Hyde Park Barracks

The Hyde Park Barracks wears a high, sand-colored brick wall topped with a pedimented clock tower that stands apart from the surrounding glass towers of Sydney. Built by convict labor in eighteen nineteen, the barracks housed men sent to serve out their sentences under the colonial government. Francis Greenway, an architect and convicted forger himself, designed the structure. Thousands of men slept here in hammocks, packed into sparse, open rooms, waiting for their assignments to work on road gangs or for local settlers.