Private Pleasures

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