His major Sydney buildings include the new wing of the Australian Museum, the General Post Office, Lands Dept, Chief Secretary’s Dept, Mortuary Station, Macquarie Lighthouse, and the neo-classical Callan Park complex (of which he was particularly proud). With fewer than 10 men on his regular staff, Barnet completed thousands of NSW public projects including defence works, lighthouses, courthouses, jails, post offices and police stations. In 1865 he became Colonial Architect, succeeding old and incompetent John Dawson from whom he inherited a good deal of unauthorised expenditure. In 1860 Barnet joined the NSW Colonial Architect’s Dept, responsible for major building and repair projects as well as lighting Sydney’s streets, cleaning the chimneys at Victoria Barracks and providing coffins for paupers.
(Barnet designed and coloured the carvings on its cedar ceiling his watercolour of the interior of the Great Hall is in the Macleay Collection.) Barnet designed the Presbyterian Church (he was a deacon) in the Cleveland Paddock, and was employed by Edmund Blacket as a clerk of works on the Randwick Asylum and Sydney University’s Great Hall. There was plenty of work for an architect in 1850s Sydney with the building of the University of Sydney and a number of churches. Barnet is one of the architects whose local buildings are featured on the Glebe Walks website.īorn on 17 October 1827 in Scotland, Barnet was apprenticed to a builder at age 15, trained as an architect and was a clerk of works in London before migrating with his new wife Amy née Gosling in 1854 under the auspices of the Family Colonisation Loan Society. Much is on the public record covering James Barnet’s career as Colonial Architect (see this article in our “People in Glebe’s History” section this article focuses on his life in Glebe and Forest Lodge where he settled after arriving in Australia. 2023 Bulletin Schedule & Guidelines for Authors.
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