Old Sydney Town

Old Sydney Town was a small open-air museum and theme park which operated from 1975 until 2003 in the town of Somersby, near Gosford, New South Wales, Australia. Once a living tribute to the early years of Sydney's colonial settlement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the town is now used as a location for film and television production.

The park was opened in 1975 by Gough Whitlam. It was developed by architect Frank Fox with the help of the Federal Government and the Bank of NSW.

Noted historian and distinguished heritage architect Robert Irving was the Research Director at OST for several years from the establishment of the project, when Frank Fox was the owner and entrepreneur and before anything new was erected. At the time he was a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales and, at Frank Fox’s request, gathered a research staff of four people to prepare the documentation for the buildings to be erected. The project was focussed on the pre-Macquarie period and the ideal of unimpeachable authenticity. Its overall control was initially in the hands of Fox and the Bank of NSW.

When Robert Irving was Year Master of the first year of the architecture course, it was arranged that the first year students should erect the very first buildings at OST as a major component of their first year studies. All 130 students, divided into 13 groups, carried out historical research for each one of their chosen buildings, made scale models, calculated the required materials and prepared ordering lists, in the process learning the simple trades as necessary for each building at the Randwick workshop of the UNSW. Then afterwards they spent two weeks camping on the site and building each structure. A dozen members of staff lived there with Robert Irving for this time too as supervisors. Frank Fox arranged accommodation and catering as well as obtaining and delivering the materials. In that fortnight we built and mostly finished the thirteen buildings, learning to lay bricks, wattle-and-daub, shingles, tiles, thatch and other primitive materials just as the convicts were known to have used. Perhaps the most interesting to be erected was Bennelong’s Hut, the original having been the first privately occupied brick building erected in Sydney. Workmen at the site afterwards finished off what the students had been unable to complete. The whole exercise was a very successful and memorable learning exercise for the first year students (and for the staff).

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