Hyde Park, Sydney

Hyde Park is Sydney's oldest public park, and these photographs catch it a century apart. The earliest looks across it in 1842, when the eastern skyline was Lyons Terrace and the park itself was still closer to a commons — a racecourse and cricket ground before it was a garden — than to the formal axis it became.

In the 1930s the park acquired the two monuments it is now photographed for. The Archibald Fountain went in at the northern end in 1932, paid for by a bequest from J. F. Archibald of the *Bulletin*, who stipulated that it be designed by a French sculptor — François Sicard — to mark the association of France and Australia in the First World War. Two years later, at the Liverpool Street end, Bruce Dellit's Art Deco Anzac Memorial was dedicated on 24 November 1934, with Rayner Hoff's sculpture and a crowd of about a hundred thousand watching the Duke of Gloucester open it.

Between the two the park keeps being a park. The fig avenues that make its two long walks were planted well before either monument, and the ordinary business of the photographs — people walking under them, sitting on the grass, cutting across on the way somewhere else — is the same in 1842 as in 1948.