Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee sixty years on the throne — was celebrated across the Empire on 22 June 1897, not in 1898. The live slug is almost certainly confusing the jubilee with Sydney’s municipal thank-you gift: the Queen Victoria Markets Building, which Council resolved in 1897 to name for her unprecedented reign, and which Mayor Matthew Harris opened on 21 July 1898. George McRae’s Romanesque pile on George Street is the lasting Sydney monument to that jubilee; the calendar date of the jubilee itself is 1897.
Treat this post as two linked facts: empire party June 1897, QVB doors July 1898. Don’t invent a second Diamond Jubilee in 1898. Golden Jubilee 1887 is the earlier sibling post on this blog — keep the fifty- and sixty-year marks in separate drawers.