General Monthly Meeting
Archaeology and New Perspective on the Settlement of Sydney:
the Excavation and Reconstruction of the Dawes Point Battery, Sydney's
Earliest Fort
Date: Wednesday, 1st August, 2001
Time: 6:00 for 6:30 pm
Venue: ASN Theatrette, corner of George Street and Hickson Road,
The Rocks, Sydney
(next door to the Billich Gallery)
A site tour has been arranged immediately
after the lecture.
The 1995 excavation of Dawes Point Battery, constructed to guard the approach to Sydney in 1791, has evoked a number of questions about the strategic importance of the British settlement of Sydney in the 18th century. Construction of the fort commenced three years after the foundation of the colony in response to the potential threat of attack from Spain, intent on pressing its own territorial claims in the Pacific as defined by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. The confrontation between Britain and Spain, known as the Nootka Sound Incident, was eventually settled diplomatically, but not before Britain had flexed its colonial muscle and formulated plans to launch an attack from Sydney on Spain’s base on the west coast of Canada. Spain surrendered to Britain many of its trade and possession claims both in the Pacific and on its rim ending a two hundred-year monopoly on Asia-Pacific trade.
The Dawes Point Battery remains are being conserved and integrated into the surrounding public park as part of a program in Sydney’s historic Rocks district to promote the heritage of Sydney Harbour. It is a site that links Australia and its neighbours within the global theme of colonialism, forming a focus for the interpretation of the centuries of conflict between the European powers over their colonial and trading ‘rights’ in the region. It was here too that the some of earliest recorded attempts at conciliation were made with the indigenous occupants of Sydney, the Cadigal. The remains also serve to focus attention on the reliance of the European settlers on the sea. It was to sea that they watched for contact with Britain, and to sea they watched for Britain’s enemies.
Wayne Johnson is a Graduate in Arts (Hons) Sydney University majoring in Archaeology and has just completed a doctorate on Landscape Archaeology also at Sydney. From 1985-88 he worked at the Powerhouse Museum developing the Steam Revolution and Boulton & Watt Exhibitions and then as consultant archaeologist on the Darling Harbour project during its construction. This involved the recording of slipways, timber wharf piles, the Iron Wharf, Peter Nicol Russell’s engineering works and Mort’s Fresh Food & Ice Company as well as the surviving stone walls of Cooper & Levy (later Barker’s) 1823 steam mill (prior to their demolition).
From 1991-3 he was archaeologist to the Heritage Branch of the Department of Planning, and since 1993 archaeologist for the Sydney Cove Authority (since 1999 Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority). In addition he conducts the course “Archaeology of Modern Times” with the School of Archaeology and Prehistory at Sydney University. In 1995 he conducted an archaeological excavation of the Dawes Point Battery, site of Sydney’s first fortification and built shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet. Since the creation of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority he has also been involved with the conservation of industrial relics at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops and the White Bay power station.
Wayne has also worked on a number of overseas archaeological excavations. These have included the excavation of 4000 year old tombs in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, an ancient city in Jordan and, most recently, Roman and Celtic settlements in Portugal.
or
THE POINT OF THE BRICKED-UP DAWES IN FORT STREET
Reported by Edmund Potter
When a few centuries ago the then remoter regions of the world were being charted and appropriated, Dutch, English, French and probably Portuguese navigators were all minded to colonize Australia. In the end only the Brits took over, but until Mr Wayne Johnson lectured to our Royal Society in the Rocks, I for one was unaware that another European power, the Spaniards no less, had been coveting whales, fish and harbours around our felon-filled Great South Land. This threat motivated Britain to earmark one million pounds for a punitive naval strike on what is now Vancouver. The Spaniards (perhaps still smarting from their Armada debacle some 200 years earlier) diplomatically backed off, but nevertheless Dawes Point (at first named after Nevil Maskelyne, British Astronomer Royal) was fortified in 1791 with a gun battery to defend Sydney just in case.
The Battery, aging and disused, was dismantled and built upon by Francis Greenway about 1830, and disappeared among the present Harbour Bridge footings in the early 1920s. Our speaker (an experienced archaeologist) knew in the 1990s that a wall in Fort Street had some bricked-up doorways, and he wondered if they were connected somehow to the former battery at Dawes Point. He examined many old drawings, plans and illustrations, and conducted an archaeological dig in 1995. His team soon exposed the remains of the original battery, including a flight of stone steps up to one of the bricked-up doorways in Fort Street. The emplacements were uncovered, together with the foundations of the substantial soldiers' quarters, a building that old pictures showed had looked like a castle from the water but like a shed from the land. The nearby underground magazine emerged uncomfortably close to the small observatory that Lt Dawes had established in the difficult years following the arrival of the First and Second Fleets. With some foundations and walls now restored and a vaulted roof reconstructed at the original site, the 1791 battery is nearly ready for public viewing on the slope of Observatory Hill. Most members and visitors were given a preview by Mr Johnson after his talk, which had been splendidly illustrated by numerous slides including building plans, photographs of Greenway's hidden quarry, and pictures of the 1923 temporary works for the Harbour Bridge.
Mr Johnson also sketched the career of Lt William Dawes (1762-1836), who arrived with the First Fleet in early 1788 and quickly set up his observatory, blending nocturnal attendance with aboriginal discourse. While Dawes did compile the first dictionary of the local tribal language, nevertheless Governor Philip was displeased ( partly it seems with the cordiality of the discourse), and Dawes left Australia in 1791. Later, Dawes became Governor of Sierra Leone and was assigned to official duties in Antigua. Written records from Dawes' short-lived observatory are rare indeed, but the comet that Maskelyne had apparently warned him to expect never turned up.