Elizabeth Farm museum at 40

This year Elizabeth Farm celebrates 40 years open to the public as a house museum!

Thousands of people a year enjoy visiting Elizabeth Farm, a house museum located in Parramatta, on Dharug Country. Built in 1793 for colonists John and Elizabeth Macarthur and their growing family, Elizabeth Farm is the earliest surviving colonial homestead in Australia. The property was in private ownership from the time it was built until the late 1970s, when it was acquired by the NSW Government. It was then that a process began to transform Elizabeth Farm into the public museum we know and love today.

The push for Elizabeth Farm to be preserved for future generations and opened as a public museum was instigated by Edith, Nona and Ruth Swann, who had lived at the house since it was purchased by their father, William, in 1904.

After spending much of their lives at Elizabeth Farm, the sisters decided in 1967 to advertise the property for sale. They were determined that it should be sold to a body that would ensure its survival and, ideally, open the house to the public. The Elizabeth Farm Trust, an independent community-based group, acquired the property with the intention of restoring the house and providing public access.

Fundraising and initial conservation works then began, but the full task of preserving Elizabeth Farm proved beyond the capacity of the well-meaning Trust. When the NSW Heritage Act 1978 was introduced, Elizabeth Farm was formally transferred to state government ownership on 23 June 1978. The Act allowed a Permanent Conservation Order to be placed on the property, and this was the first of its kind in NSW. Indeed, Elizabeth Farm is listed as item 001 on the NSW state heritage register.

Once the property was in state government ownership, an extensive conservation program led by the Heritage Council of NSW commenced. This spanned several years before a newly created government entity – the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now Museums of History NSW) – took over and set out to interpret the house interiors. Elizabeth Farm was formally transferred to the Historic Houses Trust a year after its official opening.

Re-creating the house’s interiors posed significant challenges for the Historic Houses Trust’s curators. Assembling an original collection of the Macarthurs’ furniture was impossible, so copies were made of known pieces at properties owned by Macarthur descendants, including beds, a dining room sideboard, portraits and a writing desk. The use of reproduction furnishings meant that the house could be a ‘barrier-free’ museum, where visitors could wander at will, handling objects or relaxing by the fire in the drawing room. The pared-back rooms worked like stage sets, inviting the visitor to fill them with stories of the families who had lived there. This hands-on approach to history has proven successful with visitors over the past 40 years, creating an immediacy of experience that is rare in historic houses. As well as offering guided tours, the property hosts learning programs for school groups and has held a series of festivals and programs that celebrate its importance to the local community and the people of NSW.

All these years on, we can reflect on the words of NSW Premier Neville Wran when he officially opened the museum on 16 June 1984 and said Elizabeth Farm will be:

A building which provokes the imagination and conjures up all the images of early colonial life ...

‘... Elizabeth Farm also marks a new innovative development in the presentation of house museums. There are no ropes and no barriers. Visitors can actually feel what it was like to live in this house during the Macarthur period, even sit in front of the drawing room fire or at the writing table where Elizabeth Macarthur wrote letters to her husband and her children in England.’¹

Today, we can look back on the past 40 years of Elizabeth Farm as a house museum that has served the public well.