Bricks and mortar have long been regarded as a sort of litmus test of ‘civilisation’. In the past they made an obvious and convenient distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘man-made’. They defined – in European terms at least – the unassailability of progress and they marked technological differences between the civil and the barbaric. In their newly built state they define the present as the height of progress, and in their gothic ruined state, the solidity of an Egyptian pyramid or the Colosseum, Yet what they erase is often the fact that their existence entirely depends upon the so-called ‘barbarous.’
Bark huts were constantly derided by early Governors of the Colony of New South Wales who saw them always as temporary measures for housing the lower classes. Early ‘musters’ or censuses noted the growth of townships purely in terms of numbers of stone or brick dwellings. Indeed Governor Macquarie (1810-1819) is remembered largely for his transformation of Sydney into a place with solid sandstone and brick buildings. By 1820, visitors to Sydney regularly noted – with a pleasant surprise this far away from Europe – the amount of so-called ‘substantial’ buildings that soon turned the place from a den of tents and huts into an outpost of British civilisation.
Yet in the very early days of colonial Sydney they had big problems with bricks. With a limited skilled labour force, few resources for much at all – especially brick-making – and generally poor clay soils, it took some time before ‘substantial’ dwellings could be constructed. Indeed the first Governor’s ‘portable house’ was pre-fabricated from canvas and wood, and the first Government House built of bricks shipped over from England. The officers of the First Fleet were so confident there would be lime somewhere around Botany Bay that they didn’t even bring any. They also assumed the dense forests would provide good hardwood for initial buildings – which it did – but the British didn’t anticipate white ants. The first timber buildings were rapidly eaten and the first efforts at using bricks without lime were washed away in Sydney summer showers.
Like many things in early Sydney, either the local people provided help, or their resources were plundered. Often, the fact that Europeans adapted to their local environment with Indigenous help was somehow overlooked in the desire to progress toward establishing the ‘civil’ in what were thought to be particularly barbarous lands. In many ways the early colony of Sydney was dependent on the Eora and Darug people for survival. It was dependent on their assistance and it was dependent on their resources. In a land so unfamiliar and difficult to comprehend compared to Europe, any such ‘break’ was useful.
In many ways the foundations of the modern city of Sydney rest upon Eora work – particularly in two areas; the fact the British settlement took advantage of Aboriginal tracks and roads and laid out their own upon them (arguably defining the nature of the arterial shape of the future colonial town). The other area was the exploitation of the numerous piles of discarded shells.
When someone pointed out that the shorelines of the harbour were lined with shells that could be turned to lime, there were probably a few sighs of relief. Here was a ‘one-stop shop’ for stuff from which to grind a cement and it could be easily gathered by convict labour. The piles of shells – what we might call ‘middens’ – around the harbour edges were quickly dug out and processed into lime.
Today we might find the use of such a stockpile of rubbish to be quite ironic – Cadigal peoples rubbish pits proved to be the mortar of European brick buildings, always regarded as the measure of ‘settlement’ in the colony. Yet to call the mounds and heaps of shells that lined Sydney Harbour ‘rubbish tips’ does not do them justice. As architect Peter Myers has noted:
…to describe them as ‘kitchen middens’ or ‘discarded refuse’ is a limited vision of their true intent. There are recorded sightings of shell monuments 12 metres high along the water’s edge (perhaps significantly, that is equivalent to the height of the southern podium of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House). Can you imagine how many thousands of years of gathering and accumulation went into their making?
Myers argues that these middens should be thought of as monuments that formed part of the first ‘city-scape’ of Sydney. He suggests that the ‘second city’ of Sydney was a re-working of the fabric that Governor Phillip discovered and inherited in 1788 – especially the shell monuments and pathways of the Cadigal people. By plundering the lime from middens;
…[Governor] Phillip, whatever may have been his aesthetic, was forced to destroy the urban framework of a by-now tragically depleted Aboriginal population… So we, or rather our predecessors, burnt the shell monuments of the prehistoric or First City, in order to construct the present historic or Second City.
Governor Philip had a vision of an outpost of ‘civilisation’ in the Great South Land that depended on bricks and mortar:
Buildings of stone might easily have been raised, had there been any means of procuring lime for mortar… But neither chalk, nor any species of lime-stone has yet been discovered. In building a small house for the Governor on the eastern side of the Cove, …lime was made of oyster shells, collected in the neighbouring coves; but it cannot be expected that lime should be supplied in this manner for many buildings, or indeed for any of great extent. Till this difficulty shall be removed by the discovery of chalk or lime-stone, the public buildings must go on very slowly.
In fact, the middens of thousands of years of compacted shells all around the coastlines of the Sydney area were to provide lime for many years to come.
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Questions around how to interpret the past have long plagued not only historians but all cultural fields. The interpretation of historic sites has largely become the terrain of the ‘heritage industry’ – the archaeologists, architects and sometimes historians who might guide sympathetic renovations and design the ubiquitous ‘interpretive panels’ that are often the main element in a trade off for the rejuvenation of a derelict industrial building that is being turned into a block of flats or offices or even an art gallery. If we put some groovy looking panels with old photographs of what the building used to look like, and make sure the façade is kept ‘original’, then we can approve new developments.
In such a competitive piece of real estate as Sydney, these trade offs are becoming so common the (often informative and well designed) interpretive panels are themselves becoming such a part of the everyday they demand little attention. Once the heritage work is done, the history of that particular site is all but closed off and filed away.
Yet history is never finished business. It can never be sealed off or put to rest – new ages bring new politics or new research or historical understanding. Monuments tend to close off history. They often make better park benches than sites of remembrance.
I am interested in how performances of history might open new ways for interpreting the past – particularly the possibilities of historical re-enactments as commemorative and interpretive devices for historians and their publics,
The ‘doing’ of history, rather than showing the past on an interpretive panel or in a museum case, has begun to reveal some interesting insights into the past. It has long been regarded as an excellent educational tool. A multi-sensory experience and engagement with the past in ‘hands-on’ history has long been successful in popular history sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sydney Town or Sovereign Hill. More reflective engagements with this method have begun to appear.
All this activity and performance of history is of course fraught with dilemmas – we often choose to re-enact the more glamorous histories of knights and nobles, or to ignore the re-enactment of tragedies. We cannot re-enact death and disease, or torture, or the historical conditions of racism and past gender roles. Re-enactments, like much performance, are always on a knife-edge of failure and success. However, they draw strength from their stated goal – an attention to authenticity – that is quite unarguably, the task of the historian.
There are increasingly more ways the concept of a re-enactment has been applied in interpreting the past. In performance art there has been a deal of interest in ‘re-staging’ events. One of the most useful elements has been the juxtaposition of a recreation of the past in a present landscape or setting. Performance artists have drawn inspiration for ‘community revival’ projects through performed recreations of events from a community’s past. Often not framed specifically as historical re-enactments, they might involve leaving out the fancy dress to create more playful references to contemporary politics.
Histories of place are often framed in terms of a linear progress that positions certain markers such as buildings as signs along the wayside in the creation of a modern world. Yet these histories cover up the activities of those who were not involved in the historical project – those who did not design the buildings or write the documents that we now come to call history. Yet if we look more closely, and if we visualise the records we do have, we can get glimpses of unwritten histories.
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How we might generate historical understanding of places over time through works of art is an interesting question that artists have long struggled with. Cordeiro and Healy’s sculptural work Primary Producers provokes us to ask how we might think of a history of place, and how we might interpret this history. It is part installation and part performance – a performance that hinges on the concept of a re-enactment.
In answer to a request for a ‘site-responsive’ installation for Performance Space at CarriageWorks, Cordiero and Healy invited people to join them in the process of shucking 3,500 oysters in order to gather the shells, dry and fire them to release the lime content and then mix this with sand and water to form concrete for a sculptured block. This was their ‘part installation, part site-specific action’ that was to draw attention to the colonial foundations of modern Sydney. Possibly redolent of the nature of colonial Sydney before the Rum Rebellion of 1808, the participants were encouraged – just like the participants of the 1808 military putsch – by the offer of free ‘grog.’ Whatever the case, the atmosphere generated was of a typical Sydney picnic – oysters and beer – and highlighted the continuity of picnics from the time the Cadigal lived where the CarriageWorks now stands, to the present day. Gorging on shellfish by the harbour is not a new thing.
Primary Producers brings into focus history and the theory of history. The installation creates a monument to the Cadigal rubbish tip/monuments that became the mortar of Sydney. The oyster shucking performances create a re-enactment of five thousand or so years of Cadigal picnics by the shores of Sydney Harbour. The shuckers may use steel rather than stone knives, and wear safety gloves, but the process is similar. And, like the theory of recreating the past in the mind’s eye, it is evocative. Something physical forces you to contemplate, and in this case it is specifically the colonisation of early Sydney. It is this history of lime-making and the First City that takes place amongst the oyster-shuckers, sitting down to a Cadigal dinner on Cadigal land.
The process of the installation of Primary Producers involved something that could be thought of as a re-enactment. This was not a re-enactment as we may know them – as an obsessively historically accurate recreation of past events or objects. It was in part a process of getting people to think about the past by engaging in an activity from the past – one that is now the terrain of a group of seafood industry workers – oyster shucking. And like historical pageants or re-enactment performances, it encourages participation in the creation of a work of art and history.
It also suggests how we might interpret our histories, specifically through various forms of participatory historical re-enactment. It comments on both the history of Sydney, and the methodology of historians in understanding that history. Considering the massive level of effacement of early Sydney from the historical consciousness of Sydneysiders, this is quite an important interpretive device.
Re-enactments often aren’t really strict ‘re-enactments’ of the past. Often they are merely what is often called ‘living history’, or the doing of things that ‘would have been done’ back then, the daily tasks of living in the past. Historical re-enactors go to often extreme lengths to create an immersive environment to conduct this – by such things as building a Viking village and living in it for a week. Primary Producers dispenses with this, but carefully extracts the concept. The oyster shuckers are at once demeaned by thinking of how a people once lived here and shucked, but are now gone. Yet they are offered a sort of continuity – by doing the things they would have done. They are reminded of how there once was a way of eating oysters at Sydney picnics that involved a little more than asking a waitress for a plate of Sydney Rocks.
At first glance beer, oysters and colonialism may seem rather incongruous and a bit of a long bow to pull. Yet Primary Producers, as its name suggests, at once refers to the First Australians and their ‘primary production’, as well as the ways this has been seen (or rather not seen) by Europeans over time. Often in the past Aboriginal economies were dismissed as hunter-gatherer and thus primitive, uncivilised – able to be swept aside due to the fact they weren’t ‘productive’ (i.e.; didn’t have agriculture as Europeans knew it). Yet today we are starting to query just how ‘productive’ European agriculture really is in Australian conditions, and we are starting to see the value of Indigenous plants and animals – apart from the ones we have always valued such as oysters. Cordiero and Healy’s work shows ‘primary production’ is really a quite unstable cultural concept, rather than an economic term, and a concept that was deployed with long lasting consequences in the process of the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia. The Primary Producers installation is both a reminder of Cadigal exterminations and of how we do the same things Cadigal did for thousands of years – eat oysters.
Dr Stephen Gapps
Historian and Curator
Journal of a tour of Governor Macquarie’s first inspection of the Interior of the Colony, commencing on 6th Novr. 1810. ML, Historical Records of New South Wales, vols. I and II; Historical Records of Australia, ser. I, vols. I and II Watkin Tench A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, ebooks@Adelaide 2006. Available at: HYPERLINK “http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tench/watkin/settlement/” http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tench/watkin/settlement/
Peter Myers ‘The Third City: Sydney’s Original Monuments and a Possible New Metropolis’ Architecture Australia January 2000. Available at: HYPERLINK “http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/aaissue.php?article=18&issueid=200001&typeon=2” http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/aaissue.php?article=18&issueid=200001&typeon=2
See Peter John Cantrill and Philip Thalis ‘Beyond planning and architecture: the urban project in Sydney’ in Urban Design International September/December 2005, Volume 10, Number 3-4, pp147-163 for an overview of the ways Europeans adopted Aboriginal footpaths.
From analysing early texts, paintings and sketches of the colony, Myers showed that perhaps the largest midden of cast-off shells and refuse was at Bennelong Point, now site of the Sydney Opera House. These middens were often the primary surviving evidence of the aborigines’ occupation of a place
The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson etc., John Stockdale, London 1789 Available at: HYPERLINK “http://australiaexplorers.com/arthurphillip/journaltobotanybay/index.html” http://australiaexplorers.com/arthurphillip/journaltobotanybay/index.html
See for example Connor Prarie ‘Follow the North Star’ program, HYPERLINK “http://www.connerprairie.org/discover_learn/distancelearning” http://www.connerprairie.org/discover_learn/distancelearning discussed in Scott Magelssen,
“This Is a Drama. You Are Characters”: The Tourist as Fugitive Slave in Conner Prairie’s “Follow the North Star” Theatre Topics Volume 16, Number 1, March 2006, pp. 19-34
See Claire Frost ‘J Arts Crew Review; Primary Producers’, available at: HYPERLINK “http://www.theprogram.net.au/featuresSub.asp?id=4594&state=2” http://www.theprogram.net.au/featuresSub.asp?id=4594&state=2