Sydney in the 1840s
Sydney became a city on 20 July 1842, by an act passed to declare the town to be one and to incorporate its inhabitants. In the same year John Rae drew it. He was twenty-nine, three years off the boat from Aberdeen, and about to become the new corporation's first full-time town clerk — a job he took in 1843, at the start of a public career he did not put down for fifty years. His street views are dated, again and again, 1842. He was self-taught, and he worked with the help of a camera obscura he had built himself, because he wanted them accurate rather than picturesque; that is exactly how they read.
The city he was drawing ran to about eleven and a half square kilometres across six wards, taking in Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills, Chippendale and Pyrmont, and roughly three thousand men could vote in it — those occupying a house, warehouse, counting house or shop worth £25 a year. King Street looking north. George Street north from King. York Street past the market building and the Corporation offices. The Supreme Court and St James' from Elizabeth Street. Government House and Macquarie Street.
Hyde Park gives the best measure available of the distance between that city and this one: a bare, fenced common with Lyons Terrace along one skyline, the first St Mary's on another, windmills turning on the ridge above Woolloomooloo, and Darlinghurst Gaol and Sydney College standing behind a cricket match. That cathedral burned on the night of 29 June 1865; what occupies the site now is William Wardell's, begun after the fire.
The governor still kept a country house out at Parramatta, where Government House was sketched on 3 September 1844 and again that year across its own domain.
These are drawings rather than photographs, and only just. George Barron Goodman opened the colony's first photographic studio on 12 December 1842, on the roof of the Royal Hotel in George Street — one of the streets Rae had been drawing that year. It took about thirty seconds to fix a sitter's face, which was fast enough for a portrait and nowhere near fast enough for a street. So what you are looking at is a city as one self-taught man with a lens and a pencil judged it worth the afternoon.
