“The Towers” - Lavender Bay - The Holtermann Gold Nugget

You won’t find “The Towers” on a North Sydney street walk anymore — Shore School sits on the ridge above Lavender Bay where Bernhardt (Bernard) Otto Holtermann’s mansion once punched the skyline. The money came fast: in October 1872 the Star of Hope mine at Hill End threw up the Holtermann gold specimen — the famous “nugget,” really a huge gold-in-quartz mass — and suddenly the German-born miner could build like a prince.

Around 1874–75 he put up an extraordinary house with a tall central tower that gave the place its nickname. That tower wasn’t just showing off. With photographer Charles Bayliss he turned it into a camera platform and shot vast harbour panoramas — plates exhibited internationally (including Philadelphia) and still among the sharpest records of 1870s Sydney and the north shore. Holtermann died in 1885. The house passed via Thomas Dibbs of neighbouring Graythwaite to the new Sydney Church of England Grammar School.

By the mid-1930s — roughly fifty years after it rose — Shore encased mansion and tower in modern brickwork and effectively demolished them as the campus grew. What’s left for the rest of us is the Holtermann photographic collection: the viewpoint survived as glass plates long after the tower came down.

Bernhardt Holtermann with the Star of Hope gold specimen — the fortune that paid for The Towers above Lavender Bay. (Holtermann Collection / State Library of NSW)

Sydney Harbour from Holtermann’s tower, 1875. (Holtermann Collection / SLNSW)

North Sydney and Sydney Harbour, 1875 — Charles Bayliss / B.O. Holtermann. (Holtermann Collection)