No post-1788 settlement has a longer history than The Rocks, but until now that history has been left to decent amateurs in search of the picturesque. Even academic historians knew the area mainly as host to the bubonic plague outbreak of 1900, its slums captured for posterity by some splendid photo­graphs taken during the clean-up process.

Grace Karskens is filling the gap. She has found the material so rich that the present volume extends only to the 1830s, with one or more sequels to follow. Using the archaeological record as well as legal records, surviving correspondence and much else, she has produced an impressive microcosmic study which stands with Alan Atkinson’s Camden as challenging us to re-interpret our stereotypes of early New South Wales.

Convict society in the first fifty years of white settlement has been seen recently through some remarkably different spectacles. This is understandable, since modern ideas about class and gender shape our views of our society’s origins. Robert Hughes gives the world a romantic painter’s vision of an unmitigated gulag, and Jan Kociumbas writes of a patriarchal society whose controllers socially engineered the under-class into powerless workers and breeders. Portia Robinson presents a much more sprightly picture of women possessing agency for self-improvement, and John Hirst sees the convicts and their masters bargaining for a ‘fair crack of the whip’ moral economy with recognised tolerances on both sides.

The Rocks by Grace Karskens emerges as a more ambiguous, subtler, and to my mind satisfying reconstruction of what it was like to live in Botany Bay. She makes the important point that Sydney was largely a transplant of a pre-industrial Britain, with traditions and systems of networking not yet pushed into conformity with industrial and bureaucratic ethics. Even the surveyors found it hard to map the streets of The Rocks in regular lines.

Consequently, The Rocks was not just a society where the rough and the respectable lived side by side. Often the rough and the respectable were embodied in the same family, even in the same individual. Ellen Flaherty arrived a convict in Macquarie’s time. ‘She had drunken and violent landlords, co-lodgers who were prostitutes, a criminal, unskilled first husband, and her only child drowned in a well’. But she ended up a licensed publican in good standing. An estimated ninety per cent of the inhabitants appeared before a magistrate at one time or another, but this did not invite shame or ostracism.

Physical violence was common, even among the respectable. Men resorted to their fists, spouses fought, horse­whips were brandished, stones thrown, and verbal abuse exchanged. Yet children were not treated brutally. They were more at risk from lack of supervision from busy parents. Boys played dangerous games, toddlers like Eliza Flaherty’s daughter tumbled down wells. But, in general, parents valued their children.

This needs stressing, because clergy and governors who denounced convict morals often bemoaned their effect on the rising generation. Certainly, at times children born out of wedlock outnumbered the legitimate, but often couples lived together many years without formally marrying, and when men or women formed another relationship their children were often readily accepted by the new partner.

Women in The Rocks enjoyed more independence than might be expected. They were not confined to the house, they chose their friends freely, and couples often went their separate ways for work or leisure. Women with property defended their rights vigorously against unsatisfactory male partners. In declining to conform with the conventional nuclear family, the people of The Rocks in the 1820s seem startlingly like many younger Australians of the 1990s.

Such attitudes underline the character of The Rocks as a transplant of pre-industrial England, not yet bound by the rule of the time clock and the ethics of the factory. Back in England, though, the Industrial Revolution was advancing. Modern­minded visitors like J.T. Bigge in 1819, critical of Macquarie’s old-fashioned paternalism, saw nothing but disorder and misrule in a society like The Rocks. His disparaging comments began the long tradition of giving The Rocks a bad name.

Other areas such as Brickfield Hill were if anything, rougher, but The Rocks sat at Sydney’s front door to the western side of the peninsula where it could easily be targeted as a problem area. As the influences of Victorian England reached out to Australia, The Rocks would become an anomaly and an embarrassment, though the process took decades. We shall be impatient for Karskens to describe it.

Through her grass-roots approach, Karskens conveys the vitality of The Rocks in its formative years. The archaeological record provides some vivid touches. A piece of Chinese porcelain shaped by Aboriginal hands into a useful sharp tool serves as a reminder that displacement was not immediate and native usage was not extinguished with Sydney’s first buildings.

Some of the clearest voices emerge from the transcripts of court records. Stephen Winn tells a coroner’s inquest about his deceased wife: ‘She was ordinary sober, as good a woman as ever broke bread at home – but two glasses would have a great effect on her’. John Howes speaks of the burial of a stillborn child: ‘I knocked up a bit of a box and Mary Oakes put it in -I took it down to Woolloomooloo and buried it in the sand. I dug a hole about two feet deep, we made the hole with a stick and with our hands’. Mary Baxter and Eleanor Frazier, formerly rivals for the same man, share ‘a cheerful glass’ before ‘supporting one another well-enough’ back to Mary’s lodgings.

Karskens, by recovering those ex-convict voices, enables us nearly two hundred years later to recognise their human personalities. They were neither a sullen, undifferentiated workforce of serfs nor a precociously democratic proletariat. In many respects they were remarkably like ourselves.