Australiana Pioneer Village is a heritage-listed open-air museum at Rose Street, Wilberforce, New South Wales, an outer suburb of Sydney, Australia.

The land on which Australiana Pioneer Village is situated was farmland recognised as essential to the survival of colonial New South Wales, being one of the earliest grants made in Australia.

Located in the District of Mulgrave Place, the third mainland settlement of the colony, the 30 acre grant was registered to William MacKay on 1 May 1797, but by 1809 at least part of it was in the possession of Joshua Rose.

A man who relished challenges, whether competing in gruelling Australian car trials or being part of the 1940s group who pioneered water-skiing, Bill McLachlan fashioned a vision: to save part of the Hawkesbury's historical legacy, and to demonstrate its pioneering accomplishments [5][4] In an era before New South Wales heritage legislation such an enterprise had to be carried out privately, and resiting endangered buildings was one of few options open.

It was a very natural option in the Hawkesbury district where there was, and still is, a long tradition of adaptation of buildings, both public and private, often involving reuse of materials or transfer complete to another site.

Brian Bushell of Wilberforce brought the small Bee House shop from McGraths Hill and others transported the Riverstone General Store and Jack Greentree's garage which became the "Bank of Australasia".

An award-winning heritage video made by Hawkesbury City Council was partly shot at the Village in 1994 and it was featured on Telstra's telephone book cover in 1998.

[10][4] This cottage and its curtilage were originally part of the land parcel Bill McLachlan purchased from John Rose and on which he constructed the Australiana Pioneer Village.

A Cobcroft building of the nineteenth century was close to the existing barn and its archaeological remains can be seen at 496 Wilberforce Road (on an empty paddock that today is part of the Australian Pioneer Village).

Local State Emergency Services personnel were actively involved in operating the far flung check points and co-ordinating the incoming radio reports from each one.

Edward Sydney Paull [no connection to Samuel Paul] bought the property in the 1930s together with the adjoining premises to the West (now the Gazette office) where he conducted a grocery business, expanding that he ran in March Street in one of the cottages recently conserved as part of the Richmond Town Centre.

[4] Built at McGraths Hill c.1879 as part of a tearoom and shop complex, this building was used as a retail outlet for honey made from Box-Gum and from Patterson's Curse, now branded a weed but marketed as "Salvation Jane".

Bill Mangold who offered the house to Hawkesbury City Council for the Australiana Pioneer Village building remembers living there as a child with his grandmother, Phoebe the wife of Gottlieb II, after his grandfather's death.

[19][4] The schoolroom plan is by W. E. Kemp, Architect and was designed as an 8th Class (small) school able to give accommodation for 40 pupils under the space formula of the revolutionary Public Instruction Act of 1880, at a cost of (£228.5.3).

[4] Originally built between c. 1890 and 1920s in Ocean Street, Kogarah, this cottage was bought by Jack Griffiths, a Kensington dentist, and removed for him to Freemans Reach in 1950 or 1951 by Harvey Fotheringham who ran a fleet of trucks transporting market produce to Sydney.

Clarke recalls that Jack Griffiths came to her house, at Earle Street Wilberforce in 1943 to attend to her father's teeth in the dining room, while the Bushell children including Marj.

[23] His handwriting and ability to compose letters show him a well-education man, while his character was vouched for by the Sackville Reach Schoolmaster, Mr Britten, who described him as "a thoroughly reliable and trustworthy person".

The concrete passenger station building stands at the Zig Zag Railway at whilst the wooden goods shed was taken to Australiana Pioneer Village by Silvio Biancotti in 1970 in one piece.

It has a roof of corrugated steel, simple barge boards and splayed weatherboard cladding to the sides and rear, probably dating from the early twentieth century.

[4] Australiana Pioneer Village [APV] is a rare example in New South Wales of the worldwide interest in the 1960s and 1970s in creating heritage places by transferring historic buildings from elsewhere to a single site for educational purposes.

[4] The village created in 1970 by the vision of one man has attracted fierce loyalties among the families originally associated with the buildings and among a wide range of people, local, national and international, who value the place for its educational and historical attributes.

[4] The cross-section of rural life presented at Australiana Pioneer Village, including the cultural diversity, Aboriginal, Jamaican and German as well as Anglo-Celtic, represented in the origins of its component parts, has attracted an annual visitation exceeding 30,000 and has been successful with school groups from a wide catchment.

Australiana Pioneer Village demonstrates to a wide audience human activity that is in grave danger of being lost and is outstanding because of its integrity and the community esteem in which it is held.

The site is part of the original curtilage of Rose Cottage, a slab building of the Macquarie period already on the NSW State Heritage Register, which is immediately adjacent to APV but in the ownership of a separate private trust.

One of the houses in APV, moreover, the so-called "Kenso" cottage was itself originally built in Kogarah but was moved to Freemans Reach as a residence twenty years before it was finally transferred to Wilberforce.

APV was the creation of Dugald (Bill) McLachlan (1917–1971), an industrial chemist who has significance as a pioneer of water-skiing on the Hawkesbury, as well as some fame in car rallies.

The wide dirt single street of the hamlet provides a telling vista of the principal structures and activities, framed by the wooden church at the south end.

The APV has attracted fierce loyalties both among the families originally connected with the buildings themselves and among a wide range of people who value the place for its educational and historical attribute.

At the same time, the survival of these buildings and the research which they have prompted about their original location and the people who were associated with them has made possible on an ongoing basis the acquisition of new knowledge about the social and family history of ordinary rural Australians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The homes are a remarkable cross-section of the unpretentious cottages occupied by so many members of a farming community in the state in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, while the service buildings give a reasonable sampling of the everyday environment of a country village.