Three university collections — antiquities, natural history and art — in one 2020 building, free, and almost unvisited.
Opened in November 2020, the Chau Chak Wing brought together three separate University of Sydney collections that had been scattered around the campus for over a century.
Entry is free.
The Nicholson Collection
The largest collection of antiquities in the southern hemisphere, begun in 1860 by Sir Charles Nicholson, who bought extensively in Egypt and Italy.
Egyptian material including mummies, coffins and a substantial holding from excavations the university funded. Greek and Cypriot pottery, Roman glass and sculpture, Near Eastern material.
The museum has done serious provenance work and displays the results, including on the circumstances of nineteenth-century collecting.
The Macleay Collection
Natural history, assembled by the Macleay family from the 1790s — insects in particular, with around a million specimens, alongside birds, mammals, ethnographic material and one of Australia’s oldest scientific photographic archives.
The Macleay entomology holding is internationally significant and includes type specimens.
The University Art Collection
Australian and international art including a strong Aboriginal holding, plus historical portraits and the university’s own contemporary commissions.
Ambassadors and repatriation
The museum’s First Nations material is presented with community involvement, and the university has an active repatriation programme for ancestral remains and cultural material, which the displays address directly rather than in a footnote.
The building
Johnson Pilton Walker, in sandstone and glass, with a public forecourt. Three floors, well lit, and designed so that the objects rather than the architecture carry it.
The campus
Worth an hour on its own. The Quadrangle — Victorian Gothic sandstone in the manner of Oxford, begun 1855 — is one of the finest nineteenth-century buildings in Australia, with the Great Hall modelled on Westminster Hall. The lawn in front of it is open to walk on.
The university is Australia’s oldest, founded 1850.
Practicalities
Open daily except public holidays. Free. Two hours is right.
Newtown is a fifteen-minute walk south-west and is the obvious place to eat afterwards.
More Museums
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Free, doubled in size in 2022, and holding the best collection of Aboriginal art in any state gallery.
Australian Museum
The oldest museum in Australia, with a First Nations gallery that has been substantially rethought.
Museum of Contemporary Art
An Art Deco maritime services building on the quay, full of contemporary art, free, with a rooftop café.