What lies beneath

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by James Woodford

Download the complete article PDF

James Woodford's biography and other articles by this writer

Walk around the Sydney city block bounded by Kent, Sussex, Napoleon and Erskine Streets and you are on top of a cultural ground zero. Below your feet is one of the first places where Australia's Stone Age ended and the Industrial Revolution began.

And ironically, that very spot is one of the most recent places the nation's prehistoric heritage has been uncovered. Dig deep enough and you will not reach the apocryphal China but rather Australia as it was for tens of thousands of years.

Underneath your shoes, past the asphalt, concrete and ruins of buried colonial and twentieth century buildings, lies a place called Weerong. It is the name that the Cadigal people had for the shoreline at the modern location of Circular Quay.

The popular wisdom, until recently, was that two centuries of construction, demolition, landscaping, filling and draining had obliterated the archaeological evidence of Weerong's original inhabitants.

Just as the natural, chaotic, sandstone-covered low-lying ridge, carpeted in Angophoras and other woodland species, is now all but lost except to the most vivid of imaginations, so too are the easily visible signs of Weerong's people.

The uncomfortable truth that the place was once someone else's can no longer be ignored.

While Weerong has been wrought into Sydney – a place of hard surfaces, geometric shapes, grids and gridlock, the transformation is far from complete.

Dominic Steele owns an archaeological consulting firm and was recently called on to work on Leighton Properties' KENS Project (an acronym based on Kent, Erskine, Napoleon and Sussex Streets). After the original multi-storey carpark on the site was removed and the site cleared, teams of archaeologists searched for both European and Aboriginal cultural heritage. The fact that the demolition involved the removal of mountains of concrete combined with the knowledge that the carpark was only the latest incarnation of twentieth century ingenuity created low archaeological expectations. How could anything survive underneath such a series of architectural abominations?

But every now and then, says Steele, who has worked extensively on Sydney's archaeology, something amazing turns up.

‘You have this city landscape that has been developed since 1788, with multiple levels of change and occasionally you go, "wow, look what we have just found underneath this massive footprint".'

In the case of KENS, a number of small trenches were opened up in the brief window of time available between the demolition of the carpark and the construction of the office tower.

Nearly one thousand Aboriginal artefacts were found, says Steele. These included stone flakes, stone tools and some raw materials that were not sourced from the immediate Sydney area and may indicate trading networks.

To the untrained eye, these pieces of worked stone may look like ‘a bag of rocks', he says. But in fact they tell a story of a not-so-distant time when Sydney was an unimaginably different place. ‘It is the city's hidden history,' Steele says. ‘This place had a rich and vast set of resources.' To an open mind, it is revealing. ‘All I was ever made to read at school was European history.'

Think of it for a few moments. No buses, no Sussex Street, no peak-hour snarl across the Anzac Bridge, no politicians in Macquarie Street, no Protestant work ethic, only a small band of people using stone technology living on what was immediately around them and what they could barter with their neighbours.

From a few holes under one building have come a thousand stone artefacts. The implication is that under the whole of the central business district it is likely that a treasure trove of Sydney's prehistory is entombed. ‘It's not a dead and dark archaeological landscape,' Steele says. ‘There's the potential for the survivorship of a lot of archaeology.'

Backing up Steele's statement is the fact that more and more archaeological sites have turned up under demolished city buildings since the early 1990s, when it was realised that even the most subtle of remains can survive against the odds of massive disturbance.

THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM'S Dr Val Attenbrow studied one of the city's most poignant archaeological finds. Under some nineteenth century terrace houses at Cumberland Street in The Rocks, an historical archaeologist engaged by developers noticed what appeared to be a small shell midden and contacted Attenbrow, an eminent archaeologist and pre-hstorian. It was two-thirds of a metre in diameter and only six centimetres deep. As she relates in a paper on the find, it was a difficult and quick dig, and reading her report I think of someone rescuing a tortoise from a busy four-lane expressway. ‘The developer had begun excavating the sandstone bedrock for the development when I undertook my archaeological work and heavy trucks were moving in and out of the building site within five metres of the face where the shell was exposed. I therefore excavated the deposit as quickly and expeditiously as possible!'

Within the tiny midden, Attenbrow found eighty-two fragments of fish bone and eighteen species of shellfish. The small midden would have been about thirty metres above high tide mark, and some 450 metres from the Tank Stream – probably the closest source of fresh water. Material in the midden was dated to 1448 AD – more than three hundred years before European settlement.

In the early 1990s, when it was uncovered, it was only the second Aboriginal site that had been found in the city in recent times. ‘Its small size and contents, comprising only shell fishbone and charcoal, suggest it is the result of only a brief period of activity, perhaps a single event – a single meal or snack for a small group of people.'

The fact that the event of a single meal can be preserved under Sydney alone speaks loudly of the gap between Weerong and the city. It is almost absolutely certain that, even though there are now millions of us and spectacular feasts are held every day, archaeologists in the future are unlikely to ever find evidence of a single meal. Attenbrow's mini-midden speaks of a simpler and less crowded time. The date of 1448 suggests an era ending, a clashing of cultures about to happen and a late glimpse into a people about to meet forces which would lead to irrevocable change.