The Rocks with a heavenly purpose

A PILGRIMAGE through Sydney's historic precinct.

The Rocks

I AM supposed to prayerfully reflect before I begin my pilgrimage through The Rocks, that historic sandstone outcrop nestled within the great bosom of Sydney Harbour.

But all around me are businessmen and women striding purposefully to their next meetings, waiters bustling in and out of cafes, schoolchildren on excursions and tourists gawking at the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I resemble a tourist myself, for I have clasped in my hand a book, A Pilgrimage through The Rocks, Sydney, to which I must refer while retracing the footsteps of Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop.

"There will be many opportunities for you to stop and reflect," Sister Jeanette Foxe, a Josephite nun and author of the book, told me earlier.

To "stop and reflect" in the midst of all this traffic surging through The Rocks as though it were still some busy working port? This is as easy today as it would have been back in 1838, when MacKillop's father, Alexander MacKillop, first arrived in the colony of NSW.

The site of penal settlement and refuge to starving Irishmen and homeless Scots, The Rocks was, as Foxe writes, "a place of hard living, opium dens, houses of ill-repute and pubs -- a squalid slum". I dispense with the prayer but give a mental nod to the past and traditional owners of this land -- the Cadigal people of the Eora nation -- an acknowledgement that is particularly poignant at this place where geography and history collide.

The laneways here have retained their cobbled charm but the grime has been washed clean. The crowds thin out as I progress north up George Street to the spot where Hickson Road peels off towards Campbells Cove. Against the backdrop of the bridge and the harbour is Campbells Bond Store, where the newly arrived Alexander MacKillop found work.

The warehouse once stored imported goods, but today it houses smart restaurants filled with the sounds of clinking glasses and laughter.

I cross under the bridge's southern pylons to the spot where Mary MacKillop, freshly expelled from Queensland, set up two Houses of Providence where she and her fellow Josephite sisters could care for orphans and destitute girls and women. The bridge's foundations have displaced the houses and the little church from which MacKillop's mother, Flora, was buried; but I can picture the orphans playing on the flat tin roofs, never imagining the structure that would one day span the breach between this shore and the one across the harbour.

The orphans are long gone but poverty still exists here, with public housing abutting gentrified terraces with their immaculately restored railings and lacquered front doors. The streets are wide and empty west of the bridge, and I stop to reflect, as Foxe has suggested. At the corner of Lower Fort and Windmill streets, I contrast my own good fortune with the afflictions visited upon residents when the bubonic plague broke out here in 1900.

I continue down Argyle Street and into Kent Street, past St Brigid's, where the Josephites taught. The pubs, close-set buildings and houses that open directly on to the street testify to the social conditions of the time.

My pilgrimage ends up the hill at St Patrick's Church on Grosvenor Street. An elderly, haphazardly dressed woman approaches me. She hasn't eaten a thing all day, she tells me. I think of the clinking glasses and laughter coming from Campbells Bond Store, and it's as though Mary MacKillop has just breathed down my back.

A Pilgrimage Through the Rocks, Sydney by Sister Jeanette Foxe (St Paul's Publications, $7.95; stpauls.com.au).

• sydney.com