Sydney got its first NSW Blue Plaques in the second week of October 2022, and the Lower North Shore took all three of them in a morning: May Gibbs at Nutcote, Brett Whiteley on Walker Street, and Sir Edward Hallstrom at the gates of Taronga. They are the State's London-style discs — Heritage NSW, not the City's street signs and not the RAHS green plaques from the 1980s — bolted onto the actual house, studio or workplace so you can stand where the work happened.
Nutcote, 5 Wallaringa Avenue, Neutral Bay, is the compact harbourside cottage B. J. Waterhouse designed for Gibbs and her husband in 1924-25. She lived and drew there for more than forty years. The gumnut babies were already famous when she moved in; the house is now a museum, and the plaque is on the building that made the garden look like a picture book. A few bays west, 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay, is where Whiteley and Wendy made a studio out of a run-down flat from 1969, bought the whole house in 1974, and painted the harbour until 1988. The Archibald-winning Self-portrait in the studio (1976) is a Lavender Bay picture.
Hallstrom is the odd one out, and the most Mosman. Self-made refrigeration man, zoo trustee from 1941, chairman through the 1950s, honorary director after that, and one of Taronga's largest private benefactors. The disc is at the Bradleys Head Road entrance, not a house. Spell Mosman. These three were Sydney's first Blue Plaques; Caroline Chisholm in East Maitland and Nancy Bird Walton at Kew went earlier in the State. The scheme has grown since. This post is the October 2022 Lower North Shore wave, not a catalogue of every disc in NSW.
Sydney's First Blue Plaques Installed On Lower North Shore - Mosman Collective - October 2022
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