Garden Palace fire

A Sydney landmark perished in the flames

Nobody knows who started it, or exactly where it started, but within a short time of the fire erupting, on the morning of September 22, 1882, most of the citizens of the city knew about it. That was primarily because the flames could be seen from most parts of Sydney.

At a height of 64m tall, the building was the tallest structure in Sydney at the time. Others were alerted to it by the smoke, but their eyes soons turned toward the Botanic Gardens, where they were horrified to see that the Garden Palace - an impressive structure inspired by London’s Crystal Palace whose high domes dominated the skyline - was burning to the ground.

The edifice, which had been built to house the great Sydney International Exhibition of 1879-80, one of the first big world fairs in the southern hemisphere, had taken pride of place in the city near Government House in the Botanic Gardens. Now, within 40 minutes it was a pile of smouldering rubble.

As the day wore on the scale of the tragedy became apparent. Apart from changing the city’s skyline forever, the city also lost priceless artworks, artefacts from the Technological and Sanitary Museum and irreplaceable government records.

The Garden Palace came into existence as the result of the 19th century fad for international fairs. Much of the credit for these should go to the French who held industrial expositions from the late 18th century into the 19th century. One of the first and most influential of the large expositions in the 1800s was the French industrial exposition of 1844 which showcased the latest and best of France’s agricultural and industrial technology and techniques, along with some from other nations.

Not wanting to be outdone by the French, the world’s first, and then still arguably the greatest, industrial power, Great Britain, held an international exposition in 1851. They gave it the grandiose name of the Great Exhibition Of The Works Of Industry Of All Nations. To show off some of their industrial strength, they built the Crystal Palace, a purpose built cathedral to industry made of glass and cast iron, the money for it raised through public subscription. The Crystal Palace would stand well beyond the end of the exposition (it burned down in 1936).

The 1851 British Great Exhibition was enormously successful, drawing huge crowds and showcasing British know-how. In the years afterward it inspired fairs in Paris, Munich, Dublin Vienna and Philadelphia.

The Australian colonies were keen to show that they could compete on the world stage, so in 1877, the Agricultural Society of NSW announced its intention to hold an international exhibition in 1879. Some people derided the idea as overly ambitious, but for many the biggest motivation for pushing ahead with it was the desire to beat Melbourne, who had announced their intention to hold an exhibition in 1880.

Originally the plan was to make use of the Agricultural Society’s existing Exhibition Building at Prince Alfred Park (built for the 1870 Intercolonial Exhibition and later demolished in 1954). They also only planned to run the fair for a month. However, the society soon found that there was far more interest in the event, and they knew that they would need more funding and a much better venue than the relatively pokey Exhibition Building. It almost ended there because the Agricultural Society thought they would never be able to raise the money needed, nor did the organisation have the personnel and skills to hold a large exposition, so they made the decision to call it off.

But by then the momentum for the exposition had grown far beyond anything the Agricultural Society could stop. Too many people in Australia’s colonies and people from overseas wanted to see it happen.

So it fell to the NSW governor Sir Hercules Robinson to step in. He could see how bad it might be for Australia’s reputation to cancel the event after having announced it. He insisted the exhibition go ahead, to make sure that the colony would suffer no loss of “credit and prestige with the outside world”.

NSW premier Henry Parkes was initially reluctant to commit funding to the event, after public subscriptions had already failed to raise anywhere near enough money. In January 1879 he gave in to public pressure and granted £50,000 to hold the world fair. Parkes must have been close to having an aneurysm when the cost blew out to around £200,000.

With the due date for the exhibition approaching fast, a site was selected at the Botanic Gardens for the exposition. It was decided an August opening date was impossible but that September might be achievable.

When construction started on the purpose-built venue for the exhibition, architect James Barnet had not even finalised his designs, he had to keep changing them because as more and more exhibitors wanted to be part of the exposition he needed to expand the space of the Garden Palace.

Construction progressed at a frantic pace and the project saw the first use of electric arc lights in Sydney to extend the work hours well into the evening.

Many Sydney residents complained about the construction noises ringing out across the city at all hours. Some safety standards were ignored in the race to finish the building and at least one worker died, but the great palace rose, albeit slightly behind schedule.

The official opening ceremony was rained out but the great Garden Palace finally opened on September 17. It held thousands of exhibits from nations around the world, many of which made their way south to the Melbourne exhibition after the Sydney show closed in April 1880.

But the Garden Palace remained, holding many irreplaceable heritage objects including over 300 artworks and a collection of early indigenous artefacts. The building continued to be used to display these, but was used to hold occasional events and also housed government offices and stored government documents and records.

Many of the objects still displayed there were from the collection of the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum, the forerunner of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (and the Powerhouse Museum), which was temporarily set up in the Garden Palace until it could find its own home.

Much of what remained was destroyed in the fire including a huge bronze statue of Queen Victoria that held pride of place under the central dome. There was some speculation that it may have been deliberately lit by residents who detested the building because it blocked their view of the harbour. Another theory is that there had been workmen in the basement of the building who may have accidentally started the fire before they left the previous day. But no one was ever officially blamed for the disaster.

The gates of the Garden Palace still stand at the Macquarie Street entrance of the Botanic Gardens and a circular sunken garden marks the spot beneath where the great central dome of the building once stood.

More than a century later, in 2014, the Garden Palace rose again. The winning entry in the 45th annual Kaldor Public Art Project was a recreation of the building by Sydney-based Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones.

Jones resurrected the palace with thousands of white indigenous-inspired objects marking the outline of the massive palace. There were also spoken word performances telling the story of the building, what it housed and what was lost when it was destroyed. Although the artwork was only a ghost of what went before, it gave a sense of the void that was left when the building caught fire and burned to the ground.

(Based partly on a story published in the Daily Telegraph in 2014)