The Fall of the Rink

Darlinghurst Skating Rink was also a venue for social gatherings including charity balls, political rallies and spectacles. In October 1889, it hosted the ‘Grand National Baby Show’ for which advertisements once again drew attention to the scale of the hall being ‘more than three times the size of any hall in the City’. Mothers wishing to ’exhibit their Babies’ were to fill out a form to enter a competition with first prize being £100 and special prizes of £25 for twins and £50 for triplets.¹

Here they come With fife and drum… Infant cavalry, Bursting with rivalry… They’re all here, Never fear, Oh the muster is strong Of the square and the round, the squat and the long… So the fat and the lean, and the big and the small, Are all crowding and crushing at the Darlinghurst Hall

~ Rose de Boheme, ‘Babbleonia or Field-Day with the Infantry’, 1889²

Daily attendance numbers were reportedly 12,000 to 15,000 people, with 400 babies ’exhibited’ over the four-day show. The first prize was awarded to the mother of a ‘remarkably fine and handsome’ 14-month-old named Mary Emma Davidson. The Australian Town and Country Journal published a portrait of the baby and reported the family, who lived in Balmain, had experienced hardship when Mr Davidson, a labourer, was injured in an accident.³

In August 1890, the rink held the annual reunion in aid of the Women’s Refuge in Tempe. That month, it was also the site of a political demonstration of 2,500 to 3,000 members of a labourer’s strike under the auspices of the New South Wales Labour Defence Committee.⁴

Yet despite the rink’s apparent popularity and variety of events, including football on skates and children’s carnivals, the rink did not last. It was opened for the last time on 8 September 1890, which was reportedly attended by a mere 100 people in fancy dress for one last soirée in the hall.⁵

Read the next part of the story.