Governor Macquarie caused the sandstone Obelisk to be erected in the (then) centre of Macquarie Place in 1818 to mark the place from where all public roads were to be measured for the expansion of the colony into the interior on New South Wales. It was erected near the carriageway into the first Government House. "New South Wales" at the time was mapped as covering two-thirds of the continent, excluding only the territories now known as Western Australia. The distances and other Colonial centres inscribed on the Obelisk show the actual extent of the still tiny colony in 1818 despite its vast extent shown on maps at the time. Mileage is given only for Bathurst, Windsor, Parramatta, Liverpool, South Head and the North Head of Botany Bay. This was nevertheless the first major expansion of Sydney town into the interior of New South Wales, compared to when Macquarie first became Governor when he described the poor state of the colony, noting that the roads only penetrated forty miles into the interior. Built between 1816 and 1818, the obelisk before the Department of Lands building is literally the "hub" of NSW, the datum point from which all distances in NSW were measured from Sydney. Its inscriptions record the extent of the road network in 1818.
