A conspicuous object.
Val Anderson’s 1992 drawing of the 1840s Maitland Hospital building.
(Maitland Hospital Collection 405)
On 12 May 1849 as the first Maitland Hospital building was nearing completion, the Maitland Mercury marvelled at it as ‘one of the chief architectural ornaments of the town’ and as ‘a conspicuous object’ sitting as it did on the slope of Campbell’s Hill. The article details the layout, features and structure of the building.
Designed by local builder Thomas Ashton, it was described as a two storey building with verandahs and balconies at the front (facing north over Maitland) and at the back. A simple rectangular shape, the rooms on both floors were of similar size and orientation, and were designed as different sized wards. There were twelve fireplaces, a bathroom and ‘closet’ on each floor, and doors that opened from the main wards onto the balconies.
It is a layout apparent in Ashton’s surviving plan, and that can be discerned underneath the adaptations evident in a 2007 floor plan of the building.
Thomas Ashton, Plan for The Maitland Hospital, 1849 (detail)
(Newcastle Region Library)
Floor plan of the top level of the building, 2007
(with thanks to Bruce Pritchard).
Turn the 2007 plan upside down to compare it to Ashton’s plan which originally had the building facing High St. The plan was reversed so that the entrance and main balconies looked across the floodplain to Maitland and the countryside beyond.
The first patients were moved into the new building in November 1849. There were seven men in the ‘large upper northern ward’ and three women ‘in one of the small lower wards’. The new hospital was commended for its ability to accommodate comfortably ‘more patients than (we trust) this district will supply for twenty years to come’, and for its ‘lofty wards’ and ‘ventilation’. This was contrasted with the overcrowding and vermin problems that had plagued the hospital in its former premises at Hannan House. (Maitland Mercury, 12 May 1849, 17 November 1849)
A Frederick Terry etching from 1855 shows the hospital sitting on its hill looking across the Long Bridge and towards the city. Val Anderson’s sketch of the front of the building (see above) imagines the elegant yet simple and inviting front of the building that is now buried behind the accretions of additions and walkways that have shaped the Maitland Hospital site throughout the twentieth and into the twenty first centuries.
(National Library of Australia)
The Maitland Hospital sits in the top right hand corner.
This building on its ‘commanding site’ and with ‘very beautiful’ views from its balconies served as the core of Maitland’s Hospital until early in the 20th century.
The 1899 fourth report of the Royal Commission into Public Charities provided the following description.
Maitland Mercury, 4 November 1899, p.4.
Over the twentieth century, rooms and spaces were changed and adapted as new services and needs became apparent.
For example, 1939 architect’s plans detail the conversion of what had, in 1904, become the children’s ward to maternity wards and facilities.
Floorplan showing ‘conversion of children’s ward to maternity ward’, Government Architect, 22 September 1939.
(Maitland Hospital Collection 406)
In 2021 the 1849 building housed the Hospital’s main administration and the executive suite.
Views of the building in 2019 and 2020.
The front view is largely obscured by buildings added to the site in the twentieth century.
Significance
The building is of high significance because:
it is one of the oldest extant public buildings in Maitland;
it marks The Maitland Hospital as the oldest public hospital in regional New South Wales located continuously on the one site;
it is associated with a number of prominent local and colonial people, some of whose names are etched on plaques in the building; and
despite alterations over the years, the basic layout and structure of the building is intact.
Updated 15 August 2021.