Painting the Rocks: The Loss of Old Sydney

First published on 29 Jun 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

In the first decades of the 20th century, many buildings from our colonial past were torn down, whole streets disappearing as Sydneysiders embraced the march of progress. Amid slum clearances, wharf rebuilding and debates about working-class living conditions, an informal network of artists were impelled to paint images of ‘Old Sydney' before it vanished forever. Painting the Rocks, a joint initiative between the Historic Houses Trust, the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and the Museum of Sydney, documents the efforts of what was Sydney's first urban conservation movement.

"A lot of what we know about the Rocks and Millers Point during this period is thanks to a group of artists who were concerned with marking the loss of colonial architecture," says exhibition curator Caroline Butler-Bowden. "It was their reaction to this so-called progress. In terms of conservation of our buildings and heritage, we always think of the green bans of the 1960s and 1970s, but Painting the Rocks proves that there was actually incredible interest during this early period a good 60 years beforehand."

Spearheaded by Julian Ashton, one of the leading artists of the day, the artists' movement induced EW O'Sullivan, Minister for Works, to grant £250 for the acquisition of drawings and paintings of the ‘Old Sydney' that was about to be redeveloped. This culminated in An Exhibition of Pictures of Old Sydney at the Society of Artists' Rooms on Pitt Street in March 1902. Painting the Rocks will exhibit 30 of these romantic and often sentimental artists' impressions. But they'll be juxtaposed with stark reality: government-commissioned photography, inspection reports and remodelling plans.

Casting Sydney's most notorious slum district in picturesque terms, the 1902 paintings proposed an alternative set of urban, social and aesthetic values. "It was a shift away from depicting the pastoral or the rural, which was so much a part of how Australians saw themselves, and the beginning of a much more urban art form," Butler-Bowden says. Art lovers will appreciate the richness of the works. "The detail in them is fantastic. There's a magnificent array of things going on - washing lines strung from house to house and people gathered on street corners chatting. Then there's children playing games in among the goats and dogs and chickens that roamed the streets; there's horse-drawn carts, there's Chinese hawkers and street sellers plying their wares."

Conversely, Painting the Rocks features images used to justify the demolition of homes and businesses. Following the outbreak of bubonic plague, photographers documented decrepit housing with third-world sanitation and poorly clad street children. "The photographs are quite confronting and the government responded to them with panic and fear, systematically quarantining and cleansing entire city blocks," Butler-Bowden says.

Those with a fear of furry rodents, be warned: for authenticity, the exhibition will include an authentic rat trap containing a preserved rat. "We really want to give a sense of the place," Butler-Bowden says. "We're also recreating the dimensions of one of the houses to give you a sense of how tiny they were. There will be wood blocks to show what material streets were made of, and old gas lamps and personal artefacts from individuals who lived in the Rocks."

The exhibition also encourages Sydneysiders to engage with the Rocks as it stands now. "We've tried to do a ‘then and now' - what you found 100 years ago, and what you find today," Butler-Bowden says. "As people will discover in the exhibition there's a lot that remains there today, but a lot has changed too. I'd really encourage people to come to the exhibition, take away a walking map, go beyond George Street, look out over Walsh Bay and really get lost in the crooked backstreets of the Rocks." Joanna Lowry