Hyde Park Barracks Domes Restoration Project

Image: J. Ellis, ‘St James’ Church, The Supreme Court & Hyde Park, Sydney’,
watercolour, Caroline Simpson Collection, HHT.

The reconstruction of the Hyde Park Barracks guardhouse domes interprets an aspect of Macquarie’s vision for the colony of NSW. Macquarie saw polite architecture as civilizing and ornamented Sydney’s principal street with a suite of public buildings – St James’s Church, the Supreme Court, Hyde Park Barracks, the Mint and Parliament House, Sydney (the latter were wings of the ‘Rum Hospital’. In his enquiry into New South Wales’s administration (1819-1822), Commissioner Bigge was to censure Macquarie for this, regarding architectural embellishment as an imposition on the British Government purse and a waste of convict labour.

Spirits bottle with makeshift stopper (uf6626) in the Hyde Park Barracks Archaeology collection, photo Gary Crockett

Despite their appearance, the Barracks guardhouses were inevitably cramped and rank inside. They sheltered and protected convict constables, whose job it was to inspect bodies and belongings entering and leaving the compound. Essex born, brickies labourer, James McDonald was a Barracks constable in the mid 1820s, a position that came with pay and a few privileges. In 1826 he was caught smuggling alcohol to prisoners heading up river to Parramatta and, later that year, was stood down for 2 weeks for stealing a length of chain from the convict lumberyard. He argued that the chain was to capture a runaway dog owned by his boss, John Connor, the Deputy Superintendent of Convicts at Hyde Park Barracks. Shortly afterwards he copped a flogging for aiding a prisoner’s escape. Who ever said ‘power corrupts’…?