Annual Giving: Sharing our stories

Museums of History NSW is responsible for a portfolio of significant heritage places dating from between 1793 and 1950. From Australia’s oldest surviving homestead to a grand harbourside estate, working-class terrace houses in The Rocks, and a mid-20th-century modernist icon, each site requires ongoing specialised care and attention. MHNSW works in collaboration with experienced heritage consultants and traditional tradespeople to undertake conservation works to preserve our places, making them accessible to the public.

Each place presents unique conservation challenges that require considerable resources, careful research, investigation, planning, and specialist skills to achieve a successful result. Essential conservation works are funded by the NSW Government; however, we require additional funding to refresh and interpret our places for a more meaningful visitor experience.

By donating to heritage conservation, you are helping to ensure that our extraordinary places will endure for the enjoyment and education of current and future generations.

Museums of History NSW helps students from NSW Government schools in low socio-economic areas to access and experience our acclaimed onsite learning programs through our Learning Subsidy, which provides subsidised transportation for students to participate in curriculum-linked programs.

Providing subsidies for bus transport significantly reduces the expense associated with school excursions, giving students from all backgrounds across NSW the opportunity to discover how people lived in the past and the important events and stories that unfolded at our places.

Your support for the Learning Subsidy ensures that all students can engage with history at MHNSW sites.

Museums of History NSW is committed to building deep and enduring relationships with First Nations people, working in partnership with communities to recognise the complex and contested histories of our places, archives and collections.

In 2024–25, we will work with the support of Sydney coastal communities to identify, record and share First Nations heritage values associated with the site of Australia’s first Government House, where the Museum of Sydney stands today. Artefacts from the site’s archaeological collection will be accessible to community representatives for the sharing and exchange of cultural knowledge. From this, First Nations peoples’ connection to the site and its broader area will be documented, forming the basis of the articulation of heritage values. We will also work to have these values inscribed into the National Heritage Listing for the site.

As an extension of this project, MHNSW intends to appoint a First Nations Resident Fellow in History or Historical Archaeology to interpret the findings and publish new accounts of the history of the first Government House site. The Fellow will examine the site’s archaeology as both evidence of, and a lens into, the intersection of two world views in one place.

To achieve this goal and present the multiple perspectives of this significant site to a broad range of audiences, we need to raise $100,000.

The State Archives Collection documents the daily work of the NSW Government and its agencies from 1788 to today. This vast collection records history as it happens, providing valuable and at times life-changing evidence of events and decisions that have shaped, and continue to shape, our nation, communities and lives.

Digitisation preserves this unique collection and assists research, enabling local and international communities and future generations to access, learn from and appreciate the history of NSW.

We have launched an ambitious project in collaboration with family history and local historical societies to digitise and index the Small Debts Registers. These registers were created by the courts of petty sessions (now the local courts) throughout NSW. From 1846, these courts had the authority to settle small debts (defined as debts of up to £10), and the registers are invaluable for recording the minutiae of 19th-century life. In documenting day-to-day transactions and disagreements over goods sold, lodgings, unpaid wages and loans, they provide remarkable insights into relationships within local communities.

To complete the digitisation of these extraordinarily rich local records, we need to raise $88,000.

Museums of History NSW supports researchers, heritage practitioners, designers, educators and artists to connect and engage with history through our sites and collections, creating material that offers fresh insights into and diverse perspectives on the history of NSW.

We seek donor support to help us deliver a renewed fellowship program in 2025. This program will invite a researcher, heritage practitioner, designer, educator or artist to research MHNSW’s collection (incorporating our historic buildings and sites and their objects, the NSW State Archives Collection and the Caroline Simpson Library Collection) to discover knowledge and insights that can be applied towards scholarly or creative works, heritage practices or learning programs.

To support a fellowship at MHNSW, we need to raise $25,000.