The Rocks

Grace Karskens

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522848441
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863338
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Rocks is Sydney's earliest surviving neighbourhood. Grace Karskens builds up a vivid picture of the lives of its earliest white inhabitants. A wealth of historical documents, pictures, maps and archaeological evidence allows her to recover the words and gestures, tastes and habits, aspirations and fears, of the dealers, publicans, labourers, artisans, watermen, washerwomen, servants and prostitutes who lived there.
What sort of town did these people make? What did it look like? How did they treat their neighbours? And what of other human relations—how did men and women behave sexually? What did they think was 'moral' behaviour? What were their marriages like? How did they bring up their children?
Grace Karskens shows it was a place very different from the usual images of a brutal 'gaol colony': it was, rather, a preindustrial town, a face-to-face society, marked more by movement and opportunity, dialogue and negotiation than by coercion, discipline and punishment.

The Rocks

Contents

Conversion Table

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I Community and Commonality: The Growth of the Rocks as a Locale

1 ‘This Long & Wished-for Country’

2 Aboriginal People of Sydney

3 Over the Water: Origins and Early Years on the Rocks

4 Patterns of Occupation

5 A Social Profile

6 A Den of Vice? Reputation and Reality

7 The Culture of the Lower Orders

8 Neighbours and Strangers: The Early Rocks Community

9 The Irish

II Family Life

10 Sex

11 Wives and Husbands

12 ‘My Children I love as my life’: Birth, Childhood and Growing Up

13 The Rising Generation: Education, Youth and Coming of Age

III Making a Living

14 ‘Many Laybouring People’

15 Servants and Masters

16 Seamen and Landspeople

17 The Constables

18 Publicans and Dealers

19 The Meaning of Respectability

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Plates

1. The Rocks in 1835

Surveyor General’s Office, ‘Saint Philip’, 1835, New South Wales State Archives Map 286

2. Glover Cottages, Kent Street, built in 1822

David Payne, 1997

3. Cadman’s Cottage, 1960s, below George Street, before restoration

Author’s collection

4. Steps connecting Harrington with Gloucester Street

David Payne, 1997

5. Reynolds’ Cottage, 28–30 Harrington Street, built c. 1830

David Payne, 1997

6. Unk White, ‘From the Bridge Stairs’

Unk White and Olaf Ruhen, The Rocks Sydney, 1966

7. Francis Fowkes (attrib.), ‘Sketch and Description of the Settlement at Sydney Cove’, 1788

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

8. William Bradley, ‘Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, 1788’

From William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales 1786–1792, manuscript, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

9. Anon., ‘A View of Sydney Cove—Port Jackson March 7th 1792’

Wading Collection, Natural History Museum, London

10. Edward Dayes, ‘Western view of Sydney Cove, 1797’

Petherick Collection, National Library of Australia

11. Edward Dayes, ‘Eastern View of Sydney’ c. 1796

Petherick Collection, National Library of Australia

12. and 13. John William Lewin, ‘Sydney Cove 1808’, views to the west and east of the Cove

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

14. John Eyre, ‘View of Sydney from the West Side of the Cove’, 1810

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

15. H. Stuart Wilson, ‘95 and 97 Cumberland St’, 1902

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

16. John Eyre, ‘View of Part of the River of Sydney in New South Wales Taken from St Phillip’s Church Yard’, c. 1812

From A. West, Publisher, Views of New South Wales, First Series, Sydney, 1813, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

17. Hand-cut pit with channels, which served as an early well, excavated in Gloucester Street, 1994

G. Karskens 1994

18. John Hoskin, ‘Jamieson House, Jamieson Street, Aug. 1934’

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

19. Extract from Harper, ‘Plan of the Allotments or Ground in Sydney’, 1823

New South Wales State Archives Map SZ469

20. William Hawkins’ drawing of his house in Harrington Street at the corner of Argyle Street, 1825

Colonial Secretary’s Correspondence, New South Wales State Archives 4/1824A No. 368, p. 397, 1825

21. John W. Lancashire, ‘View of Sydney Port Jackson, New South Wales taken from y/e Rocks on the Western Side of the Cove’, 1803

Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales

22. Detail from Major James Taylor, ‘The Entrance of Port Jackson, and Part of the Town of Sydney, New South Wales’, 1821

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

23. Augustus Earle, ‘View from the Sydney Hotel’, c. 1826

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

24. Samuel Elyard, ‘The Queen’s Wharf’, 1873

Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales

25. John Carmichael, ‘George Street from the Wharf’, 1829

From John Carmichael, Select Views of Sydney, New South Wales Engraved by John Carmichael, Sydney, A. Hill, 1829, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

26. ‘Corner of Gloucester Street & Cumberland Lane’, 1900

Government Printing Office Collection, New South Wales State Archives COD 121, Aperture Card No. 835

Figures

1. The Rocks and Sydney

Jeffrey Karskens

2. The Rocks, Sydney: modern Sydney Cove Authority boundaries and original location, 1788–c. 1830

Jeffrey Karskens, based on an extract from ‘Parish of St Philip’, 1968, New South Wales State Archives

3. Charles Grimes, ‘Plan of Sydney’, 1800

Redrawn at Department of Lands 1897, Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales

4. Charles Alexander Lesueur, ‘Plan De La Ville de Sydney Capitale des Colonies Anglaises, Aux Terres Australes’, 1802

Published in François Péron, Voyage de Découvertes aux terres Australes . . . Historique . . . Atlas, Paris, 1807, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

5. James Meehan, ‘Plan of the Town of Sydney in New South Wales, 31 October 1807’

copy held in Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

6. Joseph Fowles, drawings of Harrington and Jamieson Streets in 1848

Joseph Fowles, Sydney in 1848, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Conversion Table

1 inch	2.5 centimetres
1 foot	0.3 metre
1 yard	0.9 metre
1 mile	1.6 kilometres
1 acre	0.4 hectare
£1 (one pound)	$2.00
1s (one shilling)	10 cents
1d (one penny)	0.8 cent
1 gallon	4.5 litres
1 ounce	28 grams
1 pound	450 grams

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book germinated a decade ago. I was commissioned to write a brief historical outline of a site between Cumberland and Gloucester streets in the Rocks for the Department of Public Works. While the northern end was a vacant space, an ex-bus station littered with stored building materials, overgrown with creepers, at the southern end were rows of derelict nineteenth-century houses, boarded up (ineffectively) against squatters. But the rear spaces and structures of these houses were intact: laundries, lavatories, washing lines, paved yards and laneways; the whole simply left as it was, though quiet now, and weed-covered from disuse.

In researching that site, I discovered that, despite its billing as ‘birthplace of a nation’, a ‘historic village’ and suchlike, and the considerable sums invested in its restoration and preservation, the Rocks had no serious written history. At the time I was able to write an account from pictures and maps, directories and rate books, and the accounts of early twentieth-century amateur historians. Yet the site remained a mystery, intriguing, an intimate glimpse of the forgotten urban world of the nineteenth century. What were these people like? What kinds of lives had they been able to make here? What individuals, families, communities existed here?

An Australian Postgraduate Research Scholarship awarded in 1991 gave me the opportunity to research and write the Rocks’ history on a full-time basis, Hence the first organizations to be acknowledged and thanked are the Department of Education, Employment and Training, and the Department of History at the University of Sydney. I had the good fortune to have Professor Brian Fletcher as my Ph.D. supervisor. A historian of considerable standing, widely published, and also very busy, he provided enormous support in everything from the broader historical perspectives of colonial life to the minutiae of style and grammar, and well as never-failing encouragement. In the first years he provided sensible and tactful suggestions on keeping the subject under control. The study telescoped with astonishing rapidity from a complete history, down to a history to about 1930; then it was to conclude with outbreak of Plague in 1900; and down once more to a history ending about 1860. Finally it became clear that a study using this methodology, range of fields and amount of detail should cover just the early colonial period, to about 1830. Fortunately the shrinking process terminated there; or I should perhaps have written merely of ‘The Rock’.

For such a seemingly obscure subject, there exists a wealth of information, much of which is held by the Mitchell Library and the Archives Authority of New South Wales. No research of this kind could be carried out without the courteous and helpful people who staff these reading rooms, people who fetch the books, drag out trolleys of old volumes, copy the documents, maps and pictures. Mention should be made of the enlightened staff at the Archives who, confronted with my excited gibberish over having discovered the District Constables’ Notebooks, waived the ten-page limit on xerox copies and provided me with all eighty pages. The statistical and social analysis of streets, households, families and neighbours which was so important to this study was thus made easier.

The Sydney Cove Authority also holds considerable resources for research, particularly in the form of maps and pictures. Here I acknowledge the help of past personnel, heritage architect Noni Boyd, and archaeologists Jane Lydon and Wayne Johnson. The process of research and writing involved discussions and consultations with these people, who work with the Rocks’ material culture, as well as with many other colleagues and friends in the disciplines of both history and archaeology. I was fortunate that Carol Liston was undertaking similar research on the people of Parramatta; many animated and fruitful comparative discussions (and late nights) ensued. Other historians—Rhys Isaac, Stephen Garton, Barrie Dyster, Max Kelly, Julia Home, Shane White, Penny Russell, John Shields, Hilary Carey, Shirley Fitzgerald, Linda Young, Paula Jane Byrne, Terry Kass, Chris Keating, Paul Ashton—have given great assistance, some by reading this and related work, and providing critical comment, others in less formal ways, with suggestions, data, references, contextual perspectives, encouragement, enthusiasm, a patient ear; and so on.

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Table of contents

• The Rocks