Vanished Thresholds: Colonial Gentry and the Shaping of One of Sydney's Earliest Suburbs

Lesley Johnson

doi:10.5130/csr.v19i2.2729

Abstract

This article explores the way a colonial gentry was constituting itself as a social grouping in the mid nineteenth century through shaping the landscape and material culture of suburbs such as Darling Point in Sydney. In doing so , they sought to create an 'infrastructure of certainty' for themselves in the challenging and volatile world of what was still predominantly a penal colony. Important to this investigation is an understanding of the lack of stability of this social grouping, particularly in its earliest years, and how this was played out in the subdivisions of land and the building, ownship and furnishing of the early stone villas of this area. I am interested in what this built environment might suggest about the effectivity of material culture in the mobilisation and performance of class, gendered and racial identities in particular urban environments in the nineteenth century.

Highlights

Darling Point, one of Sydney’s earliest suburbs, was described in 1857 as a small closed society, ‘a strange nation’
Just over a century later, in 1965, Gavin Souter and George Molnar listed this inner-‐ city suburb in Sydney’s east as one of the city’s ‘preferred’ suburbs, along with other suburbs such as Vaucluse, Point Piper, Bellevue Hill and Pymble.[2]. Around this time large tower blocks of apartments with views over the harbour began appearing above the trees in Darling Point in spaces created, for the most part, by the demolition of nineteenth-‐century ‘villas’ or by the subdivision of their land
The strange juxtaposition of the stone gates before the towers made of concrete, brick and glass provide sullen reminders of the history of the suburb as does the continuing presence of the few remaining grand old houses such as Lindesay, the first gothic house of Sydney, and Carthona, Bishopscourt and Swifts, all made of stone