Admiralty House - Kirabilli - Governor General's Residence

I Guess That Everyone   Knows That Adiralty House Is The Residence Of TheGovernor  General When In Sydney.

Originally The Land Was Acquired By The New South Wales Government In 1885 As A Residence For The British Officers In Command Of The Australian Naval Station. 

At That Time London Took Responsibility For Defence On The Southern Continent. A Dozen Admirals Had Resided There  Up Until 1913 When The Royal Australian Navy Was Established.

Back in 1806 When Kiribilli Was Wild And Uninhaited, Robert Campbell Bought The Property For a Few Pounds. 

It Surprises People Today That Kirribilli Point Was Referred To As "Russian Point". This Began in 1814 When The Russian Shhip SUVOROV Called In To Port Jackson. 

Colonnaded stone building, which which explains the garden dominate the Kirribilli, and has since 1916 been a resident of Australia’s governor general.

The house was bought in 1885 by the state of New South Wales as a residence for the naval commander in chief. Earlier the house of been described as having a white Veranda, spacious entrance hall, drawing and dining rooms, 10 bedrooms, and the usual rooms in the main part of the house for large courtyard, seventh rooms, kitchen stables etc with an abundant water supply which never fails in the driest weather.

To make this residence fit the British Admiral grand proportions. Did therefore came like a thunderclap to the state of Florida keys from the second last at McHughes it, for George King Cole, struck his black bear and handed the residents over to the Commonwealth.

Francis Greenway’s Public Fountain – Bent & Spring Street

Under Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Francis Greenway designed a sandstone Doric public fountain for Macquarie Place that small civic triangle that marked the administrative heart of early Sydney. Built about 1819–20 by stonemason Edward Cureton (with taste often credited also to Elizabeth Macquarie), it stood on the western side of the reserve so townspeople could draw water without entering the Governor’s Domain. The Bent and Spring Streets corner sits in the same colonial civic precinct; period descriptions put the fountain in Macquarie Place, not as a free-standing ornament mid-intersection.

It was one of Greenway’s civic works from the Macquarie years — a period Commissioner John Thomas Bigge famously called extravagant. By the 1880s the fountain was dilapidated; it was demolished around 1883–87 and replaced by the statue of merchant and pastoralist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort that still occupies the western corner. No Greenway fountain fabric survives above ground.

Photographs here relate to the Macquarie Place site and the memory of Greenway’s lost Doric fountain.