By Julie Power
The past can often be found in the toilet.
No matter when or where you are in the world, people throw things down the toilet, says archaeologist and Egyptologist Dr Aaron de Souza, who is curating two new exhibitions opening at the Museum of Sydney on Thursday.
Dr Aaron de Souza says there are similarities between the excavations of Sydney’s First Government House site and his work exploring ancient Egypt through archaeology. Credit: Wolter Peeters
On the site of Sydney’s First Government House, the Museum of Sydney may seem a world away, and about 4000 to 5000 years in time, from Egypt. But there are many similarities, said de Souza, who worked on digs between Cairo and Aswan for more than a decade.
“They’re human settlement sites,” he said.
“So people are living there, throwing stuff away and going to the toilet. It is a bit different from [Egyptian] tombs, which were for the top 1 per cent, the rich people.
“History tells us what happened … archaeology makes history tangible. It allows us to literally touch the past. With archaeology, you can see the colours, you can sense what they were cooking, drinking.”
The first of the exhibitions, Unearthed, puts on display some of the 140,000 objects excavated in a major archeological expedition of First Government House before the museum was built 30 years ago, including the outhouses, kitchens, and bakery: the areas where the servants worked and lived. Much of the area is still preserved under the Museum of Sydney’s forecourt.
These decorative blue plates were found down a toilet used by servants on the site of the First Government House, next to where the Museum of Sydney is now located. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Among the objects are blue decorative plates found in a privy, which were used by servants working at Government House in the early days of settlement after the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788.
Many people assumed the plates were stolen. But de Souza wonders whether they were discarded, and a staff member put them down the loo for a “soft landing”.
The exhibition also includes the remains of Sydney’s first printing press, a cannonball, bones from cattle, shells from a midden and shards of old wine bottles reshaped as tools by First Nations people.
The museum collaborated with the Gujaga Foundation for the First Nations’ perspective.
First Government House was located on the site of a large midden, and Gujaga said its layers were like a history book, with each layer a chapter on the past.
Most of the original site is now buried under Phillip and Bridge streets in Sydney’s CBD.
A second, interactive exhibition, Dig It! lets visitors search for artefacts found on the Sydney site using the same tools and techniques de Souza used in Egypt. It also highlights the painstaking way each item found on a dig is recorded.
Former Premier Neville Wran talking to archeologist Anne Bickford at the original dig at First Government House, in 1983. Credit: Lindy Kerry for NSW Department of Planning
“People often ask me what’s the best thing I’ve ever found,” de Souza said. They are often disappointed by his response, expecting him to say mummies or gold.
“When I tell them it is a particular type of pottery, which showed the exchange of knowledge between Egyptians and Nubians, they say that’s boring.”
The most outstanding piece in the exhibition, de Souza said, is an unassuming brick impressed with a eucalyptus leaf.
“It was a striking metaphor for the irreversible transformation brought by British colonisation in 1788,” he said.
The brick with an impression of a eucalyptus leaf. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Museums of History NSW chief executive Annette Pitman said archaeology was “like meticulous detective work”.
“Objects that have rested under the city for generations suddenly speak when they’re unearthed, telling us things that records never captured. Artefacts such as broken bricks, bones.”
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