Wynyard in the 1840s

Before it was a square it was a parade ground, and the barracks that made it are still standing. A long two-storey military range runs along the skyline above the tiled roofs, with a verandahed cottage and a brick warehouse in front of it — soldiers' quarters put up in stages between 1792 and 1818, on the ground the colony had been drilling on since almost the beginning.

They went in 1848. The garrison moved out to the new Victoria Barracks at Paddington, the land was subdivided for shops and houses, and the open centre of the old Barrack Square was kept back as a public square named for General Edward Buckley Wynyard, who commanded the British forces here from 1848 to 1853. It was fenced and planted as a recreation ground in 1875. So a photograph of the barracks is a photograph of the last few years of a use that had run for half a century, and the reason there is a green square in the middle of the city today.

Around it is the town at Church Hill in 1842, drawn from life. George Street runs north from King Street past a corner premises lettered "Fishers City Depot," carts and pedestrians on an unpaved roadway. York Street looks south to the single-storey arcaded market building with its central dome and finial — the produce markets on the block later cleared for the Queen Victoria Building. And on Church Hill in 1845 the Dove and Olive Branch keeps its licence under Ann Bushby, her name painted above the door and on the hanging sign, boards on the wall advertising Wright's Australian Beer.

Read the signwriting. In 1840s Sydney it is most of what survives of who was there.