In 1973 Sydney Opera House transformed Sydney and Australia. It teamed up with our first icon, Sydney Harbour Bridge, to create the greatest symbol imaginable of an ambitious, forward-looking international city. These symbols of Sydney return their investment in branding alone - before they even begin performing their respective functions.
The Harbour Bridge and the Opera House set a standard for Sydney to aspire to in all things. They’re visionary, they’re generous, they're complex, they’re functional and they’re beautiful.
Which is why I find the Museum of Sydney, just a stone’s throw from these loved icons, such a disappointment.
You don’t hear much about The Museum of Sydney - even living in Sydney. It keeps a low profile - for good reason.
There’s a lot in a name and a location. A visitor glowing in Sydney glory after visiting the Opera House, the Botanical Gardens and Circular Quay might be drawn to the nearby Museum of Sydney. They might assume from the name that they’ll find a place for a deeper experience of the city’s stories and people. As Sydney is where Australia's colonisation story begins, it would be reasonable to expect this to be on of the country's best museums.
Photo: Mark Bowyer First Government House - 1788
The Sydney harbour icons glow will quickly go down in flames. Lucky, visitors to the Museum of Sydney might see an interesting exhibition. They will not experience a Museums of Sydney.
When bestselling American author Bill Bryson visited Sydney in the 1990s while writing his bestseller In a Sunburned Country (aka. Down Under), the Museum of Sydney was a new arrival. In his book he wrote of the museum “a sleek and stylish new institution which manages to look interesting and instructive without actually being either”. His book is still in print. A surprising number of international visitors still carry it. And Bryson’s still right. Sydney either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Decades later Museum of Sydney is largely unchanged.
The Museum of Sydney hasn’t improved. It may be worse - since the main exhibition feels so tired. And there doesn’t seem to be a plan.
There’s a reason why global cities avoid billing a museum with their city’s name. These museums come with big expectations, big responsibilities and big budgets - the scale of a major museum. A Museum of London is in the works. Have a look at what’s planned for a sense of what's expected.
How underwhelming can a Museum of Sydney be?
Buried remnants of the original 1788 Government House structure still visible through a glass casing in the museum’s exterior plaza, set the scene. There’s an old bust of the first governor, Arthur Phillip - who lived here. And a 1990s collaborative art work. So far so good.
Once you step inside, unless you’re headed to the fabulous cafe (also referenced favourably by Bryson in the 90s), it’s all downhill.
This is not a Museum of Sydney. It may not even be a museum. A historical exhibition space perhaps?
The Australian Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chau Chak Wing Museum, the Maritime Museum and even the modest Rocks Discovery Museum, are all Sydney institutions worthy of the name. The State Library - not a museum - hosts a museuemesque collection.
The Museum of Sydney has neither the space, budget nor ambition to meet the expectations of its name. Its current (I assumed unchanged in 30 years) permanent exhibition consists of a display of replicas of the ships of the First Fleet, a small replica of First Government House and some interpretive panels. There’s a subtitled video from the early 2000s featuring a much more youthful Liberal Party leader, Peter Collins and Sydney historians talking about the location.
A museum highlight is the screening of an episode of Rachel Perkins’ wonderful 2008 series The First Australians (you can check it out on SBS on Demand).
There’s a focus on First Peoples recognition. But without any anchor narrative or context, it lacks meaning - especially for visitors with little or no knowledge of Australian history.
Unearthed is a current exhibition that looks at archeological findings discovered back in the 90s. I’ve seen many other exhibitions over the past 6 years. They’ve all been interesting but fall way short of anchoring a Museum of Sydney.
Presumably funding is so tight that Museums of Sydney, now chaired by Bob Carr, the man who opened the museum, can’t even try to improve things.
A billion dollars has been spent on the scandal-plagued Parramatta Powerhouse, likely at the expense of every other Sydney cultural institution.
There are two solutions for the Museum of Sydney. Change the name and concept making it a small specialised museum or exhibition space, or invest and expand the museum somewhere else. In 2021 there were plans to create a First Nations Museum on the site. That plan was abandoned location was considered inappropriate by First Nations leaders.
A First Nations museum is long overdue in Sydney, as is a place for explaining the early decades of colonisation and dispossession.
Sydney may be the place where the stories of colonisation begin, but it's way behind Hobart, Melbourne and Adelaide when it comes to telling its stories.
How could we have gotten away with misrepresenting this museum to our visitors for so long?
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