Category Archives: Sydney snaps

Seven Bob Beach

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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As the ferry passes the entrance to Double Bay I peer in to see Seven Shillings Beach, a little beach I had read about then visited some time ago.

In her 1949 publication, Some Houses and People of New South Wales, G Nesta Griffiths describes how the beach below Redleafcame to be named Seven Shillings Beach, citing information from Miss Dora Busby, granddaughter of the Mr and Mrs Busby mentioned:

The aboriginal owner of the fishing rights was Gurrah, whose lubra, Nancy, was a sister of Sophie, who lived near the spring at Vaucluse. When Mr Busby bought Redleaf, Gurrah lived just outside their fence, and they had continual trouble with members of the tribe. Mrs Busby tried to buy their fishing rights, and offered them blankets, clothes and flour. At last Gurrah said he would sell for seven shillings. Mrs Busby was afraid this would only be spent on rum, and tried to persuade Gurrah to take more useful goods. At last so many fowls and eggs were stolen that she gave Gurrah the money, and the tribe moved up to what is now the Ronagarden, on Victoria Road.[i]

I find a typed correction inside the back cover of the edition of Nesta Griffiths’ book held in the Mitchell Library. Written by Miss Dora Busby, it notes that she was told by her grandmother that Gurrah’s ‘lubra’ was Emma, not Nancy; that ‘When Mr Walker built Redleaf, Gurrah lived just outside the fence in a ti-tree lean-to’; and that ‘Both from him [Gurrah] and from members of the tribe which lived in the camp where Ronanow stands, the Walkers suffered a good deal of trouble one way and another.’ It was Mrs Walker who offered to buy Gurrah’s ‘fishing rights off the beach’ and that, ‘He and his Emma joined her sister Sophie at ‘Sophie’s camp’ at Vaucluse, and when Emma died he buried her in Double Bay.’

What is fascinating about this passage for me is what it hints at: Gurrah and a ‘tribe’ – or even two ‘tribes’ – lived on Sydney Harbour in the 1870s. They were living enough of a traditional life to be regarded as ‘owning the fishing rights’. A tradition of use and habitation was acknowledged, even if it wasn’t respected. Another Aboriginal woman, Sophie, lived nearby. Where did the second ‘tribe’ move to after being dispossessed when Ronawas built in 1883?

After reading about this transaction I wanted to see the location for myself so, on a mid-winter’s day, I headed to Seven Shillings Beach (or ‘Seven Bob Beach’ as my mother-in-law told me it was called by the locals). Frustrated in my attempts to reach it by road, every possible access point blocked by gates and driveways and security-fenced houses, I parked in the Woollahra Council carpark and walked down. The council building is the old Redleafhouse, and I can see why the lady of the house wanted those pesky Aborigines out of the way – they would definitely have interrupted her view of sun-tipped waves and crisp white sand when she walked between the columns of her verandah. However, to suggest that she had ‘suffered’ in any way at the hands of the Aboriginal people is astonishing, colonial hyperbole.

[i]Griffiths, G N. Some Houses and People of New South Wales. Ure Smith, Sydney, 1949, p131.

Walking the harbour

10 Sunday Jun 2018

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As the ferry crosses the heads, calm today, no lurching up and down, we leave the Quarantine Station behind on North Head and towards the lollipop-stripes lighthouse on South Head. I’m on the left-hand side of the ferry so I’m looking south, travelling past Watson’s Bay as we turn to head down the harbour. The little footbridge at Parsley Bay stands out white against the dark crevice of the narrow bay. Then Nielsen Park and, in the mouth of Rose Bay, Shark Island. The crowded headland of Point Piper heralds the entrance to Double Bay, Clark Island stands out from Darling Point and the corner rounds to Rushcutters Bay, full of tall-masted boats as bare as the trees behind them. We hurry past Woolloomoolloo – just one grey navy ship today – Fort Denison and Mrs Macquarie’s Point. Farm Cove, the Botanic Gardens and boom – Bennelong Point and the Opera House. The ferry slows to turn left before the Harbour Bridge, negotiating the watery traffic to enter Circular Quay.

These are the bays Teresa Hawkins walked in For Love Alone, where every park, every shadow, every tram shelter was full of the ‘semitones and broken whispers’[i]of lovers. For Teresa Hawkins, the main character in Christina Stead’s novel, For Love Alone, life with her family at Watson’s Bay revolves around water. Harbour water, seawater, cliffs and sand and boats. Teresa longs to join the fishermen; she longs to be the woman she saw with them, tending a boiling pot of fish, with the men bringing her wood for the fire.[ii]The water, the lapping, ceaseless water, is as restless as Teresa herself as she struggles with life as a young woman in the early 1930s. The ferry provides transport into town, company and gossip. It’s what her sister Kitty runs for in escaping her life as the family’s unpaid housekeeper. It’s the viewing platform for social proprieties – only the girls who are engaged can sew for their trousseau on the ferry. It takes Teresa to work every day so she can earn enough money to leave, to go to England.

These are the roads Hurtle Duffield, the main character in Patrick White’s The Vivisector, walked after dinner parties at Boo Courtney’s, or after visiting his lover Hero Pavloussi. Past the streets of Rose Bay and Bellevue Hill that would be shelled by Japanese submarines on 7 June 1942. Past Cranbrook, school for Patrick White and a plethora of other Whites, co-founded by Patrick’s father, home and death-place of Patrick’s great-uncle, James White. Past ‘Cinta’ in Lindsay Ave Darling Point, home of Dorothea Mackellar from the 1930s to 1968.

At Rushcutters Bay Hurtle Duffield would have turned off New South Head Rd to go up to his house in Paddington. If he’d turned the other way, towards the harbour, he might have found himself at Lulworth House, a nursing home in Roslyn Gardens where Patrick White’s partner, Manoly Lascaris, died in 2003 and site of the house where Patrick White himself lived as a child from 1916. Lulworth, according to David Marr, was the inspiration for all of White’s descriptions of harbourside houses,[iii]but when I read about the Whites at Cranbrook between 1873 and 1890, their race season ball ‘one of the great social events of the year’[iv]and their house full of rare china and European art, I can’t help wondering if some of that inheritance also found its way to the ears of the quiet, self-absorbed little boy.

 

[i]Stead, C. For Love Alone. Virago, 1978 p63. First published by Peter Davies Ltd, 1945.

[ii]Stead, C. For Love Alone. Virago, 1978 p62. First published by Peter Davies Ltd, 1945.

[iii]Marr, D. Patrick White: A Life. Vintage 1991, caption to plate 12.

[iv]From ‘Beautiful Sydney’ 1895-6, quoted in ‘Cranbrook: the first fifty years’, AC Child, nd.

Trade and the city

02 Saturday Jun 2018

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It was trade that turned NSW from a prison camp into a thriving colony.  The very early years of the colony are typified by a sense of waiting on the edge of the world – waiting for the next ship to arrive with news of home, and supplies of food. In April 1790 Watkin Tench wrote:

… on the present ration the public stores contained salt meat sufficient to serve until the 2ndof July, flour until the 20thof August and rice, or peas in lieu of it, until the 1stof October. … When the age of this provision is recollected, its inadequacy will more strikingly appear. The pork and rice were brought with us from England. The pork had been slated between three and four years, and every grain of rice was a moving body from the inhabitants lodged within it.[i]

Crops failed and cattle strayed. Penal colonies on penal colonies were established to punish offenders who reoffended. Unable or unwilling to understand the food growing in the land around them, it was the establishment of working farms and trade lines that made the colonists less dependent on England for supplies. While many in the NSW Corps made fortunes through their produce and their trading, they were the people in those early years who had access to the farms, through grants of land, tools, seeds and convict labour. They also had access to money – or at least sources of credit in England – through their own pay, and through payments made to them by the Commissariat Store. They could ask their agents in England to send them goods paid for by their pay; they could sell goods (wheat, meat, maize etc) to the Commissariat Store in Sydney and be paid by Treasury Bills, again drawn on the banks in London and redeemable there to buy more goods.

Arguments about whether the officers were exploitative monopolists, pragmatic opportunists or altruistic life-savers invite analysis of Sydney’s development as if it was a city that reinvented the wheel. But look at the heritage of most of Sydney’s colonisers. In 1788, when the ‘town’ of Sydney housed a little over 1000 people in tents and huts, London was heading towards being the largest city in the world. It took that crown away from Peking in 1825 and in 1841 the census revealed that London had become the first city in the world with over 2 million inhabitants. London was a classic ‘merchants’ city’ that grew up to meet the needs of its people and surrounding areas. (This is as opposed to a ‘princes’ city’ that is developed to showcase the ruler’s wealth and might – for example, Rome as constructed by the popes, reliant on the tributes of its adherents for its survival.) A ‘merchants’ city’, according to John Reader in his book Cities,[ii]is the more robust form. A city built on trade is run by a group of people who have an interest in its survival. They make money from its functions and existence, and they will build up those functions to improve their own chances. It’s a vindication of capitalism that this should be the case, but neither the self-interest of the prince or the proclamations of the state build as strong a city.

John Reader argues that merchants and cities were entwined from the earliest days. Proto-merchants, he reasons, came from the very earliest cities and moved out into the countryside, trading their pottery and baskets, which then allowed farmers to create agricultural surpluses – no point in creating a surplus if you can’t store it in something impermeable like a pottery jar. These surpluses were created for hard times, but also for further trade. In time, these farmers could move away from subsistence living and use their (collective) spare time to develop new arts and technologies – and more cities.

So to criticise the early traders in Sydney for trying to make their fortunes is to deny the very basis of capitalism and of the traditions of the British people. Merchants trade in order to make money – that is their motivating force. They don’t trade to feed the hungry or to provide the homeless with shelter.

 

[i]Two classic tales of Australian exploration. Tim Flannery (ed). Text Publishing, 2002, p122.

[ii]Cities, John Reader. William Heinemann 2004

Something to trade

27 Sunday May 2018

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Although Sydney was initially established as a punishment nearly as final as hanging, or possibly more simply just to get convicts out of England – and maybe to rehabilitate them at the same time, but maybe no-one cared that much – it very swiftly became a convenient stopping point for traders, and a market for sale of goods as well.

Cook’s voyages in 1772-75 had revealed the abundance of sea life in the southern waters, and sealing and whaling had followed.

Sealers were after oil and skins; whalers wanted the oil that was used for lighting: “he [the whale] must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”[i]A very large sperm whale “will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil” or “ten tons of net weight”.[ii]The jawbone supplied “ivory teeth … that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding whips.”[iii]Also prized was ambergris, “an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale”, a substance that was “soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.”[iv]

Sealing and whaling ships regularly stopped along the coast for repairs and to boil down their catches. Manning Clarke records that five whaling ships brought convicts in 1791 on their way to the whaling grounds, with the first American whaler arriving in 1802.[v]Hermann Melville reverses cause and effect:

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman; all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.[vi]

The sealers and whalers were greedy and indiscriminate, killing in 50 years the bulk of seals and whales in the area. As Melville says, ‘They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint.’[vii]

The hunt was extremely dangerous for the hunters as well as the prey: “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”[viii]Not only the hunt – which was conducted by men in small boats flinging harpoons into whales when close enough – but the subsequent ‘boiling down’ of the blubber to make oil. Having secured the animal to the side of the boat and hoisted it high enough to be reached by the ‘spade-man’, the blubber is cut into chunks and brought on board. There it is minced and fed into the ‘try-pots’.

With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.[ix]

The life of the sealer was equally fraught, with many sealing gangs dropped off on tiny wild islands for months, sometimes years at a time, to catch everything they could and then load it when their ship returned.[x]

For the tiny new colony of Sydney Cove, these sacrifices added up to one thing: something to trade.

 

[i]Moby Dick P391

[ii]Moby Dick p333

[iii]Moby Dick p362

[iv]Moby Dick p447

[v]Clark, CMH. A History of Australia. Vol 1. Melbourne University Press, 1979, p197. First published 1962.

[vi]Moby Dick p120

[vii]Moby Dick p202

[viii]Moby Dick p224

[ix]Moby Dick p463

[x]Hainsworth p144 ff.

From green forest to Green Valley

18 Friday May 2018

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When the white settlers had arrived at Warrane and renamed it ‘Sydney Cove’, they had brought with them deadly diseases. Within the first twelve months large numbers of the local people were dead, many from a disease that may have been smallpox. At the beginning of the 20thcentury, just over one hundred years later, the forest the white settlers had landed in was gone, the stream they had relied on for water was closed in, and they were facing deadly diseases themselves. Large areas of the city were cordoned off and quarantined in the first months of 1900 during an outbreak of bubonic plague. Parts of the city they had built were resumed and demolished.

The Sydney Corporation Amendment Act1900 empowered the City Council to resume land for purposes connected with streets and public places, but it was the 1905 amendment of that act which gave the council the power to resume land for slum clearance and public housing purposes. Between 1905 and 1917 the council made 83 resumptions, starting in Ultimo, then in Wexford Street, Haymarket, Camperdown and Chippendale. Surry Hills lost 75% of its housing stock between 1900 and the 1930s as the council cleared the area and rezoned it commercial and industrial.[i]A lot of property had already been resumed for the extension of the railway, including the Convent of the Good Samaritan (built on the site of the Carters’ Barracks), the Benevolent Asylum (built in 1821), and the Devonshire Street cemetery.

When Ruth Park and Darcy Niland went to live in Surry Hills in 1942, the area was still full of tiny, cramped houses with little planning for hygiene. Ruth Park turned the slum into the ground-breaking, award-winning trilogy, The Harp in the South. She and Niland described it in their joint autobiography, The Drums Go Bang!

The shrieks and screams of the Saturdee-arvo merrymakers filtered through the walls; someone was mercilessly beating a child two backyards away, and the indescribable smell of the slums, of stale food and a century of dirt, unwashed bodies, beer, and an unbearable contiguity of lives filled that little damp-stained room.[ii]

The government’s slum clearance program came under intense scrutiny after The Harp in the Southwon the 1946 Sydney Morning Heraldliterary competition, and in the 1950s the area Ruth Park had written about, bounded by Devonshire, Clisdell, Belvoir and Riley Streets, was demolished. There had been eight streets with up to 900 terrace houses in the area: they were replaced by the Northcott Estate towers, with 591 apartments, opened in December 1961. Ruth Park attended the opening. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1963.

Few of the original inhabitants of the area were rehoused at Northcott[iii]. The rats, the ‘cramped and squalid streets’, the ‘dark congested hovels’[iv]might have been gone but so were the people with their ‘uncluttered, basic kindness’.[v]The people were scattered to the wider suburbs.

Some people were rehoused by the Housing Commission in the 1950s in new developments at Ryde, Villawood, Maroubra, Seven Hills, Ermington, Rydalmere and Dundas Valley. The first planned neighbourhood estate was at Orphan School Creek in Canley Vale, with between 200 and 300 detached and semi-detached houses.[vi]

In the early 1960s the Housing Commission widened its horizons and built its first new town. The Green Valley estate was built between 1961 and 1965 to house 25,000 people in 6000 new properties.[vii]It nearly doubled the population of nearby Liverpool. Its suburbs – Ashcroft, Busby, Cartwright, Heckenburg, Hinchinbrook, Miller and Sadleir – were named after early (white) luminaries of the district. Its street names were themed as well, with cattle in Busby (such as Frieisian, Devon, Aberdeen Streets) birds in Hinchinbrook (Emu, Robin, Egret Streets) and sheep in Miller (Merino, Shropshire and Leicester Streets).

The 1966 census showed that the people were predominantly of British origin – 98%, which was higher than the NSW figure of 96%. But their ages showed a population wildly at variance with the NSW average – 20.6% were aged under 5, compared to 9.5% in NSW. Only 40.1% were aged over 20, compared to 62.9% in NSW. It was a population thrown out to fend for itself, with few leaders and few resources.

 

[i]http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/history/sydneystreets/Lost_Streets/Resumptions/map.html

[ii]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p.106.

[iii]What have they done there? Two years at Northcott: An observation of a work in progress. Emily Mayo – In consultation with all partners. Big hART, December 2004.

[iv]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p192.

[v]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p151.

[vi]http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/About+Us/History+of+Public+Housing+in+NSW/The+1950s.htmviewed 25 May 2010

[vii]http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/About+Us/History+of+Public+Housing+in+NSW/The+1960s.htm

The city expands

12 Saturday May 2018

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Sydney continued to expand steadily in the 1830s. Traders and entrepeneurs were transforming it into a colony, rather than a penal settlement. In 1840 transportation to NSW would stop.

A ‘Plan of Sydney with Pyrmont, New South Wales: The Latter the Property of Edw. Macarthur Esquire, Divided into Allotments for Building. 1836’[1], shows that the creeks that were present just five years earlier are vanishing and Cockle Bay is contracting. Streets are dotted in over the cattle market grounds. There are three new wharves between Miller’s Point and Dawes Point. The area around Pyrmont Bay, as the name of the map suggests, is divided into 101 allotments.

There is still a small section marked ‘Cattle Markets’ near Campbell Street in 1843, and now there is a ‘Hay Market’ as well. Wharves are appearing in Pyrmont Bay. Ferry routes to Balmain and across the harbour are indicated, and the river route to Parramatta. Streets cross the lowlands of Woolloomooloo and the ridge above, called Darlinghurst. Wests Creek is marked, running down into Rushcutters Bay. Grose Farm is labelled out on the edge of the city, in the fork between Parramatta Road and City Road.

The Hay and Corn Market and the Cattle Market can still be seen in a map from 1854[2]. The edges of the harbour, from ‘Semi Circular Quay’ to Pyrmont, bristle with wharves for all that trade. ‘Semi Circular Quay’ itself is flat and wharfless. A wharf and jetties have appeared in Woolloomooloo Bay. There are Toll Bars on the major roads into and out of the city – ‘South Head Old Road’ (east of Dowling Street); ‘William Street east’ (at Rushcutters Bay), ‘Parramatta Street’ (just west of the turn-off to ‘The Glebe Road’). The ‘Terminus of the Sydney Railway’ is marked between Cleveland Street and Devonshire Street (although there would be no terminus buildings, and no trains, for another year), and the train line is marked as ‘Sydney and Goulburn Railway’ (recording the original motivation for a train line, proposed in 1848). A branch train line marked down the west side of Darling Harbour would also be completed and opened in 1855.

The next map in the book, from 1866[3], is a masterpiece of interconnectedness, with bridges across Darling Harbour, Blackwattle Bay, and linking Pyrmont and Glebe Island. There are roads and a subdivision on the north side of the harbour, called ‘St Leonards’.

Then the maps can no longer contain themselves within the city. The 1868 map stretches out to Tempe and Botany in the south, Canterbury and Ashfield in the west, Balgowlah to the north. Coogee, Waverley and Randwick show substantial development in the east.

When the first train line, from Sydney to Parramatta, opened in 1855, the spread of people out of the city accelerated. In 1851 9,684 people lived in suburbs; this figure increased to 28,233 by 1856. It took about another twenty years for the number of suburb-dwellers to exceed the number of city-dwellers. By 1891 there were more than twice as many people living in the suburbs – 275,631 – compared to the city – 107,652.[4]

[1]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p23.

[2]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p26-7.

[3]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p29.

[4]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p76

Brickfield Hill

06 Sunday May 2018

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The stretch of George Street, roughly from Hay Street to Bathurst St, known for many years as Brickfield Hill, was named for the brickworks that were developed almost as soon as the white settlers arrived. By 1790, the master brickmaker, “was tasked to make and burn ready for use 30,000 tiles and bricks per month. He had twenty-one hands to assist him, who performed everything; cut wood, dug clay, etc.” [i]

A book of early maps shows Sydney erupt and spread, always subdividing and gridding, hacking off new portions of land and covering them with lines. The ‘Brick Field’ is shown on the very first map in the book, sketched by Francis Fowkes in April 1788. It is way off on the southern outskirts of the settlement, past the Saw Pits and the two ‘Shingling Parties’. There is a little cluster of camps, buildings and gardens on each side of a tapering line of water simply labelled ‘Cove’, with the ships of the First Fleet hovering on wavy lines at its mouth.[ii]The little colony had to make everything with what was to hand, and the earliest huts were made of the “soft wood of the cabbage palm”[iii].

In 1802 a map by Charles Alexander Lesueur has the brickfields marked as “Village de Brick-field où se trouvent plusieurs fabriques de Tuiles, de Poteries, de Faïances, &c.”[iv][Village of Brickfield where there are many manufacturers of tiles, pottery, crockery etc]. The brickfield is on a sizeable creek that runs down towards Cockle Bay, branching near the head of the bay, presumably into mangroves. There are three windmills shown, two on top of the cliffs west of Sydney Cove, and one where the Conservatorium now stands. (Sydney was to have 19 windmills, built and destroyed between 1797 and 1878.[v]) This map also shows two gallows. Even in 1802 one is marked as ‘disused’ as the streets have encroached on its privacy – this one must have been near the corner of present-day Park and Castlereagh Streets. The position of the second I calculate to be somewhere in Hyde Park, maybe near the War Memorial.

In the 1822 map the town is nearing the brickfields. The old cemetery, on the corner of George and Druitt Streets, is full. There is a building labelled ‘Market House’ on the adjacent block, with easy access from the Cockle Bay wharf, where produce from farms at Parramatta and the Hawkesbury was unloaded.[vi]The city is reaching out – a new cemetery is marked way out past the brickfields, near the “Turnpike [toll] Road to Parramatta and the interior”[vii]and the road to South Head is clearly marked.

By 1831 the map shows the site of the brickfield as a cattle market, but the name is retained on a nearby section of George Street – ‘Brickfield Hill’ is written between Liverpool and Goulburn Streets.[viii]There is a Benevolent Asylum near the turnpike, a Police Office next to the Market Place, steam engines and wharves on Darling Harbour and wharves and dockyards on Sydney Cove.

The Picture of Sydney and Strangers’ Guide in NSW for 1839describes Brickfield Hill as having been ‘not only steep and difficult, but actually dangerous’. However, in 1837-8 the incline was flattened, making it ‘easy for all kinds of drays, wagons and other carriages.’

The Town Hall would be built on the site of the original cemetery. The Queen Victoria building (QVB) would be built on the site of the Market House. But that’s all in the future.

 

[i]1788, by Watkin Tench. Reprinted in Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration, Tim Flannery (ed.), Text Publishing, 2002, p152.

[ii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p7.

[iii]R Burford, ‘Description of the Town of Sydney’ 1829 quoted in Graham Connah, ‘Of the hut I builded’: The Archaeology of Australia’s History, CUP 1988

[iv]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p15

[v]Fox, L. Old Sydney Windmills. Published by Len Fox, 1978.

[vi]Bridges, P. Foundations of Identity: Building Early Sydney 1788-1822. Hale & Iremonger, 1995, p146.

[vii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p19

[viii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p21

A tale of one city

26 Thursday Apr 2018

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Up until 1787 Warrane was an important food source for about 30 clans. In 1788, part of the area occupied by the Cadigal was suddenly called ‘Sydney Cove’ instead of Warrane. Suddenly more than a thousand people (accounts vary) had to be fed and housed and subdued in this area. By 1860 – only a lifespan of 72 years later – there were 95,789 people in Sydney, and it provided everything from grand houses to workers’ cottages to slums. The housing and population booms of the next two decades brought the population up to 224,939 in 1880, a figure which itself was nearly doubled by 1890 to 383,283 and ‘Sydney’ covered an area of more than ‘150 square miles’.[i]

‘Sydney’, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (the Sydney Statistical Division), spreads from the east coast to Blackheath and Mt Victoria in the west, Bargo in the south and the bottom of Lake Macquarie in the north.[ii]It covers an area of over 12,000 square kilometres and has a population of just over 5 million – nearly two-thirds of the population in 1.5% of the area of NSW.[iii]

Various schemes have tried to impose order on this expansion. The first governor, Governor Philip, devised a plan for the town, specifying the size of the allotments and streets, even protecting the environs of the Tank Stream by a band of 15 metres on either side that was not to be used for tree-cutting or cattle-grazing. When Philip left in 1792 his plans and orders lost their potency, setting the pattern for ideals with short lives.

Marjorie Barnard described Sydney in 1947 as a creation of profiteering and ostentation.

Macquarie’s was the last effort to plan Sydney. After him it just grew. It accumulated amenities and swelled to the idea of progress. Profiteering and ostentation left their marks indelible and heavy on the material fabric of the city. The well-to-do and worthy citizens – it was overwhelmingly their city – made no concessions to geography or climate. They built a city in the spirit of no surrender.[iv]

Mrs Charles Meredith, travelling with her husband in 1839, noted the ‘spirit of no surrender’, as well as the ‘ostentation’: “I never saw any native fish at a Sydney dinner-table – the preserved or cured cod and salmon from England being served instead, at a considerable expense, and, to my taste, it is not comparable with the cheap fresh fish, but being expensive, it has become ‘fashionable’, and that circumstance reconciles all things.”[v]

But Macquarie’s wasn’t the last to attempt to plan Sydney. After over a hundred years of private developers, a Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and Its Suburbsin 1909 produced recommendations for improvements to roads, public transport, slums, children’s playgrounds and building regulations. Private individuals in the 1910s lobbied to improve life for the masses through improved public health, housing, transport and civic design. ‘City beautiful’ ideas and reforms in cities in Europe and America inspired developments around Australia, with soldier repatriation after WW1 becoming a major theme of town planning.

In 1946 a new body, theCumberland County Council, was set up.The 1948 Cumberland County Council planbecame state policy in 1951, but the push from land developers, keen to cash in on the attraction of suburban living and the new goals of consumerism, and the state government’s own Housing Commission, saw encroachments on the ‘green belts’. Cars and highways were favoured over public transport, suburbs over decentralisation.

Plans for Sydney have proliferated since: in 1968, Sydney Region Outline Plan, in 1988, Sydney into Its Third Century, in 1995,Cities for the 21stCentury, in 1997, A Framework for Growth and Change.[vi]In 2010 it was Investing in a Better Future, which had a certain hopeful ring about it, but in March 2018 the Dickensian-sounding A Metropolis of Three Citieswas launched. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …’

 

[i]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p78

[ii]http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/nrpmaps.nsf/NEW+GmapPages/national+regional+profile?opendocumentviewed 26/4/18

[iii]http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1338.1Main+Features9Dec+2010

[iv]The Sydney Book. Written by Marjorie Barnard, drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. Ure Smith, 1947, p22.

[v]Mrs Charles Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. First published by John Murray 1844. Facsimile edition Penguin Books 1973. P43.

[vi]The Australian metropolis: a planning history. S Hamnett and R Freestone (eds). Allen & Unwin, 2000.

Terra nullius

20 Friday Apr 2018

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A ferry ride on Sydney Harbour is always a little holiday, a period of delight, rocking gently on the waves while the glinting buildings, the swathes of bushland, the waves at the shore, the yachts and warships and tugs and cruisers pass by.

Today is no exception. The ferry chugs its way out of Circular Quay, past the exuberant flamboyance of the Opera House. I’ve seen it blue, and pink; covered in paisley patterns and butterflies; I’ve seen it with ‘No War’ gallantly painted on its sails, the red paint dripping. Today it is gleaming white.

The point on which it stands, Bennelong Point, was named for Bennelong, an Aboriginal man of the Wangal people captured by Governor Phillip in late 1789 in a desperate attempt to communicate with the Aborigines. The first Aboriginal man kidnapped for the same purpose, Arabanoo, had died of the smallpox in May 1789. A house was built for Bennelong on Bennelong Point; since then, it has been Fort Macquarie, and a tram shed.

Fort Denison comes into view on our right hand side and the woman behind us excitedly tells her little girl, ‘That’s Fort Denison. We can go there too. That was here when the convicts used to come to Australia. Before anyone was here.’ The myth of terra nullius, so convenient in the 19thcentury, rejected in the Australian High Court in 1992, lives on.

It’s not true that no-one was here before ‘the convicts used to come to Australia’.

[there were] Colbee … Bereewan, Bondel, Imeerawanyee, Deedora, Wolarawaree, or Baneelon, among the men; … Wereeweea, Gooreedeeana, Milba, or Matilba, among the women. Parramatta, Gweea, Cameera, Cadi, and Memel, are names of places.[i]

The Cadigal, the people whose land was immediately usurped by the colonists, was a clan of about 60 people. Jakelin Troy calls their language ‘the Sydney language’, and defines it as being spoken by a tribe that lived across an area from the coast to the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers to the north and west, and as far south as Appin[ii]. According to Troy there were at least two dialects of the Sydney Language spoken by the various clans within the tribe, and the name ‘Eora’ or ‘Iyora’ is now given to the people who lived on the coast, and their dialect[iii]. A number of the early colonists were interested to record this language, despite the difficulties on both sides in understanding particular sounds. Troy points out that only the officers of the First Fleet recorded the Sydney Language. A contact language, New South Wales pidgin, rapidly took its place. The Aboriginal people were much more linguistically adept than the British, picking up both English and the pidgin. David Collins (deputy judge-advocate in Sydney 1788-1796) wrote in April 1792 that the Aboriginals, “conversed with us in a mutilated and incorrect language formed entirely on our imperfect knowledge and improper application of their words.”[iv]

Jakelin Troy’s book, The Sydney Language, provides a 50 page wordlist, bringing to life the people who spoke the language. Their words for people and kin, body parts, weapons, implements and other made objects, plants and animals show the priorities that they had – three words for different types of baskets, four types of shields, ten types of spears.  They had five different ways of saying ‘stop’, from ‘wari wari’, meaning to stop something being done that you don’t like, to ‘mayalya’ meaning ‘a little stop’.  It’s when you read their words for tickle (‘gidi gidi’), shiver, embrace, afraid, pick teeth, laugh, sexual desire, breathe, snore, love … that you feel the connection.[v]

 

[i]Tench, W. 1788. First published 1789 and 1793. Reproduced in Flannery, T, Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration. Text Publishing, 2002, p265.

[ii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p8.

[iii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p9.

[iv]Collins, 28 April 1792. Quoted in Jack Egan, Buried alive: Sydney 1788-92, Allen & Unwin 1999 p287.

[v]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p33-84.