Sydney

 Hyde Park Barracks

On Sunday 23 April we went with the Travel Club to the Hyde Park Barracks.  I had walked past this building many times during my working years in Sydney, but I never had an opportunity to visit it.

In 1984 the Barracks was converted into a museum containing a record of colonial Australia and also the experiences of Aboriginal people as they witnessed the taking over of their land by the British colonists.

Hyde Park Barracks was built with convict labour and was the first convict Barracks in the colony.  During the first thirty years of the colony the convicts were free to roam and live where they liked.  They lived with relative freedom and opportunity.  They were, of course assigned to work during the day and their labour was put to productive use in building the colony.  Most lived with and worked for private masters.  

The Barracks was commissioned by Governor Lachlan Macquarie and officially opened in 1819.  He hoped that by housing the convicts in a barracks, their productivity would be increased and their moral character improve. 

Conditions inside the Barracks were pretty grim.  The spartan dormitories had double rows of hammocks strung up as beds with very little room between each hammoock and buckets for their toilets.  Convicts in the Barracks faced harsher rules and restrictions and did not have the freedom of living independently in the town. 

The Barracks is a three-storey building with a simple Georgian facade and shingled roof and designed by convict architect Francis Greenway.  Governor Macquarie was so impessed with the design that he granted Greenway a full pardon. 

Here are the gates fronting the top end of Macquarie Street.  This picture is taken inside the gates and looking out on to the street.  The Sydney Tower can be seen which is the tallest building in Sydney.  It is also known as the Centrepoint Tower.

Beautiful brick work handmade from local clay and baked into bricks at government and private brickyards.  The convicts laboured on the site, climbing up and down scaffolding producing high quality brickwork.

A little side entrance gate to the left of the main entrance fronting Macquarie Street.  The Barracks can be seen in the background.

Here is another view of the same gateway.

I am sorry for the late publication of this blog as I left it in draft form and kept meaning to come back to it.  However, time has got away and I have decided to leave it as it is, as I will be writing about other travels before long.

Acknowledgment

All of the technical information for this blog entry has been obtained from a little booklet I purchased at the Barracks called Hyde Park Barracks and published by Sydney Living Museums.