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. Karskens, Report 150
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. Karskens, Report 151
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