Hyde Park Barracks

Georgian brick building at the southern end of Macquarie Street. Designed by colonial architect Francis Greenway to house male convicts, it subsequently became an immigration depot, government asylum, law courts and museum.

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Milestone

Constructed

1817 - 1819

Name

Commemorated by

Royal Australian Historical Society Green Plaque 69. Hyde Park Barracks

Position

1817 - 1819

Property

Part of

Sydney Living Museums

Occupied by

Female Immigration Depot

1848 - 1886

Occupied by

Vaccine Institution

May 1857 - 1886

Type

Museum or gallery

Gaol or detention centre

1819 - 1848

Hostel

1848 - 1886

Court

1887 - 1990

Laila Ellmoos

2008

From convict barracks to female immigration depot to asylum for destitute women, Hyde Park Barracks has witnessed and revealed much of Sydney's social history.

Peter Davies

2010

Sydney's first 'big dig' at Hyde Park Barracks, and subsequent archaeological work, produced one of the best collections of nineteenth-century institutional material in the world. These items illuminate the lives and interests of the thousands of women who passed through this building during its history as an immigration depot and destitute asylum.

Perry McIntyre

2012

supported by

The Consulate General of Ireland in Sydney

Eleven shiploads of Irish girls, orphaned by the Great Famine of the 1840s, arrived in Sydney between 1848 and 1850. They were housed in the Hyde Park Barracks before going out to work and marry in Sydney and beyond. In the 1990s, a worldwide movement among the Irish diaspora to commemorate the Famine, led to the construction of Sydney's Famine memorial, set into the Hyde Park Barracks perimeter wall.

The Dictionary of Sydney was archived in 2021.

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