Hyde Park Barracks Domes Restoration Project

What symbol would we use to get your attention in a public space? A big blue thumb (like this) sign? A giant red arrow?

Just as a special gift might reflect how we feel about another person, we find clues as to how different people feel about our society, and what our life should contain in our surroundings. There are stand-out architectural examples that dominate our skyline. Think of the Sydney Opera House with those amazing sail-like shells –people all over the world who see a picture of that building associate it with Australia and with Sydney. It’s a calling card for us all. There are things we walk past everyday loudly vying for our attention, like enormous illuminated advertisement billboards, and then there are special occasion instances like the light projections we find every year as part of the Vivid Festival. But what did we do in earlier times when engineering and design were more modest, when we didn’t have electricity, when the idea of marketing and brands and getting people’s attention was in its infancy? Where might we find the clues in our early buildings? Well, in Sydney, it all started with a dome.

The interesting thing about the settlement of Australia by Great Britain in the late 1700s is that it was designated a penal colony and rather than building a gaol and putting people in it, the whole country became the prison settlement. So you might imagine that it was rather a momentous occasion when, for the first time, it was decided that everyone who lived outside of the Hyde Park Barracks was a free man, and those who were incarcerated were the people who were serving time for their crimes. For Governor Macquarie, this was a significant shift in our thinking about Australia and a move towards the ‘civilising’ of our society. The addition of domes to the guardhouses of the Hyde Park Barracks was an important part of symbolising this shift in thinking. A ‘civilised’ society incorporated fine architecture which included decorative features like domes. Today, people walk past the Hyde Park Barracks without giving a second thought to the importance of that building in our history or the meaning of those fairly modest objects being reconstructed underneath a shield of scaffolding and hessian. And yet that symbol, and the act of thinking that we were capable of building a society with all the benefits and finery we could possibly imagine, were the beginnings of the modern Australia that we enjoy today.

Dome on Carlton Hill

It is human nature to attach meaning to different symbols and objects, to define spaces for specific purposes – we do it a lot with smaller objects that represent aspects of our own lives. A favourite coffee cup, a pair of earrings given to us for a birthday or anniversary, a dirty, beat-up toy that a child refuses to part with…all those objects have meaning for us beyond the value of the materials themselves. It’s what we see there and how it makes us feel about ourselves that gives the object its importance to us. How often do we stop to use this way of seeing things – some might call it seeing with your heart – in our shared public spaces? To admire the outline of a building, the placement of a park or to notice something else that pleases us and to realise in that moment that other people have been responsible for that; that someone else has left a message of something interesting or beautiful for us to see in our comings and goings in daily life. Of course we are all very quick to complain when we find a sculpture or construction site that isn’t to our liking. How good are we at practising the discipline of appreciating what others preserve for the benefit of us all?

We’d love to hear how you would design your own ultimate Sydney building, or reclaim a famous Sydney place at our Skyline School Holiday workshops, or through our Domes Shingle competition where you can add you own design to our shingle template, send it in and have a chance at winning a great prize!

The Firkin Crane, Ireland’s National Centre for Dance

We’d love to hear from you about favourite old Sydney places that are being used in new ways.

Hello…and welcome to the first of several guest blog posts I’ll be contributing to the Historic Houses Trust blog in the lead-up to the unveiling of the Hyde Park Barracks Domes currently undergoing restoration.

A classical musician doesn’t usually have the opportunity to wander into other domains like architecture so this particular project is a real treat. In my capacity as a member of Polyartistry, I’ll be creating some activities with my colleague Matthew Aberline and the wonderful HHT team around these domes.  Poly’s main brief is simple: we want to know what you think about things, and then we use those thoughts to create new works of art, or to animate spaces and ideas in myriad ways.

What does butter have to do with dancing? A quick detour in Google to see what butter + dance turns up directs me to a low-fi animation of a piece of butter dancing to “pump it” by the Black Eyed Peas …interesting… but not the only connection between butter and dance.

Reimagining and reclaiming spaces once used for industries that have been relocated for a variety of reasons is nothing new, and in August I found myself working in what used to be a Butter Factory on a dance performance that is based on a book written in the 1920s. Ireland was an international centre for butter making – and the Firkin Crane was one of the buildings that formed part of the Butter Exchange in the 19th century, which was the largest in the world at that time. Now the Firkin Crane continues its life in the Cork community as Ireland’s National Centre for Dance and the sense of industry and producing an essential product continues, but this time the product is art.
In our old spaces, we find remnants of the way life used to be – socially, economically and culturally – and we can be inspired by what used to take place there in order to influence what we create there in the present. There are so many examples of imaginative ways in which we’ve reclaimed spaces that were once utilitarian in value and now house centres for creativity and ideas. Here in Sydney, Australia, The Historic Houses Trust maintains a number of our most significant spaces, providing us with a window into our past in order that we might see those spaces as significant pieces of the puzzle that makes present-day Australia what it is.

The Hyde Park Barracks has been an important place for Australians without most of us realising it, so accustomed are we to skyscrapers and modern design, technology and a much flashier way of making our spaces. But what HPB symbolises for us is the birthplace of modern Australia – the beginnings of everything that we see around us today. The vision of people like Macquarie provided the foundations for our modern skyline, both in an aspirational, but also a practical, sense. What really cemented the idea that Australia could be a modern, civilised nation that might one day rival any other country in the world? Two elegant, simple wooden domes that were the beginnings of a vision for our nation in which we were free people rather than an oversized penal colony at the end the world, equal to other societies, and just as capable as anyone else of creating a community in which people could work together to build a better future. Perhaps today it seems like a humble beginning, but imagine starting with nothing but bushland, creating all of our early settlements, having to improvise and make do with what was at hand: the domes, being decorative, represented a completely different view of what we might be capable of. Architecture has for a long time had a function of inspiring us to better things – whether it is feats of engineering once thought impossible, or representing a level of magnificence beyond our everyday imaginings. How often do we stop to look at the skyline, though, and consider the meaning of it, to read in the outline of our surroundings the traces of belief in our capacity?

Tell us about your about favourite old Sydney places that are being used in new ways.