Walk south of Central into Prince Alfred Park and the lawns feel like they are waiting for something bigger than a lunchtime kickabout. They were. Sydney’s first purpose-built exhibition hall stood here — in what had been Cleveland Paddocks — years before the Domain got its Garden Palace. The Intercolonial Exhibition Building opened on 30 August 1870 for the Intercolonial Exhibition of General Industries and Arts, organised by the Agricultural Society of NSW to mark the centenary of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay and to rehearse colonial displays for overseas shows. All the Australian colonies and New Zealand were invited.
The park had been gazetted in the mid-1860s and named for Prince Alfred after his 1868 visit. City engineer Edward Bell designed the hall; Benjamin Backhouse laid out the grounds — the first Australian park designed around a major exhibition, ahead of Barnet’s 1879 Garden Palace and Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building of 1880. After 1870 the hall stayed busy with shows, concerts and later uses, including the Australian War Memorial museum collections from 1925 until they moved to Canberra in 1936.
The building came down in 1954. The park is still public open space; some of the nineteenth-century planting, including boundary Moreton Bay figs from the early layout, is part of its heritage character. The photographs here remember the lost hall — different building, different park, nine years earlier than the Garden Palace.
The First Sydney Exhibition Building
Prince Alfred Park
