Hyde Park Barracks Museum
Exhibition Design

At the core of the new museum experience is a custom-designed “Story Guide”, which tracks the visitor’s position and seamlessly delivers location-specific content. The guide weaves vivid storytelling and first-person narratives together into an emotional, unexpected, at times poetic, piece of environmental theatre.

This immersive 360° installation turns the museum’s panorama painting of Sydney in 1815 into a playful interactive. The visitors’ position is tracked to activate the animation of little vignettes that depict the convicts’ life and the presence of Australian Aboriginals.

A large sculptural form stretches across two galleries on the third floor. Visitors are invited to explore multiple perspectives on the colonial expansion through a number of dioramas, illustrating scenes of convict labour and the settler’s impact on Aboriginal communities.

An open circle with nine pillars clad in native wood commemorates the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838. Visitors are surrounded by 360º video footage from the original crime site, shot on the anniversary the atrocity was committed. In voice-over, Aunty Sue Blacklock, a descendant of a Gamilaraay survivor, recounts the story of the carnage inflicted upon the indigenous people by the settlers.

An interactive panorama of Sydney 1848 bookends the narrative of the convict experience by echoing the panorama from 1815, which opened it. Visitors are tracked via motion sensors, their movement transforming a line drawing of Sydney at the end of the convict era into a colourful illustration of a modernising city.

The "Legacies Gallery" concludes the exhibition experience with three life-size screens giving voice to indigenous elders as well as descendants of convicts and immigrant women who once inhabited the Barracks. They share their reflections on the impact of the Barracks on their ancestors, communities and personal biographies.