They’d make a flogging: The case to re-open Old Sydney Town

In the UK, there are plans for a new theme park based on history, in this case British history. The company involved, we’re told, has already pioneered the idea in Spain and France.

Sorry, “pioneered”? Really? To Australian ears, it’s all so 1975. That’s when Old Sydney Town – a theme park based on Australian colonial history – came to life. And that was a latecomer compared to Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill, which opened in 1970 and is still going strong.

Sovereign Hill, mind you, was never a patch on Old Sydney Town. Old Sydney Town had it all. It had the floggings, plus the floggings, oh and there were also the floggings.

It was impossible to escape a flogging at Oly Sydney Town, pictured here in 1976.Credit: Nigel Scot McNeil

My point is that although there were other attractions - the olden days classroom, the olden days ship, the olden days shoppe – every other offering was bleached from your memory once you’d witnessed the floggings.

The horror, the horror.

I’m sure we understood they were actors – perhaps not enjoying the best moment of their careers – but my god, it was realistic. The shirts came off, the cat o’ nine tails flew through the air, its leather talons glinting in the central coast sun, and bloody stripes appeared on the backs of the writhing, screaming convicts.

The true pioneer of historical entertainment. Credit: Stevens

As a method of entertaining children, it was only a tad shy of a child in ancient Rome watching the gladiators hack each other to death. If you wonder why older Sydneysiders are a bit nervy – often in therapy, commonly addicted to drugs – look no further than our exposure, as 10-year-olds, to this chapter torn from the Marquis de Sade.

Old Sydney Town expressed a grim view of convict life, a view most famously expressed in Robert Hughes’ book The Fatal Shore. It’s a vividly written account, but recent historians doubt its premise. In the Hughes version, early Sydney was an evil gulag in which a chap who’d stolen one sandwich – one sandwich! – was flogged until death by sadistic wardens. I exaggerate, but not by a lot.

Historians such as Grace Karskens are more measured. There was terrible violence, but it tended to occur in Tasmania or Norfolk Island. And it was meted out to convicts who’d reoffended once in the colony.

Providing you behaved yourself, convict life in Sydney was often a cut above your experiences back in the UK, surviving as a member of the impoverished underclass. Karskens says some convicts even wrote letters home, urging siblings to find some way to be sent here.

Old Sydney Town was a go-to location for NSW schoolchildren. Credit: Stevens

Perhaps the Karskens version provides a weak sales pitch for a theme park: “Welcome to Lovely Old Sydney Town – a place so much better than the London of 1803!”

Yet, there must be ways to create an entertaining theme park and still be true to our history. The floggings might have to be abandoned, but surely the Emu Wars could be re-enacted every day: soldiers firing at emus, the emus sidestepping the bullets, the birds led to victory by their emu leader.

I’d like to see an Indigenous guide leading an explorer into the hinterland, at which point the early explorer would claim to have “discovered” it all, solo and unaided. And I’d like an LGBTQI pavilion in which a diorama could pay tribute to Captain Moonlight and his touching relationship with James Nesbitt.

But how would we use the stocks, always given pride of place in Old Sydney Town? With a nod to our contemporary sensibilities, they would be the perfect place to display Thomas Austin, the man who – keen to have a target for his shooting parties – introduced wild rabbits into Australia in 1859. Visiting kids would be allowed to pelt his statue with rotten fruit.

There was a time when Australians couldn’t get enough of their history. By day, we’d visit Old Sydney Town or Sovereign Hill; by night, we’d watch TV shows like Rush, Eliza Fraser, All the Rivers Run, Against the Wind and The Timeless Land. Most people were less aware of the troubled nature of our history, and so TV drama became a chance to enjoy period clothes, digging for gold and the odd convict flogging.

Irish settler Stephen Mannion (Michael Craig) and his young wife Conor (Nicola Pagett) in The Timeless Land, 1980.Credit: ABC

Once non-Indigenous Australians became more aware of the country’s true history of settlement and dispossession, we began pushing history offstage. Historical TV dramas, by and large, disappeared; Old Sydney Town closed its doors.

That’s a shame because if you are willing to embrace Australian history in all its darkness and light, it’s as fascinating as you can get – all 65,000 years of it.

Mark Twain, after a visit here in the 1890s, put it this way: “Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history but like the most beautiful of lies ... It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities, but they are all true; they all happened.”

So let’s reopen Old Sydney Town, rebuilt and reimagined, and prove that when it comes to history, we can beat the British theme-park entrepreneurs and do it every time.