The Barracks Museum is a battered looking, forbidding sandstone pile crowned with a clock and the words “L. Macquarie, Esq., Governor 1817.” According to Ruth Park:

Hyde Park Barracks were designed as a male convict dormitory. They were built in two years, and from 1822 were occupied by up to nine hundred convicts… There were twelve well ventilated wards, each in charge of a watchman, who had to summon the guard if fighting or sodomy took place. The men slept in hammocks, and were called at sunrise to a nourishing breakfast of porridge, which they hated.

For years, also according to Park, the barracks were neglected, used occasionally as government office buildings, and more or less constantly threatened with demolition by Australians still a wee bit sensitive about their origins as a penal colony. Now, of course, that’s changed. It’s a museum, its story laid out and graphically depicted with that weird combination of anger, regret, pride, and relish with which modern Australians view their history.

The exhibits include walls where the layers of paint and the old woodwork and brickworkare are preserved and labeled, murals depicting Sydney’s early, harrowing history, several mummified rats, clay pipe bowels and discarded shoes, a revoltingly realistic plastic facsimile of the watery soup the convicts were fed, an upstairs room, peopled only with wooden silhouettes of various past convicts and the almost illegible early 19th century paperwork offering their particulars. Ghostly voices over the sound system read quotes from convict histories, and a reconstruction of the room where the inmates slept is hung with brown hammocks that look like discarded insect skins. You can even look through the original holes in the wall where warders kept an eye on their charges.

I walked back downstairs to the main room with the murals. A teacher had led her class of eight-year-olds in and they were all settled on a bench in their uniforms (boys in blue shorts, white shirts, blue jackets and beanies, girls in blue skirts and white blouses, all carrying backpacks) to listen to her lecture about the barracks.

Which was unlike anything I ever heard at Slidell Grammar. “Now, children,” she said, holding up something that looked like a prop from a Vincent Price movie. “Who can tell me what this is? Nobody? Very well. It’s called a cat o’ nine tails. See the little knots on the ends…?”

Certainly not the kind of thing Mrs. Wiggins would have told us, which is a pity because I would have been as delighted and fascinated as those kids plainly were.