After years in the planning – and following a 12 month closure – the first reinterpretation of the Hyde Park Barracks since it opened as a museum in 1991 was unveiled this week. Quickly touted as a landmark project, the museum's refresh aims to set new standards for visitor experience.
The upgrades have been largely delivered through revenue raised by a heritage conservation scheme managed by the City of Sydney.
Adam Lindsay, Executive Director of Sydney Living Museums, told ArtsHub: ‘We make these sites relevant today – taking history and finding contemporary entry points to it, so that we can use that to understand the present, and make a better future.’
Dating from the convict era, the refurbished Hyde Park Barracks features enhanced learning facilities, improved facilities, installation of a lift and accessible pathways, and sight and hearing impaired access. It also incorporates technology solutions to offer experiences that are more authentic and relevant to the way people live today.
Key to the new look and new feel site is the blend and balance between analogue and tech-driven storytelling. Created by New York’s Local Projects (known for their work on the 9/11 Museum) in collaboration with Antenna International, audio specialists to the world’s museums, visitors wear a device that is geo-targeted, picking up narrated stories in sync with their physical journey across the site.
NSW Minister for the Arts, Don Harwin said: ‘It offers a new way of seeing history as something lived that is emotional, challenging and will inspire.’
The Minister acknowledged that ‘one in five Australians have a convict ancestor, and they want to know about the stories of Aboriginal resistance and free immigration that have built this great country, and Hyde Park Barracks connects all of us to a story about Australia and its beginnings.’
 Brett Boardman_004002.jpg)
Sydney Living Museums' new tech-audio visitor experience at Hyde Park Barracks. Photo: Brett Boardman.
The balance of voices
As part of the site's relaunch, the City of Sydney has worked with Sydney Living Museums to commission Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist, Jonathan Jones, as part of their Art and About program.
Lindsay describes the process as ‘a literal manifestation of the intersections between convict and Aboriginal stories.’
Jones’s 2500m2 installation fills the Barracks' courtyard. Its title, untitled (maraong manouwi), translates as Emu's footprint, drawing an uncanny graphic connection with the English Broad Arrow design emblazoned on convicts' tools and clothing.
Jones’s intention was to juxtapose and illustrate the two vastly different stories and experiences during the period of First Contact. He said of the project: ‘These histories live within us – they are in our families, in our lineage, in our bloodstream, but we don’t acknowledge them, and this project is really about waking up that relationship.
‘This is a shared space for us all to come together to learn something about our real history of Australia, so we can move forward together,’ he added.
Jonathan Jones. Photo: James Horan.
The emu is a significant animal to many Aboriginal communities – one of the few creatures where the father rears the young. Conversely, the Broad Arrow is a symbol of imperial ownership and represents the convict labour force responsible for the expansion of Sydney and in turn, the dispersal of First Peoples from their homelands.
Jones speaks to that history also through the use of white and red gravel from Wiradjuri Country, making reference to the fact that convicts were tasked with crushing rocks. Over the duration of the installation, visitors are invited to walk on top of the artwork, slowly disintegrating it and blurring histories.
Jones added: ‘The project invites everyone to come on site and physically engage with history; to physically engage with culture, and to physically engage with Country and walk through it, destroying the artwork, and officially taking part in what can only be described as a ceremony.’
Lindsay added of Jones’ project: ‘In my opinion, this artwork is the Wrapped Coast for this generation, for it embodies that same mixture of awe, meaning and camaraderie as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s seminal work of 51 years ago.’
The Hammock Room at Hyde Park Barracks, extended with new audio experience. Photo: ArtsHub.
Not just a shell of colonial power
Inside the Barracks, that premise of juxtaposition and balance continues. Lindsay says it is all about finding the right mode to tell the right story. ‘There is a tendency to show off [with refurbishments], but it was about constantly asking the question "What is the best way to tell this story?",’ he said.
‘For example, the hammock room – people love it! The best way to tell that story is show how people slept, and keeping those memory alive, knitting together past and present. All we have done is add a new audio experience, which transforms [the display]. It’s familiar but experienced in a new way,' Lindsay explained.
The same could be said of the re-design of the museum's dioramas – usually presented as dusty holes in the wall. ‘They are really sculptural, playing off the right angles of the Georgian building and yet the angles turn viewing into a physical experience – you move and twist your body to see them, just like the multiple perspectives and angles on the stories they tell.’
They are also completely reversible in terms of their footprint upon the UNESCO World Heritage listed site.
Exhibition design makes viewing dioramas a contemporary experience. Photo: ArtsHub.
Lindsay said that in re-envisaging the Barracks building they were committed to telling different narratives, not just the singular story of petty criminals, seven years hard labour then free, but multiple narratives that come from individuals. It is only together that we can start to understand the range of stories around the 166,000 convicts housed at the Barracks between 1788 and 1868, and how their fate was intertwined with Aboriginal histories of the site, he explained.
Lindsay concluded with a contemporary reference: ‘I liken it to being at a gym on a treadmill and looking out the window to McDonalds across the road. These convicts had the persistent presence of the Court opposite, determining their fate.’
Hyde Park Barracks is an incredible site; an intersection of power and empowerment; of the individual amidst their invisibility within a system, and the alignment and overlaying of Aboriginal and colonial narrative.
Visiting a museum could not be more exciting – or more relevant today.
Jonathan Jones’ Untitled (Maraong Manaouwi) will be showing until 15 March.
A 20% discount will be offered to NSW residents in the opening months of the new experience to assist locals in becoming reacquainted with the history of their State.