The GIO Building is a heritage-listed office tower located at 60-70 Elizabeth Street in the Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It was built during 1929. It is also known as the General Insurance Office Building; the GIO building, and was constructed as the Sun Building or the Sun Newspaper Building. The property is privately owned and was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
The GIO building was built in the Interwar Skyscraper Gothic style.
History
The early owners of the site
The land on which 60-70 Elizabeth Street stands comprises sections of three early land grants made in Section 40 of the City of Sydney. It includes land from part of Allotment 7, granted to Jacob Josephson on 5 April 1836, part of Allotment 18 granted to Francis Wilde (or Wild) on 14 May 1836 and part of Allotment 8 granted to Joseph Roberts on 29 December 1842, although all were in occupation for a number of years beforehand.
The major part of the site consists of that portion located on the part of Allotment 7, one of several adjoining parcels of land granted to Jacob Josephson. Josephson was a jeweller by profession, a Jewish Christian who reached Sydney in May 1818 as a result of being convicted of having forged bank notes in his possession. He died in the first half of the 1840s, and his son Joshua Frey Josephson inherited his property, including Enmore House, in 1945.
Joseph Josephson was born in 1815 in Hamburg, and arrived with his mother in Sydney in 1820. He displayed great musical talent and was teaching music by 1834. On 17 February 1844 he became a solicitor, the same year in which he was elected to the Sydney City Council to represent Cook Ward. In 1848 he became Mayor of Sydney as well as a justice of the peace, and on 9 June 1855 he was admitted to the New South Wales Bar Association. The following year he travelled to England, entered Lincoln's Inn and was called to the Bar in April 1859. On his return to Sydney he practiced as a barrister and in 1862 became a land titles commissioner under the newly introduced Real Properties Act. During this decade he was a director of the Australian Joint Stock Bank and invested in pastoral and city land. In 1868 he became solicitor general, but resigned from parliament in 1869 after his appointment as a district court judge. Josephson resigned in 1884 to devote more time to his private affairs, and died in January 1892. Lot 7, however, remained in the possession of the Josephson family until the beginning of the 1920s.
Lot 8 appears to have been occupied by one Richard Roberts from July 1829 onwards, and was not associated with Joseph Roberts and also William Henry Roberts until September 1842. It remained in the possession of members of the Roberts family until 1874, when title to it was conveyed to John Starkey.
The land granted to Francis Wild in 1836 was hotly contested several years later by Bridge Jagon, who claimed to be his widow, and John and Mary Harper, who claimed to have been left the land in Wild's will. A ruling was made in favour of Mary Harper and it came into her possession at the beginning of 1851. The John Harper mortgaged the property to John Thomas Neale in December 1864, but about three years later it was sold to Jacob Christian Fischer, probably as a means of settling the payment of the mortgage. After Jacob Fischer died in August 1894 titled passed to his widow Jane, and on her death in December 1905 to her son George. On 1 July 1908 it was then conveyed from George Fischer to Sir Matthew Harris. Harris (1841-1917) was the great nephew of John Harris of Ultimo. He acquired a large amount of real estate, partly through inheritance, and between 1881 and 1900 he represented the Ward of Denison on the Sydney Municipal Council, and Sydney-Denison in the Legislative Assembly between 1894 and 1901. Harris served as Mayor of Sydney between 1898 and 1900. He later became president of Sydney Hospital was a vice president of the Royal Agricultural Society and president of the Wentworth Park Trust. In all probability Harris purchased the property as an investment.
The property remained in the possession of the Harris family until 1927, when it was then sold to Sun Newspapers Limited.
Early development on the site
By 1835 the land granted to Francis Wild and William Roberts was substantially developed but Josephson's more substantial adjoining lot was relatively empty, containing only four detached, domestically scaled buildings along Phillip Street. However, by the second half of the 1830s the section of Elizabeth Street between Hunter and King streets was "bounded on both sides ... by a series of irregular-built private dwellings - some of them having, however, a respectable appearance; but the principal buildings are towards the south end of the section, near which, a very handsome enclosed series of Chambers, for the use of the legal profession, have been erected; communicating with Elizabeth and Phillip Street, and being in the immediate vicinity of the Supreme Court House, they are found to be very convenient by the gentlemen of the law ..." Already the legal profession was congregating in this part of Sydney. Phillip Street, by contrast, was relatively undeveloped.
By 1842 Wentworth Chambers, the future site of 60-70 Elizabeth Street and possibly the "handsome enclosed series of Chambers" previously mentioned, had been erected on part of Josephson's grant. At the end of the 1840s the character of Elizabeth Street had undergone substantial change. The section between Hunter and King streets showed that "with few exceptions the whole of the buildings are of modern construction, and being situated in the vicinity of the Supreme Court, are principally occupied as Chambers by the Barristers, and other members of the Legal Profession". Wentworth Chambers consisted of two single storeyed gabled buildings with an open passage running between them. Josephson appears to have lived or operated chambers on the opposite side of the street at the same period.
Joseph Josephson's land was brought under the provisions of the Real Property Act in February 1863 by his son. It was one of the earliest properties in NSW to have been brought under these provisions, and at the time much of it was occupied by a number of houses that fronted Elizabeth and Phillip Street. A Certificate of Title dated 30 September 1873 confirms that Joshua Josephson was the owner of the land. Wentworth Court, or Place as it was termed, was occupied by "weekly tenants" in the middle of the 1870s. By the first half of the 1880s the building was known as Wentworth Court and contained a ground floor and two upper levels. It was considered to be sufficiently important in the middle of this decade to warrant separate listing in Sands Sydney and suburban directory. Its mixed tenants included artists, merchants, watchmakers, surveyors, and most of all, solicitors and barristers. A photograph of the building taken in May 1926, shortly before it was demolished, shows its Elizabeth Street facade to have been a restrained three storey building with a high parapet and a simple tripartite fenestration pattern. At the same time, the Phillip Street facade was more elaborate in its decorative treatment and punctuated by arched openings, in addition to being a storey taller.
The title of the land was transferred to Sydney Arthur Josephson and William Edward Wilson as joint tenants. Title to the land was transferred from Josephson and Wilson to Sun Newspapers Ltd in stages, from May 1920 to February 1921. The site was then consolidated when Sun Newspapers Ltd purchased a large amount of Lot 18 from the Harris Family during 1927. It has not been ascertain when the company purchased Lot 8 or part thereof.
Sun Newspapers
The Australian Newspaper Company was one of several that published newspapers in Sydney during the 1890s. Its Australian Star was one of only two afternoon tabloid newspapers published in Sydney during that decade. However, after 1901 the company began to run at a loss. In 1907 it started attempts to raise capital, and towards the end of 1908 it needed to raise capital to fund new plant and for other purposes. The chairman of the Company, Sir Robert Anderson, approached the managing director of the Associated Tobacco Companies, Sir Hugh Denison, for a loan to assist these funding requirements. Despite obtaining the loan, in a relatively short period of time the Australian Newspaper Company found itself contemplating the very real prospect of liquidation. One of its directors, Herbert Easton, induced Sir Hugh Denison to examine the company's position, and the result was that a consortium of a number of Sydney's businessmen formed a new company that was called the Sun Newspaper Company Limited. Two of the board of the Australian Newspaper Company served on the board of the new organisation, and a complete overhaul of its publications was made. The Australian Star remained in publication for a further three months, whilst the Sunday Sun was transformed into a daily paper, and the first issue of its successor, The Sun, was issued on 1 July 1910. Its editor, Montague Grover, aimed to provide the publication with something new:
Sedater [sic] schools of journalism looked askance at many of Mr. Grover's "revolutionary" changes, but the public evinced a growing appetite for them.
Circulation on the first day was double that of The Star, helped no doubt by promotional stunts such as motor boats bearing Sun posters speeding around the harbour and a chariot drawn by seven horses driven by a golden haired "Apollo" traversing Sydney's streets. The new newspaper turned out to be no less surprising, with news on the front page instead of the expected advertising and changes to the conventional layout of newspapers from that era. The sun was successful because, amongst other things, its publishers made great and innovative use of a cable service from overseas and gave a large amount of its space over to crime and human interest stories. Further increases in circulation meant that the premises occupied by the newspaper became inadequate, so land at the rear of the Castlereagh Street building, extending back to Elizabeth Street, was purchased and a new building was erected over the entire site. The building was completed towards the end of 1915.
In 1918 Sun Newspapers Ltd took over the failing The Northern Times in Newcastle and changed its name to The Newcastle Sun, and erected a new four storey building in Hunter Street, Newcastle. This was designed by architect Joseph Kethel. During the second half of the 1920s the company expanded its interests still further. The Daily Telegraph Newspaper Co Ltd, which had been founded in 1879 and had erected a very large building at the corner of King and Castlereagh Streets between 1912 and 1916, found itself falling behind in this competitive era. A new company was set up to incorporate the Daily Telegraph Newspaper Co Ltd, with holding the controlling interests in it.
In January 1921 Moore Street, which extended between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets beyond Martin Place, which only stretched between George and Pitt Streets, was renamed Martin Place as well. Evidently Sun Newspapers Ltd recognised that the extension would eventually take place, reflected by the purchase of the property between Elizabeth and Phillip Streets from Josephson and Wilson that concluded in February 1921. The building occupied by Sun Newspapers Ltd was located at the head of Martin Place and so right in the path of the proposed extension of the street through from Castlereagh Street to Macquarie Street. This had been suggested as far back as 1909 by a Royal Commission into the improvement of the City of Sydney.