Grace Karskens

Revisiting the Worldview: The Archaeology of Convict Households in Sydney’s Rocks Neighborhood

The excavation of the Cumberland/Gloucester Streets Site in Sydney’s historic Rocks area in 1994 was marked by the successful application of an innovative, integrated approach to urban archaeology in Australia. This approach allowed fresh explorations of many aspects of Sydney’s social and cultural development, including the material world of the first generation of convict settlers. This paper examines that world within the wider context of standard and more recent interpretations of the convict colony, as well as drawing on and evaluating scholarship in the history of material life over the last 20-odd years. It offers some reflections on the idea of the worldview, the importance of local context, and the ways in which we approach the archaeology of settler societies.

The dialogue of townscape: The rocks and Sydney, 1788–1820

This paper explores the origins of Sydney from the perspective of the convict and ex‐convict majority by examining the townscape of the early Rocks where they appropriated land and built houses from the earliest years of white settlement. Instead of the orderly outpost of empire presented by governors, artists and map‐makers, or the gaol town or ‘gulag’ portrayed in some historiography, the Sydney the Rocks represented was built and occupied largely according to the tastes, priorities and inclinations of the people, with relatively little official interference. Early Sydney emerged through a constant dialogue between people and government, one that encompassed signs and rituals of deference and obligation, pragmatic negotiations, everyday subversion and, more occasionally, outright defiance.

Can environmental history save the world

As a ‘genre of history’ in Australia environmental history is relatively new, emerging in the 1960s and 70s from encounters between history, geography and the natural sciences in the context of growing environmental concern and activism. Interdisciplinary in orientation, the field also exhibited an unusually high level of engagement with current environmental issues and organisations. In this era of national research priorities and debates about the role and purpose of university-based research, it therefore seemed fair to ask: ‘can environmental history save the world?’ In response, a panel of new and established researchers offer their perspectives on issues of relevance and utility within this diverse and dynamic genre. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Water Dreams, Earthen Histories: Exploring Urban Environmental History at the Penrith Lakes Scheme and Castlereagh, Sydney

Karskens, Grace, “Water Dreams, Earthen Histories: Exploring Urban Environmental History at the Penrith Lakes Scheme and Castlereagh, Sydney.” Environment and History 13, no. 2 (May, 2007): 115–54. doi:10.3197/096734007780473555 . Urban environmental history comprises both human and ecological experience; the two were and are inseparable, and their interaction is dynamic. This essay explores the human and bioregional history of the Penrith Lakes Scheme at Castlereagh in outer Western Sydney as a case study in integrating the two approaches. Conceived in the late 1960s, the Scheme is a quintessential ‘hybrid landscape,’ aiming to rehabilitate 2,000 hectares of open-cut gravel quarries by creating huge artificial lakes and landforms. But it destroyed a rich palimpsest of earlier farming and Aboriginal landscapes, both of which had also transformed the environment. By focusing on this place over time, it is possible to track the succession of Aboriginal, settler, industrial and urban histories, to explore the shifting meanings of this environment, the different ways they knew and shaped this country, and the politics and strategic uses of different types of environmental knowledge. All rights reserved.

Tales of Sydney and the Telling of Sydney Histories

LUCY HUGHES TURNBULL, Sydney: Biography of a City. Sydney: RandomHouse, 1999, pp. xii, 534, notes, bibliography, index.

The early colonial presence, 1788–1822

A75.00 cloth. JOHN BIRMINGHAM, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney. Sydney: Knopf/RandomHouse, 1999, pp. 563, bibliographical notes, bibliography, index,

Inside The Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood

A45.00 cloth. PETER SPEARRITT, Sydney’s Century: A History. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 2000, pp. xvi, 316, tables, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.

The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney

A79.95 cloth,

Historical Archaeology in Australia: Historical or Hysterical? Crisis or Creative Awakening?

A37.95 paper. JOHN CONNELL, ed., Sydney: The Emergence of a World City. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. xvi, 381, tables, bibliographical notes, index.

The Colony: A History of Early Sydney

A54.95 paper.