Department of Psychology Museum

The oldest and largest psychology collection in Australia, known as the Psychology Museum, is held at the School of Psychology at The University of Sydney. The collection comprises over a thousand early laboratory and mental testing artefacts, with the addition of documentary, photographic and audio-visual materials.

The museum must have presumably started in the 1980s, for which no clear evidence is available. In 2004 the School's accommodation in the MacCallum and Brennan Buildings, adjacent to the Main Quadrangle, was extensively refurbished. The bulk of the Museum collection remains in temporary storage pending further refurbishment of the Griffith Taylor Building.

The Sydney University is the first established School of Psychology in Australia and are currently one of the largest and most prestigious. Until the early 1930's this was the only university in Australia offering a full course in psychology. Psychology was first formally taught in the university from the 1880s as part of Philosophy and from 1921 in a semi-autonomous department of Psychology.

With the creation of the McCaughey Chair, Psychology became a fully autonomous department in 1929. For the first 70 years, five figures stand out as having exercised a major shaping influence on the direction of the Department, each of them, as the dates below indicate, serving on the staff for at least 20 years.

In 1929 H.T. Lovell was appointed to a full chair. For nearly a quarter of a century H. T. Lovell and A. H. Martin were the only permanent members of the Psychology staff. Lovell was succeeded to the Chair in 1945 by his student W. M. O'Neil, who was in turn succeeded by his student, R. A. Champion, in 1965. With the expansion of the Department a second Chair was created and taken up by another of O'Neil's students, J. P. Sutcliffe, in 1966.

The museum's collections includes photographs and lecture notebooks of the early professors. Items lists of the library and photographic collections were prepared by the museum.