Colonial Secretary’s Office – Part 2

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The sandstone pile on the corner of Bridge and Macquarie still answers to two names: the Colonial Secretary’s Office to anyone who learned Sydney from old maps, and the Chief Secretary’s Building on the heritage paperwork. Same building. James Barnet designed the Victorian Free Classical block (built 1873–81); Walter Liberty Vernon stacked on the fifth floor, mansard and copper dome in 1894–96 — additions Barnet was said to have hated, because they softened his Palazzo Farnese homage.

This was the engine room of colonial government: Colonial (later Chief) Secretaries, Executive Council, Parkes’s office legend and all. Bridge Street frontage to one side, Phillip Street to the other, Macquarie Street completing the L. The statues and corridors are as much the point as the skyline silhouette opposite the old Treasury and the Domain. Part 2 here is a photo walk around that fabric — not a second building, and not Greenways earlier government offices.

Stand on Bridge Street and you are looking at late-colonial swagger in freestone: the office that ran the colony, then the state, from the same corner. Keep the live photographs; this intro is only the name-tag and the architects.

Colonial Secretary’s / Chief Secretary’s Building — Bridge Street (left) and Phillip Street (right) frontages. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0, sv1ambo).

The Colonial Secretary's Office 

The Colonial Secretary was a senior official in New South Wales, working with the governor on administration and public affairs. In nineteenth-century Sydney, the office was associated with the government precinct along Macquarie Street. The surviving buildings and plaques in this area help document the changing structure of colonial government.