The Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney

Sydney's Botanic Garden was laid out on Farm Cove in 1816, on ground the colony had already tried and failed to grow wheat on, which makes it the oldest scientific institution in Australia and the oldest botanic garden in the southern hemisphere. Look for what a Victorian garden was for: gates, urn-lined paths, an equestrian statue, a carriageway, people photographed at leisure on a Sunday.

The exception dominates the collection. In 1879 the Garden Palace was thrown up on the garden's Macquarie Street edge in eight months — a vast timber-and-glass exhibition hall designed by the Colonial Architect James Barnet for the Sydney International Exhibition, which opened on 17 September that year. Its dome was the largest thing on the skyline and appears in these frames above the pond, the way a cathedral appears above a town.

It stood for three years. On the morning of 22 September 1882 it burned to the ground, and because several government departments had been storing records inside it, the fire took with them the early land and squatting records of New South Wales — along with an irreplaceable collection of Aboriginal artefacts. The photograph of the burning is one of the few images anyone has of it. What is left today is the gates, the garden, and an outline in the grass.