Sydney got its first NSW Blue Plaques in the second week of October 2022, and the Lower North Shore got all three of them that week: May Gibbs at Nutcote, Brett Whiteley on Walker Street, and Sir Edward Hallstrom at the gates of Taronga. They're the State's London-style discs. They come from Heritage NSW, so they're not the City's street signs and not the green plaques you see around the old town. Each one is bolted onto the actual house, studio or workplace, so you can stand where the work happened.
Since then the scheme has grown, and four more have gone up across the North Shore and Ryde: Billy Hughes at Lane Cove, Ethel Turner at Killara, Grace Cossington Smith at Turramurra and Susan Schardt at Ryde. That makes seven between the Harbour and the upper North Shore. I've gone round them one by one below.
What the Blue Plaques Are
Heritage NSW runs the program, and the then Heritage Minister James Griffin said it was modelled on the scheme in the United Kingdom. When the first North Shore discs went up, he called it a $5 million program and said 21 recipients had been named so far, with a second round of public nominations to follow. Mosman Collective reported that the three North Shore plaques were the third, fourth and fifth installed anywhere in the State. Caroline Chisholm's at East Maitland came first and Nancy Bird Walton's at Kew came second.
Every plaque has its own page on the Heritage NSW website. Each page gives the address, says whose land it's on and whether you can get to it in a wheelchair, then tells the story. That's where most of what follows comes from.
Which Councils Have One
- North Sydney: May Gibbs (Neutral Bay) and Brett Whiteley (Lavender Bay)
- Mosman: Sir Edward Hallstrom (Taronga Zoo)
- Lane Cove: Billy Hughes (Richardson Street)
- Ku-ring-gai: Ethel Turner (Killara) and Grace Cossington Smith (Turramurra)
- Ryde: Susan Schardt (Royal Rehab)
- Willoughby and Hunters Hill: none on the Heritage NSW map when I checked in October 2026
May Gibbs – Nutcote, 5 Wallaringa Avenue, Neutral Bay
Nutcote, at 5 Wallaringa Avenue, Neutral Bay, is the harbourside house the architect B. J. Waterhouse designed for Gibbs and her husband. North Sydney Council says they moved in in 1925, and she lived and drew there for 44 years, until she died in 1969. 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.
From Harvey River to the Gumnut Babies
Heritage NSW tells it this way. Gibbs was born in 1877 and came out from England as a young child to Harvey River in Western Australia, which is where she fell for the bush. At 15 she won first prize in a Western Australian wildflower art exhibition. She went back to England to study art from 1901 to 1904, and again in 1909. Her first illustrated children's book, About Us, came out in 1912, and she drew covers for the suffragette journal The Common Cause. Ill health sent her back to Sydney, where she made her living illustrating government pamphlets and magazine covers, including the Sydney Mail.
The war changed everything. She drew postcards of native flowers and tiny bush "babies" for families to send to soldiers, and the Red Cross put them in parcels for the front. In her own words: "I did the gumnut cards because I wanted to do something for people to send to the soldiers." Gumnut Babies came out in 1916. Then in 1918 all 17,000 copies of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie sold out on the first release, which shocked her publisher, Angus and Robertson.
Nutcote and After
She married Bertram James Ossoli Kelly in 1919, and Heritage NSW describes Nutcote as a Spanish-style house among gum trees on the shore of Neutral Bay. Her Bib and Bub comic strip ran for more than 40 years from the 1920s. Her 1918 Baby Week poster for the Department of Public Health, Dr Stork and Mrs Kookaburra, was used in official health publications until 1959. Kelly died in 1939 and she lived on at Nutcote with her dogs. She was made an MBE in 1955.
After she died the house was sold and could have been knocked down. North Sydney Council says a nationwide community campaign saved it. Today the house and garden are restored to how they were in her time, and they're protected by a Permanent Conservation Order.
Brett Whiteley – 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay
A few bays west, at 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay, Whiteley and Wendy rented the upstairs flat in 1969, and the lower level became his first Sydney studio. They bought the whole house in 1974, and he painted the harbour from there until 1988. His Archibald-winning Self-portrait in the studio (1976) is a Lavender Bay picture.
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Longueville Boy to the Chelsea Hotel
Heritage NSW says Whiteley was born in Sydney in 1939 and grew up in Longueville on the Lower North Shore. William Dobell used to visit the family home. He left school at 17 to work in advertising and took night life-drawing classes at the National Art School and Julian Ashton's, which is where he met Wendy Julius. He won the Italian Government travelling scholarship in 1959. The pair married in London in 1962, and their daughter Arkie was born there. A Harkness Fellowship took them to New York in 1967 on the last voyage of the Queen Mary, and they lived at the Chelsea Hotel.
The House on the Bay
After they bought the house in 1974, they worked with the architect Tony Edye to turn it back into a single home with a bigger studio. Wendy once said Lavender Bay looked "run down, a dead end, but to us it seemed magical". The prizes rolled in: the Archibald and Sulman in 1976, the Wynne in 1977, and the Archibald, Sulman and Wynne all in 1978. He bought the Surry Hills factory that is now the Brett Whiteley Studio in 1985. Brett and Wendy divorced in 1989, and he died in 1992.
Wendy's Secret Garden
Wendy began making the garden on the railway land below the house in 1992, with Arkie's backing. Arkie died of cancer in 2001. In 2022 Wendy announced a bequest that will leave almost 2,000 of Brett's works to the Art Gallery of NSW and the Brett Whiteley Foundation, and the sale of the house will secure the collection.
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Sir Edward Hallstrom – Taronga Zoo, Bradleys Head Road, Mosman
Hallstrom is the odd one out, and the most Mosman. He was a self-made refrigeration man. He became a zoo trustee in 1941, and Heritage NSW says he was vice-chairman and then chairman from 1951 and 1959, then honorary life director for the rest of his life. He was one of Taronga's most generous private benefactors. The disc is at the zoo entrance on Bradleys Head Road, not on a house.
Cabinet Maker to Millionaire
He was born near Coonamble in 1886, worked odd jobs from the age of 10 and left school at 13 to be an apprentice cabinet maker. He started a refrigerator factory in 1928 and designed a kerosene-powered fridge for the outback. By the mid-1940s Hallstrom's Pty Ltd was turning out 1,200 refrigerators a week and employing more than 700 people, and Silent Knight was a household name.
The Zoo Years
In 1937 he used the money from selling 500 fridges in Africa to buy two rhinoceroses for Taronga. He paid for expeditions to New Guinea, Africa and South America, and set up a farm at Mona Vale to grow food for the animals. He showed off crowd-pleasers like King Kong the gorilla and Nellie, the elephant who played the harmonica. When attitudes changed in the 1960s, the Government brought in a professional zoologist as director and Hallstrom became director emeritus. He died in 1970 at his Northbridge home. A genus of petrels, Hallstroma, carries his name.
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Billy Hughes – 6 Richardson Street, Lane Cove
Lane Cove's plaque goes to Australia's seventh Prime Minister. Heritage NSW gives the address as 6 Richardson Street East, Lane Cove, and on its map as 6 Richardson Street, East Lane Cove. Hughes lived there at "Osborne Park", and he sometimes gave speeches from its balcony.
London, Wales, Sydney
He was born in London in 1862, moved to Wales at seven, and came to Australia in his early twenties, living in Brisbane before Sydney. He won the seat of Sydney-Lang for Labor in 1894 and West Sydney in the first federal parliament in 1901. When Andrew Fisher resigned in 1915, Labor elected Hughes to replace him.
The Little Digger
The troops on the Western Front called him "the Little Digger", and he loved it. The two conscription referendums he led in 1916 and 1917 both failed. After he was egged in Queensland in 1917 and the state police wouldn't act, he set up the Commonwealth Police Force. In 1916 he set up the Advisory Council on Science and Industry, an early forerunner of the CSIRO. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference he won Australia its own voice.
He spent 58 years in state and federal politics, for four parties, and three of them expelled him. He died at Lindfield on 28 October 1952, and his state funeral was one of the biggest in Australian history. Heritage NSW calls him a controversial figure in death, as he was in life.
Ethel Turner – Woodlands, 1 Werona Avenue, Killara
Woodlands is where Ethel Turner wrote Seven Little Australians. It was built in the 1880s as "Inglewood" for Edward Aleyn Braham and later leased to her stepfather, Charles Cope. The family moved out from the inner city in September 1891 to what we now call Killara.
Heritage NSW says she was born at Balby, Doncaster, in 1870 and came out with her mother and sister in 1879. She loved the quiet of the bush up there: "red, lonely roads running up hill and down dale... Of course one wrote a book!" She and her sister Lilian started a sixpenny magazine, Parthenon. She began Seven Little Australians on her 23rd birthday. Captain Woolcot is a version of her stepfather. She wrote in the drawing room and the bedroom she shared with Rose, and put the finishing touches on it sitting on a low branch of an apple tree in the garden.
The book has sold several million copies in English and been translated into at least 13 languages. Its manuscript, held by the State Library of NSW, went onto the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register in 2019. Altogether she wrote more than 30 volumes of fiction.
Grace Cossington Smith – Cossington, 43 Ku-ring-gai Avenue, Turramurra
Grace Cossington Smith was born in Sydney in 1892 and grew up in Neutral Bay. She studied under Antonio Dattilo Rubbo from 1910. She came home from England to the family's Turramurra house in 1914, and it was renamed "Cossington" in 1920. Her father built her a small studio in the garden, and the house became the subject of many of her later paintings.
Heritage NSW calls her 1915 The Sock Knitter, a picture of her sister knitting socks for soldiers, "perhaps the first fully Post-Impressionist work painted in Australia". She painted the Harbour Bridge going up, including The Curve of the Bridge (1928–29), and later the glowing interiors of Cossington. Recognition came late. After her big Art Gallery of NSW retrospective in 1973 she was made an OBE that year, and an AO in 1983, shortly before she died.
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Susan Schardt – Royal Rehab, 235 Morrison Road, Ryde
Ryde's plaque is at Royal Rehab, on Susan Schardt Way off Morrison Road. Susan Schardt was born sight impaired at Queanbeyan in 1872 to German immigrant parents, and went to the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institution at Darlington from 1880 to 1887.
It started with one young man at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital who had lost both legs and was being sent out with nowhere to live. She found him a room in Surry Hills and paid a carer, then started collecting money to do the same for others. In 1900 she opened the Commonwealth Home for Destitute Invalids, later the NSW Home for Incurables, in a rented house in Cleveland Street, Redfern, with up to 16 beds. When that building was condemned, Sir Henry Moses offered his Ryde mansion Weemala at half its value. The home opened there on 10 April 1907. Her appeal for a cancer home led to Moorong, opened in 1924, which is now Royal Rehab's spinal unit.
With her sighted companion, Beatrice Ricketts, she toured NSW for over 20 years, talking up services for people with disabilities. She died at Weemala in 1934 and is buried at Waverley Cemetery. Her own words are on the Heritage NSW page: "Although I never had sight, I always had the ambition to leave the world better because I lived in it."
Timeline
- 1862 – Billy Hughes born in London
- 1870 – Ethel Turner born at Balby, Doncaster (Heritage NSW)
- 1872 – Susan Schardt born at Queanbeyan
- 1877 – May Gibbs born in England
- 1886 – Edward Hallstrom born near Coonamble
- 1891 – Turner family moves to Inglewood, now Woodlands, Killara
- 1892 – Grace Cossington Smith born in Sydney
- 1894 – Hughes elected for Sydney-Lang
- 1900 – Schardt opens the Home for Destitute Invalids in Redfern
- 1907 – Home moves to Weemala, Ryde, 10 April
- 1914 – Cossington Smith comes home to Turramurra
- 1915 – Hughes becomes Prime Minister; The Sock Knitter exhibited
- 1918 – Snugglepot and Cuddlepie sells out
- 1920 – Turramurra house renamed Cossington
- 1924 – Moorong opens
- 1925 – Gibbs moves into Nutcote
- 1928 – Hallstrom starts his refrigerator factory
- 1934 – Schardt dies at Weemala
- 1939 – Brett Whiteley born
- 1941 – Hallstrom becomes a Taronga trustee
- 1952 – Hughes dies at Lindfield, 28 October
- 1969 – Gibbs dies; Whiteleys rent 1 Walker Street
- 1970 – Hallstrom dies at Northbridge
- 1974 – Whiteleys buy 1 Walker Street
- 1984 – Cossington Smith dies
- 1988 – Whiteley leaves Lavender Bay
- 1992 – Whiteley dies; Wendy begins the Secret Garden
- October 2022 – Gibbs, Whiteley and Hallstrom plaques installed, Sydney's first
- By mid-2025 – Heritage NSW pages for the Hughes, Turner, Cossington Smith and Schardt plaques are up (updated June and July 2025)
Where the Sources Disagree
- Which plaque was first: Mosman Collective (October 2022) says the three North Shore plaques were the third, fourth and fifth in NSW, after Caroline Chisholm (East Maitland) and Nancy Bird Walton (Kew). The Wikimedia Commons description of the Nutcote plaque photo calls it "the first blue plaque to be unveiled in NSW". The Nutcote plaque was in Sydney's first batch, but not the State's first.
- Where the Whiteley plaque is: Heritage NSW gives the location as 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay, the house. North Sydney Council (January 2023) says it is installed in Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden. The garden is right below the house, so both may describe the same spot.
- Hughes's address: the Heritage NSW story page says 6 Richardson Street East, Lane Cove, and its map says 6 Richardson Street, East Lane Cove.
- Hallstrom's chairmanship: Heritage NSW says he was "vice-chairman and then chairman from 1951 and 1959", which I read as vice-chairman from 1951 and chairman from 1959. My 2022 text said chairman through the 1950s.
- Nutcote: North Sydney Council says the Gibbses moved in in 1925. Heritage NSW just says they built it after their 1919 marriage. My 2022 text gave 1924–25 for the design.
- Whiteley's Archibald: Heritage NSW names the 1976 winner Self-portrait in the studio, and North Sydney Council calls it Self portrait.
My Earlier Posts
- The Historical Sydney Green Plaques
- Taronga Zoo – From Moore Park to Bradleys Head
- Luna Park Sydney – Milsons Point
- Arthur Stace – Mr Eternity (another Blue Plaque, at Ultimo)
Sources
- Heritage NSW – Blue Plaques NSW (map and list)
- Heritage NSW – May Gibbs
- Heritage NSW – Brett Whiteley
- Heritage NSW – Sir Edward Hallstrom
- Heritage NSW – William Morris (Billy) Hughes
- Heritage NSW – Ethel Turner
- Heritage NSW – Grace Cossington Smith
- Heritage NSW – Susan Schardt
- North Sydney Council – Blue Heritage Plaque honours, 17 January 2023
- Mosman Collective – Sydney's first Blue Plaques installed in Mosman, Neutral Bay and Lavender Bay, 12 October 2022
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each picture.