Private Pleasures

Figure 2.23 Women and children, who seem to have been called from the houses, pose for the photographer on the steps below the east 

site's residents probably bought groceries from 'P.Stewart cheap cash grocer' in the Susannah Place terrace in Gloucester Street (top right). (SCA) 

135 

\,. • I

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

More than two decades earlier, the Byrne's daughter Catherine married a mariner 

named John Winch in 1827. The Winchs bought one of the two-roomed houses on 

Cumberland Street, No.122, which was built in as part of the Nicholas development 

of the old Cribb land in 1834. Catherine remained here, close to her parents and 

childhood home, until her death in 1841, and John stayed on until 1861, about the 

same time that the old Byrne house was pulled down. This proximity thus infuses 

the small, speculatively built house with meaning: the importance of family ties, and 

of locality. 

Among the things retrieved from a refuse pit at this house, too, was a bone 'convict' 

kit issue knife handle with '23' incised on one side. It was found in deposits dating 

to the 1830s or 1840s, that is, the early years of Catherine and John Winch's 

occupation. The knife dates from no earlier than the 1830s, and was of the sort 

typically issued to convicts under sentence. It may have been purchased from the 

Commissariat by the Winchs and seems to have been used until it was broken and 

then thrown out. While the 1840s marked the end of transportation and a 

groundswell of passionate public opposition to its reintroduction, the association of 

this article with convictism apparently had no negative connotations for the nativeborn 

Catherine and John. After all, their own parents had been convicts. 35 

We have seen that the women of the site came to one anothers' assistance when 

their many babies were born, and to help lay out the bodies of their dead. There 

were spiritual as well as practical dimensions to the rituals following death, in 

particular. Spiritual belief was also materially expressed in the numerous and 

varied religious medals, jewellery and rosaries which seem to be particularly 

associated with women. The religious medals would appear to be the later 

nineteenth century equivalents of the ceramic religious plaques found in the earlier 

contexts. Iacono observes their talisman function as 'household protectors', their 

inscriptions denoting humility and resignation, yet a belief that the Virgin Mary, 

Saint Joseph or guardian angels would intercede pleading for protection and 

mercy: and of course their peculiarly Catholic character. That such meaning could 

be attached to commodities which were mass-produced in their millions is a good 

example of the way people used modern manufactured objects in traditional, very 

personal ways. The fact that they were found across the site, and at other sites 

such as Lilyvale, suggests that such religious beliefs were also communally shared 

and we have parallel evidence for this communality in the documentary record. 

The Registers of St Patrick's and St Michael's churches on the Rocks show that 

when the babies were brought to be baptised, for their spiritual redemption and 

protection, the sponsors, or godparents, who promised to watch over the child's 

spiritual welfare were frequently neighbours from the site, fellow Catholics and 

evidently trusted friends. Andrew Fennelly, the son of Patrick and Catherine, was 

sponsored by Sarah Murphy, who lived nearby in Gloucester Street, in 1865. 

Butcher William Mitchell who had lived close to the Hoseman family for twenty 

years sponsored the son of Alfred and Rosetta Hoseman in 1887; he had also been 

Karskens, Report 136

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

a witness at their wedding. Thomas and Mary Conwell's son Thomas Denys was 

sponsored by the midwife Mary Ann Meddows in 1893; Thomas and Jane Cotter 

were the godparents of Lily Sarah White, the daughter of the corner grocers 

Thomas and Mary White in 1887. The Whites in turn sponsored the son of Joseph 

and Mary Awlsbury in 1889. The Awlsburys lived at 4 Carahers Lane in the 

following year and later ran a lodging house at the old Whaler's Arms hotel. 36 

The site, then speaks of people drawn together by family relations, by the day-today 

transactions in the shops, by the rituals of birth and death, by Catholicism, by 

friendship. All of these were expressed, reinforced or even created by the simple 

fact of living close by one another. 

2.3.4 Clean, Comfortable ... and Respectable? 

'Clean, comfortable and respectable' were the key working class values and 

aspirations identified by Kerreen Reiger in her review of the 1920 Royal 

Commission on the Basic Wage. 37 

It seems from the material record that these 

were values handed down from the nineteenth century generations of working 

people, particularly those of the closing decades. We have seen the unmistakable 

evidence for domesticity, comfort, pleasantness and cleanliness, and for the care of 

personal appearance through clothing, jewellery and grooming, often against 

considerable odds. The 'moralising china' designed to guide and educate children 

in moral behaviour, temperance, frugality, industriousness, and 'good humour' 

(which 'makes them happy' and 'gives them power to bless') is a startling contrast 

to notions of steadfast 'working class' rejection to such 'middle class' cultural 

values. We could add a handsome bowl printed with the head of John Wesley to 

this collection. It was found at 128 Cumberland Street and was very likely the 

possession of Elizabeth Lipscombe and her husband W J Lipscombe, a clerk and 

accountant, who lived there between 1861 and 1870. Although tracing these 

individuals has been difficult, a check on the religion of other Lipscombe families 

revealed that they were all Wesleyans. Wesleyanism attracted the humbler folk of 

the working and lower middle classes and was characterised partly by 

sabbatarianism, strict morals and the prohibition of drinking and dancing, as well a 

belief that God rewarded those who worked hard. Material success was therefore a 

sign of God's grace. This bowl, like the presence of the Lipscombes themselves, 

reflects the continued blurring of middling and working people, and hence 

overlapping culture, which had been a feature of the early Rocks, was still occurring 

well into the 1860s. 38 


---------- ---- - ----·· ------------- - ------- --- - ---------- ----- 

Figure 2.24 Religious medals and jewellery were most likely the possessions of the many Catholics 

who lived on the site. The medals bear inscriptions of faith and prayers for protection ; the jewellery 

includes a cross intricately carved from bog oak and remains of rosary sets. (Ionas Kaltenbach 1996 

138 

• 

•

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

A considerable number of artefacts from the site are associated with personal 

hygiene and care: they date from the very period when reporters like Jevons 

described the people there as having 'dirty clothes, slovenly manner and repulsive 

countenance'. Besides the enormous range of dress accoutrements and jewellery, 

there are combs made of wood, tortoiseshell, casein and vulcanite. A bone 

clothes, hat or furniture brush and tortoiseshell shoe horn kept possesions in good 

condition. A delicately-carved fish with rotating fins found under the floor of No.5 

Carahers Lane appears to be a rather novel nail cleaner. Ceramic ewers, 

washbowls and soap dishes carried on the traditions of cleanliness established in 

the convict period. From the 1830s, men slicked down their hair with oil from 

rectangular bottles and women daubed themselves with perfume from bottles 

which were identified only by manufacturers name before the 1860s, but later came 

in an enormous range of indulgent, ornate shapes. 39 

There is evidence that, towards the end of the century, working men began to take 

more interest in their appearance. Iacono notes amongst the considerable amount 

of women's jewellery, rising numbers of men's jewellery items - the collar and cuff 

studs, handsome and even extravagant 'bachelor buttons' and so on. Men also 

seem to have taken a liking to wearing non-prescriptive spectacles which would 

have given them a sober, respectable, dignified appearance. Stretched across 

their stomachs and looped through buttonholes in their waistcoats were Albert 

chains attached to handsome watches tucked in side pockets. Pocket watches had 

been made 'cheap, sturdy and reliable' from the 1870s, and time-keeping had 

become both portable and democratised, among men at least. They seem to have 

been a particularly male symbol of respectability and status. Bars from the chains, 

and watch keys and parts were recovered from the site; clearly these are the 

working men whom Graeme Davison described when he wrote: 

But on high days and holidays, when he donned his best suit, and 

joined his fellows at a trade union picnic, or took his family on an outing, 

he would also be likely to wear ... this special badge of the selfregulated, 

provident, punctual workingman. 40 

While we may consider the rise of domesticity as a sign of 'turning inwards', a 

means by which the wider world and the outside environment could be shut out, all 

sorts of manufactured artefacts carried images and slogans of issues, topics and 

distant places into the home, suggesting that people were curious and interested in 

what was happening beyond their own circles. Dinner plates had picturesque 

scenes from romantic places, from home and foreign lands, a different view for 

each place setting. A copper alloy buckle clasp commemorated the Crimean War 

with a scroll and inscription, figurines placed Napoleon and Sir John and Lady Jane 

Franklin on the mantelpieces. A mug bearing the image of a bound African woman 

with the legend 'She walks in beauty' demonstrates that the site's people were 

participants in the world-wide circulation of anti-slavery objects. Ceramic pipes 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

stamped 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' after Harriet Beecher Stowe's immensely popular 

novel (1852}, suggest that they also belonged to an international culture of 

romantic Christian sentimentalism. 41 

Wilson has identified two other streams of popular interest and concern in the 

ceramic pipe assemblage: pipes which declare support for 'Reform', the English 

Reform Bill of 1832, which extended the franchise to all but the very poor; and a 

large number of pipes which assert the political and cultural allegiances of Irish 

people. The Reform pipes, manufactured in large numbers in Sydney by Samuel 

Elliot, are important because they may well express the user's identification with the 

classes of people who were given the vote, and, conversely, their clear 

disassociation with those who were excluded from the franchise. The Reform Bill 

widened the social and political gap between the very poor, and other ranks of 

working people. Those who were destitute and in workhouses were affected 

instead by the Anatomy Act of 1832, which gave over their bodies to the doctors for 

dissection, a fate widely feared among working people. But in other hands and 

mouths were sturdy, short-stemmed pipes which called for 'Repeal', the repeal of 

the English-Irish union, in effect a slogan and catch-cry for Irish independence. 

Others, bearing the Harp of Erin or words such as 'Cork' or 'Colleen' were less 

overtly political, yet still instantly recognisable as signs of Irish affiliation. The site 

database of occupants includes a large number of Irish names, and research 

reveals that many of the immigrants were from Ireland. In this the site is typical of 

the Rocks, which Mullens has shown had a higher than average number of Irish 

residents overall. It seems likely that commercially mass produced clay pipes 

demonstrated allegiance, or identification, or simply the unconscious habits brought 

from the old country. 42 

Among the residents, too, were people with an interest in and knowledge of 

science, for while some used the natural beauty of shells as decorative objects, 

others painstakingly built up collections of shells which included examples of the 

different species. The curatorial impulse to arrange, identify, class the natural 

world, to render it knowable, and thus controllable, was not restricted to the 

genteel, leisured men and women of science; at least some tradespeople and 

labourers were hunters and collectors too. 43 Like their neighbours on the Lilyvale 

site further south, they also collected all sorts of curious things, simply for the 

pleasure of having them: a naturally formed hematite cube; whimsical backscratchers 

in the shape of a hand with a flounced cuff. A number of reed boxes 

were recovered, so it seems that people probably still gathered together to sing 

popular songs, accompanied by mouth organs or concertinas, or to listen to airs 

played on them. 

Although some of the older people, like the Hosemans and Margaret Doyle, were 

illiterate, the literacy of residents is documented in the pens, nibs, pencils (and a 

fancy Japanese pencil sharpener}, ink bottles, slate and slate pencils, and a hand- 


Figure 2.25: Rising literacy: writing slates and slate pencils, remains of a pen nib, a fancy Japanese 

pencil sharpener, and a reading glass to magnify print. (Ionas Kaltenbach 1996) 

142

Figure 2.26 Charles Carlson's name stamp, small and elegant, with a handle shaped like a Greek 

goddess, was discarded. (Ionas Kaltenbach 1996) 

143

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

The culture of later nineteenth century working people had in many ways departed 

considerably from that of the preceding convict and ex-convict generations. 

Besides the sheer increase in the number, variety and nature of possessions, some 

of the assemblages speak of new notions of individual moral improvement and 

personal self control which went beyond external appearances and material wellbeing. 

The educative and gentle pastimes are a marked departure from the earlier 

often brutal sports and pastimes of sheer pleasure, enjoyed for their own sake. 

Yet in some ways the strands of the more traditional attitudes survived. 47 We saw 

that the houses and possessions of the earlier generations seemed to exist in a 

loosely bisected world: the public and private domains, the outside and the inside, 

the appearance of material respectability versus the often unrestrained, impolite, 

sometimes violent personal and communal behaviour. 

If we look below the floorboards of the later nineteenth century houses we find 

other habits which diverge from those of cleanliness and comfort. Rocks people 

commonly used their underfloor spaces to deliberately dispose of household 

rubbish, by lifting a floorboard and sweeping or throwing it underneath. Broken 

glass and china, huge lumps of coral, food scraps, including meat which then 

putrefied, and a great number of smaller objects, built up over the years and 

choked the underfloor spaces, adding to the already severe problems of damp, 

ventilation and unpleasant smells. Dead dogs and cats were disposed of in this 

way in 128 Cumberland Street and No.5 Carahers Lane. What is evident here, and 

at the Lilyvale site, is an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality, a culture of disguise, of 

covering over or hiding of the problems of high density living. As Wendy Thorp 

points out, this may be seen as a practical measure, a response of the lack of 

regular garbage collection services, which were not improved until the last decades 

of the century. Yet the last families in No1 Carahers Lane - the Hines, Foys and 

Morans- seem to have continued the practice even in these years. 48 

We might consider the pretty perfume bottles and vases of flowers in the same 

way: attempts to cover over bodily and household smells. The evidence for habits 

of bodily cleanliness is clear enough in the washbasins and so on, but chronic 

water shortages, inconvenience and lack of space may have made full body 

bathing difficult, probably a weekly event. It is also possible that habits of dental 

hygiene (involving the inside of the body), had not yet been taken up among 

working people, though as Wilson points out, tooth decay was observed at all levels 

of colonial society. Some toothpaste jars were found in post-1860 contexts, while 

the number of toothbrushes recovered were 'surprisingly low', and none at all were 

found in the Carahers Lane terraces. Many of the human teeth recovered display 

huge cavities, often exposing the root pulp, as well as evidence of abscesses and 

severe gum disease. Found in cesspits and underfloor deposits, they had either 

fallen out or been self-extracted. A fancy little box of 'Hooper's Cachous' or breathfreshening 

lozenges, probably served the same purpose as the perfume. 49 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

Although the bellowing beasts and the stench of Cribb's slaughteryard were 

banished, large animals such as horses still shared the rather constricted rear 

yards of the shops with humans. Horses are recorded both in the bankruptcy 

papers for the bakers and butchers who went bust on this site, and also in metal 

harness pieces from the well in area H and a 'Farmers Friend' bottle, found in yard 

space, which contained medicine for 'bovine or equine complaints'. Cats and small 

to medium sized dogs were kept as J'ets as well as for the control of mice and rats 

throughout the Nineteenth Century. 5 

The proportion of the glass assemblage which was related to alcohol consumption, 

together with the hotels which stood on the site, indicate that notions of temperance 

probably did not involve teetotalling, or total abstinence from alcohol. While some 

families, like the Lipscombes, the Hines, who appear to have married in the 

Wesleyan chapel in Princes Street, and perhaps the Briggs, probably shunned 

alcohol altogether, drinking remained an important part of Rocks socialising, as it 

had been from the early days. The site's people drank wine, beer, champagne, 

schnapps, and brandy. This presence of bottles, decanters and hotels, however, 

does not automatically give credence to the images of the working classes as 

hopelessly debased by intemperate habits. These images were more the product 

of middle class obsessions with working people's drinking habits. Temperance 

and alcohol consumption could run together, for temperance, or sobriety, in the 

earlier sense meant moderation, and the avoidance of drunkenness. Waterhouse 

notes this rise in moderation over the Nineteenth Century, and it may be declining 

consumption, as well as improved garbage services, which account for the 

diminishing numbers of bottles from late nineteenth century contexts. 51 

Gambling also remained a popular pastime among working people, one which 

continued the traditions of pleasure for its own sake. While this is clear from 

historical accounts, archaeological evidence tends to suggest possibilities rather 

than incontrovertible evidence. The many gaming pieces manufactured from lead 

or shaped from broken ceramics and slate may have been used in 'innocent' 

games, children's or adult's; equally they may have been used as counters for 

games involving wagering. Wayne Johnson suggests that the numerous Chinese 

brass coins, 'cash' or 'half cash', found across the site, with slight concentrations in 

the Carahers Lane terraces, were used as gambling counters in games such as 

Fan Tan. Their low face value makes their use as money unlikely, while evidence 

gathered in 1891-92 on Chinese (and European) gambling described Fan Tan as 

'played on a table with the aid of a square sheet of metal, a cup, and a few dozen 

brass coins'. 52 

Beneath the floorboards, too, were some of the thirty spent cartridges from .22 and 

.45 calibre guns, lead shot and gun flints. The presence of such weapons and 

their potential violence and danger seems at odds along with the lamps, shell 

collections and figurines, making one consider the limits of domesticity and moral 


Figure 2.27 Dental hygiene? Two of the relatively few toothbrushes recovered; the lid from a 

toothpaste jar; a metal box for 'Hoopers' breath-freshening lozenges; some of the heavily decayed 

teeth, self-extracted and thrown under floorboards or into cesspits; pliers which might have done the 

job; and a section of denture which replaced lost teeth. (Ionas Kaltenbach 1996) 

146

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

order. Simon Cooke, in a recent paper exploring nineteenth century suicides, 

reflected upon the widespread and completely unregulated availability and use of 

all types of guns in the period. The short .22 cartridges from No.1 Carahers Lane 

also suggest that women as well as men were gun owners and users, for they are 

likely to have come from the small, easily concealed 'Ladysmith', also known as the 

'prostitute's favourite'. 53 

For all the evidence of respectable culture amongst tradespeople, labourers and 

wives, there are also concurrent signs of older cultural streams - less polite, less 

inhibited, not entirely pious and proper - and evidence of liveliness, of pleasures, of 

certain dangers and risks. But there were other risks -sickness and death - which 

were simply part of everyday life, for they still fell outside the sphere of human 

intervention and control, and had to be endured and managed by people as best 

they could, using the material things at hand. 

2.3.5 Babes in the Wood : Sentiment, Grief and the Culture of Consolation 

One of the ceramic figurines recovered from the cesspit fill of 122 Cumberland 

Street shows two children sheltering under the wings of a now headless angel. 

Wilson recounts the tale behind this image: its origins were a rather bleak and 

brutal sixteenth or seventeenth century story in which the children are lost in the 

forest, and perish of cold and hunger. In the nineteenth century version, revived 

in the 1840s and depicted in a famous and much reproduced painting, the lost 

children, rather than enduring horrifying deaths, are taken to heaven by an angel. 

The story was given an Australian dimension by the tale of the three Duff children 

who really were lost in the bush in Victoria in 1864, were rescued, and became the 

subject several paintings and an illustrated book for children The Australian Babes 

in the Wood: A True Story told in Rhyme for the Young (1866). The figurine, also 

dating from the 1860s, encapsulates certain peculiarly Victorian attitudes to death, 

particularly child death. In the early period in Sydney, children's deaths were 

reported and memorialised in very frank ways, often dwelling on the circumstances 

and horror of death, the grim fact of mortality, and the grief of bereaved parents. 

The rise of 'sentiment' seems in part to have been an attempt to mitigate, to cover 

over or disguise the harsh facts of disease, death and bodily decay. Figurines such 

as this one were not merely commercialised commodities, bereft of meaning, but 

represent a culture of consolation. At least the poor 'Babes' were now safe in a 

'better place' with the angels; they were spared the torments and tribulations of life; 

they would remain innocent forever. 54 

If we examine the family histories of many of our residents, the reasons for such a 

culture become clear. Among the impersonal infant mortality figures of the 

Nineteenth Century, the victims of summer intestinal diseases, dehydration, and 

the terrible epidemics, are five of the ten children of Catherine Fennelly, born in 

various Gloucester Street terraces between 1857 and 187 4. Ellen Hoseman at 114 


Figure 2.28 Babes in the wood: two children shelter under the wings of a now headless angel. Other 

figurines include the heads of Mother Goose and a gnome. Nappy pins and bone spoon suitable for 

feeding babies also bespeak the great numbers of infants born in the site's houses.(lonas Kaltenbach 

1996) 

148

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

Cumberland Street lost six of her twelve infants. Margaret Doyle lost two 

daughters before her daughter Margaret was born. Florence Lathrope, who 

probably ran the old Bird in Hand hotel as a boarding-house between 1903 and 

1904, had lost three of her five children and her husband before she came to live 

on the site. 

These losses, and the grief they entailed, the sickbeds, small coffins and the 

funerals, were thus very common occurrences, typical rather than atypical 

household experiences. That the same households should also display artefacts of 

consolation and sentiment, buffering the direct and constant interface of life and 

death, is not surprising. Mourning jewellery made of costly jet and its imitation, 

vulcanite, were also worn by the site's women. They were large, striking pieces, 

designed to be seen against heavy, voluminous, black mourning clothes. These 

pieces are also signs that the site's women were participants in the intricate and 

formalised mourning rituals developed to deal with both public mourning and 

private grief over the Nineteenth Century. Like the rise of the sentimental itself, 

such practices were newly adopted rather than traditional, since there is no 

indication that the lower orders of the convict period had such formalised mourning 

periods or material accoutrements. Again, it would seen that such modern rituals 

of propriety crossed the boundaries of social status. 55 

We might then think of the culture of domesticity and comfort as a whole in a 

similar way. The firm control and shaping of household interiors by women, the 

adoption of what was held to be 'proper, should be considered against the 

precariousness of both physical health and economic stability. The latter were of 

fundamental importance, and both were often beyond ·the control of working 

people. Although they now turned more often to doctors {though not, apparently, to 

dentists) medical science had not yet developed to the stage where many diseases 

or injuries were treatable or at least mitigated. The archaeological evidence 

indicates that people also continued the earlier traditions of self-help, dosing 

themselves with emetics like salts and cod liver oil, and the patent medicines which 

became popular from the 1860s. The site also yielded various glass syringes and 

even a cupping glass for bleeding patients. 56 

So the determined domesticity - lace curtains, colourful sets of china, the pretty 

vases and figurines of poodles or ladies or lambs-, and the good and fashionable 

clothing, were a kind of defiance, and a defence, against bouts of unemployment, 

the sickbeds, and the deathbeds. Let us consider the experiences of labourers 

like Joseph Duncan {who had lived in 122 Cumberland Street, where the 'Babes' 

figurine was found, in 1867 -1870) and Searight Newton, a wharf labourer who 

occupied 4 Cribbs Lane in 1896. Both these men went bankrupt as a result of illhealth 

and under, or unemployment. Duncan, who filed for bankruptcy in 1878 

over debts totalling forty-five pounds, had already lost all of his household furniture 

(worth only six pounds) and attributed his situation to 'being laid up with a poisoned 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

finger and afterwards with broken ribs'. He had a wife and five children, and the 

family was left with only their clothing. Searight Newton, who had a flowing 

copperplate signature, filed for bankruptcy in 1896 when he lived on the site. He 

also had a wife and five children and was being pressed by creditors for debts of 

sixty-eight pounds, and hounded by the landlord, Peter MacManus, for rent. Again, 

he had been laid up for eighteen months and had no work. He reckoned his 

earnings had been less than one pound a week in the past year. The family's 

furniture was worth only £1.5s so they were allowed to keep it. The Newtons were 

among the many families who quickly moved on from the site. 5 7 

The site's people would have been well aware of their neighbours' predicaments, 

and they knew such misfortunes could befall almost any family. Such example 

might well move people to cling ever more tightly to the known, the controllable, the 

ordered. On the other hand they would also have observed Charles and Catherine 

Carlson's success, and the success of other immigrant families who became 

property owners. It is likely that most people's experience fell between these 

extremes of success and distress, but their everyday social observations were 

Janus-faced, they could see evidence of both oppression and opportunity. 

We have seen evidence that working people took measures to control their own 

destinies- these are potently symbolised in the wharf labourer's union token and in 

the measures taken for birth control. But the household assemblages retrieved 

from the site also speak, in part, of older streams and attitudes, of resignation and 

of consolation, of artefacts purchased, arranged and used as ways of coping with 

things that were as yet beyond human control, of softening the blows, of making 

misfortune more bearable. They are the private inversions, the reverse side, of 

those images and artefacts of the bustling, optimistic city life, the gas-lit streets 

crowded with a throng of well-dressed working people, the gleaming new 

department stores, the theatres and sporting venues where the crowds were 

increasingly well-behaved. 58 

Archaeology from the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets site reveals the culture 

of working people to be marked not by homogeneity, but diversity, by strands of 

belief and behaviour which overlap, qualify or contradict one another, and by the 

movements of people, ideas and things. These divergences speak more of 

working classes, of ethnic, cultural, economic and generational differences, than of 

a single working class. Yet streams of commonality may also be observed in the 

broad acceptance of mass-produced commodities, and in the many ways these 

were transformed into meaningful possessions. Those meanings were shaped, in 

turn, by the particular situation of working people: responses to the problems and 

the excitements of urban life, the miseries and joys of high density living, the 

search for security, the search for consolation. 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

The perspective from the neighbourhood and households reveals that people were 

also drawn together by kinship ties, by Catholicism, by small scale and personal 

relationships with shopkeepers, and by friendships and common experiences and 

habits. These things - personal, intimate, day-to-day - mattered to them (especially 

women) at least as much as workplace experiences, and perhaps shaped 'identity' 

and allegiances more directly than the broader, more abstract concept of 'the 

working class'. 

Another way to explore how 'class' and class distinction were perceived, and thus 

created, is through the eyes of outsiders. The next chapter will examine what they 

thought they saw in places like the Rocks. 


2.3.6 Endnotes 

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

1 For general accounts of the industrial revolution and the rise of the working class in 

Australia see Buckley and Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers; R.W. Connell and T. H. 

Irving, Class Structure in Australian History. Documents, Narrative and Argument, 

Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1986, fp 1980. See also E.P. Thompson, Making of the 

English Working Class. 

2 Wheelwright and Buckley, No Paradise for Workers, Chapter 9; see also Fox, Working 

Australia, Chapter 6 

3 Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, p143ff; Fox, Working Australia, p54ff; Waterhouse, Private 

Pleasures, p53. 

4 Peter Proudfoot, Seaport Sydney The Making of the City Landscape, NSW University 

Press, Sydney, 1996, pp37-68; interview with Mr Herbie Potter, 12 December 1995; pers. 

com. Mr Bill Ford, October 1996. 

5 Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, conclusion; quote p3. 

6 Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Chapter 3; see also 'Popular Culture and Pastimes' in 

Neville Meaney (ed.), Under New Heavens : Cultural Transmission and the Making of 

Australia, Heineman, Melbourne, 1989, pp237-285, see p270. 

7 Analysis of Residents Database; the spread of industrial development to the west of the 

city around Darling Harbour is well-described, in microcosm, in Thorp, 'Market City 

Development Paddy's Market Archaeological Excavation, Volume 2 Main Report'. 

8 Mullens, citing Terry Kass, 'Socio-Economic History of Miller's Point NSW, also makes 

this point, see 'Who are the People', pp 99, 103. 

9 Analysis of Residents Database. The idea that back-lane houses might have been 

occupied by different types of people from the buildings along the main streets, was 

suggested in Karskens and Thorp, 'History and Archaeology in Sydney', p70. However both 

the archaeological assemblages from the site, and the analysis of the Residents Database 

show that no such clear distinction existed. 

10 Analysis of Residents Database; Mullens, 'Who are the People', pp87; 84-85; James 

Broadbent, 'The Push East: Woolloomooloo Hill: the first suburb', in Max Kelly (ed.), Sydney, 

City of Suburbs, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1987, pp12-29. 

11 See discussion of mariner publicans in Karskens, 'Historical Discourse', pp54-56; 

Residents Database, entries for Cox, Fay and Berry families and for William Mitchell; 

Bankruptcy Files, William Adams, 18 August 1883; James Laing, 6 September 1877 

AONSW. 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

25 Wilson, AR- Ceramics p1 00; Thorp, 'Report on Lilyvale' Section 4.3; and her 'Market City 

Development Paddy's Market Archaeological Excavation, Volume 2 Main Report', p96. 

26 For discussion of the impact, role and uses of advertising, brand names and 

standardisation, see Carrier, Gifts and Commodities, Chapter 4. 

27 Iacono, AR-Misc. pp51 , 54; Wilson, AR-Ceramics p94; Holmes, AR-Metal p11 0; James 

Laing, bankruptcy papers, 6 September 1877, AONSW. 

28 Steele, AR-Bone p96; Holmes, AR-Metal p113; Carney, AR-Giass pp97-99. 

29 Wilson, AR-Ceramics p1 01 ; re eggs, Wilson pers. com. October 1996; Holmes, AR-Metal 

p96; Barnes, AR-Building Mat. pp11, 63, 69. 

30 Wilson, AR-Ceramics pp96,105; Iacono, AR-Misc.p62; Carney, AR-Giass p135 and pers. 

com; Holmes, AR-Metal pp22 ; Bower, 'Leather', p5. 

31 See Bankruptcy Files on William Adams, 18 August 1883; James Laing, 6 September 

1877, AONSW; compare with discussion of shopkeeper/neighbourhood relations in England 

and America in Carrier, Gifts and Commodities, pp71-72, 87-88, 92; Johnson, 'Coins, 

Medals and Tokens' pp21, 29; Thorp, 'Report on Lilyvale', Section 4.3. 

32 Residents Database, entries for Berry and Share families; note the striking resemblance of 

this progression to the female-centred stories told by Derry in 'Daughters and Sons-in-Law of 

King Cotton'. 

33 Residents Database, entries for these families; bankruptcy papers for Stephen Doyle, 2 

September 1859 AONSW; and data on the MacNamara family courtesy Margaret Bettison. 

34 Richard Burne Cumberland Street to Margaret Burne & Others, No 58 1816, Old 

Registers; RAB; Garner, 'Irish on the Rocks', pp.83-84. 

35 Iacono, AR-Misc. p85; Wilson, pers. com. re kit knife, October 1996; Hirst, Convict society 

and its enemies, pp211 ff. 

36 Iacono, AR-Misc. p69; some of these beliefs and habits related to faith in the intercession 

of saints are similar to those described by Shulamith Shahar in Childhood in the Middle 

Ages, London, Routledge, 1992, p143; Residents Database, see entries for these 

individuals and families. 

37 Kereen M. Reiger, ' "Clean and Comfortable and Respectable": Working Class Aspirations 

and the Australian 1920 Royal Commission on the Basic Wage', in History Workshop, 27 

1989, 86-105. 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

38 Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp99-1 00,1 08; Wilson, AR-Ceramics p95; Brighton also 

notes such artefacts in the Five Points assemblage: the 'Father Mathew Temperance 

teacup', for example, 'Prices Suit the Times' p8. 

39 Stanley Jevons, cited in Iacono, AR-Misc. p84; re artefacts, see pp83-85; Wilson, AR 

Ceramics p102; Carney, AR-Giass p108. Inventories of household goods in bankruptcy 

papers also usually list wash sets. 

40 Iacono, AR-Misc pp76-77; Graeme Davison, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia 

Learned to Tell the Time, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993 pp66-70. 

41 Compare with discussion in Thorp, 'Report on Lilyvale' Sections 4.3 and 5.1.2; and 

'Market City Development Paddy's Market Archaeological Excavation, Volume 2 Main 

Report', pp95ff; 118; Wilson, AR-Ceramics pp95-96; Iacono, AR-Misc pp63. On 'Uncle 

Tom's Cabin' see Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp68-69, 73; and From Minstrel Show to 

Vaudeville, pp70-74. 

42 Wilson, AR-Ceramics pp98-99; compare with Gojak and Iacono, 'Sydney Sailors Home', 

p31 and Denis Gojak, 'Ethnicity and nationalism in nineteenth century Sydney: two examples 

from Cadman's Cottage, The Rocks', paper presented to the 1991 Rocks and Millers Point 

Historical Archaeology seminar. Re Anatomy Act and Reform Bill see Ruth Richardson, 

Death, Dissection and the Destitute , Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1987; Mullens, 

'Who are the people', pp80, 81, 85, 88. 

43 Steele, AR-Bone pp13-14, Table 2.3, pp15-17, 90,114 and pers. com; compare with 

Thorp, 'Report on Lilyvale', Section 4.3. Compare with the profiles of collectors in Tom 

Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge 

University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p67ff. 

44 Iacono, AR-Misc pp 78,82; Carney, AR-Giass Type Series List p46; Martin Lyons and 

Lucy Taksa, Australian Readers Remember, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992 pp7- 

8. 

45 Holmes, AR-Metal p136 (reed boxes) p135 (name stamp); Iacono, AR-Misc. p79 

(collectibles); Residents Database, entries for Charles and Catherine Carlson, compiled from 

RBDM, Naturalisation Papers, AONSW, death and funeral notices in SMH. 

46 Family data on Portugese residents courtesy Margaret Bettison; Holmes, AR-Metal p137; 

Iacono, AR-Misc. p89; Residents Database, entries for Henry and Sarah Ann Briggs, 

compiled from RAB, RBDM; and Wilson. 'Cumberland Street/Gloucester Street List of Site 

Occupants'. 

47 See Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Chapters 1-3. 

48 Holmes, TR-B pp17-19; and AR-Metal p86; Steele, AR-Bone, pp84, 90; Thorp, 'Report on 

Lilyvale', Section 4.3. By contrast, the only rubbish purposely thrown under the floorboards 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

at Lindesay, Darling Point, was probably put there by the tradesmen undertaking 

renovations, see Lavelle, 'Lindesay', pp.35, 36, 41. 

49 See David Clark, 'Worse than Physic: Sydney's Water Supply 1788-1888', in Max Kelly 

(ed.), Nineteenth Century Sydney. Essays in Urban History, Sydney University Press, 

Sydney, 1978, pp54-65. Re teeth, transcript of interview with Dr Sam Malek, dental 

surgeon, 12 June 1996. Dr Malek examined the teeth from the site. Wilson, AR-Ceramics 

p1 02; Iacono, AR-Misc p84; Holmes, AR-Metal p31 (Metal Box 1 ). 

50 Bankruptcy papers, James Laing and William Adams; Iacono, AR-Misc. pp62, 64; 

Carney, AR-Giass p118; Steele, AR-Bone p90. 

51 Carney, AR-Giass pp97-99, 109 and pers. com; Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp63, 

99. 

52 Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp80-81; compare with MacCalman, Struggletown; 

Wilson, AR-Ceramics p105; Iacono, AR-Misc p82; Barnes, AR-Building Mat. p59; Johnson, 

'Coins, Medals and Tokens', pp29-30. 

53 Holmes, AR-Metal p114ff; Simon Cook, 'Violence and the body: methods of suicide, 

gender and culture in Victoria, 1841-1921', paper presented at the Australian Historical 

Association Biennial Conference, Melbourne, July 1996. 

54 Wilson, AR-Ceramics p97; and pers. com. August 1996; Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: 

The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, 

p158ff; Karskens, 'The Rocks and Sydney', pp230-232; John Morley observes the panoply 

of Victorian death-related rituals and artefacts with a kind of horrified fascination in Death, 

Heaven and the Victorians, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1971. 

55 Residents Database, entries for the Fennellys, Hosemans, Doyles and Florence Lathrope; 

Iacono, AR-Misc p75ff. 

56 Many of the Bankruptcy Files examined included debts owed to doctors for medical 

consultation and treatment; Carney, AR-Giass pp105, 134. Compare to evidence for selfhelp 

in the convict period, Karskens, 'The Rocks and Sydney', pp113-114. Further 

comparative research on the occurence of patent medicines, and their purpose, would throw 

more light on health and attitudes to the body and illness; compare to Bonasera, 'Good for 

What Ails You: Alternative Medicinal Use at Five Points'. 

57 Bankruptcy Files, Joseph Duncan, Laborer, 23 September 1878; and Searight Newton, 

Wharf Laborer, 6 July 1896, AONSW. 

58 See Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Chapter 3 and discussion, note 11 p88; compare with 

Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People. See also Yamin, 'From Tanning to Tea': 'the working 

class residents of Block 160 used material possessions to express their rights as members 

of a society increasingly divided by class .. .', pp12-13. 


GODDEN 

MACKAY 

tasty sauces and condiments, tea, alcohol and perhaps more sugar than was good 

for their teeth 4 . 

The artefact record offers evidence that people had leisure time and disposable 

income to indulge in pastimes and hobbies, and to delight, entertain and educate 

children; and also artefacts which speak directly about moral standards and 

behaviour and religious beliefs and commitments. In the context of the sheer 

numbers and quality of material culture, the reuse and reshaping of disposable 

commodities seems to be a cultural habit rather than an economic measure, a 

continuation of the tradition of practicality, handiness and the avoidance of waste; 

or again, habits learned in times of want. Stephen Doyle's use of a ginger beer 

bottle as a pestle, for example, may be considered alongside the highly ornate, 

finely crafted gold earring set with faceted beryl stones found in the house, which 

may have belonged to his wife, Margaret 5 . 

Analysis of the cesspit deposits located some examples of parasite eggs 

(roundworm and whipworm), but their numbers seem quite low in comparison with 

the levels in American cities, where they occurred at a rate of 20,000 eggs per 

gram of soil in the Eighteenth Century, and in the hundreds per gram of soil at the 

end of the Nineteenth Century. Other comparisons with the crowded working 

people's areas of United States cities are also instructive. The 1970s excavation of 

late eighteenth century privies in Philadelphia's New Market recovered the bones 

of two infants, while John P. McCarthy's excavation of a late nineteenth century 

Minneapolis privy 'associated with a "skid row" of boarding houses and bars', 

recovered the bones of a six-month-old child. No parallel evidence of such 

desperate measures of disposal, and possibly infanticide, have been found here or 

on any other Sydney archaeological site 6 . 

There is one significant change in the ceramic assemblage, however, which seems 

to indicate a decline in standards, or at least consumer purchasing power in the 

period 1880-1890. The appearance, from the 1880s of thick, heavy, rather 

inelegant white 'hotel-style' ware, decorated with only paired bands, marks a 

complete departure from the traditional taste for fine or pleasant china, with 

elaborate patterns in a great many colours. Here we have an indication that at least 

some families could no longer afford to buy what they preferred, a situation which 

would have been exacerbated by widespread unemployment during the 1890s 

Depression 7 . 

The artefact assemblages must also be set within the context of the small size of 

some of these houses, and their close proximity to one another, measurable and 

observable on the site. Clearly the houses were sometimes (though not 

necessarily always) overcrowded, particularly when considered in the light of 

research which showed that some families had up to twelve children. Let us revisit 

No.1 Carahers Lane where Elizabeth and Thomas Hines lived between 1877 and 

Karskens, Grace 158

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

works, from horse droppings,cesspits and so on, would have been commonplace, 

at least in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, and they must have combined to assail the 

noses of the middle class observers and visitors. Miasmic smells were also 

thought to cause disease, hence the conflation of such areas, and their people, 

with ill-health and death. 

In reality it was not the smells, but the conditions of high-density urban life which 

allowed diseases to sweep through the population. In spite of evidence of 

domesticity, comfort, self-respect and measure of personal cleanliness, the families 

of unskilled labourers and skilled tradesmen of neighbourhoods such as these 

bore the heaviest suffering and losses during each terrible nineteenth century 

epidemic 12 . 

But the site also offers some signs of considerable improvement in standards of 

living in the last decades of the century, precisely the period which historical 

sources and interpretations suggest were characterised by decline and decay. The 

connection of the houses to the sewerage system, and to water and gas mains, 

improved hygiene and comfort enormously, while enclosed stoves eliminated the 

hazards and mess of open fires (though not the heat and smells). Streets and 

lanes were paved in hard surfaces, drains and gutters were built of stone. 

Caraher's soap and candle works just to the south were shut down and demolished 

in 1881. As we shall see, Rocks people were themselves active over the decades 

in lobbying the Sydney Corporation for improvements in their local urban 

environments. Rubbish removal services improved towards the end of the 

century, as is indicated by the fall in numbers in some types of artefacts. Although 

Rocks houses were almost always described as cheap and poorly built, those on 

the site were quite solid or substantial, and many showed signs of having been 

repaired and improved over the years. There were numerous attempts to deal with 

the drainage problems inherent in the location and topography of the site, and paint 

and mortar were applied to combat damp walls 13 . While infant mortality was still 

shockingly high overall, the rate actually fell considerably in the inner city 

neighbourhoods from 1880, while it rose in the outlying suburbs. The improved 

chances of city-born babies were most likely a result of better sanitary facilities and 

practices 14 • 

What the artefact assemblages and building foundations reveal, in balance, is that 

sweeping generalisations over time about 'slums' and 'slum dwellers' are 

unfounded. These are derogatory stereotypes which tell us more of the fears, 

language and shared understandings of the observers than the people they 

'observed'. This does not mean that there were no problems of social and 

economic inequity, poverty, disease, or poor living conditions in Sydney. There 

were certainly difficulties in the processes of urban consolidation and growth on 

this site, as on others, though they were partly mitigated in time. The point is that 

these were not necessarily connected to, or the same as, widespread, constant 

Karskens, Grace 161

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

and severe poverty, filthy bodies, low morals or criminal behaviour in a sinister 

other- or underworld. There were undoubtedly pockets or alleys or courtyards of 

extreme poverty and degradation in other parts of the Rocks and Sydney; they too 

may have changed for the better or worse over time. It seems that the middle 

class observers and improvers sought out and visited the worst of places, selected 

and focused upon certain aspects of what they saw, and employed a well-known 

stock of rhetoric to synthesise these into images of 'slums'. These images were 

then expanded to portray the morals and lifestyles of working people as a whole. 

Some observers even noted signs of cleanliness, domesticity and community, as 

we have found on this site, but failed to alter their prejudicial judgements of working 

people's neighbourhoods 15 . 

It appears likely, then, that nineteenth century class barriers may have had more to 

do with the construction of such images, than with actual habits and lifestyles of 

working people themselves. The cultural and physical separation of working from 

middle class people was accompanied by a hardening of middle and upper class 

attitudes, to the extent that fear and loathing of working people made them seem 

scarcely human. 

But if working people lived in many other parts of Sydney, some of which might well 

have endured much worse conditions, why was the Rocks so often singled out for 

moral and social condemnation? Why was this particular neighbourhood invested 

with such notoriety? Was there something in the cultural behaviour or social profile 

of the people there which marked the Rocks out as separate, different from other 

places? Had they perhaps held on to the old habits of the convict generations 

which the rest of Sydney had left behind? 

At one level, it is clear that the site's people had the same material possessions 

and habits (matched up-to-date china, typical glassware and cutlery assemblages, 

fashionable beads and buttons and so on) as any other neighbourhood in Sydney, 

and even strands which indicate that notions of domesticity and moral order were 

similar to those of the middle class. Other signs speak of a distinctly working 

people's neighbourhood: evidence of working at home; clay pipes of the sort 

commonly associated with working people throughout the Nineteenth Century; 16 

proximity to workplaces; the close configuration of houses; a certain pragmatism in 

the re-use and reshaping of some of the artefacts and in rubbish disposal patterns. 

These would probably be found in any neighbourhood of similar social profile. 

But overlaying the 'typical' assemblages were some subtle patterns of distinction. 

There was a higher occurrence of glass decanters, particularly the ring-necked 

'Irish decanters', evidently in use here well after they had fallen out of favour 

generally. This is a striking continuity with the communal drinking patterns of the 

early period, when people are often glimpsed with decanters or bottles in their 

hands, fetching rum from nearby hotels and returning to their homes to share it with 

Karskens, Grace 162

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

family and friends. There appears to be much larger number of oyster shells than 

is generally found on domestic sites elsewhere in Sydney. Again, this represents an 

unbroken thread throughout the occupation of the site, for oysters remain a 

constant staple in Rocks diets and may perhaps be considered as food particularly 

associated with waterfront neighbourhoods 17 . 

Some of the houses and pubs which stood on the site during most of the 

Nineteenth Century had been built in the 1810s and 1820s. With their oldfashioned, 

simple lines and plain faces they would have seemed ugly and crude to 

outsiders more accustomed to the splendours of modern Victorian architecture. 

Moreover, they were direct visual, perhaps sinister, links with the convict period, a 

subject of increasing shame and embarrassment as the century progressed. The 

Rocks itself, although much pared-down and built up over the century, nevertheless 

retained the distinctive steep and rocky topography which had given it its commonuse 

name, and which shaped the crooked streets, odd intersections, steep 

connecting flights of stairs and narrow lanes. It was a townscape which seemed to 

outsiders to be the negation of all that was orderly and controlled, gridded and 

knowable; the fearful manifestation of a city expanding out of control, and into 

chaos 18 . 

The significance of other artefact patterns and presences becomes still clearer 

when we note that the Rocks in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century actually did 

have a higher than average proportion of Irish and Chinese people. Mariners and 

others whose working lives revolved around the sea and shipping also lived there in 

large numbers, as they had done since the beginning of European settlement. The 

Rocks thus had high proportion of immigrants, and this was demonstrated by the 

database compiled on the site's residents 19 . Not only were foreign languages and 

strange clothes, and a sense of constant movement inward and outward, part of 

the Rocks streetlife, but visual symbols of allegiance, like Irish pipes or decanters, 

jewellery made of bog oak or decorated with Celtic designs, or popish, superstitious 

little medals with foreign inscriptions, may well have caught the eye of the fearful, 

yet fascinated outsider. On the site, too, there appear to be parallel patterns of 

Irish association: Irishman Owen Caraher tended to let his houses in Carahers 

Lane to his countrymen and women, to people with names like Duffy, O'Shea, 

O'Brien, Murphy and MacNamara 20 . 

Jane Lydon's recent study of the Chinese of the Rocks explores both below the 

surface of the European representations of Chinese as 'secret, dark, dirty and 

immoral', and beyond the rather narrow historiographical confines of racism and 

oppression. She weaves together the distinctive artefacts of Chinese culture found 

on archaeological sites, such as cooking pots and medicine phials, and the range 

of cultural and social strategies (resistance, gestures of goodwill, appropriation, the 

maintenance of public and private persona) employed by the Chinese to make 

their way in a repressive society, to survive, and even 'beat the system'. Lydon · 

Karskens, Grace 163

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

also examines the way that the material culture of Chinese and Europeans, 

particularly ceramics, moved both ways, as it had done since the Seventeenth 

Century. While English earthenware is found associated with Chinese artefacts, 

Chinese ceramics, including bowls, ginger jars, and storage vessels, with their 

exotic patterns and mysterious characters, reappear on the 

Cumberland/Gloucester Streets site from the 1850s, as they do on other Rocks 

sites, reflecting rising Chinese immigration in that decade. Sherds of alabaster 

and steatite suggest Chinese scenic figurines, such as those found at Lilyvale; 

Chinese coins or 'cash' used in fantan were also found on the site 21 . 

The continued presence of mariners and those associated with the sea-going 

trades is signalled by artefacts dating from early period to at least the 1860s. A 

sailor's palm, used to protect the hands while repairing sails had been lost in 

George Cribb's well, while the Williams well contained a marlin spike used in 

ropemaking, and a grappling hook. The site, like other Rocks sites, Lilyvale and 

Reynolds Cottage, also yielded whale teeth, including whole and worked items, and 

sawn tip or root section offcuts. Steele points out that sperm whale teeth were 

valuable trade items between whalemen and Pacific Islanders; they were also 

'divided up among the crew members during long whaling voyages', and used as 

'spare change by the ship's purser and crew alike to pay for provisions and repairs 

to ships'. Mariners, with their distinctive language and lore, skills and clothes, were 

another group traditionally regarded with distrust and suspicion. They were 'men 

apart' whose lifestyles seemed to transgress every principle of social order and 

stability (though in reality, their lives at sea were utterly bound, minutely divided, 

and highly disciplined). They tended to be characterised either as foolish, rather 

childlike spendthrifts, 'Jack Tar' at the mercy of the 'land sharks of the Rocks' and 

in need of care and protection; or alternately as wild, dangerous strangers given 

completely to the pursuit of drink and sex, who were in need of Christianisation and 

moral reform. The Sailor's Home, associated with the Christian philanthropic 

Bethel Union Society, was opened in George Street below the Rocks in 1864. This 

institution offered both shelter and moral influence, though, as suggested 

elsewhere, the presence of numerous gin bottles among the sailor's refuse 

suggests that calls to sobriety and tea drinking was not entirely heeded. The 

Sailor's Home, airy, orderly, regularly divided, also constituted the reverse of the 

sort of cramped back-lane lodging house which No.5 Carahers Lane appears to 

have been. A large proportion of the worked whale teeth occur in the same 

underfloor deposits as a inordinate number of clay pipe fragments, and a large 

range of middling to cheap cutlery, which suggest that the tenants here sublet to a 

number of seamen and other itinerants 22 . 

There are those objects which speak of immigrants who settled, at least for a time, 

on the Rocks -the Carlson name stamp, the Briggs measure, the anonymous F. 

Chapman's inscribed tag. The Rocks was a gateway, an entrepot, a place of 

coming and going, a first foothold. A well-preserved billycan lid and a pannikin 

Karskens, Grace 164

2.4.1 Endnotes 

GODDEN 

MACKAY 

1 See Fitzgerald, Rising Damp, p229; see also Max Kelly, 'Picturesque and Pestilential: The 

Sydney Slum Observed 1860-1900', in Kelly, Nineteenth Century Sydney, pp66-80. 

2 Mayne, Representing the Slum; David Englander cited in Mayne, 'A barefoot childhood: so 

what?'; see also The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870- 

1914, and the H-Net Urban History Discussion List, contributions from John P. McCarthy, 

Alan Mayne, John Stobo, and David C. Hammack, 1995-1996 

3 Iacono, AR-Misc p59ff; Bower, 'Leather', pp5-8 

4 Steele, AR-Bone p14; Everett, 'Parasites', Sections 4 and 5,pp5-8; Carney, AR-Giass 

pp97-99, 115-116, 118; Holmes, AR-Metal p113; Wilson, AR-Ceramics p102. 

5 lacono, AR-Misc p73; Wilson, AR-Ceramics p105. 

6 Parasite egg-counts cited by John P. McCarthy (Institute for Minnesota Archaeology), H 

Urban 14 March 1996. McCarthy reports that 'Analysis of parasite eggs from privy 

deposits ... reveals incredible levels of round worm infestation in most eastern cities [of the 

United States] into the early 20th century' (H-Urban 7 March 1996). Claire Everett expresses 

some reservations about these findings, arguing that the number of people who used the 

privies analysed is unknown; pers. com. September 1996. The survival rate of parasite eggs 

may also differ on sites in the two countries. Compare also with the residents of Five Points, 

New York, who appear to have 'suffered from trichinocis as well as dysentery', Yamin, 'From 

Tanning to Tea', p9. 

7 Wilson, AR-Ceramics p1 00-101 . 

8 Holmes, TR-B pp15-16. 

9 Population growth figures cited in Kelly, 'Picturesque and Pestilential'; The 'hidden' 

occupants came to light via baptismal and death records, as well as the 1879 Electoral Roll. 

10 On yards see Wilson, TR-A pp16, 25; Holmes, TR-B pp12, 16, 18; Carney, TR-C p19; 

Iacono, TR-E p12; on drains, see Wilson, TR-A p17; Holmes, TR-8 pp10, 17-19; Carney, 

TR-C pp14, 19; Steele, TR-F p9; and TR-G pp11, 12-13; Karskens and Thorp, 'History and 

Archaeology in Sydney', p70; see also Thorp, 'Report on Lilyvale'. 

11 Clarke, 'Worse than Physic'; Iacono, AR-Misc. p67; Wilson, TR-A p17 (barrel in yard of 

126 Cumberland Street); Steele, AR-Bone pp84, 90; Holmes, TR-B p17ff, 24. 

12 Peter H. Curson, Times of Crisis : Epidemics in Sydney 1788-1900, Sydney, Sydney 

University Press, 1985, pp64, 67, 86, 102. 

Karskens, Grace 166

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