NSW’s $1B Museum Opens Amid Parramatta Anger

Powerhouse Parramatta opened after 11 years of planning, three years of construction, two parliamentary inquiries, four NSW premiers and a bill of $1 billion. But banners at the opening declaring “not a museum” and “vale Willow Grove” carried a community dispute into the state’s carefully staged celebration: the historic building was demolished for the redevelopment, and residents challenged both the project’s remit and its collection.

“Five years after the demolition of Willow Grove, the community's blood still boils over this project,” heritage advocate Suzette Meade said. “The NSW government underestimated the damage it caused, the disrespect it showed and how deeply it disenfranchised the people of Parramatta. We will never forget.” The ceremony began with a Welcome to Country. Seven of the eight children who attended the 2019 groundbreaking returned as young adults, while four-year-old museum collaborators Theodore Bui, Jason Cilia and Tyler Pham Luu donated toys to The Dark.

A state project, and a contested price

Former premier Mike Baird announced plans to relocate the Powerhouse in the state’s most populous region weeks before the 2015 election. The NSW government now describes the museum as Sydney’s answer to The Smithsonian and London’s British Museum. About 20,000 people were expected over the opening weekend.

Labor Premier Chris Minns cut the ribbon with 18 students from Menindee Central School, the museum’s first students to stay overnight. Shortly after 10am, Minns declared it “open for business” and said Labor’s earlier opposition had been wrong. “This is fantastic. This is going to be great for western Sydney. It's going to be great for NSW,” he said, calling the museum “city shaping.”

The building, designed by Moreau Kusunoki and Genton, has a striking exoskeleton. Visitors saw five exhibitions, but entry to the marquee show, Task Eternal, costs $30 for visitors over 16. Access to James Turrell's Shangri La (Over the Hump) costs another $10. The other shows are free.

Task Eternal explores space and flight in four chapters. The children’s exhibition The Dark includes a meteor tunnel, night forest and spaceship; timed entry applies to Es Devlin’s The Turning, and visitors had to keep phones out of sight in sealed pouches in The Dark. Children paddled in a shallow pond in the Indigenous exhibition Overflow, with views through glass windows toward the central business district and Blue Mountains.

The promised museum meets the operating hours

From November 30, exhibition hours were set at 10am to 5pm, with late entry on Fridays. That schedule replaces original plans for a 24-hour museum with nightly events, overnight stays and apartments for visiting artists and scientists. The opening of 30 serviced apartments on the top floor was delayed; their fit-out cost more than $3 million, while logistics and management remained under review. The hours announcement also raised questions about staffing needs.

Powerhouse said it had secured 18 contracted bookings for its commercial spaces through June 2027, from business, industry, cultural and government organisations. The museum’s scale and operating costs were central to Minns’s pledge of sufficient funding. “It's not cheap, and it does cost taxpayer money, but we believe this is an investment in the future,” he said. “The fixed costs of this beautiful building mean that you've got to have world-class exhibitions inside their halls.”

Arts minister John Graham acknowledged the absent chief executive, Lisa Havilah, who had been stood down 72 days earlier pending a formal misconduct investigation. Appointed in 2019, Havilah had been a critical force in the building’s design, fitout and exhibitions, but wasn’t invited to the opening. Minns said, “There's an investigation taking place, and we need to make sure that's done. But I think that you can do two things at the same time. You can pay tribute to the enormous work that Lisa and others have put into the institution while respecting the need for an independent investigation.”

Asked whether the inquiry would be resolved quickly, Graham said: “One of the issues with that process is people have got a right to be able to contribute more material and ask for more time. We will not short-circuit that process.”

Who gets a cultural institution

The project marks a shift in state arts spending, which had remained concentrated east of Sydney Olympic Park since the Australian Museum opened in 1827. Arts advocate John Kirkman, who served on an advisory committee seeking funding equity for Western Sydney, compared the Powerhouse with the Sydney Opera House. He recalled growing up in Granville in a fibro house without books or art and travelling by train to the Powerhouse at Ultimo.

“As a young bloke growing up in Parramatta I walked past this site ... on my way to school. There was a car park here,” Powerhouse Trust president David Borger said. He had lobbied for Western Sydney’s first state-significant cultural institution. “It was the ugliest building on the Parramatta River, and never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that we'd actually have this magnificent cultural institution built. We haven't done anything like this, frankly, since the Opera House. But there's a new house in town.”