Members of Northbridge Combined Probus Club toured the Queen Victoria Building on 20 February and heard the lovely story about how the splendid three-metre-high bronze statue came to be positioned outside the building. It was originally erected in Dublin during Queen Victoria’s reign when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.
When Ireland became independent of the United Kingdom in 1922, the statue stood in front of Parliament House, where it was no longer welcome. The group was shown a photo of the statue being lifted onto a truck by a crane with a cable around her neck. It was then unceremoniously dumped in the yard of a school in Dublin and forgotten.
Decades later, when the major renovation of the Queen Victoria Building commenced, the developers searched the world for a statue of Queen Victoria without success. Eventually, they were told about the Dublin statue gathering dirt and weeds in the schoolyard. It was brought to Sydney by truck and ship, but arrived two weeks after the opening of the building. She finally found a safe home on a new sandstone pedestal outside the building in 1987.
