Hyde Park, Sydney

The park was a racecourse before it was a park. It had been common land — grazing, firewood, sport — until Macquarie's proclamation of 1810 named it Hyde Park and set it aside for the "Recreation and Amusement of the Inhabitants of the Town, and as a Field of Exercise for the Troops". The troops obliged: the officers of the 73rd Regiment laid a racecourse on it to improve the breed of army horse, and were racing on 15, 17 and 19 October. Cricket followed in the 1820s. The formal axis of fig avenues and bronze monuments is a much later idea laid over a field.

The field is what John Rae drew. Rae worked with a camera obscura, tracing the projected view rather than composing it, which is why they are trusted where a more artistic hand would not be. His Hyde Park, taken from Elizabeth Street and assembled across several sheets into a 180-degree sweep, reads almost as a survey: riders and walkers on the fenced path, groups sitting on the grass, a tent pitched in the middle distance, and cricket going on in more than one place at once.

Read the skyline behind them. The Gothic church across the grass is old St Mary's with its separate square campanile — the building that burned down in 1865, not the one standing there now, whose spires went unbuilt until 2000. Along the ridge are Lyons Terrace, Darlinghurst Gaol and Sydney College, which a later hand has annotated as "now Grammar School", and further along the Woolloomooloo windmills on a hill that has not had one in a very long time.

Worth knowing what you are looking at: Rae's 1842 views are photographs taken in 1893 of drawings made in 1842, issued as an album by the Government Printer fifty years later. The date on the picture is the date of the scene, not of the sheet.

A century on the same ground is unrecognisable and completely familiar: a path under big figs, benches, pigeons, a man in an overcoat, and the new cathedral's tower above the trees.