What is better for a retaining wall, timber sleepers or blocks?

Treated timber is approved for in ground use and has a reasonable service life, however block retaining walls and concrete sleeper retaining walls are more durable having a greater life expectancy. This is based on suitable footings & good drainage. Both Blocks and concrete sleepers come in a wide range of colours, sizes and styles to create a more aesthetic landscape. Common styles of retainers walls to consider are timber sleep retaining walls, link wall or link block retaining walls and concrete sleeper walls

Should I pave or concrete?

While concrete certainly has its benefits, pavers give a more aesthetic finish to a landscape area. Pavers area available in range of colours, texture, styles and sizes. Larger format, 400mm and 500mm pavers have become increasingly popular with modern and contemporary landscape designs. Pavers are also commonly used for garden borders and edges for their straight line finish which is widely desired in modern landscape construction.

Do I need landscape design plans before I get a construction quote?

Yes. A landscape design will allow us to discuss the project with enough detail to allow for an accurate price estimate. This design process will also determine whether council approvals are required, which can impact cost and timing.

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Reap Financial Benefits with Quality Landscaping Darlinghurst Services. To illustrate, landscaping is not an expense; it’s an investment. Indeed, a well-maintained garden can raise your property value by up to 20%. Choose All Green Gardening Services for an investment that pays off. Remember, quality is just a call away.

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Our expertise at All Green Gardening and Landscaping lies in crafting beautiful, organic landscapes that enhance both residential and commercial properties. Join us on our Facebook Page for updates. Be it a backyard transformation in Darlinghurst or a grander endeavor, our commitment remains the same: exceptional customer service and expert landscaping in Darlinghurst. Our services encompass both residential and commercial landscaping, in close collaboration with our talented designers and installers.

When it comes to significant design tasks, our licensed landscape designers will be on-site to create the perfect layout. Our designers will arrange a site consultation to understand your project and assess the work needed. After this stage, you’ll receive a detailed landscape design consultation from us.

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Transform Your Outdoor Space with Turf Laying Services in Darlinghurst. Firstly, a lush, green lawn is the cornerstone of any beautiful garden. Not only does turf add aesthetic value, but it also increases your property’s worth. Choose All Green Gardening Services for expert turf laying. Conveniently, we’re just a call away for your Sydney turf needs.

Top-Quality Mulching Services: Best in Darlinghurst, NSW

Looking for standout mulching inDarlinghurst, NSW 2010? All Green Gardening & Landscaping is here to deliver. Our mulching is more than aesthetics; it’s a promise of a vibrant and healthy garden. Trust our expertise for moisture-rich, weed-free, and nutrient-dense landscapes.

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When in Darlinghurst and in need of excellent pavers, turn to All Green Gardening and Landscaping!

Need a Retaining Walls Darlinghurst Team

Our commitment at Darlinghurst is to furnish superior panel and post concrete retaining walls, an economical choice compared to brick and limestone.

Expert Tree Services inDarlinghurst

All Green Gardening & Landscaping is your go-to for expert tree services inDarlinghurst. Our dedicated team offers everything from pruning to stump removal, ensuring your trees get the best care possible. Partner with us for a lush and secure landscape.

Top-Tier Weeding Services in Darlinghurst

All Green Gardening & Landscaping takes pride in providing Darlinghurst with premium weeding services. Our team guarantees a garden where desired plants flourish unhindered. Embrace a garden free from invasive growth with our expert touch.

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Frequently Asked Questions

{We offer a comprehensive range of landscaping services, including garden design, lawn maintenance, tree and shrub care, hardscape construction, irrigation system installation, and more. | We provide an extensive selection of landscaping services, including garden design, lawn care, tree and shrub maintenance, hardscape creation, irrigation system installation, and beyond.

Our landscaping services are designed to enhance your property’s visual appeal, creating beautiful, well-kept outdoor spaces that boost curb appeal and property value.

Customising landscapes to match your style and desires is what we do best, ensuring your vision is realized.

Current Landscaping Jobs in Darlinghurst

Currently, we’re in search of a skilled Local Landscaper in Darlinghurst for same-day jobs.

Hayden Lane
Darlinghurst, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Oxford St
Darlinghurst NSW.

William Street
Darlinghurst NSW. The famous Coca-Cola sign is in the background. How many signs can you see?

Trams on Burton St Viaduct
Darlinghurst NSW. Nowadays the former tram viaduct is used for vehicle traffic.

Taylor Square 1941
Darlinghurst NSW. This photo was sourced from SLNSW and is from the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW collection of photos. Notice the air raid shelter in the centre of the photo.

Darlinghurst Street Scene
Darlinghurst NSW.

R1 Tram passing Darlinghurst Hospital
Darlinghurst NSW.

Tram on Darlinghurst Rd (near Taylor Square)
Darlinghurst NSW.

Cell Block Theatre, formerly Cell Block D of Darlinghurst Gaol, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, now part of National Art School
Darlinghurst Gaol, in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, operated for over 70 years as the city’s gaol. Of all the cell blocks at the former gaol the one now known as the Cell Block Theatre is the oldest and most original externally. It was completed in 1840 and built by day labour with sandstone quarried by prison inmates from an area lying around present-day William Street and Woolloomooloo Bay. It was used to house female prisoners and known as D wing. There were thirty-six double cells, six single cells and one padded cell for “lunatics”. The latter was lined on the floor and walls up to 9 feet in height with horsehair 5 inches thick encased in leather. If further restraining was required, a straight jacket was used. Each prisoner slept under two blankets on top of a paillasse (straw filled hessian bag used as mattress). The bed itself was merely three pine boards supported on two trestles. The female prisoners sewed shirts, pillow cases, sheets and night shirts for sale, and made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta. The finer needlework was done by hand and by the 1870s the coarser work was being undertaken with two sewing machines. Women who could not sew, picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre), undertook scrubbing or cleaning. By 1870 Darlinghurst accommodated 127 women prisoners overlooked by a matron and four assistants. The siting, design and early construction of Darlinghurst Gaol extended over a period of two decades. The plan for the gaol was taken from an 1820 booklet for an English county gaol to accommodate 400 prisoners, designed by George Ainslie and published by the English Society for the Improvement of Prison Disciplines. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time and well beyond the resources of the colony in 1820. Standish Lawrence Harris was the colony’s Civil Architect at the time, and it was he who supervised the initial work which began in 1822 but stopped in 1824. By this time, the 21 foot (6.4 m) high and 2 foot 6 inches (0.76 m) thick perimeter walls, now bounded by Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst Road and Darlinghurst Courthouse, had been completed. As well as this, an arched entrance with a porter’s lodge on each side was finished and the excavations for the proposed buildings and drains were almost completed. Work then stopped for 12 years until 1836 when construction finally recommenced. An iron gang of convicts was stationed within the walls of the gaol to quarry the stone. They were housed in portable travelling huts or ‘boxes’ on wheels, sleeping twenty-five men in each on two shelves. By day they worked in the nearby quarry, on the Woolloomooloo hillside preparing the stone, and by night slept in the boxes. The stone was carted to the gaol under contract and the building erected by free labour. The original plan of the gaol was like the spokes of a wheel, with seven two-storey wings (later reduced to five) detached from a central observation point and chapel. With the arrival in 1838 of a new Governor, Sir George Gipps, the north-western wing was already underway. Gipps ordered the alterations to the gaol comprising the addition of a third storey to the cell blocks and increasing the capacity of the gaol. Meanwhile, conditions at the old Lower George Street lock up, Sydney’s first gaol, became so bad that transfer to Darlinghurst Gaol became necessary in June 1841, despite it not being completed (one wing and the superintendent’s house were completed, one wing was nearly finished and two wings had been started). There was no water supply for privies and none of the yards for prisoner classification had been constructed. It was into these conditions that on 27 June 1841, the 119 male prisoners, guarded by fifty police, four inspectors and a chief constable, marched, chained together from the old gaol known as “Smell Hole” to the “New Jail” at Darlinghurst. The following day, fifty female prisoners undertook the same journey jeered at by a raucous crowd. Water at the new gaol was obtained by prisoners with handcarts and stored in scuttle drums. Five months later open tubs placed in the yard behind a wooden screen were still in use as privies. Construction of the gaol continued in an erratic fashion until July 1844, when an economic depression forced the abandonment of work until October 1846. An east wing extension was built between 1866 and 1872 under the direction of Harold Maclean (1821-89), who had been appointed Sheriff of New South Wales in 1864 and Sheriff and Comptroller-General of Prisons in 1874. Maclean worked towards implementing classification, uniform management for all gaols and systematic employment for inmates. He banned the treadmill and argued that prisons should be industrious hives of labour. He allowed prisoners schooling, choir practice, and visits by authorised outsiders. The extensions were probably designed in the office of the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904). They also featured an infirmary, workshops, staff quarters, kitchens and boiler room. The new cell block, ‘E’ wing, constructed between 1866 and 1869, comprised a central hall with side wings running off it, constructed in a ‘Y’-shape to the north of the radial plan cell blocks. The areas between the wings of the new blocks to the north and east were divided into six yards. After the abandonment of public hangings in 1855, the new gallows was given a permanent home in the eastern fork of the new cell wings on the first-floor level. Hailed as a “model gallows”, it faced the rising sun and was considered humane, being only a short distance from the condemned cell. Of the sixty-seven prisoners hanged on this new gallows, two of the most well-known were Henry James O’Farrell (1833-68) who had attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf in 1868, and the bushranger, Andrew George Scott (1842-80), better known as Captain Moonlight. Maclean also provided for two other facilities at Darlinghurst, a dead house (morgue) and a photographic studio for prisoners’ identification introduced in 1871. Probably around the same time as the extensions, the front entrance was redesigned and bears the hallmark of a design feature used by Barnet in similar institutions, that of a lion’s head carving on the arch keystone depicted with a key in his mouth. A visiting journalist to the Gaol in December 1870 from Sydney’s “Evening Mail” provides an excellent description of the gaol’s operation. He wrote that cell wings A and D had been completed in 1840 by free labour, B wing by Norfolk Islanders and C and E wings by prison labour trained and overseen by foremen. A and B wings were for male prisoners accommodated in either one or three-man cells. B wing also contained a padded cell The “Y-shaped” E wing also included six dark cells and six solitary cells. Prisoners worked from 7 am until 4 pm with 1¾ hours set aside for meals. These were eaten in open sheds sitting at forms ad tables in the prison exercise yards to which the prisoners were allotted, depending on their offences from light to the death sentence. The yards were decorated with small flower beds tended by the inmates. Meals were prepared in the prison kitchen and conveyed to the prisoners in hand carts. They comprised hominy (maize meal) for breakfast; meat, potatoes and various vegetables for lunch; and bread etc on platters in the evening. If prisoners were well behaved after a year, they were given rations of tea and sugar as well and one or two ounces of tobacco depending on industry and merit. Prisoners worked or were trained in a wide range of trades and service activities including as mat makers, cooks, labourers, brush makers, stone masons, stonecutters, shoemakers, tailors, book binders and painters, as well as school, hospital and lunatic keepers. In the gaol workshops, coir (cocoanut fibre) door mats of various sizes were the most commonly-produced item made by inmates for sale to the public. These were woven on 23 looms, while hair, coir and scrubbing brushes and bath brooms and tin buckets, dishes, plates, tubs and quart and pint pots were also manufactured. Female prisoners sewed shirts, sheets and night shirts for sale, made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta or picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre). Both male and female prisoners could also attend school for two hours a day but not many of them took up this offer. A gaol library contained 500 titles. Despite this glowing report, during the late 1800s there were constant criticisms of conditions at the gaol. Haphazard development, together with gross overcrowding above the design capacity (732 prisoners in 1900), led to continuous problems. The necessity of walled courtyards, to segregate prisoners and to prevent a rush on the gates, caused lack of air circulation. The threat of disease was compounded by the reluctance of authorities to install underground pipes for waste disposal since they could provide potential escape routes. In 1912 Long Bay Gaol was completed and prisoners at Darlinghurst were transferred there. The stained-glass windows from the old gaol chapel were installed in the Long Bay chapel. (However, when this chapel was relocated, the windows were reinstated at Darlinghurst and remain to this day). Following the prisoner move, political discussions began concerning the appropriate reuse of the old gaol. These were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which time it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, as well as a military detention barracks. After the War, the then Minister for Public Instruction, Thomas Davies Mutch (1885-1958), lobbied for the conversion of the gaol into a technical college, which was agreed to. From 1921 conversion of the gaol into East Sydney Technical College commenced. Several courses of sandstone were removed from the perimeter walls and the coping replaced. (It as sold to Sydney University and St Jude’s Anglian Church, Randwick). Apart from enlargement of the windows, the external appearance of the gaol buildings was not much altered. Internally, the cells were demolished and the cell blocks were reconstructed as two-storey instead of three-storey buildings, to conform with health regulations for schools at the time, creating large light-filled studios. The gaol’s landscaping was largely removed to make way for car parking spaces. However, the old women’s cellblock, D wing, was not included as part of the college as an early proposal to use the building as part of the adjacent courts complex did not eventuate and the structure was left to decay. In 1955 when the college became administered independently, it was decided to convert the cell block into a much-needed theatre. At the time, Sydney was lacking in large theatres, and funds were raised through a public appeal for conversion into the Cell Block initiated by Katharine Hepburn and Sir Robert Helpmann in 1957. The three tiers of cells, catwalks, stairs and internal fittings were removed but the windows remained their original size, compete with their bars. The large internal space this created was found to have perfect acoustics. As well as theatrical productions, over the years it has it served to stage performances from opera to pop music, dance to fashion parades, art exhibitions and even artists’ balls. The college eventually provided six schools of study, Art and Design, Fashion, Food, General Studies, Catering and Nutrition, Management and Office Administration. Although, from its inception it had a strong tradition in teaching art, being for many years the centre of art education in New South Wales. Many of Australia’s most distinguished artists, potters and sculptors studied and taught there. The entire former gaol complex has been used solely as the National Art School from 2005 and from 2009 has offered independent tertiary level qualifications. The Cell Block Theatre can be privately hired and more recently has become a venue for weddings, cocktail and dinner parties, product launches, conferences and seminars, and photoshoots. References INSIDE DARLINGHURST. (1870, December 13). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 3. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107125632 Simpson, Margaret. “Old Sydney Buildings: A Social History”, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, p. 106-111.

Former Workshops, Darlinghurst Gaol, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, now part of National Art School
Darlinghurst Gaol, in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, operated for over 70 years as the city’s main gaol. Of all the impressive sandstone buildings on the site, the prison workshops, shown here, were the most plainly finished. However, they originally housed facilities for an interesting array of trades taught to the prisoners and reflect changing attitudes to prisoner rehabilitation from the early 1860s. This saw that inmates were given work and exercise and the treadmill was banned. Prisoners worked or were trained in a wide range of trades and service activities including as mat makers, cooks, labourers, brush makers, stone masons, stonecutters, shoemakers, tailors, book binders and painters, as well as school, hospital and lunatic keepers. The construction and repair of gaol buildings, making and repairing of furniture, tools, painting, polishing and even bookbinding was undertaken by inmates. The workshops were originally two-storeys in height built in about 1862 but a third storey was added after 1870, built by young prison inmates trained as stonemasons and carpenters under the supervision of a foreman. Within the workshops, a blacksmith’s shop had four forges, with areas for tinmen, iron fitters and turners. Articles manufactured here included buckets, dishes, plates, tubs, quart and pint pots. A carpenter’s shop had four benches with roofs, patterns, doors and windows being produced. All types of brushes were made in the brush shop while book making and binding undertaken in another shop. The most numerous items made in the gaol workshops were coir mats and matting made from coconut fibre brought from the South Sea Islands. These were woven on twenty-three looms some capable of making mating 30 yards (27.43 m) in length. A warping room housed six spinning jennies on which skeins of coir were unwound and a binding room cut and edged the mats to size. The mats could be made to order with words and dying added. Female prisoners sewed shirts, sheets and night shirts for sale, made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta or picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre). Both male and female prisoners could also attend school for two hours a day but not many of them took up this offer. A gaol library contained 500 titles The siting, design and early construction of Darlinghurst Gaol extended over a period of two decades. The plan for the gaol was taken from an 1820 booklet for an English county gaol to accommodate 400 prisoners, designed by George Ainslie and published by the English Society for the Improvement of Prison Disciplines. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time and well beyond the resources of the colony in 1820. Sandstone for its construction was quarried from an area lying around present-day William Street and Woolloomooloo Bay. Standish Lawrence Harris was the colony’s Civil Architect at the time, and it was he who supervised the initial work which began in 1822 but stopped in 1824. By this time, the 21 foot (6.4 m) high and 2 foot 6 inches (0.76 m) thick perimeter walls, now bounded by Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst Road and Darlinghurst Courthouse, had been completed. As well as this, an arched entrance with a porter’s lodge on each side was finished and the excavations for the proposed buildings and drains were almost completed. Work then stopped for 12 years until 1836 when construction finally recommenced. An iron gang of convicts was stationed within the walls of the gaol to quarry the stone. They were housed in portable travelling huts or ‘boxes’ on wheels, sleeping twenty-five men in each on two shelves. By day they worked in the nearby quarry, on the Woolloomooloo hillside preparing the stone, and by night slept in the boxes. The stone was carted to the gaol under contract and the building erected by free labour. The original plan of the gaol was like the spokes of a wheel, with seven two-storey wings (later reduced to five) detached from a central observation point and chapel. With the arrival in 1838 of a new Governor, Sir George Gipps, the north-western wing was already underway. Gipps ordered the alterations to the gaol comprising the addition of a third storey to the cell blocks and increasing the capacity of the gaol. Meanwhile, conditions at the old Lower George Street lock up, Sydney’s first gaol, became so bad that transfer to Darlinghurst Gaol became necessary in June 1841, despite it not being completed (one wing and the superintendent’s house were completed, one wing was nearly finished and two wings had been started). There was no water supply for privies and none of the yards for prisoner classification had been constructed. It was into these conditions that on 27 June 1841, the 119 male prisoners, guarded by fifty police, four inspectors and a chief constable, marched, chained together from the old gaol known as “Smell Hole” to the “New Jail” at Darlinghurst. The following day, fifty female prisoners undertook the same journey jeered at by a raucous crowd. Water at the new gaol was obtained by prisoners with handcarts and stored in scuttle drums. Five months later open tubs placed in the yard behind a wooden screen were still in use as privies. The gallows at the new gaol was erected over the gateway in Forbes Street and the first public hanging took place on 29 October 1841, when Robert Hands and George Stroud went to their deaths. Construction of the gaol continued in an erratic fashion until July 1844, when an economic depression forced the abandonment of work until October 1846. An east wing extension was built between 1866 and 1872 under the direction of Harold Maclean (1821-89), who had been appointed Sheriff of New South Wales in 1864 and Sheriff and Comptroller-General of Prisons in 1874. Maclean worked towards implementing classification, uniform management for all gaols and systematic employment for inmates. He banned the treadmill and argued that prisons should be industrious hives of labour. He allowed prisoners schooling, choir practice, and visits by authorised outsiders. The extensions were probably designed in the office of the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904). They also featured an infirmary, workshops, staff quarters, kitchens and boiler room. The new cell block, ‘E’ wing, constructed between 1866 and 1869, comprised a central hall with side wings running off it, constructed in a ‘Y’-shape to the north of the radial plan cell blocks. The areas between the wings of the new blocks to the north and east were divided into six yards. After the abandonment of public hangings in 1855, the new gallows was given a permanent home in the eastern fork of the new cell wings on the first-floor level. Hailed as a “model gallows”, it faced the rising sun and was considered humane, being only a short distance from the condemned cell. A total of sixty-seven prisoners hanged on this new gallows. Maclean also provided for two other facilities at Darlinghurst, a dead house (morgue) and a photographic studio for prisoners’ identification introduced in 1871. Probably around the same time as the extensions, the front entrance was redesigned and bears the hallmark of a design feature used by Barnet in similar institutions, that of a lion’s head carving on the arch keystone depicted with a key in his mouth. A visiting journalist to the Gaol in December 1870 from Sydney’s “Evening Mail” provides an excellent description of the gaol’s operation. He wrote that cell wings A and D had been completed in 1840 by free labour, B wing by Norfolk Islanders and C and E wings by prison labour trained and overseen by foremen. A and B wings were for male prisoners accommodated in either one or three-man cells. B wing also contained a padded cell for “lunatics” lined on the floor and walls up to 9 feet in height with horsehair 5 inches thick encased in leather. If further restraining was required, a straight jacket was used. Each prisoner slept under two blankets on top of a paillasse (straw filled hessian bag used as mattress). The bed itself was merely three pine boards supported on two trestles. The “Y-shaped” E wing also included six dark cells and six solitary cells. C and D wings accommodated the female prisoners. There were seventy-eight single cells in C wing with the inmates of bad character on the ground floor and the other on top. D wing, which eventually became the Cell Block Theatre, housed thirty-six double cells, six single cells and one padded cell. Prisoners worked from 7 am until 4 pm with 1¾ hours set aside for meals. These were eaten in open sheds sitting at forms ad tables in the prison exercise yards to which the prisoners were allotted, depending on their offences from light to the death sentence. The yards were decorated with small flower beds tended by the inmates. Meals were prepared in the prison kitchen and conveyed to the prisoners in hand carts. They comprised hominy (maize meal) for breakfast; meat, potatoes and various vegetables for lunch; and bread etc on platters in the evening. If prisoners were well behaved after a year, they were given rations of tea and sugar as well and one or two ounces of tobacco depending on industry and merit. Conditions inside the gaol were so good that in fact it had a lower death rate than the relevant general population at the time. For many of the prisoners, especially vagrants and working-class inmates, gaol conditions in the second half of the 1800s provided proper clothing and shoes, three meals a day, a bed to themselves, shelter from the elements, proper medical treatment, a weekly bath and even vaccination against smallpox. Furthermore, modern prison attitudes ensured the prisoners had supervised exercise periods and meaningful work. Despite this glowing report, during the late 1800s there were constant criticisms of conditions at the gaol. Haphazard development, together with gross overcrowding above the design capacity (732 prisoners in 1900), led to continuous problems. The necessity of walled courtyards, to segregate prisoners and to prevent a rush on the gates, caused lack of air circulation. In 1912 Long Bay Gaol was completed and prisoners at Darlinghurst were transferred there. The stained-glass windows from the old gaol chapel were installed in the Long Bay chapel. (However, when this chapel was relocated, the windows were reinstated at Darlinghurst and remain to this day). Following the prisoner move, political discussions began concerning the appropriate reuse of the old gaol. These were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which time it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, as well as a military detention barracks. After the War, the then Minister for Public Instruction, Thomas Davies Mutch (1885-1958), lobbied for the conversion of the gaol into a technical college, which was agreed to. From 1921 conversion of the gaol into East Sydney Technical College commenced. Several courses of sandstone were removed from the perimeter walls and the coping replaced. (It as sold to Sydney University and St Jude’s Anglian Church, Randwick). Apart from enlargement of the windows, the external appearance of the gaol buildings was not much altered. Internally, the cells were demolished and the cell blocks were reconstructed as two-storey instead of three-storey buildings to conform with health regulations for schools at the time. The gaol’s landscaping was largely removed to make way for car parking spaces. The college eventually provided six schools of study, Art and Design, Fashion, Food, General Studies, Catering and Nutrition, Management and Office Administration. The former workshops were used by the Food School. From its inception the college had a strong tradition in teaching art, being for many years the centre of art education in New South Wales. Many of Australia’s most distinguished artists, potters and sculptors studied and taught there. The entire former gaol complex was used solely as the National Art School from 2005 which from 2009 has offered independent tertiary level qualifications. The former workshops are now used as sculpture studios, print and digital labs, the Rayner Hoff Project Space and the National Art School’s archive collection. Main References INSIDE DARLINGHURST. (1870, December 13). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 3. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107125632 Simpson, Margaret. “Old Sydney Buildings: A Social History”, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, p. 106-111.

Former Morgue, Darlinghurst Gaol, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, now part of National Art School
For over seventy years Darlinghurst Gaol, in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, was Sydney’s main gaol. Shown here is the little sandstone morgue or dead house, as it was known, located close to the gaol perimeter wall near the Burton Street gates. It had been completed by 1870 and features that date inscribed just below the roof gutter on the front. It was built by prison inmates who were trained as stonemasons and carpenters under the supervision of a foreman. Carved over the front door are an hour glass, indicating that time had run out for the prisoner, a skull and cross bones, indicating death and what is thought to be a burning stake, probably relating to severe punishment. It was topped with a ventilator which has since been removed. The morgue was where bodies prisoners, who had just been dispatched on the gallows, were taken. Over the entire life of the prison only 76 prisoners were hanged, two of the most well-known were Henry James O’Farrell (1833-68) who had attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf in 1868, and the bushranger, Andrew George Scott (1842-80), better known as Captain Moonlight. The morgue was also used for coronial inquests of deaths occurring within the prison from a variety of causes including influenza, convulsions, dysentery, pneumonia, heart failure and mania. Most of the prisoners passed away in the gaol hospital or in their cells. Despite the deaths, conditions inside the gaol were so good that in fact it had a lower death rate than the relevant general population at the time. For many of the prisoners, especially vagrants and working-class inmates, gaol conditions in the second half of the 1800s provided proper clothing and shoes, three meals a day, a bed to themselves, shelter from the elements, proper medical treatment, a weekly bath and even vaccination against Smallpox. Furthermore, modern prison attitudes ensured the prisoners had supervised exercise periods and meaningful work. The siting, design and early construction of Darlinghurst Gaol extended over a period of two decades. The plan for the gaol was taken from an 1820 booklet for an English county gaol to accommodate 400 prisoners, designed by George Ainslie and published by the English Society for the Improvement of Prison Disciplines. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time and well beyond the resources of the colony in 1820. Sandstone for its construction was quarried from an area lying around present-day William Street and Woolloomooloo Bay. Standish Lawrence Harris was the colony’s Civil Architect at the time, and it was he who supervised the initial work which began in 1822 but stopped in 1824. By this time, the 21 foot (6.4 m) high and 2 foot 6 inches (0.76 m) thick perimeter walls, now bounded by Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst Road and Darlinghurst Courthouse, had been completed. As well as this, an arched entrance with a porter’s lodge on each side was finished and the excavations for the proposed buildings and drains were almost completed. Work then stopped for 12 years until 1836 when construction finally recommenced. An iron gang of convicts was stationed within the walls of the gaol to quarry the stone. They were housed in portable travelling huts or ‘boxes’ on wheels, sleeping twenty-five men in each on two shelves. By day they worked in the nearby quarry, on the Woolloomooloo hillside preparing the stone, and by night slept in the boxes. The stone was carted to the gaol under contract and the building erected by free labour. The original plan of the gaol was like the spokes of a wheel, with seven two-storey wings (later reduced to five) detached from a central observation point and chapel. With the arrival in 1838 of a new Governor, Sir George Gipps, the north-western wing was already underway. Gipps ordered the alterations to the gaol comprising the addition of a third storey to the cell blocks and increasing the capacity of the gaol. Meanwhile, conditions at the old Lower George Street lock up, Sydney’s first gaol, became so bad that transfer to Darlinghurst Gaol became necessary in June 1841, despite it not being completed (one wing and the superintendent’s house were completed, one wing was nearly finished and two wings had been started). There was no water supply for privies and none of the yards for prisoner classification had been constructed. It was into these conditions that on 27 June 1841, the 119 male prisoners, guarded by fifty police, four inspectors and a chief constable, marched, chained together from the old gaol known as “Smell Hole” to the “New Jail” at Darlinghurst. The following day, fifty female prisoners undertook the same journey jeered at by a raucous crowd. Water at the new gaol was obtained by prisoners with handcarts and stored in scuttle drums. Five months later open tubs placed in the yard behind a wooden screen were still in use as privies. The gallows at the new gaol was erected over the gateway in Forbes Street and the first public hanging took place on 29 October 1841, when Robert Hands and George Stroud went to their deaths. Construction of the gaol continued in an erratic fashion until July 1844, when an economic depression forced the abandonment of work until October 1846. An east wing extension was built between 1866 and 1872 under the direction of Harold Maclean (1821-89), who had been appointed Sheriff of New South Wales in 1864 and Sheriff and Comptroller-General of Prisons in 1874. Maclean worked towards implementing classification, uniform management for all gaols and systematic employment for inmates. He banned the treadmill and argued that prisons should be industrious hives of labour. He allowed prisoners schooling, choir practice, and visits by authorised outsiders. The extensions were probably designed in the office of the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904). They also featured an infirmary, workshops, staff quarters, kitchens and boiler room. The new cell block, ‘E’ wing, constructed between 1866 and 1869, comprised a central hall with side wings running off it, constructed in a ‘Y’-shape to the north of the radial plan cell blocks. The areas between the wings of the new blocks to the north and east were divided into six yards. After the abandonment of public hangings in 1855, the new gallows was given a permanent home in the eastern fork of the new cell wings on the first-floor level. Hailed as a “model gallows”, it faced the rising sun and was considered humane, being only a short distance from the condemned cell. A total of sixty-seven prisoners hanged on this new gallows. Maclean also provided for two other facilities at Darlinghurst, a dead house (morgue) and a photographic studio for prisoners’ identification introduced in 1871. Probably around the same time as the extensions, the front entrance was redesigned and bears the hallmark of a design feature used by Barnet in similar institutions, that of a lion’s head carving on the arch keystone depicted with a key in his mouth. A visiting journalist to the Gaol in December 1870 from Sydney’s “Evening Mail” provides an excellent description of the gaol’s operation. He wrote that cell wings A and D had been completed in 1840 by free labour, B wing by Norfolk Islanders and C and E wings by prison labour trained and overseen by foremen. A and B wings were for male prisoners accommodated in either one or three-man cells. B wing also contained a padded cell for “lunatics” lined on the floor and walls up to 9 feet in height with horsehair 5 inches thick encased in leather. If further restraining was required, a straight jacket was used. Each prisoner slept under two blankets on top of a paillasse (straw filled hessian bag used as mattress). The bed itself was merely three pine boards supported on two trestles. The “Y-shaped” E wing also included six dark cells and six solitary cells. C and D wings accommodated the female prisoners. There were seventy-eight single cells in C wing with the inmates of bad character on the ground floor and the other on top. D wing, which eventually became the Cell Block Theatre, housed thirty-six double cells, six single cells and one padded cell. Prisoners worked from 7 am until 4 pm with 1¾ hours set aside for meals. These were eaten in open sheds sitting at forms ad tables in the prison exercise yards to which the prisoners were allotted, depending on their offences from light to the death sentence. The yards were decorated with small flower beds tended by the inmates. Meals were prepared in the prison kitchen and conveyed to the prisoners in hand carts. They comprised hominy (maize meal) for breakfast; meat, potatoes and various vegetables for lunch; and bread etc on platters in the evening. If prisoners were well behaved after a year, they were given rations of tea and sugar as well and one or two ounces of tobacco depending on industry and merit. Prisoners worked or were trained in a wide range of trades and service activities including as mat makers, cooks, labourers, brush makers, stone masons, stonecutters, shoemakers, tailors, book binders and painters, as well as school, hospital and lunatic keepers. In the gaol workshops, coir (cocoanut fibre) door mats of various sizes were the most commonly-produced item made by inmates for sale to the public. These were woven on 23 looms, while hair, coir and scrubbing brushes and bath brooms and tin buckets, dishes, plates, tubs and quart and pint pots were also manufactured. Female prisoners sewed shirts, sheets and night shirts for sale, made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta or picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre). Both male and female prisoners could also attend school for two hours a day but not many of them took up this offer. A gaol library contained 500 titles. Despite this glowing report, during the late 1800s there were constant criticisms of conditions at the gaol. Haphazard development, together with gross overcrowding above the design capacity (732 prisoners in 1900), led to continuous problems. The necessity of walled courtyards, to segregate prisoners and to prevent a rush on the gates, caused lack of air circulation. The threat of disease was compounded by the reluctance of authorities to install underground pipes for waste disposal since they could provide potential escape routes. In 1912 Long Bay Gaol was completed and prisoners at Darlinghurst were transferred there. The stained-glass windows from the old gaol chapel were installed in the Long Bay chapel. (However, when this chapel was relocated, the windows were reinstated at Darlinghurst and remain to this day). Following the prisoner move, political discussions began concerning the appropriate reuse of the old gaol. These were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which time it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, as well as a military detention barracks. After the War, the then Minister for Public Instruction, Thomas Davies Mutch (1885-1958), lobbied for the conversion of the gaol into a technical college, which was agreed to. From 1921 conversion of the gaol into East Sydney Technical College commenced. Several courses of sandstone were removed from the perimeter walls and the coping replaced. (It as sold to Sydney University and St Jude’s Anglian Church, Randwick). Apart from enlargement of the windows, the external appearance of the gaol buildings was not much altered. Internally, the cells were demolished and the cell blocks were reconstructed as two-storey instead of three-storey buildings to conform with health regulations for schools at the time. The gaol’s landscaping was largely removed to make way for car parking spaces. The morgue’s fine symbolic carvings were chiselled off in the 1920s as unseeingly reminders of the past though in more recent years stone masons have recreated them. The building itself was reused as the college’s main switch room. The college eventually provided six schools of study, Art and Design, Fashion, Food, General Studies, Catering and Nutrition, Management and Office Administration. From its inception it had a strong tradition in teaching art, being for many years the centre of art education in New South Wales. Many of Australia’s most distinguished artists, potters and sculptors studied and taught there. The entire former gaol complex has been used solely as the National Art School from 2005 which from 2009 has offered independent tertiary level qualifications. Main References INSIDE DARLINGHURST. (1870, December 13). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 3. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107125632 Simpson, Margaret. “Old Sydney Buildings: A Social History”, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, p. 106-111.

Former Kitchen, Darlinghurst Gaol, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, now part of National Art School
For over seventy years Darlinghurst Gaol, in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, was Sydney’s main gaol. Shown here is the former kitchen wing. It had been completed by 1870 by prison inmates working as stone masons, carpenters, blacksmiths or their assistants under the direction of a foreman. As well as the kitchen, the building housed the commissariat and the prison’s food supplies, the gaol’s school room and the shoemakers' workshop. It features a curved slate roof, clerestory lighting, which provided more natural light, and two tall sandstone stone chimneys. The kitchen was staffed by three cooks and eight assistants and produced all the meals for the inmates. Meals such as meat and vegetables were prepared in six coppers stirred with strong three-pronged forks and bread baked in ovens. All the bowls, tubs, bread platters and drinking vessels were stored in the kitchen as well. Milk was delivered from a nearby dairy and some vegetables grown next to the kitchen. One-and three-quarter hours per day were set aside for prisoners’ meals. These were eaten in open sheds sitting on forms at tables in the prison exercise yards to which the prisoners were allotted, depending on their offences from light to the death sentence. After the bell was rung, meals were conveyed to the prisoners in hand carts to their yards. These comprised hominy (maize meal) for breakfast; meat, potatoes and various vegetables for lunch; and bread etc in the evening. If prisoners were well behaved after a year, they were given rations of tea and sugar (and soap) as well and one or two ounces of tobacco depending on industry and merit. The gaol’s school room was located in the top area of the kitchen wing. Both male and female prisoners could also attend school for two hours a day but not many of them took up this offer. It was fitted out with the unusual desks and forms. The siting, design and early construction of Darlinghurst Gaol extended over a period of two decades. The plan for the gaol was taken from an 1820 booklet for an English county gaol to accommodate 400 prisoners, designed by George Ainslie and published by the English Society for the Improvement of Prison Disciplines. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time and well beyond the resources of the colony in 1820. Sandstone for its construction was quarried from an area lying around present-day William Street and Woolloomooloo Bay. Standish Lawrence Harris was the colony’s Civil Architect at the time, and it was he who supervised the initial work which began in 1822 but stopped in 1824. By this time, the 21 foot (6.4 m) high and 2 foot 6 inches (0.76 m) thick perimeter walls, now bounded by Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst Road and Darlinghurst Courthouse, had been completed. As well as this, an arched entrance with a porter’s lodge on each side was finished and the excavations for the proposed buildings and drains were almost completed. Work then stopped for 12 years until 1836 when construction finally recommenced. An iron gang of convicts was stationed within the walls of the gaol to quarry the stone. They were housed in portable travelling huts or ‘boxes’ on wheels, sleeping twenty-five men in each on two shelves. By day they worked in the nearby quarry, on the Woolloomooloo hillside preparing the stone, and by night slept in the boxes. The stone was carted to the gaol under contract and the building erected by free labour. The original plan of the gaol was like the spokes of a wheel, with seven two-storey wings (later reduced to five) detached from a central observation point and chapel. With the arrival in 1838 of a new Governor, Sir George Gipps, the north-western wing was already underway. Gipps ordered the alterations to the gaol comprising the addition of a third storey to the cell blocks and increasing the capacity of the gaol. Meanwhile, conditions at the old Lower George Street lock up, Sydney’s first gaol, became so bad that transfer to Darlinghurst Gaol became necessary in June 1841, despite it not being completed (one wing and the superintendent’s house were completed, one wing was nearly finished and two wings had been started). There was no water supply for privies and none of the yards for prisoner classification had been constructed. It was into these conditions that on 27 June 1841, the 119 male prisoners, guarded by fifty police, four inspectors and a chief constable, marched, chained together from the old gaol known as “Smell Hole” to the “New Jail” at Darlinghurst. The following day, fifty female prisoners undertook the same journey jeered at by a raucous crowd. Water at the new gaol was obtained by prisoners with handcarts and stored in scuttle drums. Five months later open tubs placed in the yard behind a wooden screen were still in use as privies. The gallows at the new gaol was erected over the gateway in Forbes Street and the first public hanging took place on 29 October 1841, when Robert Hands and George Stroud went to their deaths. Construction of the gaol continued in an erratic fashion until July 1844, when an economic depression forced the abandonment of work until October 1846. An east wing extension was built between 1866 and 1872 under the direction of Harold Maclean (1821-89), who had been appointed Sheriff of New South Wales in 1864 and Sheriff and Comptroller-General of Prisons in 1874. Maclean worked towards implementing classification, uniform management for all gaols and systematic employment for inmates. He banned the treadmill and argued that prisons should be industrious hives of labour. He allowed prisoners schooling, choir practice, and visits by authorised outsiders. The extensions were probably designed in the office of the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904). They also featured an infirmary, workshops, staff quarters, kitchens and boiler room. The new cell block, ‘E’ wing, constructed between 1866 and 1869, comprised a central hall with side wings running off it, constructed in a ‘Y’-shape to the north of the radial plan cell blocks. The areas between the wings of the new blocks to the north and east were divided into six yards. After the abandonment of public hangings in 1855, the new gallows was given a permanent home in the eastern fork of the new cell wings on the first-floor level. Hailed as a “model gallows”, it faced the rising sun and was considered humane, being only a short distance from the condemned cell. Of the sixty-seven prisoners hanged on this new gallows, two of the most well-known were Henry James O’Farrell (1833-68) who had attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf in 1868, and the bushranger, Andrew George Scott (1842-80), better known as Captain Moonlight. Maclean also provided for two other facilities at Darlinghurst, a dead house (morgue) and a photographic studio for prisoners’ identification introduced in 1871. Probably around the same time as the extensions, the front entrance was redesigned and bears the hallmark of a design feature used by Barnet in similar institutions, that of a lion’s head carving on the arch keystone depicted with a key in his mouth. A visiting journalist to the Gaol in December 1870 from Sydney’s “Evening Mail” provides an excellent description of the gaol’s operation. He wrote that cell wings A and D had been completed in 1840 by free labour, B wing by Norfolk Islanders and C and E wings by prison labour trained and overseen by foremen. A and B wings were for male prisoners accommodated in either one or three-man cells. B wing also contained a padded cell for “lunatics” lined on the floor and walls up to 9 feet in height with horsehair 5 inches thick encased in leather. If further restraining was required, a straight jacket was used. Each prisoner slept under two blankets on top of a paillasse (straw filled hessian bag used as mattress). The bed itself was merely three pine boards supported on two trestles. The “Y-shaped” E wing also included six dark cells and six solitary cells. C and D wings accommodated the female prisoners. There were seventy-eight single cells in C wing with the inmates of bad character on the ground floor and the other on top. D wing, which eventually became the Cell Block Theatre, housed thirty-six double cells, six single cells and one padded cell. Prisoners worked or were trained in a wide range of trades and service activities including as mat makers, cooks, labourers, brush makers, stone masons, stonecutters, shoemakers, tailors, book binders and painters, as well as school, hospital and lunatic keepers. In the gaol workshops, coir (cocoanut fibre) door mats of various sizes were the most commonly-produced item made by inmates for sale to the public. These were woven on 23 looms, while hair, coir and scrubbing brushes and bath brooms and tin buckets, dishes, plates, tubs and quart and pint pots were also manufactured. Female prisoners sewed shirts, sheets and night shirts for sale, made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta or picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre). Despite this glowing report, during the late 1800s there were constant criticisms of conditions at the gaol. Haphazard development, together with gross overcrowding above the design capacity (732 prisoners in 1900), led to continuous problems. The necessity of walled courtyards, to segregate prisoners and to prevent a rush on the gates, caused lack of air circulation. The threat of disease was compounded by the reluctance of authorities to install underground pipes for waste disposal since they could provide potential escape routes. In 1912 Long Bay Gaol was completed and prisoners at Darlinghurst were transferred there. The stained-glass windows from the old gaol chapel were installed in the Long Bay chapel. (However, when this chapel was relocated, the windows were reinstated at Darlinghurst and remain to this day). Following the prisoner move, political discussions began concerning the appropriate reuse of the old gaol. These were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which time it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, as well as a military detention barracks. After the War, the then Minister for Public Instruction, Thomas Davies Mutch (1885-1958), lobbied for the conversion of the gaol into a technical college, which was agreed to. From 1921 conversion of the gaol into East Sydney Technical College commenced. Several courses of sandstone were removed from the perimeter walls and the coping replaced. (It as sold to Sydney University and St Jude’s Anglian Church, Randwick). Apart from enlargement of the windows, the external appearance of the gaol buildings was not much altered. Internally, the cells were demolished and the cell blocks were reconstructed as two-storey instead of three-storey buildings to conform with health regulations for schools at the time. The gaol’s landscaping was largely removed to make way for car parking spaces. The kitchen became the college canteen. The college eventually provided six schools of study, Art and Design, Fashion, Food, General Studies, Catering and Nutrition, Management and Office Administration. From its inception it had a strong tradition in teaching art, being for many years the centre of art education in New South Wales. Many of Australia’s most distinguished artists, potters and sculptors studied and taught there. The entire former gaol complex is now used solely as the National Art School which from 2009 has offered independent tertiary level qualifications. The former kitchen wing is used by the art school as a project space and exhibition area. References INSIDE DARLINGHURST. (1870, December 13). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 3. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107125632 Simpson, Margaret. “Old Sydney Buildings: A Social History”, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, p. 106-111.

Former Chapel at Darlinghurst Gaol, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, now part of National Art School
For over seventy years Darlinghurst Gaol, in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, was Sydney’s main gaol. Shown here is the gaol chapel or church, completed in about 1871, despite being central to the gaol’s original plan of 1820. It is one of only a handful of round churches built throughout the British Empire at the time, the most notable being the medieval Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge. Its construction was by prison inmates working as stone masons, carpenters, blacksmiths or their assistants under the direction of a foreman. Apparently, the gaol’s most talented mason, who carved much of its intricate work was an indigenous man, “Billy”, from the Namoi area who learnt his trade while serving a ten-year sentence. While the chapel was under construction, separate services for Church of England, Catholic and Presbyterian prisoners were held in various prison wings with the Jewish adherents meeting in the gaol school room. Once completed, the chapel was topped by a high dome and ventilating lantern. Originally light bridges or walkways of iron and lattice work connected the round ends of the cell blocks to the first-floor balcony of the chapel building. These were 32 feet (9.75 m) long, 3 feet (0.91 m) high and 3 feet wide and made by the prison blacksmiths. The chapel itself was located on the first floor of the building and designed to hold 200 prisoners, with 100 female prisoners out of sight in a gallery. It featured a group of three stained-glass windows surmounted by the words “Glory to God in the Highest”. A harmonium provided music for the hymns and the prisoners sat at long pews. The ground floor became a bath house. The siting, design and early construction of Darlinghurst Gaol extended over a period of two decades. The plan for the gaol was taken from an 1820 booklet for an English county gaol to accommodate 400 prisoners, designed by George Ainslie and published by the English Society for the Improvement of Prison Disciplines. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time and well beyond the resources of the colony in 1820. Sandstone for its construction was quarried from an area lying around present-day William Street and Woolloomooloo Bay. Standish Lawrence Harris was the colony’s Civil Architect at the time, and it was he who supervised the initial work which began in 1822 but stopped in 1824. By this time, the 21 foot (6.4 m) high and 2 foot 6 inches (0.76 m) thick perimeter walls, now bounded by Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst Road and Darlinghurst Courthouse, had been completed. As well as this, an arched entrance with a porter’s lodge on each side was finished and the excavations for the proposed buildings and drains were almost completed. Work then stopped for 12 years until 1836 when construction finally recommenced. An iron gang of convicts was stationed within the walls of the gaol to quarry the stone. They were housed in portable travelling huts or ‘boxes’ on wheels, sleeping twenty-five men in each on two shelves. By day they worked in the nearby quarry, on the Woolloomooloo hillside preparing the stone, and by night slept in the boxes. The stone was carted to the gaol under contract and the building erected by free labour. The original plan of the gaol was like the spokes of a wheel, with seven two-storey wings (later reduced to five) detached from a central observation point and chapel. With the arrival in 1838 of a new Governor, Sir George Gipps, the north-western wing was already underway. Gipps ordered the alterations to the gaol comprising the addition of a third storey to the cell blocks and increasing the capacity of the gaol. Meanwhile, conditions at the old Lower George Street lock up, Sydney’s first gaol, became so bad that transfer to Darlinghurst Gaol became necessary in June 1841, despite it not being completed (one wing and the superintendent’s house were completed, one wing was nearly finished and two wings had been started). There was no water supply for privies and none of the yards for prisoner classification had been constructed. It was into these conditions that on 27 June 1841, the 119 male prisoners, guarded by fifty police, four inspectors and a chief constable, marched, chained together from the old gaol known as “Smell Hole” to the “New Jail” at Darlinghurst. The following day, fifty female prisoners undertook the same journey jeered at by a raucous crowd. Water at the new gaol was obtained by prisoners with handcarts and stored in scuttle drums. Five months later open tubs placed in the yard behind a wooden screen were still in use as privies. The gallows at the new gaol was erected over the gateway in Forbes Street and the first public hanging took place on 29 October 1841, when Robert Hands and George Stroud went to their deaths. Construction of the gaol continued in an erratic fashion until July 1844, when an economic depression forced the abandonment of work until October 1846. An east wing extension was built between 1866 and 1872 under the direction of Harold Maclean (1821-89), who had been appointed Sheriff of New South Wales in 1864 and Sheriff and Comptroller-General of Prisons in 1874. Maclean worked towards implementing classification, uniform management for all gaols and systematic employment for inmates. He banned the treadmill and argued that prisons should be industrious hives of labour. He allowed prisoners schooling, choir practice, and visits by authorised outsiders. The extensions were probably designed in the office of the Colonial Architect, James Johnstone Barnet (1827-1904). They also featured an infirmary, workshops, staff quarters, kitchens and boiler room. The new cell block, ‘E’ wing, constructed between 1866 and 1869, comprised a central hall with side wings running off it, constructed in a ‘Y’-shape to the north of the radial plan cell blocks. The areas between the wings of the new blocks to the north and east were divided into six yards. After the abandonment of public hangings in 1855, the new gallows was given a permanent home in the eastern fork of the new cell wings on the first-floor level. Hailed as a “model gallows”, it faced the rising sun and was considered humane, being only a short distance from the condemned cell. Of the sixty-seven prisoners hanged on this new gallows, two of the most well-known were Henry James O’Farrell (1833-68) who had attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf in 1868, and the bushranger, Andrew George Scott (1842-80), better known as Captain Moonlight. Maclean also provided for two other facilities at Darlinghurst, a dead house (morgue) and a photographic studio for prisoners’ identification introduced in 1871. Probably around the same time as the extensions, the front entrance was redesigned and bears the hallmark of a design feature used by Barnet in similar institutions, that of a lion’s head carving on the arch keystone depicted with a key in his mouth. A visiting journalist to the Gaol in December 1870 from Sydney’s “Evening Mail” provides an excellent description of the gaol’s operation. He wrote that cell wings A and D had been completed in 1840 by free labour, B wing by Norfolk Islanders and C and E wings by prison labour trained and overseen by foremen. A and B wings were for male prisoners accommodated in either one or three-man cells. B wing also contained a padded cell for “lunatics” lined on the floor and walls up to 9 feet in height with horsehair 5 inches thick encased in leather. If further restraining was required, a straight jacket was used. Each prisoner slept under two blankets on top of a paillasse (straw filled hessian bag used as mattress). The bed itself was merely three pine boards supported on two trestles. The “Y-shaped” E wing also included six dark cells and six solitary cells. C and D wings accommodated the female prisoners. There were seventy-eight single cells in C wing with the inmates of bad character on the ground floor and the other on top. D wing, which eventually became the Cell Block Theatre, housed thirty-six double cells, six single cells and one padded cell. Prisoners worked from 7 am until 4 pm with 1¾ hours set aside for meals. These were eaten in open sheds sitting on forms at tables in the prison exercise yards to which the prisoners were allotted, depending on their offences from light to the death sentence. The yards were decorated with small flower beds tended by the inmates. Meals were prepared in the prison kitchen and conveyed to the prisoners in hand carts. They comprised hominy (maize meal) for breakfast; meat, potatoes and various vegetables for lunch; and bread etc on platters in the evening. If prisoners were well behaved after a year, they were given rations of tea and sugar as well and one or two ounces of tobacco depending on industry and merit. Prisoners worked or were trained in a wide range of trades and service activities including as mat makers, cooks, labourers, brush makers, stone masons, stonecutters, shoemakers, tailors, book binders and painters, as well as school, hospital and lunatic keepers. In the gaol workshops, coir (cocoanut fibre) door mats of various sizes were the most commonly-produced item made by inmates for sale to the public. These were woven on 23 looms, while hair, coir and scrubbing brushes and bath brooms and tin buckets, dishes, plates, tubs and quart and pint pots were also manufactured. Female prisoners sewed shirts, sheets and night shirts for sale, made clothes for the orphan schools at Parramatta or picked oakham (unravelled rope fibre). Both male and female prisoners could also attend school for two hours a day but not many of them took up this offer. A gaol library contained 500 titles. Despite this glowing report, during the late 1800s there were constant criticisms of conditions at the gaol. Haphazard development, together with gross overcrowding above the design capacity (732 prisoners in 1900), led to continuous problems. The necessity of walled courtyards, to segregate prisoners and to prevent a rush on the gates, caused lack of air circulation. The threat of disease was compounded by the reluctance of authorities to install underground pipes for waste disposal since they could provide potential escape routes. In 1912 Long Bay Gaol was completed and prisoners at Darlinghurst were transferred there. The stained-glass windows from the old gaol chapel were installed in the Long Bay chapel. (However, when this chapel was relocated, the windows were reinstated at Darlinghurst and remain to this day). Following the prisoner move, political discussions began concerning the appropriate reuse of the old gaol. These were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, during which time it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, as well as a military detention barracks. After the War, the then Minister for Public Instruction, Thomas Davies Mutch (1885-1958), lobbied for the conversion of the gaol into a technical college, which was agreed to. From 1921 conversion of the gaol into East Sydney Technical College commenced. Several courses of sandstone were removed from the perimeter walls and the coping replaced. (It as sold to Sydney University and St Jude’s Anglian Church, Randwick). Apart from enlargement of the windows, the external appearance of the gaol buildings was not much altered. Internally, the cells were demolished and the cell blocks were reconstructed as two-storey instead of three-storey buildings to conform with health regulations for schools at the time. The gaol’s landscaping was largely removed to make way for car parking spaces. The chapel became the college library. The college eventually provided six schools of study, Art and Design, Fashion, Food, General Studies, Catering and Nutrition, Management and Office Administration. From its inception it had a strong tradition in teaching art, being for many years the centre of art education in New South Wales. Many of Australian’s most distinguished artists, potters and sculptors studied and taught there. In recent years the chapel has been restored, including the roof, in Welsh Heather Blue slate from Penrhyn quarry near Bethesda in county Gwynedd. The entire former gaol complex is now used solely as the National Art School which from 2009 has offered independent tertiary level qualifications. The chapel is now used by the drawing students as a studio. References INSIDE DARLINGHURST. (1870, December 13). Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), p. 3. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107125632 Simpson, Margaret. “Old Sydney Buildings: A Social History”, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, p. 106-111.