The Hyde Park Barracks Museum displays evidence of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked here during its 190 year history.

A diverse and colourful history is revealed in the personal histories and recollections of the Barracks’ occupants and through pictures, documents, artefacts, objects, soundscapes and the fabric and rooms of the building itself.

The museum explores the process of researching the past and invites visitors to piece together the historical evidence in all its forms to learn about the Barracks’ occupants and to consider how their experiences add to our understanding of the history of New South Wales.

Cultural Significance

Hyde Park Barracks is a place of outstanding importance for Australians. It is one of the most significant secular buildings surviving from Australia’s colonial development.

As the first convict barrack in the colony, it marked a major change in the living and working conditions of male convicts in New South Wales.

It is also major evidence of Governor Macquarie’s vision for Sydney and one of the finest works of the accomplished colonial architect, Francis Greenway, who was himself a convict. The remaining early fabric provides evidence of building practice and architectural design in early 19th century Sydney. It has survived, despite many uses, to retain its status as a landmark within the historic precincts of Queens Square and Macquarie Street.

Remnants of building fabric and archaeological evidence, particularly from the Barracks’ use as a female immigration depot and a government asylum for infirm, destitute women, and its later adaptation as courts and government offices and as a museum, provide tangible evidence of the changing attitudes and functions of government, community opinion and historical and conservation practice. The Barracks has social value for many Australians, particularly Irish Australians, as a place associated with male convict transportation and female immigration. This was made manifest by the installation in 1998–99 of a monument to the Great Irish Famine. This part of the Barracks’ precinct has since become a place for Irish Australian community gatherings in Sydney.

Overview

Before 1819 there was no government accommodation for convicts. Instead, convicts secured ‘lodging and fire’ in private houses and hotels in areas like The Rocks. They were permitted to work privately after their day’s work for the government in order to pay for this.

In The Rocks’ public houses, however, convict men and women and soldiers associated freely after working hours. They shared a love of town life and, in many cases, personal networks from the old country. Disorderly public behaviour and frequent robberies in The Rocks led to increasing demands for greater control of convicts’ living arrangements.

In response, Governor Macquarie ordered the convict architect Francis Greenway to design a building where convicts could be secured at night. Convict artisans and labourers began work under Greenway’s supervision in 1817 and the Barracks was completed in 1819. It provided basic accommodation for 600 male convicts – the labour force Macquarie needed for his ambitious if sometimes unauthorised public works program.

For almost 30 years, from 600 to 1400 male convicts assembled here nightly. Convict boys lodged in a separate ward from the men until 1820 when the Carters Barracks was constructed on the southern outskirts of the town. Other convicts were brought to Hyde Park Barracks for trial, punishment and reassignment.

The majority of convicts were English and Irish men found guilty of theft and sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for seven or fourteen years or for life. Their punishment was separation from country and family, and exile to the opposite side of the world to labour for the government.

Convict transportation to New South Wales officially ceased in 1840. In 1848 the remaining men were sent to the penal establishment at Cockatoo Island and the Barracks was adapted as an immigration depot that accommodated ‘unprotected female’ assisted immigrants. Young women, mostly Irish orphans seeking new prospects in the colony, resided in the limewashed brick dormitories from their arrival until their services were hired out. In the early 1850s the immigration depot also housed the newly arrived wives and children of convicts waiting to be reunited with husbands or fathers.

In 1862 a government asylum for infirm, destitute women was established on the third level of the Barracks and this later expanded to the second level. Terminal patients from the nearby Sydney Infirmary sheltered in the overcrowded asylum with the demented and other social outcasts whose numbers steadily increased to more than 300 by the 1880s. The housing of immigrant and asylum women ended in 1886.

Accommodation for government departments, which had appropriated the perimeter buildings from 1848, sprawled through the courtyards until eventually courts and government offices were established in the dilapidated dormitories vacated by the women. Partitions, new joinery, windows, doors, stairs, wall and ceiling finishes transformed these spaces into offices for various branches of the Attorney General’s Department, which remained until 1979.

Conservation

Hyde Park Barracks has survived into the 21st century despite a number of proposals which would have seen the building demolished. In 1904 it was proposed that it be replaced by a grand court complex that would have been part of a majestic sweep of new sandstone edifices from St Mary’s Cathedral and along Macquarie Street. By the 1970s, it had survived proposals for relocation or replacement by a new parliament house, an Anglican cathedral and an expressway.

The idea that Hyde Park Barracks be made into a museum was raised as early as 1935. The grimy, careworn clutter was by then providing hardly tolerable accommodation for the Industrial and District Courts.
The New South Wales government finally instigated a conservation program for the Barracks in 1975, in response to mounting public concern.

One of the largest government-sponsored archaeological excavations in Australia was mounted and yielded compelling evidence of the phases of occupation. Following extensive conservation work by the Public Works Department to reconstruct the Barracks’ exterior to its appearance as a convict barracks circa 1819, the museum, operated by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (now known as the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) opened in 1984.

Displays celebrating the lives of the people of Sydney and those aspects of convict culture which centred on Hyde Park Barracks were presented, along with diverse, temporary local and overseas exhibitions.

A museum about its own history

In 1990 the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales assumed control of the Barracks and commenced a further refurbishment of the building. Old displays were removed, modern services realigned and extensive conservation works undertaken, based on a critical focus on the place itself, the diverse histories of its occupants and its cultural significance for Australia.

The Trust has sought to bring to the Barracks creativity and imagination, care and conservation, study and scholarship, design and drama. Competing claims of conservation, design, interpretation and management have been synthesised under one guiding philosophy – a museum about its own history.

Thousands of ordinary men and women passed through the Barracks: convicts, immigrants, inmates, clerks, clients, trade unionists, employers, jurors and judges. They all left their mark in one way or another: trowel marks from an artisan builder, splashes by a Public Works painter, pins dropped between floorboards by an inmate, an apron stolen by rats, a bottle hidden under the floor. The building also produced much paperwork – lists, letters, rules, plans. Some has survived in libraries and archives, together with paintings, photographs and sketches.

The story of Hyde Park Barracks crosses major themes in Australian history: European settlement on Aboriginal land, convict labour and reform, changing systems of punishment and notions of justice, immigrant reception, the housing of poor and feeble women, evolution of the State, expansion of law and social policy, arbitration and the struggle of capital and labour, changing Australian identity, the growth of the modern city and heritage movements.

The Barracks was witness to these unfolding experiences as Sydney evolved from convict colony to cosmopolitan city. Historic themes inform current debates about our identity as Australians past, present and future.

Journey

The story of Hyde Park Barracks unfolds from the visitor’s first encounter with the historic Macquarie Street and Queens Square precincts that surround it. The imposing central building is set in its red gravel courtyard within the remnants of original walls and gatehouses and the modified northern perimeter building that housed the superintendent’s quarters, bakehouse and store.

Male convicts were searched at the front gate on returning from work, in a futile effort to stop the illicit trade in rations; later the matron of the female immigration depot met newly arrived immigrant girls here; and later still infirm, destitute women were received into the government asylum. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, the courtyard was where litigants prepared themselves for court proceedings and lawyers or public officials spoke to assembled media.

Inside the central building the presence of these prior occupants is conveyed through a series of interrelated experiences.

Level 1 was adapted for use as museum exhibition spaces because the fabric and rooms of the building had been much disturbed over time. With polished floors and white walls, it is a modern introduction to a colourful history. It contains an introduction to the museum and houses exhibitions on convict history in the Greenway Gallery.

Level 2 was largely reconstructed with interior schemes from the early 20th century courts and government offices phase, based on the evidence of paint scrapes. Here the layers of the history of the building are laid bare.

Level 3 has been returned, as near as possible, using archaeological, documentary and pictorial evidence, to the period of male convict occupancy.

Level 1 - Orientation

The ghost stair is a steel structure that traces the handrail of the southern staircase which was removed after 1887. The original vertical shaft has been reinstated and a steel line now traces the passage taken by convicts plodding upstairs to their hammocks. It provides the link to three approaches toward building conservation and historical interpretation: level 1 – adaptive reuse; level 2 – exposed layers of historical use; level 3 – reconstruction. As with all conservation work, this zone was documented and samples of extracted building materials stored for research and possible future reconstruction.

Artefact

Everything you see is part of the history of this place. From the limewashed brick of the original convict ward, to the galvanised steel air-conditioning duct that controls the museum’s environment. From the lowly rats that stole many possessions, to illicit objects hidden away from official eyes, to the lofty wig that adorned a judge in session.

Looking back over 185 years we open chapters of history, trace people’s lives, peel back layers of building fabric: doorways, fireplaces, ceilings, paint and plaster, objects made and unmade, hidden and revealed. This room at the north-west corner of level 1 is a summary of the museum journey ahead and a journey into the Barracks’ past.

The Greenway Gallery

In this modern gallery, the Hyde Park Barracks Museum presents changing exhibitions about convict history.

These spaces, originally designed for 70 men in hammocks in each long room, have served many purposes during the past 185 years.

This is where newly arrived young immigrant women assembled eagerly awaiting ‘hiring day’, and where colonists jostled for the women’s labour. Partitions and doorways were later inserted for judges’ chambers, offices and waiting rooms.

Before new flooring was laid in the early 1980s, a thorough archaeological investigation and excavation was carried out under the northern room. A relatively undisturbed (and uninhabited) ‘ratacomb’ remains beneath the southern room.

The central hallway features pictures and drawings from the Hyde Park Barracks’ collection.

Level 2 - Layers

Level 2 of the museum exposes the layers of use and abuse of Hyde Park Barracks over time by the more than 50 different occupant groups. It also demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach to researching historical evidence: scrapes to expose layers of paint, archaeological investigations of building construction methods and fabric, excavations of layers of artefacts. Documentary research provides additional evidence to understand these investigations and uncover layers of meaning.

Each mark, artefact or word provides historical evidence about past lives and experiences.

Level 2 - Stories

The south-east room on level 2 records, chapter by chapter, the chequered experiences and histories of Hyde Park Barracks and of the people who lived and worked here over the past 185 years. The display not only shows the evolving shape of the Hyde Park Barracks complex in models, pictures and plans from 1817 to the present day, but also places this evolution within the context of the Australian culture and society that shaped people’s lives here.

Superintendent and convict, matron and immigrant, laundress and inmate, judge and clerk. These are just some of the men and women who have passed through this place: a microcosm of the history of Sydney and changing attitudes to our past.

Level 2 - Stories
Male convict barracks 1819–1848

Hyde Park Barracks was constructed from 1817 to 1819 by convict labourers and tradesmen worked under the supervision of government architect and convicted forger, Francis Greenway. The government’s use of skilled convicts for public works such as this was criticised by Commissioner Bigge in 1823, although he approved of the main building as ‘handsome’.

The Barracks lodged both government-employed convicts and convicts assigned to work for private masters. Although the men were referred to as prisoners, it was not a prison.

Nevertheless, the Barracks was part of a strategy to restrict convicts’ freedom and raise their productivity. They were given basic accommodation and increased rations of food but lost opportunities for private earnings and were forced to work long hours for the out. Shortly after its opening, Francis Greenway observed that the Barracks’ routines and rations had promoted an unenthusiastic and institutionalised workforce.

Convicts lodging at the Barracks were often referred to as ‘government men’. They were employed in government-run dockyards, stores, gardens, quarries, mines, waterworks, military barracks and in building, land clearing, street and road making projects or in Sydney’s brick field or lumber yard.

Convicts assigned to work for free settlers and emancipists would leave the Barracks. They were referred to as ‘convict servants’ or ‘assigned servants’.

Well-behaved convict men received favourable treatment and could be given responsible positions as constables, messengers, scourgers (or floggers) and gatekeepers. They could even be given freedom to spend time out of the Barracks after work. Married men with families were allowed to sleep in private lodgings without surveillance and report to the Barracks each morning. They were permitted to work privately on Fridays and Saturdays, but were required to attend religious services on Sundays.

Many convicts became eligible for a ticket of leave after four or five years which entitled them to leave the Barracks and find their own employment but only within the district stipulated on the tickeT

Policies for the reform of the colony’s convict population and the use of its labour changed with each new government administration.

A bell called the men lodging at the Barracks to muster every morning at daybreak (Sundays and holidays excepted). They were delivered to their overseers and searched at the gate before being marched to their daily labours.

Men required to work at the Barracks and invalids incapable of work remained behind. These men swept the yard and aired and cleaned the central dormitory building, shaking out the bedding and folding the blankets.
Working hours were sunrise till sunset. During summer, there was one hour for rest from 8am to 9am for men working outdoors. The men were returned for their main meal in the middle of the day, typically fresh and salted meat and bread. After one hour in the mess-room, the bell was again rung and the men were mustered and marched back to work.

Overseers ensured the men were returned to the Barracks before sunset. Day constables searched them at the gate for stolen or illicit items like liquor.

There was recreation in the yard before the night constables came on duty at 8pm and a bell signalled the time for retiring. The men played cards and made cabbage tree hats by oil lamps.

There was another muster at 8.30pm and absentees were listed before the ward lamps were extinguished and the doors carefully locked.

The exterior gates were closed at 9pm and secured until daybreak.

A sentence of flogging was handed down for offences against discipline in the Barracks – drunkenness, gambling, disobedience, neglect of work, absconding or desertion, abusive language, insubordination or disorderly conduct.

After 1830, the Court of General Sessions established at Hyde Park Barracks administered punishments for Barracks’ men and other government-employed convicts. Penalties included days in solitary confinement, iron gangs, walking on the treadmill at Carters Barracks or a maximum of 150 lashes. The court could also extend convicts’ sentences by up to three years with hard labour and transfer men to penal settlements in the colony or as far away as Norfolk Island and Port Arthur.

By 1833 floggings took place in a yard behind the Barracks’ rear wall. In response to colonial and British concerns about brutality, the maximum number of lashes ordered by a single magistrate was limited to 50. In 1833 a new regulation lash was designed by Superintendent Slade.

Historians debate the extent of floggings and whether convicts lived in fear of the lash. Some of the men flogged are listed here by name, ship, offence and punishment.

William Smith, Exmouth, drunk, insolent and resisting a constable, 50 lashes. This man was flogged about two years ago; he flinched much throughout the punishment; the skin was lacerated, and blood appeared at the 24th lash; he seemed to suffer great pain, which was evinced by suppressed groans; blood ran at the 45th lash; he cried out ‘domino’ when finished.

Jon Tree, Asia, neglect of duty by feigning sickness, 36 lashes on the breech. At the 11th stroke the blood appeared and continued running; he cried out loudly at every lash; this was the first time of corporal punishment. The boy suffered most severely, and in my opinion, 12 lashes would have been sufficient for him.

John Lenon, Mangles, absent one night from barrack without leave, 25 lashes. The skin torn at the 8th, and a slight bleeding at the 10th lash, at the 15th lash the skin was decidedly flayed off, the blood flowed slightly; the flesh much swollen. The severity of this man’s punishment was manifest. He says he was never flogged before; I could not discover any marks of punishment on his back.

William McLoughlan, America, having a stolen pair of shoes in his possession, 50 lashes. The skin was lacerated at the 25th lash; on being taken down the blood began to run very freely; this prisoner did not cry out; he, however, seemed to feel great agony.

Level 2 - Stories
Female immigration depot 1848–1886

To remedy a domestic labour shortage and gender imbalance, many single or orphaned young women were encouraged to emigrate from Britain, initially from famine-racked Ireland, and offered the opportunity of employment in the growing colony.

In 1848 the Barracks was adapted to accommodate them. The arrival of 200 orphan girls on the Earl Grey launched the building’s new role as a reception and labour exchange for ‘unprotected female’ assisted immigrants. It fulfilled this role from 1848 to 1886.

The women were supervised by a matron and resided in the Barracks for a short period until ‘hiring day’ when colonists engaged them as domestic servants. The thousands of women who passed through the depot were subject to a strict regimen of domestic duties, moral management and religious instruction. The women were confined for their own protection and ministered to by clergy.

In the early 1850s the Immigration Depot also housed the wives and children of convicts brought to the colony at government expense to be reunited with their husbands and fathers.

Level 2 - Stories
Female infirm, destitute asylym 1862–1886

In 1862 the government established Hyde Park Asylum on level 3. It was not a lunatic asylum but a refuge for infirm, destitute women who had no relatives to support them.

As well as elderly women, there were many young women in their twenties and thirties who were physically disabled. Terminal patients from the nearby Sydney Infirmary sheltered in the overcrowded asylum with the other social outcasts. As their numbers increased, the asylum gradually took over most of level 2.

The asylum was completely segregated from the Immigration Depot and had its own entrance and fenced recreation yard.

The only paid servant was the head laundress. Able-bodied inmates were expected to clean, cook and assist in the laundry. The women were renowned for their sewing and mending skills and made most of the clothes worn in the asylum. Sewing and repairing clothes and bed linen helped with the economy of the institution.

At times occupants complained about unwholesome and decrepit conditions. Rats were active in the wards; their nests yielded a unique archaeological collection when excavated one hundred years later. Other artefacts fell between the floorboards or were hidden there by women for safekeeping.

In 1886 the inmates were transferred to the newly built Newington Asylum near Auburn.

Level 2 - Stories
Courts and government offices 1887–1979

Courts occupied rooms in the northern perimeter building from 1830. In the prosperous 1880s new social policies created legal specialisations which spawned departments of registrars, clerks and typists. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Federation and the separation of State and Commonwealth powers meant statute books had to be progressively rewritten. The Barracks saw much of this activity. Offices were adapted and jostled for space and superiority. All facets of the new phases of state intervention in personal and property relations were represented at Chancery Square, subsequently renamed Queens Square.

Rooms were subdivided and spruced up as outbuildings expanded. Two large corrugated iron courtrooms were attached to the rear of the central building, which was also connected by overhead bridges to the bustling northern complex.

The southern range, occupied variously by the Immigration Depot and the Volunteer Rifle Corps, was altered in 1887 for the City Coroner and demolished by 1909 to make way for the Registrar General’s building.

Industrial issues dominated government business through the early 20th century. With the creation of the Australian arbitration system, Queens Square became a focus for the struggle for workplace reform in New South Wales. Landmark decisions handed down here included the basic living wage in 1927 and equal pay for women under State awards, rejected when heard in 1921 but granted in 1973.

Level 2 - Stories
Museum 1979 to the present

Hyde Park Barracks narrowly escaped demolition a number of times over the last century. The first proposal that the Barracks become a museum was made in 1935. Other proposals followed. In 1975 a decision was made to retain the Barracks complex and by 1979 conservation and museum adaptation works were planned by a team of architects, historians, archaeologists and museologists. Reconstruction work was carried out by the Public Works Department from 1980 to 1984. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences then set up the Barracks as a museum of social history. In 1990 the Historic Houses Trust assumed control of the Barracks and refurbished it as a museum about its own history.

The Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine is a sculptural installation by Hossein and Angela Valamanesh entitled An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger). It symbolises the experiences of young Irish women fleeing the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1848. The project was initiated by the Great Famine Commemoration Committee and the first stone was laid by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, during her state visit to Australia in September 1998. The monument was launched on 28 August 1999 by the then Governor-General of Australia, Sir William Deane.

Level 2 - People

Archaeological and documentary evidence suggest that two front rooms on level 2 were used as quarters for the matron of the Immigration Barracks and Hyde Park Asylum from 1848. They were later used for the government asylum’s infirm, destitute women and later still, from 1888, for the boxes and benches of the court of the Master in Equity.

Through changing exhibitions in the south-eastern room, the museum acknowledges the 50 or so different occupant groups of Hyde Park Barracks.

Level 2 - Places

The room on the south-west corner of level 2 overlooks Queens Square and Macquarie Street. Displays here look out to the Barracks precincts and beyond.

Convicts from the Barracks worked on the racetrack at Hyde Park and on the pipeline bringing Sydney’s new water supply to the city from the Lachlan Swamps (now Centennial Park).

From 1862 to 1886, Hyde Park Asylum inmates watched from the Barracks’ windows as Sydney’s citizens promenaded in Hyde Park and the Domain.

Level 2 - Archaeology

The north-eastern room on level 2 stores all and displays some of the 85,000 artefacts excavated after 1980 from under the ground and floorboards at Hyde Park Barracks. These have since been sifted, sorted, stored and researched to provide us with evidence of the lives of the people who used them.

This display explores the methods and uses of archaeology and the way this can contribute to our knowledge of past lives and the Barracks’ rooms and spaces: by location, type and use. The store and study room is the site for ongoing research and documentation.

Level 3 - Convicts

Level 3 of the museum has been carefully conserved and reconstructed to the way Francis Greenway and the convict workers built it. It recreates convict living conditions to help convey how thousands of ‘government men’ experienced life in the Barracks, as they submitted or rebelled against its routines and surveillance from 1819 to 1848.

The space speaks for itself. Reconstructed hammocks, convict profiles and the sounds of the men’s voices have been added to evoke the presence of lost human experience.

Level 3 - Routine and surveillance

Routine and surveillance were supposed to be the daily pattern of convict life at Hyde Park Barracks but the records suggest that rules were often ignored by overseers or broken by convicts. The room in the south-western corner of level 3 combines signs and symbols of power and privation. The Barracks’ clock tried to keep the discipline of time, and cast its measured shadow over work allocations.

Six hundred men, and many more during times of overcrowding, shared this place. The space of his hammock was the only private retreat for a man marked in public.

A computer database brings together past details and allows us to pick and sort the Barracks’ men as their masters did.

Level 3 - Characters

Hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, simple pleasures and sullen pain, control and anarchy. How close can we get to the experience of convict lives in this place?

Cut-out profiles by artist Heather Dorrough suggest the mood and gestures of the Hyde Park Barracks’ men; they are based on recorded details of size, shape, crime and punishment. The identities and histories of many men survive through documentary evidence.

The soundscape is a unique program developed by Paul Carter from official records. A crowd of voices, episodes, sounds and silences jostle with each other for attention.

Hyde Park Barracks Museum
Queens Square, Macquarie Street, Sydney 2000
T 02 8239 2311
F 02 8239 2322