Barry Wollaston: historic buildings in the county of Cumberland (NSW), 1954

This collection consists of 232 photo negatives by architect and photographer Barry Wollaston of buildings in the Sydney region considered by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) in the early 1950s to be of high architectural and historical value.

An initial list of significant buildings was drawn up by the Historical Buildings Committee of the NSW chapter of the RAIA in 1949 soon after its formation. The list covered churches, houses, streets, hospitals, barracks, university buildings, bridges, courthouses, convents and forts, all within the geographical scope of the County of Cumberland. Over the next few years the committee reviewed buildings on the list, assessing their architectural merit, historical significance and state of preservation.

In August 1953, the RAIA (NSW Chapter) was organising an international architectural convention to be held in Sydney in May 1954. The chair of the convention organising committee commissioned Barry Wollaston, then a final-year architecture student at the University of Sydney, ‘to take photographs of buildings in the historic list prepared by the Chapter’.¹ The photographs were to be used in an exhibition held at the time of the convention and in a special issue of Architecture: Journal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects produced for the convention. The April–June 1954 special issue included 16 of Wollaston’s photographs.