Hyde Park Barracks

The architect who designed this building was a convicted forger. Francis Greenway was transported to the colony for the crime of forging a financial document, and when he arrived, Governor Macquarie saw his talent and put him to work. Greenway designed this barracks so well that Macquarie granted him a full pardon. He literally designed his way out of a prison sentence. His face ended up on the Australian ten-dollar note -- the only convicted criminal to appear on the country's currency.

By eighteen-forty, thirteen hundred convicts slept here. At one point, convicts made up almost eighty percent of the colony's entire population. Think about that ratio. This was not a prison in a free society -- it was more like a forced labour camp that happened to have a few free people managing it.

The building is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Australian Convict Sites listing, which recognises the transportation system as unprecedented in world history. Roughly one hundred and sixty-two thousand convicts were shipped to Australia between seventeen-eighty-eight and eighteen-sixty-eight. This was the largest forced migration in modern history outside the slave trade.

But here is the detail that will stay with you. For two hundred years, rats nested in the roof cavity above the convict sleeping quarters. They dragged scraps of fabric, buttons, clay pipes, and personal items belonging to convicts up into the ceiling. When archaeologists finally opened the roof space, they found an accidental archive -- hundreds of fragments of convict life preserved by vermin. Rat curators. The rodents did what no museum could have done, building a collection of ordinary objects from people history forgot.

The rat-collected artefacts are on display inside. They are genuinely moving.