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The Rocks: Everyday Life in Early Sydney 1788-1830
Winner of the NSW Premier's Award for nonfiction 1997. Shows the Rocks as a place very different from the usual images of a brutal colony. Showing rather a preindustrial town, a face-to-face society, marked more by movement and opportunity than coercion, discipline and punishment. Hardcover ISBN 0522847226 $34.95.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1997
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About the author
Grace Karskens
10 books24 followersGrace Karskens is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. Her book The Colony: A History of Early Sydney won the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-fiction and the US Urban History Association’s 2010 prize for Best Book.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 19, 2025
The Rocks is an interesting and entertaining book. It is a history of the western section of Sydney town, known almost for as long as colonisation as “The Rocks”. I suppose there are several reasons why a history of this area is of interest to me as an Australian resident, albeit from a distant part of the country. First, Sydney was the first of the European settlements in the land and was thus, in a sense, the ancestor or forerunner of the others; secondly, I have always had a keen interest in local histories; thirdly, while the British colony of Sydney was established primarily as a convict repository, it was not exclusively a prison, with numbers of free individuals setting up their lives there, some permanently, and the prisoners were given much more freedom than they would have had if incarcerated in English gaols, or if they had been executed, as was often the alternative. This was a unique feature in a new colony.
Karskens’s study provides a lot of information explaining how all this worked, at least for the times when, indeed, it did work.
The strength of the study is in the author’s thorough examination of what documents still exist, from official papers to ephemera. The brightest parts of the work are the anecdotal stories she has gleaned from such sources as court records, newspapers and private papers.
Karskens makes the point on a number of occasions that early Sydney was really a pre-industrial settlement. This was the case not only in that such industry as was developed was very rudimentary, but, more importantly, with regards to the way people thought and behaved.
In this respect, early Sydney was very similar to many small settlements in the U.K. Karskens makes this point herself, but it does mean that much of the description she provides of the Rocks people, of their manners, behaviour and beliefs is equally applicable to many areas and many populations in Britain, and thus has already been well documented in published works about Britain. These relate to matters such as attitude to religion, to gambling, to drinking, fighting, marriage or unofficial cohabitation, parenting of children, and work ethic. (“Governors were frequently annoyed by workers’ lax attitudes. Hunter was ‘astonished’ to notice that ‘the gangs were never seen in the afternoon’, and every time it rained they simply abandoned their work for the Government and went off to work for private people instead. Labouring people commonly interrupted work for a break, a visit, a chat, a game, a drink. Crowds quickly gathered at all times of the day to watch street fights, cock-fights, a flogging, a hanging”).
The book includes a look at children’s lives, there being 458 of them on the Rocks in 1822, a third of the total population. It notes that very few were attending schools, mainly wandering the streets as they chose, with minimal supervision. They were thus exposed – as they were in their homes – to the realities of life. One of those realities was physical danger, learning about which could have dire consequences. There were many instances of injury or death from the types of accidents that might have been prevented with close supervision: burnings, drownings, being hit by animals or carts. But all of this is similar to the situation in much of Britain.
Also similar is the community spirit which included a rejection of official channels: “Even for the poor, sick, aged and homeless, there were acts of pity and comfort, and attempts to alleviate distress. Those who attended the dying, usually family members, friends”, did not attempt to prevent the death but to diminish the trauma, often with alcohol. A doctor was only called to confirm that an apparent corpse was an actual corpse.
Orphans were usually fostered by unrelated local families. Perhaps surprisingly, the community spirit even extended to magistrates and merchants: “The poor needed fairly priced, affordable food, so that when high prices on market day resulted in ‘the further mortification to a number of poor persons who attended’, they deserved sympathy. Magistrates met to examine the ‘difficulties of the poorest orders of the community in obtaining wholesome bread at a reasonable price’, and outlined breadmaking rules and prices. Butchers appealed to be allowed to sell meat on Sundays since ‘many of the Poor Inhabitants do not receive their weekly stipends sufficiently early on Saturday to procure their Sabbath days dinner’.”
Karskens points out that formal marriage, conducted by clergy, was still uncommon for comparable groups in Britain and this carried through to the Sydney settlement where it was felt the clergy had no business meddling in such matters. Governor Macquarie attempted to change this, but apparently with little effect. Women who did marry were a few years younger than those in Britain, and it is suggested this was partly because of the imbalance of the genders in Sydney, and partly because of a generally positive outlook for a couple’s future prospects. Curiously, Sydney widows were far more likely to re-marry than their counterparts in England. Divorce was effectively impossible in England for anyone but the wealthily powerful but would, in any case, be irrelevant for those many Sydney partnerships not based on a formal ceremony. Karskens refers to a number of newspaper advertisements where one partner announced his or her refusal to accept liability for debts incurred by the other; and there was apparently even a tradition of wife selling or auctioning, a practice familiar to readers of The Mayor of Casterbridge
The book makes the point that the attitude to sex outside marriage had a decidedly gendered polarity. In court cases, women involved in such situations were represented as being depraved and predatory, while the men apparently suggested they were just doing what a man must do. Karskens provides an impressive list of fathers of illegitimate children to emphasize the hypocrisy: “Judge Advocate David Collins, the Surveyor General Augustus Alt, Surgeons John White, William Balmain, Thomas Arndell and Richard Halley, Captains James Meredith and George Johnston, Lieutenants Phillip King, James Furzer, Ralph Clark, John Poulder and Robert Kellow, the Government Printer George Howe, as well as Governor King and Lieutenant-Governor Paterson, who was said to have fathered ‘six fine bastards’.”
Where there was a significant difference between Sydney and comparable British neighbourhoods resulted from the fact that the First Fleet contained some 750 convicts and 250 others (wives, children, marines, officials). It was, as I mentioned earlier, primarily established as a place to accommodate convicts (allowing for such geopolitical realities as that Britain also wanted a foothold in the region in case of French or Russian threats).
The New South Wales colony was established in the latter stages of the Enlightenment and there was a remarkably flexible attitude to the way the convicts might be treated. Incidentally, this also impacted the way the indigenous people were viewed – by the initial intentions of Governor Phillip and some others of the hegemony, and at times by the other classes as well; the intention of respectful co-existence, however, periodically fell apart when the two forms of existence proved to be incompatible.
Given that transportation was second only to execution in the hierarchy of punishments (and despite the urban myth of its being regularly imposed on innocents who stole a handkerchief from an entitled member of the gentry in order to raise money so as to feed their starving family) we must assume that the transportees were reckoned as amongst the more dangerous of Britain’s criminals. Therefore, there must have been voices raised in favour of a more draconian approach. Yet, the plan for the colony was always to make it self-sufficient, and labour was needed for that, including the labour of convict-artisans. One of the few deficiencies in this work, for me, was that Karskens largely neglected any sort of summary of who the convicts were and what they had done. Obviously, other studies have covered this matter so it would have been unnecessary for her to repeat this, but a summary of the more important findings, or some legal history for specific people whom Karskens focuses on in her narrative would have provided valuable contextual information about a significant portion of the Rocks denizens.
Sydney – for the First Fleeters – represented a new start. They had a higher proportion of literacy (75%) than the comparable population of Britain. There were no existing buildings for people to buy or rent or for which to inherit occupancy, so that they initially had to build their own accommodation, everyone starting from scratch. At first, these homes were wattle-and-daub with dirt floors, but there was soon a move to upgrade, with weatherboard or brick or rough-hewn rubble-stone cut from the terraced Rocks ground. Building methodology was often trail and error in nature: “Some of the thatched roofs were replaced by pale orange clay roof tiles, but they absorbed so much water that they caved in upon the posts and wattles below. Silvery timber shingles became the most common roof material, and were used until the 1870s. Houses were increasingly advertised as boasting glass windows and proper fireplaces.” And in the Rocks, they were able to choose their own plot on which to build.
There was no inherited gentry owning land and operating a residual serf-economy, although numbers of wealthy free settlers and officials quickly accumulated both land grants and stock so as to make themselves into a putative upper class. The majority of the people were of “the lower orders” with artisans and small business owners at the top of this group. There was a widespread urge to improve one’s station: occupy and perhaps buy a small area of land, sometimes move to a more select area. Even the Rocks had stratification: “A few sea captains and merchants, landholders, clerks and clerics lived in the larger houses along the ridge.” And Karskens reports that there was widespread desire to acquire consumer goods.
It was not possible to be too judgmental about one’s neighbours: “Over a third were, in fact, men and women still under sentence. Some were assigned servants, living with masters and mistresses in the larger houses. A few lived independently as lodgers in Rocks households, or in shared houses alongside the recently freed, seamen and a few native-born; others were husbands or wives of free spouses who had accompanied or followed them out. Others held tickets of leave which, similarly, allowed them to live in households usually with wives and families, and practise their trades or work for masters. The largest group among the adult population were the ex-convicts, either free by servitude or pardoned, who made up two-fifths of the Rocks’ adult people, and half the householders. Among the minority who had arrived free (about a fifth), over half had followed a convict spouse to the colony.” (It is slightly confusing that Karskens uses the contemporary terminology of “native-born” for those who were of European descent but had been born in the colony.)
Areas became increasingly complicatedly heterogeneous: “Of 291 households, around a third had servants, averaging just under two each. Taken as a whole, ex-convicts made up nearly 60 per cent of the masters to whom more recently arrived convicts were assigned.” It is noted that there was a more egalitarian relationship between master and servant than the terms usually signify. This, of course, is unsurprising given the masters’ own usually humble origins or compromised background.
The fact that so many of the Rocks residents were convicts or ex-convicts did not mean that they rejected the court system; apparently there was much litigation for claimed assaults and they did not eschew ethical frameworks in toto ; “‘unnatural’ crimes such as infanticide, suicide, murder, buggery and bestiality were considered horrible and unnatural. They excited unease, moral outrage and disgust among ordinary people, who demanded expiation through public shaming and execution.” Suicides were denied burial in consecrated church plots. It was apparently common entertainment to attend court-cases and, as in Britain, to observe hangings, and to gaze at corpses displayed on gibbets after a hanging. Nevertheless, the hangman of the time was ostracised, petitioning the authorities to help him find accommodation for his family since no-one was willing to sell or lease him a property.
It is fascinating that rebellion in Ireland caused a stir in Sydney. The rebels were either caught or killed, in England, but Sydney’s authorities thought it wise to protect the town from Irish rebels with a defence of loyal Englishmen. When Irish insurrectionists did arrive, as convicts, they were found to have useful skills and education and, according to Karskens, a willingness to begin again in Sydney.
Karskens does not deal with indigenous people much, although her focus is on the Rocks, a residential and business area. Presumably, the indigenous people left the Rocks fairly early after the arrival of the First Fleet; given its geology, it probably wasn’t a hunting area. And settlers’ farms were further out so there was not the conflict in this region over hunting grounds versus farm pasturage. But “Sydney Aborigines did not simply vanish or die after the arrival of the First Fleet, they were a continued presence in the town. These few glimpses suggest that their interaction, responses and experience among the newcomers varied enormously, encompassing resistance, accommodation, violence and exploitation.” She does refer to a little indigenous boy who was orphaned during a conflict and was subsequently fostered by a succession of Rocks families.
Perhaps the most optimistic information in the book, from the point of view of Sydney’s future is that “the first official seal of the colony, tellingly, showed ‘industry releasing convicts from their fetters’”. However, the Rocks itself was to become neglected and ill-regarded for many years from the 1840s.
Karskens’s The Rocks is a worthy work, providing a graphic picture of the early years of this part of Sydney. Historiographically, it is not exactly rich, but it is entertaining. I thought it could have offered a little more comparative data about other parts of Sydney but this is no great failing. I was irritated by the repeated use of the ugly genitive form “Wills’” for Sarah and Edward Wills (“The Wills’ eighteen-foot boat was stolen by escaping convicts in 1807”; “Sarah Wills’ death” etc etc) There is surely no good argument for using this form rather than the more logical Willses’ boat or Wills’s death.
A more egregious error, though, appears to have been committed by Kindle in the digital transcription process, exemplified by the misreading, among many many others, of “Newcastle” as “Newcasde”.
Karskens’s study provides a lot of information explaining how all this worked, at least for the times when, indeed, it did work.
The strength of the study is in the author’s thorough examination of what documents still exist, from official papers to ephemera. The brightest parts of the work are the anecdotal stories she has gleaned from such sources as court records, newspapers and private papers.
Karskens makes the point on a number of occasions that early Sydney was really a pre-industrial settlement. This was the case not only in that such industry as was developed was very rudimentary, but, more importantly, with regards to the way people thought and behaved.
In this respect, early Sydney was very similar to many small settlements in the U.K. Karskens makes this point herself, but it does mean that much of the description she provides of the Rocks people, of their manners, behaviour and beliefs is equally applicable to many areas and many populations in Britain, and thus has already been well documented in published works about Britain. These relate to matters such as attitude to religion, to gambling, to drinking, fighting, marriage or unofficial cohabitation, parenting of children, and work ethic. (“Governors were frequently annoyed by workers’ lax attitudes. Hunter was ‘astonished’ to notice that ‘the gangs were never seen in the afternoon’, and every time it rained they simply abandoned their work for the Government and went off to work for private people instead. Labouring people commonly interrupted work for a break, a visit, a chat, a game, a drink. Crowds quickly gathered at all times of the day to watch street fights, cock-fights, a flogging, a hanging”).
The book includes a look at children’s lives, there being 458 of them on the Rocks in 1822, a third of the total population. It notes that very few were attending schools, mainly wandering the streets as they chose, with minimal supervision. They were thus exposed – as they were in their homes – to the realities of life. One of those realities was physical danger, learning about which could have dire consequences. There were many instances of injury or death from the types of accidents that might have been prevented with close supervision: burnings, drownings, being hit by animals or carts. But all of this is similar to the situation in much of Britain.
Also similar is the community spirit which included a rejection of official channels: “Even for the poor, sick, aged and homeless, there were acts of pity and comfort, and attempts to alleviate distress. Those who attended the dying, usually family members, friends”, did not attempt to prevent the death but to diminish the trauma, often with alcohol. A doctor was only called to confirm that an apparent corpse was an actual corpse.
Orphans were usually fostered by unrelated local families. Perhaps surprisingly, the community spirit even extended to magistrates and merchants: “The poor needed fairly priced, affordable food, so that when high prices on market day resulted in ‘the further mortification to a number of poor persons who attended’, they deserved sympathy. Magistrates met to examine the ‘difficulties of the poorest orders of the community in obtaining wholesome bread at a reasonable price’, and outlined breadmaking rules and prices. Butchers appealed to be allowed to sell meat on Sundays since ‘many of the Poor Inhabitants do not receive their weekly stipends sufficiently early on Saturday to procure their Sabbath days dinner’.”
Karskens points out that formal marriage, conducted by clergy, was still uncommon for comparable groups in Britain and this carried through to the Sydney settlement where it was felt the clergy had no business meddling in such matters. Governor Macquarie attempted to change this, but apparently with little effect. Women who did marry were a few years younger than those in Britain, and it is suggested this was partly because of the imbalance of the genders in Sydney, and partly because of a generally positive outlook for a couple’s future prospects. Curiously, Sydney widows were far more likely to re-marry than their counterparts in England. Divorce was effectively impossible in England for anyone but the wealthily powerful but would, in any case, be irrelevant for those many Sydney partnerships not based on a formal ceremony. Karskens refers to a number of newspaper advertisements where one partner announced his or her refusal to accept liability for debts incurred by the other; and there was apparently even a tradition of wife selling or auctioning, a practice familiar to readers of The Mayor of Casterbridge
The book makes the point that the attitude to sex outside marriage had a decidedly gendered polarity. In court cases, women involved in such situations were represented as being depraved and predatory, while the men apparently suggested they were just doing what a man must do. Karskens provides an impressive list of fathers of illegitimate children to emphasize the hypocrisy: “Judge Advocate David Collins, the Surveyor General Augustus Alt, Surgeons John White, William Balmain, Thomas Arndell and Richard Halley, Captains James Meredith and George Johnston, Lieutenants Phillip King, James Furzer, Ralph Clark, John Poulder and Robert Kellow, the Government Printer George Howe, as well as Governor King and Lieutenant-Governor Paterson, who was said to have fathered ‘six fine bastards’.”
Where there was a significant difference between Sydney and comparable British neighbourhoods resulted from the fact that the First Fleet contained some 750 convicts and 250 others (wives, children, marines, officials). It was, as I mentioned earlier, primarily established as a place to accommodate convicts (allowing for such geopolitical realities as that Britain also wanted a foothold in the region in case of French or Russian threats).
The New South Wales colony was established in the latter stages of the Enlightenment and there was a remarkably flexible attitude to the way the convicts might be treated. Incidentally, this also impacted the way the indigenous people were viewed – by the initial intentions of Governor Phillip and some others of the hegemony, and at times by the other classes as well; the intention of respectful co-existence, however, periodically fell apart when the two forms of existence proved to be incompatible.
Given that transportation was second only to execution in the hierarchy of punishments (and despite the urban myth of its being regularly imposed on innocents who stole a handkerchief from an entitled member of the gentry in order to raise money so as to feed their starving family) we must assume that the transportees were reckoned as amongst the more dangerous of Britain’s criminals. Therefore, there must have been voices raised in favour of a more draconian approach. Yet, the plan for the colony was always to make it self-sufficient, and labour was needed for that, including the labour of convict-artisans. One of the few deficiencies in this work, for me, was that Karskens largely neglected any sort of summary of who the convicts were and what they had done. Obviously, other studies have covered this matter so it would have been unnecessary for her to repeat this, but a summary of the more important findings, or some legal history for specific people whom Karskens focuses on in her narrative would have provided valuable contextual information about a significant portion of the Rocks denizens.
Sydney – for the First Fleeters – represented a new start. They had a higher proportion of literacy (75%) than the comparable population of Britain. There were no existing buildings for people to buy or rent or for which to inherit occupancy, so that they initially had to build their own accommodation, everyone starting from scratch. At first, these homes were wattle-and-daub with dirt floors, but there was soon a move to upgrade, with weatherboard or brick or rough-hewn rubble-stone cut from the terraced Rocks ground. Building methodology was often trail and error in nature: “Some of the thatched roofs were replaced by pale orange clay roof tiles, but they absorbed so much water that they caved in upon the posts and wattles below. Silvery timber shingles became the most common roof material, and were used until the 1870s. Houses were increasingly advertised as boasting glass windows and proper fireplaces.” And in the Rocks, they were able to choose their own plot on which to build.
There was no inherited gentry owning land and operating a residual serf-economy, although numbers of wealthy free settlers and officials quickly accumulated both land grants and stock so as to make themselves into a putative upper class. The majority of the people were of “the lower orders” with artisans and small business owners at the top of this group. There was a widespread urge to improve one’s station: occupy and perhaps buy a small area of land, sometimes move to a more select area. Even the Rocks had stratification: “A few sea captains and merchants, landholders, clerks and clerics lived in the larger houses along the ridge.” And Karskens reports that there was widespread desire to acquire consumer goods.
It was not possible to be too judgmental about one’s neighbours: “Over a third were, in fact, men and women still under sentence. Some were assigned servants, living with masters and mistresses in the larger houses. A few lived independently as lodgers in Rocks households, or in shared houses alongside the recently freed, seamen and a few native-born; others were husbands or wives of free spouses who had accompanied or followed them out. Others held tickets of leave which, similarly, allowed them to live in households usually with wives and families, and practise their trades or work for masters. The largest group among the adult population were the ex-convicts, either free by servitude or pardoned, who made up two-fifths of the Rocks’ adult people, and half the householders. Among the minority who had arrived free (about a fifth), over half had followed a convict spouse to the colony.” (It is slightly confusing that Karskens uses the contemporary terminology of “native-born” for those who were of European descent but had been born in the colony.)
Areas became increasingly complicatedly heterogeneous: “Of 291 households, around a third had servants, averaging just under two each. Taken as a whole, ex-convicts made up nearly 60 per cent of the masters to whom more recently arrived convicts were assigned.” It is noted that there was a more egalitarian relationship between master and servant than the terms usually signify. This, of course, is unsurprising given the masters’ own usually humble origins or compromised background.
The fact that so many of the Rocks residents were convicts or ex-convicts did not mean that they rejected the court system; apparently there was much litigation for claimed assaults and they did not eschew ethical frameworks in toto ; “‘unnatural’ crimes such as infanticide, suicide, murder, buggery and bestiality were considered horrible and unnatural. They excited unease, moral outrage and disgust among ordinary people, who demanded expiation through public shaming and execution.” Suicides were denied burial in consecrated church plots. It was apparently common entertainment to attend court-cases and, as in Britain, to observe hangings, and to gaze at corpses displayed on gibbets after a hanging. Nevertheless, the hangman of the time was ostracised, petitioning the authorities to help him find accommodation for his family since no-one was willing to sell or lease him a property.
It is fascinating that rebellion in Ireland caused a stir in Sydney. The rebels were either caught or killed, in England, but Sydney’s authorities thought it wise to protect the town from Irish rebels with a defence of loyal Englishmen. When Irish insurrectionists did arrive, as convicts, they were found to have useful skills and education and, according to Karskens, a willingness to begin again in Sydney.
Karskens does not deal with indigenous people much, although her focus is on the Rocks, a residential and business area. Presumably, the indigenous people left the Rocks fairly early after the arrival of the First Fleet; given its geology, it probably wasn’t a hunting area. And settlers’ farms were further out so there was not the conflict in this region over hunting grounds versus farm pasturage. But “Sydney Aborigines did not simply vanish or die after the arrival of the First Fleet, they were a continued presence in the town. These few glimpses suggest that their interaction, responses and experience among the newcomers varied enormously, encompassing resistance, accommodation, violence and exploitation.” She does refer to a little indigenous boy who was orphaned during a conflict and was subsequently fostered by a succession of Rocks families.
Perhaps the most optimistic information in the book, from the point of view of Sydney’s future is that “the first official seal of the colony, tellingly, showed ‘industry releasing convicts from their fetters’”. However, the Rocks itself was to become neglected and ill-regarded for many years from the 1840s.
Karskens’s The Rocks is a worthy work, providing a graphic picture of the early years of this part of Sydney. Historiographically, it is not exactly rich, but it is entertaining. I thought it could have offered a little more comparative data about other parts of Sydney but this is no great failing. I was irritated by the repeated use of the ugly genitive form “Wills’” for Sarah and Edward Wills (“The Wills’ eighteen-foot boat was stolen by escaping convicts in 1807”; “Sarah Wills’ death” etc etc) There is surely no good argument for using this form rather than the more logical Willses’ boat or Wills’s death.
A more egregious error, though, appears to have been committed by Kindle in the digital transcription process, exemplified by the misreading, among many many others, of “Newcastle” as “Newcasde”.
June 2, 2021
If you wanted to know where Sydney's "red-light" district was in the laste 18 and early 19 century-this book will tell you! Karskens writes like a fiction author and it's early on in the book where you get immersed in the "place" and its characters. Good stuff.
June 11, 2023
3.5 stars
April 9, 2025
A good and reasonable accurate read of the early days in the Sydney colony and life in the Rocks area.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews