At 66 Darling Point Road today you meet Winslow Gardens — a 1961 apartment block in the Chicago-school manner that took the name of the mansion it replaced. The original Winslow was one of those late-Victorian Darling Point residences that made the ridge feel like a private estate road. Dictionary of Sydney notes that politician and judge Sir Joseph George Long Innes bought the existing house in the last decades of the nineteenth century; he did not build it from scratch.
Innes (18341896) was solicitor-general and attorney-general under Parkes, then a Supreme Court judge from 1881 a Reibey grandson on his mother’s side, and the man who helped settle Chisholm House as the site for today’s GPO. After he died in England in October 1896, the house emptied into the sale rooms. The catalogue already on this post — Walter Bradley & Co., March 1897 — lists pictures, works of art and “very costly & elaborate household appointments for sale at Winslow. That is the mansion speaking in its own voice: not a street number yet, but a named house on Darling Point.
Next door at 68 stands The Swifts, the Tooth/Resch baronial pile — still there. Winslow is the neighbour that the strata age erased. When you walk past 66, read the apartment name as a memorial plaque: the gardens are new; the name is the old house’s last trick.
Winslow - 66 Darling Point Road - Darling Point
CATALOGUE
OF THE
Late SIR GEORGE INNES' [handwritten: (died Octr 1896)]
Pictures and Works of Art
AND
VERY COSTLY & ELABORATE
Household Appointments
FOR SALE AT
"Winslow," Darling Point
ON
WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY,
7th & 8th MARCH,
AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK EACH DAY. [handwritten: (1897)]
Under Instructions from the Executrix in the Estate.
ON VIEW
TUESDAY, 6th MARCH,
10 A.M. TO 5 P.M.
WALTER BRADLEY & CO.,
Licensed Auctioneers & Valuators,
324 GEORGE STREET.
THE WOODHILL PRINTING WORKS, 127 YORK STREET, SYDNEY.