stage, towards Wentworth Point and Sydney Olympic Park, is under way. Somewhere, I like to think, the old toast-rack conductors are having a quiet laugh.

The Rest of the Family: Omnibuses, Trains, Ferries and Buses

Horse omnibuses. Before the trams, and for a long time alongside them, there was the horse bus. One of the earliest, called The Australian, was started in 1843 by Charles Underwood and ran from the city to Newtown and the Cooks River dam. After the Pitt Street tram closed in 1866, horse buses were Sydney's main public transport. The Dictionary of Sydney says they peaked in 1889 with some 64 services, and the Powerhouse counts 290 omnibuses on Sydney's roads by 1894. The biggest operator, the Sydney Tramway and Omnibus Company, painted "S T & O Co" on its buses, and regular passengers said it stood for "sugar, tea and oats". The electric trams finished off the horse bus, and by about 1910 it was gone.

Railways. The trains came well before the trams. The Sydney Railway Company was formed in 1849 to build a line to Parramatta, and the first sod was turned at the Cleveland Paddocks on 20 May 1850. Money, men and materials all ran short, partly because of the gold rush, and the government took the company over in September 1855. The first railway in New South Wales opened a few weeks later, on 26 September 1855, from the Sydney terminus at the Cleveland Paddocks, commonly called Redfern Station, to Parramatta Junction near today's Granville. There were stations at Newtown, Ashfield, Burwood and Homebush along the way, and the line was carried on into Parramatta itself in 1860. The first terminus was little more than a wooden platform in a corrugated iron shed. Central Station replaced it in 1906, built on the site of the old Devonshire Street Cemetery. The suburban trains and the trams were both run by the government railways for years, and the trams did a roaring trade carrying train passengers between Central and the city, especially before the underground railway opened in 1926.

Sydney's first railway terminus at the Cleveland Paddocks, usually called Redfern Station, photographed in 1871.
Credit: NSW State Archives and Records, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Harbour ferries. Ferries are as old as the colony. In 1789 a convict-built boat, the Rose Hill Packet, was sailing and rowing between Sydney Cove and Parramatta, and a return trip could take a week. By 1830 Billy Blue was rowing passengers across from Dawes Point to Blues Point. The first Australian-built steamship, the Surprise, began a Parramatta service in June 1831, and cross-harbour steam ferries were running by 1842. In 1900 the North Shore company became Sydney Ferries Limited, which took over most of the harbour services. Manly had its own famous line of big ferries. The first direct service came in 1855, when Henry Gilbert Smith chartered the paddle steamer Huntress to bring people over to his land near The Corso, and the double-ended Manly ferries became a Sydney institution. For a ride to the zoo, Mosman, Neutral Bay or Cremorne, you caught a ferry to the wharf and a tram up the hill, and the two worked hand in hand for decades. The Harbour Bridge hit the ferries hard. Sydney Ferries' passenger numbers fell from 44 million to 20 million a year almost overnight, and in 1951 the government took over the fleet.

The Harbour Bridge and the City Circle. The Bridge opened on 19 March 1932, carrying road, rail and trams together, and it went hand in hand with Bradfield's underground city railway. Museum and St James stations opened in 1926, Town Hall and Wynyard followed with the Bridge in 1932, and Circular Quay finally joined the two ends together in 1956. Despite its name, the City Circle is really more of a horseshoe.

Motor buses. The railways tried a steam bus between Potts Point and Darlinghurst in 1905, but it lasted less than a year. A private motor bus company started running between Manly and Newport in 1906, but it was wound up in 1908. After the First World War, with plenty of returned men who knew how to handle heavy vehicles, private buses boomed, from about 15 in 1915 to more than 600 by 1929. To protect the trams, Jack Lang's government passed the Transport Act in 1930, and in 1932 the trams were handed to a new Department of Road Transport and Tramways. It ran its first government bus, from St Leonards to Manly, on Christmas Day 1932. In the end, of course, it was the buses that replaced the trams, and if you catch a bus to Coogee, Maroubra or Balmain today, you're still following the old tram routes.

So next time you're rattling down George Street on the light rail, spare a thought for the horse cars, the smoky steam motors, the cable gripmen and the brave conductors on the footboards of the old toast racks. Sydney's trams have come a long way, and in a sense they've come full circle.

Sources

• Garry Wotherspoon, "Trams", Dictionary of Sydney, 2008 – dictionaryofsydney.org
• "Buses", Dictionary of Sydney – dictionaryofsydney.org
• "Opening of the Pitt-Street Tram-way", Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 1861, reprinted in "From the Archives, 1861: Sydney's first tram line opens" – smh.com.au
• Report of the Commissioner for Railways for 1879, "Report on the Tramways of New South Wales" (1880), Mitchell Library – State Library of NSW (PDF)
• "From the Archives: Sydney takes a final tram ride", Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1961, reprinted 2019 – smh.com.au
• Sydney Tramway Museum, "About us" – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au; "George St 120 Years" – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au
• Trolley Wire (Sydney Tramway Museum): August 1958, November 1999, August 2007, February 2020 – sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au
• Powerhouse Collection: horse tram car 199; King Street cable tram trailer; C-class tram 11; horse-drawn omnibus – 207034, 207898, 207883, 207261
• Wikipedia: Trams in Sydney, Fort Macquarie Tram Depot, Rozelle Tram Depot, Dowling Street Tram Depot, R1-class Sydney tram, Sydney Tramway Museum, Isaac Nathan
• Wikipedia: Inner West Light Rail, CBD and South East Light Rail, Parramatta Light Rail
• Wikipedia: Main Suburban railway line, Sydney Ferries, Buses in Sydney, Sydney Harbour Bridge, City Circle
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, from the State Library of NSW, NSW State Archives and Records and the NSW Government Railways archives – Category: Trams in Sydney