Eggs from the chickens at Rouse Hill House and Farm. Photo Scott Hill © Sydney Living Museums
Egging? Get it? I know, that was a crack up! Anyway… being Easter time our attentions naturally turn to that most biologically challenging of animals, the Easter Bunny, and eggs! Continue reading
Iceman, Frederick Danvers Power: photonegatives, 1898-1926 (detail). State Library of NSW: ON 225
Not everything was sold in corner shops. The familiar sounds of horse-driven carts and the street traders crying their wares were part of the rhythm of daily life at Susannah Place well into the 1950s. Continue reading
Herbert, Hugo & Jenny Ljunggren (Youngein), c1910. Susannah Place Museum Collection © Sydney Living Museums
Dolly’s ‘Cooking homework book’ is 101 years old. Jenny (known as Dolly) Youngein (pictured, right) lived in Susannah Place at 64 Gloucester Street, where her parents ran the corner shop from 1904. Dolly was 12 years old when she created the book. It is still in her family’s possession and is a treasured memento of her childhood. Continue reading
Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine at Hyde Park Barracks. Photo Alysha Buss © HHT
Food is never more important as when there isn’t any. The earliest years of settlement in Sydney were dogged by the very real fear of running out of food supplies for the colony, but the most significant effect of famine on colonial Australia was as a result of the chronic ‘potato famine’ in Ireland, which occurred in the late 1840s. St Patrick’s Day seemed to be a good day to pay tribute to the many ‘Irish Marys’ who made their way though Hyde Park Barracks, where they maintain a strong presence in the museum’s stories. Continue reading
The ‘cash grocer’ on the corner of Susannah Place at 64 Gloucester Street was serving local customers for over 90 years. During this time there were 12 shopkeepers who lived onsite with their families. Continue reading
The houses in Susannah Place were designed with basement kitchens, with access to the rest of the house via a frighteningly steep and narrow external staircase. Each kitchen had an open fireplace which before long was fitted with a fuel cooking stove that would warm the living spaces above in winter, but add to the heat and discomfort in summer. Unsurprisingly, as technology allowed, the basement kitchens were abandoned in favour of internal kitchens on the same level as living areas. No. 58 was the exception, and its basement kitchen was in use from 1844 to 1974. Continue reading
A peek into the corner shop at Susannah Place. Photo © Christopher Shain
Susannah Place conjures the essence of autumn, with its paint peeling, its colours fading, but leaving us with a glimmer of when the houses were busy with the daily lives of its tenants. This diminutive row of four inner-city terrace houses in Sydney’s Rocks has seen generations of change, not least revealed in its kitchens and dining spaces.
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Curator Anna Cossu at The Mint. Photo © James Horan
Inspired by wonderful and slightly eccentric history teachers and after her own foray as a teacher, Anna found herself drawn to the world of museums. Continue reading
[Philip Gidley and Anna Josepha King, and their children Elizabeth, Anna Maria and Phillip Parker], Robert Dighton, 1799. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW: ML 1244
Today’s post is brought to you by our guest blogger, HHT Historian, Jane Kelso whose exhaustive research on first Government House includes a fascination with the various Governors’ dining practices – and their guests! Continue reading
Historian Jane Kelso at Vaucluse House. Photo © James Horan
Jane developed a love of old buildings and the past growing up in a landscape of old country homesteads and Horbury Hunt woolsheds and churches near a country town whose glory days were ‘history’. Continue reading