From Water Police Office to museum
This article first appeared in the summer 2017 edition of Unlocked magazine.
The complex that now houses the Justice & Police Museum was once one of the colony’s busiest legal hubs, with a daily parade of offenders – and the odd goat. Additions and improvements mark the evolution of the site’s function as courts and police station.
After the demolition of the first Government House in 1845–46, a large portion of its grounds was carved off into new streets and allotments. But one block was reserved for public buildings, and a core part remains in public ownership today – the former Water Police Office, Water Police Station and Police Court.
Water Police Office
By 1851 the old Water Police Office (with its court and lock-up) in The Rocks was inadequate and dilapidated, and part of the reserved block, a site at the corner of Phillip and Albert streets, was chosen for its replacement. Plans were drawn up by Colonial Architect Edmund Blacket, but the project repeatedly stalled. Labour and materials were scarce and expensive, just as the colony was entering a boom period, and it was difficult to attract a contractor willing and able to carry out the work. Eventually more money was allocated and building began in 1854. The imposing sandstone structure on its elevated site overlooking the newly formed Circular Quay was finally completed in 1856.
The Palladian-influenced design with two lower wings set slightly back from a central pedimented bay was repeated in other NSW courthouses. Although the three arches and recessed porch were originally open, iron palisading was soon erected to keep out stray goats. The courtroom, with its formal layout and cedar joinery, was flanked by rooms for magistrates, clerks and records in the wings. (From 1858 to 1873 the Shipping Master’s Office occupied the east wing.) To the rear was a separate privy (toilet) block.
The distinctive three-arched pediment of the Water Police Office sitting proudly above the waterfront overlooking Circular Quay was once clearly visible from across the cove.
Changes were continually made to improve accommodation. Coir matting was installed in an effort to alleviate noise problems from the court’s oft-commented-upon ‘curious’ acoustics, which amplified the sound of traffic outside and footsteps and echoes within. Roof cowls on the wings improved ventilation, to combat the ‘stench’ emanating from nearby warehouses and courtroom regulars – both those on trial and spectators. In 1873 the long clerks’ room in the west wing was converted into a second courtroom.
Despite its name, the Water Police Court was not confined to maritime cases. Its jurisdiction stretched north from Bridge Street to Broken Bay and west to the Lane Cove River. The court handled an ever-increasing array of minor criminal and public order offences. It also held preliminary hearings for more serious crimes.
The Water Police Station
In 1855, money was allocated and a plan approved to build a new Water Police Station behind the Water Police Office, but it was two more years before another plan was submitted, by new Colonial Architect Alexander Dawson, and a contractor engaged. A T-shaped building of Pyrmont stone with offices and a guardroom facing Phillip Street and cells behind, it had rooms for the inspectors and a large barrack room above. The station, with its separate kitchen block, was completed in 1858.
In 1875–76 the station was extended with two new cells and additional accommodation above. Two years later a prisoners’ ‘airing’ (exercise) yard was added to the rear, and the yard behind the court was enclosed to keep out ‘trysting’ goats.1
The Water Police Station was also a home. Constables and their families lived in the crowded barracks overhead. By the early 1870s, four weatherboard cottages stood to the east beyond a slab cottage, which was replaced by a sturdier building. The constables’ cottages were later demolished for the Health Department building (now part of the Sir Stamford Hotel). A two-storey front verandah was added around 1911, a short-lived addition replaced by a porch in 1934.
The Water Police relocated to Dawes Point in 1913, with the Phillip Street building as a subsidiary station. It became the head station of No 4 Division of the Metropolitan Police District in 1933. In the late 1940s there were calls for the outdated and congested station, its premises described as ‘the worst in the State’, to be demolished.2 Instead, further modifications were made. Yards were enclosed for additional rooms and a concrete air-raid shelter was repurposed as the sergeants’ room. The station finally closed in early 1984.
Court No 2 (Police Court)
In 1884–85 a new courthouse had been slotted in between the two Water Police buildings. With three arches and a pediment fronting Phillip Street, its form echoed the Water Police Office. Colonial Architect James Barnet’s double-height courtroom attempted to address old complaints about the earlier building. Linoleum and asphalt blocks covered the floor to deaden sound. Ventilation tubes within the walls were supplemented by an unusual recessed skylight and an innovative ‘air-conditioning’ system using an underfloor ‘air propeller’. The new courthouse was connected to the old with a long verandah.
In the late 1890s a second storey was added above the magistrates’ rooms at the rear of Court No 2, and Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon designed bow-fronted weatherboard infills to the side arches of the porticos of both courthouses. Despite providing much-needed additional rooms, they were derided as resembling ‘little fruit, lolly, and soft-drink shops’.3
An evolving site
From the beginning the site housed a changing roster of courts and agencies, including the Chief Industrial Magistrate and Fair Rents Court. In 1918 the Water Police Court closed, giving way to the Traffic Branch of the Police Department, although the complex continued to be used for licensing and appeal cases. During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic it also became an inoculation depot. Overcrowding elsewhere saw the Water Police Court reopen in 1924. With the rise of the motor car, two dedicated Traffic Courts, and later, a special Parking Court, operated on the site, with small debts, licensing and other cases also heard.
Alterations and additions were repeatedly made and internal spaces reconfigured to ease congestion or adapt to social advances such as the entry of women into the workforce. Extensions were built over the verandah, a mezzanine was inserted above the Albert Street vestibule, and an extra courtroom was created in a small room in the east wing. Some changes reflected evolving attitudes. In 1912 the iron spikes on the ‘cage-like dock’ in the Water Police Court were removed to reduce its degrading appearance, with an automatic implication of guilt.
Road levels were significantly lowered in 1945–46 in work associated with the Circular Quay railway loop, isolating the complex from its surroundings. A split-level footpath was created on Phillip Street and the front steps were extended down to the new Albert Street level.
By 1980 the site could no longer meet the growing needs of the courts and the outdated premises were vacated. A submission to restore the buildings as a bicentennial project was prepared and a committee established to consider the adaptive re-use of the site for a ‘Police-Justice Historical Museum’, incorporating a police museum and ‘an educational model courtroom’ which could also be used as a back-up court facility.
[The Police Museum] was described as ‘the demonstrating laboratory in the policeman’s school’ – ‘the culminating stage of a policeman’s education’.
The Police Museum
The Justice & Police Museum’s origins lie in the Police Museum opened at Police Headquarters in 1910. The collection of confiscated weapons, gambling devices and housebreaking implements was expanded with evidence from challenging cases and objects documenting changing police practices. Although newspapers emphasised the gruesome nature of many of the exhibits, this museum had a serious purpose: to give new recruits insights into criminal practices and behaviour. It was described as ‘the demonstrating laboratory in the policeman’s school’ – ‘the culminating stage of a policeman’s education’.4
The museum soon outgrew its original location and was accommodated in a succession of spaces at the Redfern Police Barracks. By the 1970s a more suitable – and public – home was being sought. When the former Water Police site became vacant, it was an obvious choice.
In 1986 the NSW Public Works Department began conserving the buildings, removing ‘undesirable accretions and infills’, largely returning the site to its late-19th-century appearance.5 Following the reorganisation of the Police Department in 1987, a private company, Justice & Police Museum Limited, was established to manage and develop the museum. The next year the museum was transferred to the Ministry for the Arts, and in August 1989 the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now part of MHNSW) formally took responsibility for it. The Justice & Police Museum was officially opened in 1991.
Notes
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 December 1878, p4.
- The Sun, 3 May 1949, p3.
- Evening News, 20 November 1899, p7.
- The Sun, 5 September 1926, p23.
- Architectural Division of the NSW Public Works Department, A report prepared for the Board of Management of the Justice and Police Museum, July 1987, np.
Published on
Jane Kelso
Historian
Jane developed a love of old buildings and the past growing up in a landscape of old country homesteads and Horbury Hunt woolsheds and churches near a country town whose glory days were ‘history’. This evolved into a lifelong fascination with the connections between people and places, and a desire to burrow into archives and libraries to piece together the stories of our past. Degrees in social history and work on a diverse range of properties, collections and exhibitions have only strengthened her passion for helping people to understand and appreciate our sometimes grimy, often quirky but always illuminating and ongoing history.
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