Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta: a history and a guide
Exploring the history of the Macarthur family and with a room-by-room guide to the house as experienced by visitors, this guidebook was first published in 1984 by the Historic Houses Trust (now Museums of History NSW) to coincide with the opening of the museum. It was written and researched by curator Dr James Broadbent, with additional research by historian Joy Hughes.
As seen from the selection of pages above, the guidebook examines the design of the house, placing it in the context of John Macarthur’s interest in building and other projects that he began elsewhere. Importantly, the guidebook also addresses the later history of the house and particularly its long occupancy by the Swann family, who ensured the survival of the homestead.
Author Dr James Broadbent poetically summed up the unique, hands-on visitor experience:
‘Its interiors have been contrived as a theatre set. The furnishing is all pretence, but it is hoped that out of this visitors may gain more knowledge and more enjoyment of it: to feel what it was like to read or write as Mrs Macarthur wrote, on a spring day, in the drawing room closet, with French doors, open into the Veranda; to sit in winter in the dimly lit library-bedroom as [John] Macarthur must have done at the end of his life, brooding, or to feel the stifling heat of the kitchen range burning throughout a hot February day.’
The guidebook
Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta: a history and a guide was first published in 1984 for the opening of the house museum, and revised in 1995. This reproduction is of the revised version.
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Dr Scott Hill
Curator
Formal studies in architecture, along with travels through Asia and Europe, furthered Scott’s interest in colonial building, domestic design, and the intrinsic relationship between architecture and landscape. This culminated in his PhD ‘Paper Houses’, which examines the significant colonial identity John Macarthur’s interest in architecture, and the design of the Macarthur houses Elizabeth Farm (1793) and Camden Park (1834). In Scott’s words: ‘understanding a historic house, an interior or landscape is for me a process of 'reverse‐designing', about taking the finished product and digging down to find the 'why': the reasons, the decisions and the myriad hidden influences that led to its creation’. He has been curator at Elizabeth Bay House and Vaucluse House and most recently at Elizabeth Farm, Rouse Hill Estate, and Meroogal; ‘The Curator’ in the award-winning SLM blog The Cook and the Curator; co-curated the Eat Your History: A Shared Table exhibition; and in 2023-24 he was senior curator of the exhibition ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’ at the Museum of Sydney.