Friday 13 April 2012: Hidden Magic

So it’s Friday the 13^th.  Are you the superstitious type?  Avoid black cats?  Don’t walk under ladders? Believe the earth is inhabited not just by us but also by unseen devils?

You are not alone in these feelings nor is it new.  For just about as long as humans have walked upright, there have been beliefs in evil spirits and attempts to find methods for keeping them at bay.

These beliefs are not often considered in the European heritage of Sydney.  The truth is that a strange practise of concealing ritual objects in the walls and secret spaces of houses to ward off evil spirits appears to have not been uncommon in colonial Sydney and indeed right up into the 1930s.

Houses all over Australia have been revealing the existence of this custom, imported from England by settlers and later migrants.  In the UK, many hundreds of houses have been found to have secret stashes of talisman like objects to ward off witches and evil spirits.  Most commonly these were things like pieces of clothing, particularly shoes or hats, dead cats or bottles of home brew potions.

The shoes and hats are thought to be used as they are very personal items, moulded by the body, containing the essence of the wearer and therefore detected by spirits easily.  If they are then concealed in hidden spaces, behind walls, under floor boards, in chimneys or roof cavities it is thought that this would confuse the spirits as to where the people were and thereby keep them away from the actual families.  In Australia (and the UK) shoes are particularly common and were apparently seen as a type of trap for the devil, a belief that harks back to a priest in England named John Schorn in the 13^th Century.

Cats on the other hand had long been thought to act as witches familiars, allowing them access to houses and the people within.  They were a link to the otherworld.

This sort of behaviour can be understood in England and Europe, with centuries of myth and fairytales.  From our perspective, Sydney seems not to have these old world connections.  But old habits die hard and looking through the eyes of colonial settlers, Sydney must have been a crazy, scary place with all types of new evils lurking in the dark bush.

A historian in Newcastle (Ian Evans), who specialises in this type of research, has recorded hundreds of examples of hidden charms in houses in Newcastle, Sydney, rural NSW, Tassie and Victoria.

The houses range from simple workers cottages to grand mansions like Elizabeth Bay House, convict stations including Hyde Park Barracks and even inside the pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Mostly they are a single shoe, placed somewhere that they could not have just been dropped into, like inside a chimney on a brick ledge, or in the roof cavity behind a wall, or under the floor directly between the joists.

Many of the items appear to have placed by tradesmen as houses were finished off.  As a last job, they appear to try to protect the house and its occupants from evil.

Others, such as a convict shirt and bible found stashed in the Hyde Park Barracks give an insight into the mental stress that many of these convicts were under.  Not only were they torn from family and loved ones, had to work long, hard hours and watch their back against their desperate companions, they also feared what they couldn’t see.

In fact the Barracks gave up possibly the most curious find.  During archaeological work, a matchbox with the partial skeletons of five mice was found beneath the floor on level 3 near a door leading to the dorm rooms.

A last ditch effort perhaps to keep the devil outside while they slept.

19 June 2009: The Three Bees

On 20 May 1814 Sydney came under siege for the first time in its short history.  Not from an external enemy but from one of its own, a burning convict ship moored right in the harbour.

Until the 1840s, convict ships disgorging their human cargo were a familiar sight in Sydney.  Up till 1814 approximately 16,000 convicts had come ashore in Sydney (over 82,000 would arrive in Sydney by the 1840s).  Most ships came and went with little incident.  Convicts were sick, some died, but mostly the ships were just another day in colonial Sydney.

The Three Bees arrived in early May with her travelling companion, the convict ship Catherine.  Both had left England in late 1813 at the height of the Napoleonic War.  They were escorted down the coast of Africa by two armed frigates, which was fortunate as they came across teh French war ship Cere’s, captained by Baron Bouganville (Bouganville had already visited Sydney and would do so again in the 1820s).  A brief battle ensued, and the Cere’s was captured.  The convict ships continued on, their guns now loaded in case of any further trouble.

In Sydney, the Three Beesunloaded 210 male convicts, including 50 sick with scurvy.  On the 20th, the ship was preparing to leave when a fire was discovered in the forward hold.  The reasons were never discovered,  but it is thought a candle wick dropped and smouldered before catching fire.  Either way, by the time it was noticed the ships hold was well alight. 

Fire on a ship is bad enough, but whenthe ship has 14 loaded guns and is thought to have 130 cases of gunpowder its terrifying.  As word spread, so did panic.  Sydney was a town with many timber buildings crowded around the harbour foreshore and Circular Quay area.  If this ship blew, she could take half the town with her.  People began to evacuate the town, including Governor Macquarie.

With a breeze blowing to the south, it was decided to cut the ship loose from its moorings and let her drift to the middle of the harbour.  Anchored close to the Government Wharf, near the current MCA, she was cut adrift and slowly moved out into the middle of the channel.  As the Sydney Gazette told its readers the next day, ’as she swung to and fro with the tide, menaced each point of the Cove with her broadside in turn‘. 

The Gazette breathless went on ‘This was a tremendous crisis, a crisis of extreme agitation to the inhabitants of the town, and to those more especially whose houses and other property were from the approximation of the danger the more exposed-A ship of nearly 500 tons burthern, cast loose, it may almost be said in the middle of town, unmanageable, and pouring forth columns of smoke and fire, threatening desolation all around her, with her guns all loaded, first pointed on one object and then another’.

At approximately 6.30pm, two hours after being cut adrift, the fire finally reached the first gun, which exploded and fired into town.  In the next hour fourteen guns went off randomly, firing shot into the streets around the harbour.  Miraculously no one was injured.  The main damage done was to the writing desk of Captain Piper of the Naval Office, when a cannon ball came through his window and smashed the desk, ironically the same desk he had signed the forms for the ships imminent departure.

The Three Bees eventually hit rocks at Bennelong Point where the Opera House is now.  The fire reached the remaining powder and the whole thing exploded, burnt to the waterline and the next morning sank. 

And so it remains, on the harbour floor somewhere under the Opera House.

The whole event was recreated in a spectacular light show as part of the Vivid festival in Sydney in June 2009, except this time the Three Bees sank and resurfaced nine times in the name of art.

20 March 2009: Liberty or Death

Australia’s only serious convict uprising occured in Sydney in March 1804 at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. The battle site, though oft contested by historians, is generally accepted to be near Rouse Hill at the junction of Windsor Road and Schofields Road. But this only marks the end of the story, much precedes it.

By 1804, a growing popoulation of convict workers were employed around Sydney on Government and private estates, in road gangs, labour gangs, as domestic servants or in other employment.  One of these establishments was the Government Farm at Castle Hill where around 480 convicts were working producing food for the fledgling colony.  Amongst these convicts were a number of Irish rebels, convicts transported for their role in rebellion and uprisings in Ireland in the later 1790s, most notably a rellion and battle called Vinegar Hill in 1798. 

There had been a number of small scale attempts at uprisings by the convicts in NSW since they had first arrived in 1788.  Attempted mutinies at sea or organised rebellions on land.  Almost all had been discovered before they had even begun, usually betrayed by someone on the inside keen on cutting a better deal for themselves at the expense of the others.  Those implicated were brutally dealt with, either executed or flogged into submission.  In 1804 lessons of the past had been well learnt.  The two leaders of the rebellion, Philip Cunningham and William Johnston, veterans of previous campaigns including 1798, kept the plan secret as they organised themselves.

And what was the plan? 

A simple plan: to rise up, overthrow the colonial authorities through the seizure of the settlements of Parramatta, Windsor and Sydney and then escape the colony on ships to freedom.  To do this a simultaneous attack would be co-ordinated by the convicts at Castle Hill farm, those at Parramatta and those at the Hawkesbury (Windsor), who would then all come together and march on Sydney.  If it went right nearly a third of the colonial population would rise up.

Of course it didn’t go right, although things started well enough.  On the night of 4 March about 8pm, a convict living in a hut near the government farm set his cottage on fire as the signal.  Seeing this, the rebels at Castle HIll stormed the guards overpowering them, and to the cries of Liberty or Death set off into the country towards Parramatta.  Sadly for them, one of the groups got lost in the forest (hard to imagine but most of the land around Sydney was still thick forest) and worse, the messages to the rebels in Parramatta and Windsor had never made it.  Faced with the possibility of meeting the Parramatta garrison with only 200 poorly armed men, Cunningham turned the group towards Windsor, making their way up the Windsor Road (easy with no cars on it). But things were beginning to unravel.

Soldiers had been gathering in Sydney under the command of Major George Johnston and were now marching at double time towards Parramatta and the rebels.  On the morning of 5 March, close to Rouse Hill, Johnston caught up to the rebels’ party.  As his soldiers were still some time away, he devised a stalling tactic: he called the two leaders forth to negotiate terms and promised to return with the Catholic priest Father James Dixonfor them to talk to.  Although suspicious, the rebels agreed.  As promised Major Johnston returned with Father Dixon as well as his soldiers.  The leaders were again enticed forward, but this time as they called for Liberty or Death, the soldiers stepped forward from the trees and attempted to oblige them, by firing.  A brief return fire was heard before the rebels broke and ran leaving 15 dead behind.  Over the next few days the stragglers were hunted down by the soldiers.  Cunningham who had been wounded on the field, was taken direct to Windsor and hung from the steps of the storehouse there.  Johnston was tried and hung in a giblet to rot on the road to Parramatta for four months as a warning.  Seven others were hung in Sydney, Parramatta and Windsor, and nine were publicly flogged receiving between100-500 lashes.  Father Dixon was reputedly made to put his hand on the bloody backs of each for his suspected sympathies.  And the rest were chained up and sent north to mine the coal out of the cliffs at Coal Harbour, later to be renamed Newcastle.

A memorial remains near Rouse Hill that probably marks the spot of Australia’s only convict uprising, now largely forgotten.

30 January 2009: What’s your favourity 19th century disease?

There are so many choices… For Laila it’s dropsy*, while Mark has a penchant for scurvy. But really, while this week’s Scratching Sydney’s Surface touches on the fascinating and somewhat gruesome ways people suffered and died in the 19th century, the topic to hand is the history of Australia’s oldest working hospital.

Sydney Hospital was built by convict labourers between 1811 and 1816 at the behest of Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Commonly known as the ‘Rum Hospital’, it received its name because there was no money or will to pay for a new hospital from the powers that be in England. So Macquarie paid the contractors by way of a limited monopoly on the supply of liquor (i.e. rum) to the Colony.

Macquarie chose the hospital’s position high above the ridgeline on the eastern edge of the town, on a street he named after himself, because its aspect encouraged the circulation of air, seen to be beneficial for recovery. Comprised of three wings, each two storeys high, the Rum Hospital took up most of the eastern side of Macquarie Street between Hyde Park and the Botanic Gardens.

In the early days of the Colony, the Rum Hospital was a prominent landmark on the Sydney skyline and was a testament to Macquarie’s vision for the city. Its central wing was intended to accommodate up to 200 patients, either convicts or poor free settlers, while the wings on either side were to be used as accommodation for surgeons and staff. The hospital was far too big for the population of Sydney in the early 19th century, however, and by the 1850s the northern wing was being used as the Parliament House, while the southern wing was converted for use as Sydney’s Royal Mint.

Sydney Hospital

By the early 1870s, conditions at the hospital were becoming dire, with outbreaks of typhoid becoming regular due to the building’s faulty drainage system. Members of Parliament next door complained about the smells coming from the sewers underneath the hospital, and there were reports that rats were attacking bodies in the mortuary. Evidently, going to Sydney Hospital was no guarantee of survival, and in fact was probably a speedy way to leave this mortal coil.

 The original convict-built central wing was demolished within the decade, although the new hospital designed by Thomas Rowe was not completed until 1894.  If you take a stroll down Macquarie Street, you can’t miss the central wing of Sydney Hospital: it’s a large, ornate Victorian Gothic sandstone pile nestled between the more restrained northern and southern wings of the former convict-built ‘Rum Hospital’. And if you are feeling brave of mind and heart, you can pop into the Lucy Osburn – Nightingale Foundation Museum to check out the display of nursing memorabilia & spooky anatomical specimens (although it’s only open on Tuesdays).

Lucy Osburn – Nightingale Foundation Museum
Open Tuesdays 10-3, Entry $5 Phone: 9372 7427
http://www.sesiahs.health.nsw.gov.au/sydhosp/historicaltours.asp

***UPDATE***

Plans are afoot to close this museum, so either rush along to see it, or support the fight to keep it open!

*Dropsy was the name given to a non-specific swelling of the soft tissue; today we’d call it oedema.

9 January 2009: Convicts rule OK

To kick off the new year, Mark talks about Sydney’s convict heritage this morning on Scratching Sydney’s Surface; think Hyde Park Barracks, the so-called Rum Hospital (now home to Parliament House and the Mint Museum) and Cockatoo Island. Further afield, there is Wisemans Ferry…

Take it away Mark!

Even though convicts kicked around in Sydney over 160 years ago, much of the fabric of the city they built remains for all to see. With the Sydney Festival about to get underway, it’s good to see some of our convict-built heritage being used as festival venues. Hyde Park Barracks on Macquarie Street, constructed in 1816-17, was designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, using convict labour.  Not only did the convicts build their own prison around themselves, they were also put to good use making the dreaded cat o’ nine tails, the favoured lash used on the backs of the recalcitrants.  If you listen closely while dancing in the Festival Bar in the next few weeks you might hear the sharp crack of a well placed stroke. Similarly, Cockatoo Island, home to All Tomorrows Parties in 2009, was shaped in its earliest form by convict labour.  Stone quarried to make the impressive Fitzroy Dock was used to form the seawalls around Sydney’s harbourside.

Further afield, Wisemans Ferry in Sydney’s northwest, named after the ex-convict and ferry man, Solomon Wiseman, has a number of good convict examples. Wiseman’s house has been incorporated into the Wisemans Ferry Hotel, complete with the ghost of his wife. Across the river (you take the ferry) the convict-built Old Great North Road continues into the mountains. An engineering marvel, the road winds its way into the Dharug National Park, its buttressed sides holding the stonework in place. This is a walk worth doing, but probably not in the 40 degree heat of a western Sydney summer.