Curio

State Library of New South Wales
C. Mayes (?), surveyor, outside his office, Hill End

C. Mayes (?), surveyor, outside his office, Hill End

1872
Glass photonegative

Architect and surveyor Charles Mayes’ unusual portable building was situated at the corner of Denison and Tambaroora streets, Hill End. Before this, he practised as an architect, surveyor and civil engineer in Melbourne and Sydney, and from 1862 had published six editions of The Australian Builders' Price-Book. Mayes didn’t stay long in Hill End and in 1873 he was employed as an engineer on the Orange Extension Railway.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1872

...how this miserable hole, which cannot be said to lead anywhere, has attracted everybody to itself is an inscrutable mystery. Hill End, I am told, has been surveyed half a dozen times; and the result is that it is one of the worst laid out towns in the colony. [‘A trip to Hill End’, Sydney Morning Herald 25 May 1872, p7]