Old Government House, Parramatta

This is the oldest public building still standing in Australia. A patch of brick floor survives from Governor Phillip's house of July 1790; the three front rooms went up under Governor Hunter in 1799; and the long Palladian front everyone recognises is Macquarie's, extended from 1815 to a design by his aide Lieutenant John Watts and finished with its two side pavilions in 1818. Ten early governors used it as their country house, and Macquarie in particular preferred Parramatta's air to the sanitation of Sydney Town.

The word for the ground around it is *domain*, and it enters the language here: Macquarie reclaimed the slopes for the governor's own use and made regulations against the public wandering in. Two hundred acres of it are still park, and it is that landscape the 1840s pencil sketches are really about — the house seen small and side-on across open grazing, a team at work in the foreground, cattle standing at the edge of a watercourse, a church spire away in the town.

One of the outbuildings deserves its own look. The bath house was finished in 1823 for Governor Brisbane, who wanted somewhere private to take warm water for his war wounds; Francis Greenway and Standish Harris designed it to pump river water through lead pipes and drain it away through tunnelled brickwork. In 1886 the park trustees turned it into a pavilion, which is how it survives.

Nearly a century on, in 1938, people in top hats, tailcoats and bonnets are standing on the same lawn for Parramatta's 150th anniversary, playing their own great-grandparents in front of the house that watched the originals.