Sydney International Exhibition Album is added to the Commons on Flickr

We have just released eighteen images taken from the Sydney International Exhibition Album featuring images taken of the Garden Palace from around the 1880s. This palace was the main feature of the Sydney exhibition which was over 244 metres long and had a floor space of 112,000 metres.

Geoff Barker has been contributing some posts to Photo of the Day about the Garden Palace that are from this album. Due to the interest in this collection they have since been added to the Commons on Flickr under no known copyright restrictions. Geoff writes:

“The main feature of the Sydney exhibition, like the international ones that preceded it, was an ornate building, the ‘Garden Palace’, which was over 244 metres long and had a floor space of over 112,000 metres. This building, and a number of smaller ones, was erected in the grounds of the Sydney Domain where it dominated the Sydney skyline for three brief years before the ‘Garden Palace’ was destroyed by fire in 1882.

These photographs are significant to the Powerhouse museum because the ‘Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum’, as the Powerhouse was then known, had earmarked objects on display to be among its first acquisitions. In 1880 a committee started selecting specimens and many of these were housed in the Ceylon court in the Garden Palace building.”

These images are also significant because they give us an insight into what this building was like before it burned to the ground.

Photography by Messrs Richards and Company
No known copyright restrictions