Below you’ll find a changing selection of highlights from our collection and past exhibitions, plus fascinating stories and hands-on activities for your next crafternoon session.
We hope you will check in regularly to gain inspiration and discover something new.
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Member magazine
Unlocked is filled with great articles and posted straight to your door. Check out a selection of past issues now available online.
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Kids activities
Get creative with our activities and crafts inspired by our museums and stories. Find printouts, art projects and more.
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Discover SLM
Your weekly summary of what's new, including in the kitchen and the garden. Settle in for some good long reads.
Collection highlights
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Grave marker
In 1968 a young New Zealand couple, Bruce and Jan Rosemergy, on a grand tour of Europe arrived at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. Gallipoli in the 1960s was very different from the place it is today. Access to the area was restricted, and signs of the fighting and its aftermath, such as trenches and relics, were still evident. ‘The events of 1915 became even more touching, tangible and personal for us when we found and retrieved a metal strip lying in the sand’, Bruce and Jan recall. The strip was inscribed 32. TPR. MURRAY. V.W. 6TH. They souvenired the small war relic and tucked it safely away. Read more here
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Two-up kips
Two-up is a game of chance which involves people standing around a circular ring and betting on which side two coins thrown high into the air from a ‘kip’ will land. It is inextricably linked in the Australian psyche with ‘diggers’, a term for Australian soldiers, and in most places can only be played legally on ANZAC day. In the past, players in Sydney were known to meet on wharves where they could escape by diving into the water. Offenders were generally fined a small amount of money by the courts. Find out more.
Watch & listen
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The pleasure garden
Duration: 09:08
Duration: 09:08
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Growing up at Elizabeth Farm
Duration: 5:38
Growing up at Elizabeth Farm
Curator Scott Hill talks about childhood and the Macarthur family at Elizabeth Farm in the early years of colonial Sydney.
Duration: 5:38
Exhibition highlights
Underworld: mugshots from the roaring twenties
Criminals thrived during the turbulent 1920s when rapid societal change led to the opening up of new illicit markets for entrepreneurial felons. Sydney’s police photographers captured the zeitgeist of the era in these unexpectedly candid mug shots of cocaine sellers and addicts, sly-grog purveyors and small-time criminals. Bosses, bruisers, plotters and petty crims are captured by the camera as they stare down the lens and into history. Discover more.
Marion Hall Best: Interiors
This exhibition colourfully charted the work of Marion Hall Best (1905-1988), one of Australia’s first and most influential independent interior designers, displaying original furniture, fabrics, furnishings and design schemes. Best’s career spanned four decades from the mid–1930s, a period of transition from the department store decorators and art furnishers of the 1920s, to the independent professional designers of today. Discover more.
A Thousand Words
‘A picture tells a thousand words.’ This adage is the inspiration for an innovative exhibition, in which the public becomes the curator. A Thousand Words presents 100 of the most compelling photographic images from the rich collections of Sydney Living Museums and the State Archives and Records Authority of NSW, created between the 1880s and the 1980s. Discover more.
Upcoming membersʼ events
Meet the team
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Edward Washington, Program Producer
Ed is part of the learning team, which provides curriculum-based programs to more than 60,000 students and teachers every year. He is passionate about using objects, places and personal stories to engage students in history and archaeology. Read more.
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Jacqui Newling, Assistant Curator
Jacqui specialises in place-based social history and heritage, bringing meaningful stories from our past to contemporary audiences through various forms of media, from exhibitions to interactive opportunities for visitors in our museums. Read on.
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Megan Martin, Head, Collections & Access
Megan has a particular interest in the working of the historical imagination, in teasing out the meanings of objects in museums collections and in crafting the stories that can be recovered/discovered through a close reading of those items of material culture. Read on.
Contact us
Membership Office
W slm.is/members
T +61 2 8072 4515
E membership@slm.com.au