William Hardy Wilson (1881 - 1951)
He is regarded as one of Australia's greatest architects.
Born at Campbelltown, in 1881, the great grandson of early New South Wales colonist Caleb Wilson. He attended Newington College, where he captained the First XV Rugby team and was awarded the School Drawing Prize. He went on to study at the Sydney Technical College.
After early work with architects Kent and Budden, Wilson embarked on a long period abroad in 1905 during which he developed his artistic technique. He travelled extensively in Italy and the United States, and when he returned in Sydney in 1910, he was primed to embark on his architectural career proper. Wilson completed a string of houses in Sydney over the coming years, including Merion, for artist Lionel Lindsay, in Wahroonga (1911); Eryldene, also on the upper North Shore in Gordon for the linguist, literary scholar and camelia enthusiast E.B. Waterhouse (1913); and his own house, Purulia, Wahroonga (1916).
In 1912, Wilson began a decade-long project to record the early colonial architecture of Australia, which would eventually culminate in the publication of Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania published in 1924.
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