Private Pleasures

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