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Museum stories

Large 2 storey building with deep verandahs, steps leading to lower verandah and bushes and driveway in the foreground.
Museum stories

A rum deal

When Lachlan Macquarie began his term as governor of NSW in 1810, Sydney was in desperate need of a new hospital

Joseph Lycett, 'The residence of John McArthur Esq. near Parramatta, New South Wales'. Aquatint. Published London, John Souter, 1825. Elizabeth Farm collection, Museums of History New South Wales.
Museum stories

A turbulent past

With its deep, shady verandahs and elegant symmetry, Elizabeth Farm is an iconic early colonial bungalow

View of lowslung colonial era house across gravel and lawn, house framed by trees.
Museum stories

Abundance & curiosity at Elizabeth Farm

One of the great pleasures of visiting Elizabeth Farm is strolling from the drawing room onto the winding paths of the pleasure garden, just as the original occupants, the Macarthur family, did two centuries ago

[First Government House, Sydney] / watercolour drawing by John Eyre
Museum stories

First encounters

The Museum of Sydney is built on and around a site that links us to the very beginnings of modern Australia

Black and white image of a sandstone building. A man can be seen in the foreground.
Museum stories

Gritty business

Immerse yourself in Sydney's chilling criminal past in this unique water-front museum of policing, law and disorder – with its grizzly collection of underworld weapons along with tales of mayhem and lawlessness, aptly described as an educational resource befitting a 'professor in crime'

Image of the Meroogal homestead on a sunny day.
Museum stories

Make yourself at home

Meroogal became home to four generations of resilient and resourceful women, whose house was their livelihood as well as their home

image of painting showing a dramatic panoramic view of harbour surrounded by natural bushland with Vaucluse estate in the foreground.
Museum stories

Not a lovelier site

‘There is not a lovelier site in the known world’, wrote the Sydney-born barrister and novelist John Lang about the Wentworth family’s estate of Vaucluse

Museum stories

Surviving and thriving

The historic gardens at Rouse Hill Estate and Vaucluse House showed remarkable resilience through the heat and bushfires of 2019–20. Tristan Harman, a member of our Horticulture Team, explains his practices and introduces some of the gardens’ star performers.

The Schoolroom, Rouse Hill House & Farm, June 2004
Museum stories

Talk of the town

Six generations of Rouse and Terry families occupied Rouse Hill Estate from its construction in the early 1800s until the late 1990s, when it opened as a museum