New South Wales (Sydney Region)

First Government Place, a public square in front of the museum, preserves the site of the original Government House: most of its foundations are marked out on the pavement. The museum itself is built of honey-coloured sandstone blocks, using sandstone tooling representative of the earliest days of the colony right up to modern times - you can trace the stylistic development from bottom to top. Near the entrance, Edge of the Trees, an emotive sculptural installation which was a collaboration between a European and an Aboriginal artist, conveys the complexity of a shared history. You can walk among the massive pillars - some inscribed with the names and words of those who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 or Eora people, others with glass panels through which you can see human hair, ash, feathers or other organic matter suggesting the physical traces of the past - and listen to the haunting, evocative sounds of Eora speech. Entering the museum, you hear a dramatized dialogue between the Eora woman Patyegarang and the First Fleeter Lieutenant Dawes, which gives a strong impression of two cultures meeting and misunderstanding each other. Beneath your feet you can see, through perspex, some of the excavated foundations of Government House.

If you decide to pay to get into the rest of the museum, it's best to go upstairs to the auditorium on level 2 and watch the fifteen-minute video on the museum first. Back on level 1 a video screen extends up through all three levels, showing images of the bush, sea and sandstone Sydney as it was before the arrival of Europeans; elsewhere in the museum other exhibits, such as benches with inlays of spotted gum, are evocative of the bush. On level 2, recordings of Sydney Kooris (Aboriginal people) combine with video images to evoke a picture of these people. The Collectors Chests allow you to really familiarize yourself with history, as you can slide open the glass and steel drawers to examine various fragments found during the archeological dig here and at various sites in The Rocks, including clay pipes in the shape of skulls, Aboriginal artefacts, bone dominoes, coins and ceramic doll parts. The dark and creepy Bond Store on level 3 is the storytelling part of the museum, where holographic "ghosts" relate tales of old Sydney as an ocean port. On the same level, a whole area is devoted to some rather wonderful chronological panoramas of Sydney Harbour with views of the harbour itself from the windows.

The museum also contains an excellent gift shop with a wide range of photos, artworks and books on Sydney.

Near the museum is the expensive, licensed MOS café, on First Government Place; usually filled with executives at lunchtime, it's agreeably peaceful for a coffee at other times. Daily 9.30am-5pm; $6.