Parliament House | Sydney

Parliament House in Sydney is located on Macquarie Streets east side and consists of several buildings housing the Parliament of New South Wales.

The oldest part of Parliament House was first built as the north wing of the Rum Hospital. Macquarie Street was created and land in the Domain set aside by Governor Macquarie in 1810. As there was no funding from the British government, a contract to build the hospital was arranged involving convict labour and a monopoly on rum imports.

The building of three two storey colonnaded buildings was completed in 1816 and was praised as elegant and Commodious but also criticised for both its design and construction by Francis Greenway. Defects resulting from short cuts taken by the builders were still being discovered in the 1980s.

The north wing was the Chief Surgeons quarters, although at one point it was used as law courts. When the Legislative Council was formed in 1824, it did not have a permanent home and met in places such as the old Government House.

In 1829, the Councils membership increased from five to 15 members, and it began to meet in the downstairs northern room of the Surgeons quarters from 21 August. Only two rooms were left for the Chief Surgeon, with the remaining five rooms used as offices by the Clerk of the Executive and Legislative Councils and other government officials.

From 1931 to 1936, the Clerk was also the curator of Australias first museum, a small natural history collection which became beginning of the Australian Museum collection.

When the Legislative Council was increased to 36 members by the new colonial constitution in 1843, the room in the old building was no longer large enough, and so a new chamber was added to the north of the building. This chamber became the home of the new Legislative Assembly when a bicameral system was introduced in 1856.

The Legislative Council was moved to a prefabricated iron building that was assembled at the southern end of the original hospital building. The iron building was built in England and originally shipped to Melbourne. It was purchased for '1,835. The cost of erecting and furnishing the building as well as the new offices was '4,475. The incomplete building was first used for the official opening of the new parliament on 22 May 1856.

The new chamber was not without its problems. The walls, originally lined with packing boards covered with hessian and plastered, and the curved iron roof cause problems with acoustics, lighting and ventilation. The roof was replaced with slate in 1959. Other changes followed as the facade was moved 3 m closer to the street in 1892-93.

Deterioration in the southern wall became apparent in the 1920s, and wooden props were added to the outside of the southern wall and inside the chamber to hold up the ceiling. The southern wall was entirely rebuilt in the 1930s.

In the meantime, a dining room was constructed behind the hospital building by 1969 and the Parliamentary Library, which in 1850 had taken over the original Legislative Council chamber, expanded and moved back into the two remaining ground floor rooms, which were united to form the Greenway Room. The Jubilee Room was built as a reading room for the library in 1906.

A major rebuilding program was begun in 1974. The library was moved to the new 12 storey office block facing the Domain completed in 1980. As the last part of the rebuilding program, completed in 1985, the interiors of the two chambers were restored according to documentation on their appearance in 1892. The old Surgeons Quarters were also restored.

The Parliament of New South Wales building is located in Macquarie Street, closer to Hyde Park than Circular Quay.