Sydney Trip Day 2- The Rocks Tour

The beautiful Sydney Opera House, visible from near Sydney's Rocks area.

We started The Rocks Tour at the Argyle Centre, going out along an old cobbled street and arrived in a courtyard.

Our guide stopped and told us about the courtyard and that the bricks used to make most of the houses in the Rocks area were mined there.

We walked to a bench in front of Cadman’s Cottage and sat down.

The guide talked with us again, then took us inside.

Cadman’s Cottage was made of limestone and there was a green streak of lime scale to where something had been.

We walked around to First Impressions, a carving of the first people to leave impressions on the land, hence the name. On the first side, there was an imprint of a freeman and his family. It was as if someone had pushed a man into wood. There was a piece on the freeman on a plastic stand.

The second side was a convict with chains around his legs. The guide said that they would only get chains around their legs if they escaped in Australia.

The third and last side was a soldier.

A bit along an old road from First Impressions was the end of George St, where a battle had played out. The Government wanted to knock down the old convict buildings, but the residents wanted to keep the buildings, since it was part of their heritage. There was a big fight between the police and the residents, and the guide had a picture of it.

In the end the buildings didn’t get knocked down, but the residents had to move and live in the Sirius, an apartment block on a hill over looking the Rocks, instead of their old houses.

We arrived back at the tour centre, but instead of going in, we went through a hallway a door down from the tour centre. At the end of the hallway, there were stairs leading up to the old houses that used to be there.

We went up the stairs and found the rooms of the houses that used to be there. The stone walls were still partly there so you could see where the rooms were, and the archaeologists that studied it and made it suitably for walking through put chairs and tables in some of the rooms so you could see how crowded things were back then.

During the turn of the century, rats as well as overcrowding were a problem. Rewards were given on rat tails, but stopped once it was found that some recipients were breeding rats for profit!

Baths during this time were taken in the order of father, mother, and then in descending order of age, leading to the expression ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’.

The Rocks Tour was a very good introduction to the history of Sydney and the beginnings of Australia, revealing old secrets of this modern city.