Alana Piper’s book Yirranma Place: Stories of a Darlinghurst Corner has recently been published by NewSouth. In this blog, Alana reveals the histories of some of the women whose lives are associated with 262 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, and its surrounds.
Exploring the stories associated with a single location, especially one in such a vibrant area as Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst, opens up a window into many wider histories about the changing city and nation across time. The journey of writing the book also introduced me to many women associated with Darlinghurst’s past or present: some formidable, others eccentric or unexpected, and a few heartbreaking.
Gadigal Country
The site now known as Yirranma Place was and remains unceded Gadigal Country. It lies not far from today’s Oxford Street, which follows the path of an Aboriginal maroo trodden over millennia that connects Sydney’s South Head coastline with a ceremonial site for dispensing justice, now Hyde Park. Streams criss-crossing Darlinghurst supported local Aboriginal peoples, who continued to camp in the area regularly until the very end of the nineteenth century.
Dharawal man Ray Ingrey remembers stories from his great aunt about her grandmother, Kate Sims, camping at Rushcutters Bay, stating: ‘places like Darlinghurst and Rushcutters Bay are important places for our old people because there was fresh water, there was a lot of food source around that fresh water system. And a lot of those gullies created a bit of a safe haven from the weather. So for our old people they were ideal places to live.’
Even across the twentieth century as Sydney’s Aboriginal peoples were increasingly forced to reside at the La Perouse mission, the stories of First Nations women continued to intersect with that of Darlinghurst. Activist Pearl Gibbs helped organise the 1938 Day of Mourning protest at the Australian Hall just where the city borders Darlinghurst. Aboriginal artist Shirley de Vocht studied at the then East Sydney Technical College before her illustrious career in textile and ceramics design, which included creating the official towel for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic games. Dulcie Flower, a Meriam woman from the Torres Strait Islands, trained in midwifery at Darlinghurst’s St Margaret’s maternity hospital in the 1960s before going on to help establish the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern.
Mrs Burdekin’s Paddock
Darlinghurst was still undeveloped in 1844 when the corner block now known as 262 Liverpool Street was carved out of the massive former Riley Estate. It was awarded as part of a debt settlement to Thomas Burdekin, a shrewd merchant who had invested extensively in land since arriving from England in 1828. When he died just a few weeks after receiving the transfer of lot 22 of the Riley Estate, he left his wife Mary Ann Burdekin with five young children to raise, a large mansion situated opposite the NSW parliament house, and a land-rich but cash-poor estate to manage.
Resisting calls to sell off some of the landholdings or possibly even return to her family in England, Mary Ann diligently managed the family finances. This strategy paid off, with the rental incomes generated from properties held by the Burdekin family across Darlinghurst increasing from the 1850s as these areas became more developed. She became a philanthropist, establishing a bursary for students at the University of Sydney that still exists today. When Mary Ann died in 1889 at age 83, her obituary described her as ‘being a very acute woman of business, and of great acumen in the management of the extensive properties she controlled.’
While many houses and businesses were built in Darlinghurst, including by the Burdekins, across this late nineteenth century, 262 Liverpool Street remained undeveloped. Known as Mrs Burdekin’s paddock, in addition to periodically being used to graze dairy cows, the site was put to a wide variety of uses, from acting as a temporary school to hosting entertainments such as merry-go-rounds and high-wire acts. It was also put to a more distressing use in 1898 when an infant’s body was found abandoned there, pointing towards the sad and difficult decisions women faced in an era when their ability to control their reproductive choices were limited.
Burlington Picture Palace
From 1909, the still empty land – now owned by Mary Ann’s granddaughter Florence Hay, who had inherited it via her father Sydney Burdekin – was rented out as the Burlington Picture Palace. There was still no permanent building on site, but in December 1909 a large tent and wooden bench seating for up to 3,000 attendees was installed to act as a cinema. Spectators were able to marvel at the latest silent screen sensations, such as US film Ramona, shown to a ‘crowded audience’ at the Burlington in 1912, which depicted a tragic interracial romance based on a book by Helen Hunt.
The Burlington’s manager Alfred Sillitoe Edgecombe collapsed at the cinema of a heart attack in 1911, dying despite being rushed to St. Vincent’s. The venture was inherited by his wife Jessie, who was already listed as a partner along with William Henry Hill on the business papers. Hill, however, decided to retire from the business in the weeks after Alfred’s death, leaving it in Jessie’s hands. She ran it for only six months, before selling it to one of her husband’s relations. It thereafter changed management several times before shutting down in 1915.
First Church of Christ Scientist
In 1923, 262 Liverpool Street was sold to trustees looking for a new home for the First Church of Christ Scientist, Sydney. Christian Science was a relatively new religion, founded in the United States in Boston in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy. As a laity religion, Christian Science has no ministers, with services conducted each week by two Readers from the parishioners who make announcements, lead prayers, and read selections from both the Bible and Eddy’s book Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures. Women could hold all the same positions as men within the church. The church emphasised developing a personal relationship with God that was not mediated by a clergy. This denomination was appealing to a growing class of educated, urban professionals across the US and Australia, reaching Sydney in 1898.
The religion proved particularly attractive to modern Australian women such as feminist Vida Goldstein, artists May and Mina Moore, Kathleen Tennant, mother of author Kylie Tennant, and even author Miles Franklin. Nicola Hepenstall, whose grandmother Miriam operated the Christian Science public reading room at 262 Liverpool Street in the 1970s and 1980s, recalled that there was a feeling of sisterhood in the religion that drew her grandmother, a single mother, to it.
The striking, classical-style columned premises built to accommodate the First Church of Christ Scientist, Sydney, opened to worship in 1927 and remained a church until the site’s sale in 2010 to venture capitalist Mark Carnegie.
Mansions and homelessness
Carnegie converted the interior of the church building into a loft-style mansion that won accolades for innovative design. To many the luxury home development served as a potent symbol of Darlinghurst’s gentrification from working-class neighbourhood to a suburb of wealthy professionals living in multi-million dollar homes.
Alongside such gentrification though, homelessness retained a visible presence in the neighbourhood. Across the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, it had not been unusual for church members to arrive to find individuals sleeping rough on the church’s verandahs, as well as occasional street-workers soliciting for custom from the corner. Carnegie installed blue lights to stop drug addicts from conducting deals and getting high outside his new home. Sex-workers largely disappeared from the corner from 2014 after the introduction of lockout laws on surrounding clubs and bars led to a decline in the local sex trade.
However, the building’s exterior continued to attract those sleeping rough. One woman became such a constant presence on Carnegie’s front stoop she became known by locals as ‘The Lady on the Step’. Her story epitomises how Darlinghurst continues to be a place where the lives of the haves and have-nots are entangled.
Yirranma Place
In 2019, 262 Liverpool Street, was sold to the Paul Ramsay Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a mission of ending cycles of disadvantage in Australia. Now known as Yirranma Place, the site acts not only as the Paul Ramsay Foundation headquarters, but offers space to other social purpose organisations. One of these is Two Good Co, which works to empower and employ women who have experienced homelessness and domestic violence. The café that Two Good runs at 262 Liverpool Street works on a buy one, donate one model, with every meal purchased at the café seeing the same meal donated to local women’s shelters.
If you would like to read more about the fascinating histories that intersect with that of 262 Liverpool Street, look out for Alana’s book Yirranma Place: Stories of a Darlinghurst corner.
Dr Alana Piper is an independent scholar and consulting historian who has published over 40 academic works, including in venues such as Women’s History Review, History Workshop Journal and Journal of Social History. Her work investigates crime and social history, often with a particular focus on gender issues.