Before it was Prince of Wales Hospital, this High Cross / Avoca–High Street corner of Randwick was the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children — a large government grant occupied from 1858 by the Society for the Relief of Destitute Children (incorporated 1857). The Society had first opened at Ormond House, Paddington, in 1852; gold-rush Sydney’s rising numbers of orphaned and abandoned children pushed them to build a purpose-designed sandstone “barracks” asylum on about sixty acres at Randwick, occupied from 28 March 1858, with capacity later doubled by an 1863 wing to around eight hundred children.
Most inmates were young — commonly about three to ten. A whooping-cough epidemic in 1867 killed dozens; funds associated with singer Catherine Hayes helped build a hospital on the site named after her. From the 1880s “boarding out” (early fostering) cut institutional numbers; government funding for the Asylum ceased in 1888, though it continued privately with fewer children.
In 1915 the remaining children were moved to cottage homes or boarded out, and the Commonwealth took the site as a military / repatriation hospital for wounded First World War servicemen. From 1953 the campus became the Prince of Wales Hospital. Archaeological work in the mid-1990s recovered remains of children buried in the grounds; a memorial garden and interpretive signage stand near the Barker Street entrance.
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