Toy Collection

A small collection of children's toys sits on a shelf in one of the upstairs rooms at the Terminus Hotel: a tin truck with paint chipped at the corners, a wooden block alphabet, a plastic doll with its hair tangled and one eye missing. The toys are dust-coated. The shelf they sit on is timber, painted in the institutional cream of the upstairs accommodation. The wall behind the shelf carries the same faded floral wallpaper that runs through most of the upstairs rooms. The light from a small sash window catches the dust on the toy surfaces and softens the colours.

Sydney pubs of this era operated as accommodation, and the publican's family typically lived in the upstairs rooms while the pub traded downstairs. Children grew up in pub buildings like the Terminus. The toys in this photograph are not staged; they were left in place when the pub closed in 1983 and the upstairs rooms were emptied or partially emptied in the years that followed. By 2016, the year Susan and Isaac Wakil sold the building on, the toys had been on this shelf for at least 33 years. The 2018 restoration cleared most of the upstairs of incidental objects. The shelf in this photograph no longer holds these things.