Rocks of ages

THE Rocks in Sydney was one of the first parts of this continent to be occupied by residential buildings more than two centuries ago.

THE Rocks in Sydney, now overshadowed by the Harbour Bridge and its approaches, was the first part of this continent, apart from the site of Government House, to be occupied by residential buildings more than two centuries ago.

It was named from the sandstone outcrops that were quarried to build the original dwellings, but many early houses were poorly constructed and the area soon became a slum.

It was a place of pubs and whorehouses from the beginning, and was later dominated by gangs of thugs known as The Rocks Push. As the generations passed, the land became more valuable and the housing stock more run down and insalubrious. The interests of politicians claiming to be motivated by social reform and urban renewal, and those of developers pursuing handsome profits, became, as so often, dangerously aligned. The original drive to demolish and redevelop the Rocks area came a century ago, and is the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney. It is a compact and interesting exhibition, combining art, historical documents and memorabilia in a way that is generally useful, although we are not spared the insistent drone of a compulsory oral history interview. Such things can be valuable but should be optional; that's what headphones are for.

The demolition of The Rocks was already a long-standing plan that just required a pretext, which was duly provided by an outbreak of bubonic plague in January 1900.

We were fortunate, in hindsight, that trade from Asia had not brought plague or some other epidemic before this time; in the earliest years, one could imagine such a catastrophe could have snuffed out the nascent colony altogether.

It is not surprising that the authorities and the press were alarmed by the arrival of the bubonic plague. This disease, said to have arrived in Europe from Africa with the ivory trade, caused huge loss of life in sixth-century Constantinople. Thereafter it struck Europe periodically until the 19th century. In any case, the plague was an excuse to declare the whole of The Rocks a danger to public health, as well as to public morality: a somewhat less obvious line of reasoning, but one that partly motivated later campaigns to demolish Surry Hills and replace those terrace houses that were nests of vice with modernist tower blocks supposed to foster health and virtue.

The government used its powers to resume The Rocks area, but proprietors, often absentee slum landlords who had left their houses in a shameful condition, had to be properly compensated. So every building was duly surveyed, an architectural drawing of it drafted in a ledger, and the structure and any fixtures and fittings valued.

This is one of the most interesting and eloquent parts of the exhibition. In one of the property registers, open in a display case, we discover line after line of properties, with a red line carefully ruled through them as they were demolished. Attached to most of these is a glimpse of the people who lived in the condemned houses.

If we take one at random, 24 Clyde St -- which disappeared to make way for Hickson Road -- we find that it is categorised as a dwelling, stone and brick, iron roof, with four rooms and a kitchen. It was occupied by Catherine Gallagher, who paid five shillings rent weekly. Following the line across to the right of the page, we read: vacated 25 July, 04; and then in the next column: demolished 26 July, 04.

These resumptions and demolitions were repeated over the years, despite resistance from various quarters, until the 1950s; one of the most important phases involved the destruction of Princes Street and surrounding areas in 1927, not because the streets were uninhabitable, but to make way for the approaches to the new Harbour Bridge.

Painting the Rocks: The Loss of Old Sydney, the book that accompanies the exhibition, deals in detail with the successive demolitions, as well as providing illuminating insights into many aspects of life in the Rocks, from boarding houses to opium dens. One of the most interesting issues dealt with, however, is the very idea of old Sydney and the debate between the dominant proponents of progress and those who regretted the loss of structures that were a living connection with the city's past.

The specific focus of the show is in fact another exhibition organised in 1902, before the demolitions began. Julian Ashton, the painter and founder of the Julian Ashton Art School that still operates in The Rocks, believed that some record should be made of the district before it began to disappear, and managed to persuade the state government to provide funds for this purpose.

State sponsorship of the arts was a sporadic affair in those days, and the idea of disbursing taxpayers' money to a group of artists to paint bits of old Sydney was inevitably controversial; the press lampooned the project as welfare for penniless bohemians, and contemporary cartoons picture artists as scrawny, bearded and unwashed individuals, desperate to earn a share of the pound stg. 250 allocated.

In the end, 145 works were shown by 37 artists -- ranging from well-known to Sunday painters -- and the funds available were applied to the acquisition of 15 pictures for what is now the Art Gallery of NSW, although most of these eventually made their way to the Mitchell Library.

Many of the pictures from the 1902 exhibition have been gathered for the present show; some of the best are, not surprisingly, by Ashton, including his watercolour of Cambridge Street, looking towards the Argyle Cut, a luminous and picturesque view of an urban fabric that has grown organically on its irregular site.

The scene is animated by women and children, with connotations of family and community, as one of the authors in the book suggests; there are none of the drunks or layabouts one might expect in a dangerous slum. There is even a goat in the centre of the composition, contributing a bucolic note and perhaps a recollection of the hill towns of Italy.

The response of the press was not very favourable. Another cartoon suggests that the goats were for hire as picturesque props. The Sydney Morning Herald's critic complained that the money would have been better spent on a photographic record, considering the standard of the paintings to be inferior; many, indeed, were described as childish.

It is true that quite a few of the paintings are of rather ordinary workmanship, but those of Ashton as well as a few others, such as Fred Leist and Sydney Long, although basically documentary in intent, are certainly more alive than the corresponding photographs included in the book. Leist's back view of dwellings in Clyde Street, for example, presents the houses as actually inhabited, animated by light and shade. Even if the artist has taken some licence in his conception of these figures, he still leaves us with a sense that this is somewhere people lived, while the documentary photographs taken before demolition often merely record a ghost town.

The most successful images of The Rocks on display are by a contemporary who was overseas at the time and thus could not take part in the 1902 exhibition, but has been added on this occasion as an honorary member of the group: Lionel Lindsay, less well-known than his brother Norman, but a finer etcher.

Lindsay can be humorous and anecdotal, as in The Pawnbroker at the Argyle Cut, but he can also be much more serious and dramatic in such prints as A Rocks Resumption, with its dramatic alternation of lights and darks and tall architectural forms that show the influence of Charles Meryon (1821-68), one of the most remarkable etchers of the 19th century and an artist particularly admired by Charles Baudelaire.

Meryon's greatest works belong to the period of the Second Empire and his subject is the old city of Paris, which was also undergoing radical change in the name of progress and development, with many quarters razed to build Haussmann's ambitious network of boulevards. Lindsay's works, therefore, through his assimilation of Meryon, establish a filiation to an earlier and greater version of the same theme.

The exhibition reminds one, in passing, both of great buildings that have been lost in Sydney -- including Macquarie's Commissariat Stores at Circular Quay, demolished to make way for the Maritime Services Board, now the Museum of Contemporary Art -- and others that have had narrow escapes: some would gladly have seen Greenway's convict barracks demolished.

Through it all, of course, is the pathos of inevitable change, for even if one deplores the mindless ideology of progress and the heartless destruction of the old, the city obviously could not retain all its Georgian buildings, or indeed all its Victorian ones.