Narrabri Post Office is a heritage-listed post office at 138–140 Maitland Street, Narrabri, New South Wales, Australia. It is also known as Narrabri Post Office and former Telegraph Office. It was designed by the NSW Colonial Architect's Office under James Barnet and built by FA King in 1888. It was added to the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List on 08 November 2011.
History
The first pastoral activities in the area occurred in the 1830s, with a town forming in the late 1840s. A hotel was licensed in 1858 and the town was proclaimed in 1860. The first post office and police station were established but a major flood devastated the township in 1864. A court house was also constructed in the 1860s, but after the Robertson Land Act of 1861 the area was slowly opened up to smaller selectors and wheat-growing began in 1873. The railway arrived in the district in 1882 and generated further settlement.
The Narrabri Post Office was constructed, with quarters, by FA King in 1888 to a design by the New South Wales Colonial Architect's office, under James Barnet.
The post office was flooded in January 1910.
In the original four-arched design was extended to six arches.
Description
Narrabri Post Office is at 138–140 Maitland Street, corner Doyle Street, Narrabri, comprising the whole of Lot 21 DP775501.
The Narrabri Post Office is a single storey brick building with a timber floor and corrugated iron roof.
The original building is on a corner site at the intersection of Maitland and Doyle Streets, in the main shopping precinct. James Barnet was architect for the four-arched 1888 design. It incorporates an L-shaped quarters juxtaposed behind the arcaded front to Maitland Street, and two parallel wings running back across the site to the rear and the later Telephone Exchange.
The arcaded front originally comprised four arches, with the c.1914 addition adding two more. The arcaded front was originally a verandah but now, in its filled-in form, comprises the main public hall, the entry porch and an enclosed return loggia housing the PO boxes. The block immediately behind housed the post office and part of the quarters originally, to judge from their expression in the roof plan. This now houses the back office, clerical area and loading bay.
It has a timber-framed roof constructed in hipped gables, clad in corrugated galvanised iron, supported on a cornice with intermittent bracketing in pairs, and punctuated by a chimney at the Doyle Street end. There are three other chimneys remaining above the lunch room, postmaster's office and rear toilets area. The chimneys are corniced and in exposed face brick, and the roofs' gabled hips have small lunette ventilators.
The arcade front formed a panel in face brick and stucco to Maitland Street. The loggia was topped by a stucco-rendered entablature bearing the name Narrabri Post Office, in the manner of Barnet's other larger post offices of the time, the arch keystones rise up to support the entablature immediately overhead. The arches themselves are dressed in robust stucco archivolts and spring from a set of astylar brick piers. A date plaque in stucco with scalloped corners and the inscription 1888 sits between the second and third arches. The four inset sash windows form arched openings within each arch, one of Greenway's signatures and carried through in a similar way, with a tuck pointed and differently coloured arch over the window inside each arch screen. The north side, facing Doyle Street, is plainly surfaced in face brick with rectangular windows, plain-paned in the lower sash and multi-paned in the upper, each with a dressed sill in stone and overpainted.
The quarters' elevation to Maitland Street is linked to the post office loggia by a timber framed porch which leads into the current retail area via a single leaf door, and into the former postmaster's office by another. In its present form this was probably added later, around 1900. The quarters are expressed with a hipped roof component held clear of the main post office mass, with a corniced chimney in exposed face brick at each end of its ridge. The west front of these quarters presented one segmentally arched double-hung sash window to Maitland Street, above a short and hefty sill on two brackets. A timber-framed verandah, hipped and with square-sectioned, quasi-Tuscan posts on pedestal-bases, faces south onto a side yard.