Lost Sydney: Carahers Lane
Location: Millers Point, SydneyCarahers Lane is a short lane that runs between Long Lane to Cribbs Lane, between and parellel to Cambridge and Cumberland Streets. The first European settlers erected dwellings in the area around Carahers Lane and Longs Lane soon after their arrival in the colony. While little remains of building development pre 1850s, the layout of the allotments and laneways remain.
Carahers Lane was created by developers in the 1830s to provide access between Cribbs Lane and Longs Lane to the south. This took place when George Cribb s property was subdivided and sold off after Cribb fell upon hard times. On Carahers Lane six two-storey terraces were built, with three more on Cribbs Lane. Over the next 70 years these, and other houses on the site, were occupied by immigrants and their families from Europe.
Carahers Lane is named after Owen J. Caraher who owned and lived on land fronting Gloucester Street and Long s Lane in the 1870s. In 1900, the land around the Big Dig site (some on the YHA site having been preserved by erecting the youth hotel on stilts) included around 50 dwellings, 2 pubs, 3 shops and 3 interconnecting lanes which linked the area into The Rocks as a whole. The Big Dig site had been open space since the demolition of a large shed in the 1930s. The shed, an engineering workshop built in 1917, had itself taken the place of some 30 houses and shops, the earliest built in 1795, which were demolished around 1900. The footprints of those 30 or so buildings remain intact and preserved for posterity, and are a facinating link to the very first buildings back when The Rocks was a densely populated maritime village.
More than 750,000 items have been excavated at the dig site, which includes a well down which Chinese porcelain bowls painted in silver with flower designs, English dinner plates and side plates, and George Cribb s butcher s knife, so sharp that you could still cut meat with it. Children s toys, decorative jewellery and Chinese ceramics, which had fallen or been swept between the floor boards of the original buildings, are among the finds. Many are on display at The Rocks Discovery Museum.
Cribb Lane Big Dig
Cribb Lane past and present
In the very early years of the Colony at Sydney Vove, a number of tracks leafing up from the harbour were beaten out by the early settlers who built the first dwelings there. Cribbs Lane was one of these lanes,pre-dating Cumberland and Gloucester Streets and the rest of the regularised street pattern created in 1810.
Ann Armsden and her First Fleeter husband, George Legg, first built a house on the site around 1795. Following George s death in a boating accident on the harbour in 1807, Ann married her neighbour, baker George Talbot and rebuilt their house in stone.
Irish rebel, Richard Byrne, lived here from around 1805. Byrne was a stonemason, and may have been responsible for some of the quarrying for his neighbours houses. One pre-1820s quarry can still be seen, and it is most likely houses here were constructed from materials from the site.
For fresh water a number of wells were cut into the rock. A well dug by the Byrne family has a few steps cut into the sandstone leading to it. It was here, or a similar well in Cumberland Street, that a small child drowned in 1810. The Byrne family remained here until the 1850s. Their descendants can still be found living in The Rocks area. Butcher George Cribb, after whom the lane is named, was also a convict, and purchased a house here where he lived and operated a slaughter yard until the late 1820s. He worked for the government as part of his sentence, and in his own time he slaughtered cattle, sheep and pigs sold as meat both within the colony and to ships leaving Sydney. His slaughterhouse was in the centre of his property.
