Chester Hill, 2004

Location

The Sydney office is located at Chester Hill in Sydney’s south-west approximately 30 km (45 minutes) from the central business district.

The complex is set on 2.7 hectares and comprises two buildings dedicated to records storage, joined by an administrative centre. Stage 1, incorporating a single level storage area and a two-storey administrative centre, was completed in 1972. The Stage 2 three-storey storage area was completed in 1975.

The entire facility has a floor area of 22,000 square metres and currently holds approximately 145,000 linear metres of records in a wide variety of physical formats. It is the largest National Archives repository in the country.

The facility has climate-controlled storage for paper records and specialised temperature and humidity-controlled vaults for a range of audiovisual material. Included in specialised areas are paper and photograph preservation laboratories as well as audiovisual preservation facilities. We have a reading room in Chester Hill for public and official researchers.

The collection in Sydney

The oldest document in the National Archives’ collection held in Sydney is a Deed of Title signed on 1 May 1804 by Governor Philip Gidley King. The deed allows the allotment of land in Pitts Row (now Pitt Street) to be transferred to Matthew Kearns for 14 years. This site later became the ‘Pitt Street Extension’ of the Sydney General Post Office.

Other highlights of the collection include New South Wales post office records dating from 1830s; plans and drawings of post offices, customs houses, army and navy establishments, and Government House Sydney dating from 1860s including original coloured drawings by the Colonial Architect James Barnet.

Also included are NSW colonial trademark records from the 1860s and copyright records from the 1870s; meteorological journals of the Government Observatory, Parramatta, from 1822 to 1836; records of the Cockatoo Island dockyard from the 1860s; records of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine from the 1930s; and sound and moving image collections including Damien Parer’s Kokoda Front Line, Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s declaration of peace on 15 August 1945, decimal currency television and radio commercials, and the ABC’s Seven Little Australians.

Fitzgerald Avenue, Bunnerong (now Maroubra)

Sydney

120 Miller Road
CHESTER HILL
NSW 2162
Tel: (02) 9645 0110
Fax: (02) 9645 0108
Locked Bag 4
CHESTER HILL NSW 2162