Plymouth Rock chicken at Rouse Hill House. Photo Scott Hill © Sydney Living Museums
Be they for eggs, the dinner table or the podium, the keeping of chickens has a long history at Sydney Living Museums properties. Continue reading
The Rouse Hill dining room by candlelight. Photo Scott Hill © Sydney Living Museums
Currently at various Sydney Living Museums Houses we’re running a series of night time tours, where you can see the houses as their original occupants saw them lit by candle and lamplight. Which raises the vexing question of just HOW should you light the historic dining table? Continue reading
A plate of Tot's lemon biscuits at Meroogal.. Photo Scott Hill © Sydney Living Museums
Our houses have been home to thousands of residents, and of course, hundreds of Mothers! For Mothers’ Day this year, Meroogal is hosting a very special afternoon tea and Mums can visit our houses and museums for free. Continue reading
When you visit number 60 at Susannah Place, the ‘front room’ is furnished as it might have been when first occupied in 1844. Step through to the next room and you are transported to the 1940s, when the Sarantides, an immigrant Greek family, lived there, from 1936 – 1947. 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
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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