Hyde Park Barracks

Designed by convict architect Francis Greenway and built between 1817 and 1819, this UNESCO World Heritage-listed sandstone building on Macquarie Street housed 15,000 male convicts, then 40,000 immigrant women. The museum within uses 4,000-plus original artefacts and a location-aware audio soundscape to animate those lives — spare, specific, and harder to shake than most history you'll encounter in this city.