The title says 1901. The epidemic that remade The Rocks was 1900. Arthur Payne — sometimes Paine — a wharf lorry driver of Ferry Lane, Millers Point, was diagnosed on 19 January 1900, the first recorded case. Over eight months, 303 cases, 103 dead. Cleansing gangs whitewashed, burned bedding and pulled down “slum” fabric from March into July; more than 40,000 rats went into the official count. Smaller outbreaks kept returning into the next decade, which is how a 1901 photograph of the rear of 32 Oxford Street, Paddington, sits in this folder without being the first-wave Rocks story.
In 1901 the new Sydney Harbour Trust resumed a swathe of The Rocks and Millers Point. Public health was the excuse; a harbour bridge was already a gleam. Caption the Oxford Street yard as a 1901 inner-city backyard, not as Payne’s house. The Rocks plaque for the outbreak belongs on Ferry Lane, not in Paddington. Rats and fleas, not “filth” as a moral. The photographs of backyards are evidence of a cleansing campaign, and of a government happy to demolish what it had decided was surplus.
