What is Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney?
Hyde Park Barracks is a convict-era building in central Sydney, completed in 1819. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Australian Convict Sites.
The barracks were designed by convict architect Francis Greenway for Governor Lachlan Macquarie. They housed male convicts who worked on government projects across the colony, giving them secure lodgings and keeping them off the streets at night.
After transportation to New South Wales ended, the building was used as an immigration depot for single women, many from Ireland, and later as an asylum for elderly women and government offices.
A museum today
Hyde Park Barracks is now a museum run by Museums of History NSW. Visitors use audio guides to explore rooms recreated with hammocks and learn about the lives of convicts and later residents through objects found under the floorboards.
In 2010 it joined ten other convict sites around Australia on the World Heritage List. Together they show how Britain used transportation and forced labour to build colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Did You Know?
Archaeologists found thousands of objects, from clay pipes to fabric scraps, that rats had dragged under the barracks floors.