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A small but influential community, French Sydneysiders have been settlers, businesspeople, artists, performers and entrepreneurs. The visibility of Sydney's French community and its cultural organisations, schools and language has led to difficulties when French governments…

Maroota, in Dharug country, was first settled in 1832 as Forest Glen, but the farms failed. In 1892 another village was proclaimed there, called Maroota. Quarries supplied sand and gravel to Sydney for many years.

Grand Victorian mansion on the corner of Glebe Point and Wigram Roads in Glebe, built for timber merchant Alexander Kethel. It was later converted to a homeopathic hospital and general community hospital. It is now owned by the City of Sydney and houses the Glebe branch of…

Building which aimed to provide a place of meeting for the commercial community. It was situated on Bridge Street, and its construction was met with support from Sydney's business community including John Fairfax, Thomas Holt Jnr, David Jones and Thomas Sutcliffe Mort. The…

Ship's captain. In 1834 he was the captain of the cutter the Venus, owned by Sydney businessman John Mackie. Returning from the South Coast, he and the ship's crew were instrumental in the rescue of 17 survivors of the wreck of the Edward Lombe in Sydney Harbour. In late…

Convict who arrived in Sydney as part of the First Fleet. He was a silk weaver who was convicted in London in 1784 of theft and sentenced to 7 years transportation to America, but escaped after a convict mutiny on the Mercury. He was recaptured and departed for New South…

Civil engineer who became the first Professor of Engineering at the University of Sydney. 

After two years’ service with the New South Wales Department of Public Works, Warren initiated the teaching of engineering at the University of Sydney in March 1883.  He…

Inner eastern high-density residential suburb between Potts Point and Darling Point, named for the rushes cut by convicts for thatching in the early days of the colony. Sydney Stadium was built there in 1908 but demolished in the 1970s for the Eastern Suburbs Railway.

This installation in Martin Place created by Anne Graham in 2001 for the Sydney Sculpture Walk. The walls of early Georgian houses are traced with inlaid black granite and stainless steel grilles. The three bronze bowl fountains represent washrooms at the rear of the houses…

Former drapers which was converted to a funeral chapel by architect C Bruce Dellit. The foyer contains a sculpture by Raymond Hoff and the whole was considered one of the finest Art Deco style funerary spaces in Sydney. The building is now used as a bar and function rooms.

The main library at the University of Sydney named for Thomas Fisher, its major benefactor. It opened in 1909 in the south-western corner of the Quadrangle. In 1962 it moved to a new building adjacent to Victoria Park, the original reading room being renamed MacLaurin Hall.…

Theatre and entertainment company established in Sydney in 1921 by the pastoralist, entrepreneur and theatre producer, Sir Rupert Turner Havelock Clarke. The main order of business was the building of theatres, establishing the Kismet (later Odeon) Theatre in Randwick and the…

Late-Victorian Gothic Revival mansion located in Darling Point built for the brewer Sir Robert Lucas Lucas-Tooth. In 1963, it was bequeathed by brewer Edmund Resch Jnr to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. When the ownership covenant lapsed it was sold privately in 1984…

Percival Gull monoplane flown by Charles Kingsford-Smith from London, England to Wyndham, Western Australia, in record breaking solo flight in 1933. The aircraft crashed in Yerranderie in 1934, killing the passenger Leslie Hinks, who was returning to Sydney from Kalgoorlie…

Two storey Regency villa which originally had a frontage to Woolloomooloo Bay and could be seen from Sydney Town. Constructed of stuccoed brickwork, it has cedar interiors, marble flooring and French doors opening to wide verandahs and is one of few colonial villas to survive…

Central Railway Station was Sydney's third terminus, replacing the original 1855 station further south in Redfern and a later upgraded station built in the 1870s.

Album of photographs by members of the Amateur Photographic Society of New South Wales and presented by the society to the Governor, Lord Carrington, at the opening of an exhibition or 'conversazione' of their work at the Sydney Town Hall on 5 August 1886.

While memorials honouring the dead of the Great War were adapted to mark the sacrifice of those lost in World War II, the losses of a new generation led to innovations in memorialisation. Those who died on active service in Sydney, and those lost in conflicts Malaya, Korea,…

Coal mine established at Birchgrove in 1897 in an attempt to access the rich vein of coal which ran under Sydney from Newcastle to the Illawarra. It was the deepest ever worked in Australia and later produced methane gas, but was not a commercial success.

Army quarters in Paddington with a range of sandstone buildings dating from 1841 to the Edwardian period, that comprise one of the best groups of colonial buildings in Sydney. The Barracks housed British soldiers until 1870 before occupation by colonial forces and the…