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Northern end of Hyde Park, St James Parsonage, Dispensary, afterwards the Mint, and Emigration Barracks 1842

By
John Rae
From the collections of the
State Library of New South Wales
[a928373 / DG SV*/Sp Coll/Rae/16]
(Dixson Galleries)

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Culture and customs
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Horseracing Horses Parks
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Hyde Park Macquarie Street
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Hyde Park Barracks Old St James parsonage The Mint

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Rae, John

Scottish-born public servant, writer and painter who was the first full-time town clerk of the City of Sydney, and later a railway commissioner.

State Library of New South Wales

Culture and customs

Sydney's pre-industrial culture was comprehensive and public, and most European inhabitants were players, performers or spectators. After 1850, distinct but overlapping cultures emerged, imported and adapted from Europe and America. New forms of cultural transmission after World War I enabled the elaboration of new cultures based on ethnicity, age and gender, which have combined to produce Sydney's cultural diversity.

Horseracing

Parks

Horses

Hyde Park

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Park providing green space in Sydney's busy centre.

Hyde Park Barracks

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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.

The Mint

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Building on Macquarie Street, originally part of Sydney Hospital and subsequently used as a mint.

Old St James parsonage

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Two storey stone house built in about 1819 on land at the corner of Macquarie and King Streets, now the corner of Macquarie Street and Queens Square and the site of the Law Courts building. The site had been owned by former convict Thomas Clarkson, and the house may have been built by him before the land passed D'arcy Wentworth in about 1819. Possibly occupied by Wentworth for a short period before being leased, and subsequently purchased, by the government in 1820 to be used as the residence for the Surveyor General, John Oxley. King George IV's monogram G.R. was carved in stone over the entrance. The land was acquired by St James Anglican church in 1838 and was used as a parsonage until it fell into disrepair in the late 1880s and was demolished in 1889. The site was then leased by the church to raise funds for its maintenance and St James Chambers was built.

The Australian Museum was also briefly accommodated in a room in the parsonage for a period in the early 1840s.

Macquarie Street

Street at the eastern edge of Sydney's central business district, designed as a ceremonial thoroughfare by Lachlan Macquarie and containing many of Sydney's public buildings. It was later the best address in the colony, and became a prestigious medical precinct in the twentieth century.

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