Bottling the Past: Rediscovering the Past at Sydney’s Mint and Hyde Park Barracks

Set back from Macquarie Street, two brick and sandstone buildings stand side by side, twin markers of the city’s first thirty years. The Mint was built between 1811 and 1816 as part of the Sydney Civil Hospital. Hyde Park Barracks, right next door, was built in 1817–19 to provide accommodation for the colony’s convicts. 

In 1979, when the heritage discipline in Australia was still finding its feet, after a public campaign, these buildings became a test for the new ways of thinking about conservation.

Graham Wilson, now one of Extent Heritage’s Principal Heritage Advisors, was there. It was one of his first jobs in the heritage profession.

“Most of us were fresh out of uni,” he says today. “The discipline was in its infancy. I suddenly found myself being employed before I actually graduated, they were that desperate to get people into the field.”

The site is one of the most important from Sydney’s convict period. But for Graham, it’s more than that. It’s both a place where he learnt lessons that he has carried with him through his career, and a place with deeper personal significance due to a serendipitous family connection.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as failed potato crops brought devastating famine to Ireland, around 4000 orphan girls were brought to Australia to start new lives. Among these girls was Graham’s great-great-great-grandmother, Catherine Fox.

“It was only in reading the histories of the site that were being prepared alongside the archaeological work that I realised,” he says. “I assumed there would have been more than one Catherine Fox in that group. But there was only one.”

This connection was cemented when a medicine bottle was uncovered on the site, bearing a prescription with Catherine Fox’s name on it. It was a physical link to the past that illustrates that buildings like the Barracks aren’t just bricks and mortar—they’re links to all our pasts.

Since the initial archaeological work that Graham was involved in, both the Mint and Hyde Park Barracks have been adaptively reused as museums. These current iterations help explain the history of both sites, giving people a pathway into their own stories.

Recently, some forty years after the revelation about his forebear, Graham was asked to return to the site to advise on cataloguing the artefacts he helped recover all those years ago—including the medicine bottle.

“They’re physical, visible examples of how Governor Lachlan Macquarie wanted the convict system to operate,” explains Graham. “It was part of a global network of punishment, that he, unhappily, was tasked with managing. It was all part of his attempt to form a city out of rampant, unregulated development some 200 years ago. Macquarie was nation-building.”

The Mint is listed on the State Heritage Register, and Hyde Park Barracks is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of eleven pre-eminent Australian convict heritage sites.

“I always stop and look at it if I’m in that part of town,” says Graham. “It’s a remarkable survival given the changes to Sydney since the 1960s.”

“In terms of significance, they don’t get any higher than this.”Set back from Macquarie Street, two brick and sandstone buildings stand side by side, twin markers of the city’s first thirty years. The Mint was built between 1811 and 1816 as part of the Sydney Civil Hospital. Hyde Park Barracks, right next door, was built in 1817–19 to provide accommodation for the colony’s convicts. 

In 1979, when the heritage discipline in Australia was still finding its feet, after a public campaign, these buildings became a test for the new ways of thinking about conservation.

Graham Wilson, now one of Extent Heritage’s Principal Heritage Advisors, was there. It was one of his first jobs in the heritage profession.

“Most of us were fresh out of uni,” he says today. “The discipline was in its infancy. I suddenly found myself being employed before I actually graduated, they were that desperate to get people into the field.”

The site is one of the most important from Sydney’s convict period. But for Graham, it’s more than that. It’s both a place where he learnt lessons that he has carried with him through his career, and a place with deeper personal significance due to a serendipitous family connection.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as failed potato crops brought devastating famine to Ireland, around 4000 orphan girls were brought to Australia to start new lives. Among these girls was Graham’s great-great-great-grandmother, Catherine Fox.

“It was only in reading the histories of the site that were being prepared alongside the archaeological work that I realised,” he says. “I assumed there would have been more than one Catherine Fox in that group. But there was only one.”

This connection was cemented when a medicine bottle was uncovered on the site, bearing a prescription with Catherine Fox’s name on it. It was a physical link to the past that illustrates that buildings like the Barracks aren’t just bricks and mortar—they’re links to all our pasts.

Since the initial archaeological work that Graham was involved in, both the Mint and Hyde Park Barracks have been adaptively reused as museums. These current iterations help explain the history of both sites, giving people a pathway into their own stories.

Recently, some forty years after the revelation about his forebear, Graham was asked to return to the site to advise on cataloguing the artefacts he helped recover all those years ago—including the medicine bottle.

“They’re physical, visible examples of how Governor Lachlan Macquarie wanted the convict system to operate,” explains Graham. “It was part of a global network of punishment, that he, unhappily, was tasked with managing. It was all part of his attempt to form a city out of rampant, unregulated development some 200 years ago. Macquarie was nation-building.”

The Mint is listed on the State Heritage Register, and Hyde Park Barracks is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of eleven pre-eminent Australian convict heritage sites.

“I always stop and look at it if I’m in that part of town,” says Graham. “It’s a remarkable survival given the changes to Sydney since the 1960s.”

“In terms of significance, they don’t get any higher than this.”