Media Release 17/04/2019 : More to Town Hall than meets the eye

Did you know that Gympie’s historic Town Hall is not on one, but two historical building registers?

That’s right, Town Hall sits on both the Local and State Government Heritage Registers and as a result any work that has to be carried out on the building needs to be approved by both these bodies.

You may have noticed that there is some cosmetic damage to the outside of the town hall building.

This occurred during the severe hail storms that swept through the region last year.

While we know it’s not the best look, we are obligated to have any changes, modifications, additions or repairs approved by both the local and state registers.

This will take some time but rest assured we will have Town Hall looking its best in the near future.

On a side note, here are some more interesting facts about our Town Hall.

Gympie Town Hall was opened in 1890 on land reserved for this purpose in 1883. It was designed by Clark Brothers, who won competitions for proposed town halls for Brisbane and Gympie in 1884 and Warwick in 1885. Of the Clark Brothers' prize-winning designs for Queensland town halls, only that for Gympie may have been realised, and its construction was supervised by H W Du Rietz in the late 1880s. It was extended in 1938-9 by Brisbane architect C H Griffin. The completion of the Gympie Town Hall in 1939 was part of a wider pattern of civic building that took place during the second half of the 1930s. Numerous town halls were constructed across Australia as an expression of civic pride when the economy was on a more secure foundation after the Great Depression. Many Queensland country towns erected or remodelled civic buildings. The Queensland government played an important role in facilitating many of these projects by subsidising expenditure by shire councils on new buildings or remodelling their existing premises. In 2009 Gympie Regional Council recommenced meeting in the Gympie Town Hall after many years of meeting in the former Queensland National Bank building in Channon Street. The remainder of the building continues to be used as office accommodation for Council staff.