The little-explored Therry papers, one of the Library’s largest nineteenth-century manuscript collections, are a window into the early penal colony of NSW.
Long before Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules and Great Bake Offs, a homegrown celebrity cook introduced the newly federated Australia to a horizon of taste, practicality and sophistication.
Of all the Australian stage performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nellie Stewart was the best known and most universally loved.
Stan didn’t look good at all. I could see him in the garden, through a window. Hunched forward, sucking on a cigarette, mistaking it for a sign of life.
An Aboriginal leader’s assistance to the artists of the Newcastle penal settlement led to an unprecedented visual record of the local Indigenous people.
The extraordinary events of the past few months are unprecedented in our lifetimes, but the response to the Covid-19 pandemic contains echoes of the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. The Library is one of many institutions following the lead of our forebears.
In 1770 the Gweagal people of Kamay (Botany Bay) discovered James Cook and the Endeavour. The Library’s new exhibition explores the eight days that followed.
Established in 1820, this cemetery became the final resting place for many Sydney-siders throughout the 19th century. The land was finally cleared in 1901 to make way for Sydney's new Central Station.
Donald Horne’s unlikely editorship of the mass-market Weekend magazine was a crucial stage in the Lucky Country author’s development as a public intellectual.
An eccentric French nobleman, a letter about Cook’s Endeavour voyage and an enduring bibliographic mystery come together in the Library’s Banks collection.
Buried deep down in the cool darkness of the Library’s framed picture store hangs a beautiful portrait of the young Mrs F O’Brien. It was painted in mid-1841 by naval surgeon-turned artist Maurice Felton from a death mask.
Sifting through the ‘glorious clutter’ of the Thompson family papers offers a sense of early Sydney life and insights into several significant local families.
The Library’s collection offers glimpses into Sydney signwriting and decorating firm Althouse & Geiger that once boasted, 'We tell the world everything it wants to know'.
Eric Thompson’s career as an architect, artist and filmmaker highlights the close connection between architecture and design in the development of the film industry.
!['Portrait Gallery' c. 1870, from the Earngey album [Photographic scenes and portraits of Fijian natives, Aborigines of Queensland and Clarence River NSW, British Royalty and the Exhibition Building at Prince Alfred park, 1870-1875]](https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/styles/home_page__tile__desktop__nav__2_1_/public/a627003.jpg?itok=0ojBx_Jd×tamp=1519866263 "'Portrait Gallery' c. 1870, from the Earngey album [Photographic scenes and portraits of Fijian natives, Aborigines of Queensland and Clarence River NSW, British Royalty and the Exhibition Building at Prince Alfred park, 1870-1875]")
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