Francis Greenway’s Public Fountain – Bent & Spring Street

Under Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Francis Greenway designed a sandstone Doric public fountain for Macquarie Place that small civic triangle that marked the administrative heart of early Sydney. Built about 1819–20 by stonemason Edward Cureton (with taste often credited also to Elizabeth Macquarie), it stood on the western side of the reserve so townspeople could draw water without entering the Governor’s Domain. The Bent and Spring Streets corner sits in the same colonial civic precinct; period descriptions put the fountain in Macquarie Place, not as a free-standing ornament mid-intersection.

It was one of Greenway’s civic works from the Macquarie years — a period Commissioner John Thomas Bigge famously called extravagant. By the 1880s the fountain was dilapidated; it was demolished around 1883–87 and replaced by the statue of merchant and pastoralist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort that still occupies the western corner. No Greenway fountain fabric survives above ground.

Photographs here relate to the Macquarie Place site and the memory of Greenway’s lost Doric fountain.

Site Of The Public Fountain

Stand at the western corner of Macquarie Place — Bridge Street side, opposite the Lands Department pile — and you are on the footprint of one of Macquarie Sydney’s vanished ornaments. In 1819–20, stonemason Edward Cureton built a sandstone Doric public fountain here to Francis Greenway’s plan, with Elizabeth Macquarie closely involved (contemporary accounts have her rejecting an earlier attempt and insisting on Greenway’s design). Townspeople could draw water without entering the Governors Domain.

It sat on the southwest edge of the little civic triangle that Macquarie formalised with Greenways obelisk (1818) as the zero point of colonial roads. Commissioner Bigge sniffed at the extravagance of Macquarie ornament; Sydneysiders used the fountain anyway. By the 1880s the structure was tired. Dictionary of Sydney dates demolition to about 1883, to clear the western corner for Pierce Francis Connelly’s statue of merchant and pastoralist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort (erected 1883). Heritage notes sometimes say c.1887 for clearance — either way, no Greenway fountain fabric stands above ground; footings may survive as archaeology near the Mort statue.

This is not the Frazer Fountain in Hyde Park, and it is not a Bent Street fountain in its own right. An earlier post on this blog titles the same lost Doric under a Bent / Spring Street precinct label — useful for the civic neighbourhood, but the structure itself belonged to Macquarie Place. Keep the two posts cross-linked and the geography honest.