Warrane and The Rocks: Reading the First Town Beneath Sydney's Sandstone Quarter

Sydney Cove was Warrane long before it was a penal colony, and standing on its western shore is the way into reading The Rocks as three towns stacked on one another: unceded Gadigal Country, the convict quarter cut from sandstone by hand, and the picturesque tourist lane on top. The pubs and cobbled steps are lovely, and they are also the surface of something harder. If you begin where Sydney began, at the cove itself, the rest of the walk stops being a stroll past old buildings and becomes an act of reading the first town underneath.

Begin at the cove, not the charm

The western shore of Sydney Cove is where the Gadigal, a clan of the coastal Eora nation, had fished for tens of thousands of years, paddling nawi, the bark canoes of the harbour. In January seventeen eighty-eight, eleven ships carrying roughly one thousand people arrived in Port Jackson under Governor Arthur Phillip. He had first landed at Botany Bay on the twentieth of January, judged it poor and poorly watered, and moved north to this deeper cove. On the twenty-sixth of January seventeen eighty-eight he raised the British flag here and founded the penal colony of New South Wales. The cove took its English name from Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, the Home Secretary of the day.

What the founding accounts usually skim past is what came next for the Gadigal. In April seventeen eighty-nine a smallpox epidemic swept through the Eora. Governor Phillip estimated about half the Aboriginal people around the harbour died, and by about seventeen ninety-one the Gadigal living near this cove were reduced to roughly three people. Those are real dead, not a footnote. This is unceded Country, taken without treaty. And yet the Gadigal are still here, their culture continuing as part of one of the oldest living cultures on earth. Holding those two truths at once, the founding of a colony and the ground it was founded on, is the argument the whole walk makes. Every stop after this one is a variation on it.

The convict town, cut from stone by hand

Walk a short way from the water and the founding story hands off to the people who actually lived here. Cadmans Cottage, built in eighteen fifteen and eighteen sixteen as quarters for the governor's boat crews, is one of the very oldest surviving houses in Sydney. It is named for John Cadman, transported as a convict in seventeen ninety-eight for horse theft, pardoned, and risen to government coxswain from eighteen twenty-seven to eighteen forty-five. A convict past was not a dead end in The Rocks. It was where most people started. Notice how far the water sits now: land reclamation for Circular Quay from the eighteen thirties pushed the shoreline out, and Museums of History New South Wales records the waterline has moved about one hundred metres from a building that once stood at the harbour's edge.

Behind George Street the lanes tighten. Nurses Walk follows the convict-era street pattern almost exactly and marks the ground where the naval surgeon John White set up the colony's first hospital in tents in seventeen eighty-eight, only weeks after the landing. Nearby runs the Suez Canal, a slip so narrow two people can barely pass, its name a plain pun on sewers after the open drain it once carried down to the water. These are the arteries of the first town. It is easy to make a ghost-tour thrill of them at night; the more honest picture is the daytime one, water carried up by hand, washing strung between walls, the sick moved to tents on the hill.

Susannah Place is the quiet counterweight to governors and fleets. This terrace of four small brick houses, built in eighteen forty-four on Gloucester Street, was lived in continuously until about nineteen ninety, roughly a century and a half, by more than one hundred working-class families: Irish immigrants, Greek shopkeepers, Norwegian sailors. It is now a house museum that conserves rather than restores, keeping the worn paint and patched walls visible so you read every era at once. It survived twice: the plague-era demolitions of the early nineteen hundreds, and the redevelopment push of the nineteen seventies, when union Green Bans helped save much of The Rocks from the wrecking ball.

The stone remembers who cut it

The Argyle Cut is the tour's clearest lesson in reading the stone. This canyon driven straight through the sandstone ridge was begun in eighteen forty-three by convict chain gangs working with picks and hammers, three years after transportation to New South Wales had ceased in eighteen forty. The work was brutally slow, and the government abandoned it half finished. It resumed in eighteen fifty-nine with explosives and Sydney Municipal Council labour, and overhead bridges were added between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-eight. Convicts began it by hand; free labour with blasting powder finished it. Run your eye along the walls and you can read the difference between what was chipped and what was blown.

The climb ends on Observatory Hill, the highest point of the inner city. The sandstone observatory here was completed in eighteen fifty-eight; its time ball first fell on the fifth of June that year, and by later in eighteen fifty-eight it had settled into dropping daily at one o'clock, so ships could set their clocks before sailing. The hill wore other crowns first: a convict-built windmill from about seventeen ninety-six that gave it the name Windmill Hill, and the never-completed Fort Phillip, commissioned in eighteen oh four after the Castle Hill convict rebellion.

The walk closes at Dawes Point, whose Gadigal name is Tar-ra, beneath the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a steel arch spanning five hundred and four metres that opened on the nineteenth of March nineteen thirty-two. Here in seventeen ninety and seventeen ninety-one, the marine astronomer William Dawes, working with a young Aboriginal woman named Patyegarang, recorded the Sydney language in notebooks now held at a university library in London and digitised for anyone to read. A soldier and a young Aboriginal woman sat down together, and words that might have been lost were kept.

Walk it at your own clock

Seven stops, a little over two kilometres, roughly seventy minutes, with a short uphill to the harbour view as its reward. No group, no schedule, no tip at the end. You linger on the sandstone steps as long as the light holds, or move straight through. For more Sydney routes, see our guide to Sydney walking tours, and browse the rest of Sydney when you plan the day. Start at Circular Quay West, at Warrane, and let the first town rise up through the charm.

Sources

• National Museum of Australia and State Library of New South Wales: First Fleet arrival at Sydney Cove, twenty-sixth of January seventeen eighty-eight, and the founding of New South Wales.
• 1789 Sydney smallpox outbreak (Wikipedia) and "Governor Phillip and the Eora" (Dictionary of Sydney): the epidemic and its toll on the Gadigal.
• Cadmans Cottage and Susannah Place (Museums of History NSW): the colony's oldest houses, the working-class terrace, and Circular Quay reclamation.
• Argyle Cut and Sydney Observatory (The Rocks Discovery Museum, Dictionary of Sydney): convict-cut passage, Fort Phillip, and the time ball.
• William Dawes' Notebooks (SOAS Digital Collections): the Sydney language recorded with Patyegarang at Dawes Point.