On the wall of the police station in George Street North, The Rocks, a small plaque does the quiet work of a vanished institution: “The Site Of The First General Hospital In Australia – 1788 – 1816.” Surgeon-General John Whites sick tents and laboratory went up within days of landing. His journal entry (the live post already quotes the sense of it) is still the sharpest picture we have — marines, wives, children and convicts ashore; tents filling with camp dysentery and scurvy; “more pitiable objects were perhaps never seen.”
A more permanent hospital building followed in early 1788 on the west side of Sydney Cove, near the later Commissariat Stores — twelve convict carpenters and hired ship hands knocking up something Governor Phillip thought would “stand for some years.” It never emptied. Overflow stayed under canvas. When the Second Fleet’s Surprise crawled in during June 1790, the chaplain Richard Johnson described a deck of half-naked sick that turned the landing into a horror — the little hospital’s resources already stretched past kindness.
Dictionary of Sydney dates the Rocks general hospital 1788–1816. After that, Macquaries “Rum Hospital” on Macquarie Street took over the general role (the bargain that traded spirit monopoly for a public hospital). Nothing of White’s tents or the first timber hospital survives above ground; the plaque and the street alignment are the reminder. Keep White’s words. Add the Cove setting. Point readers on to Sydney Hospital if they want the next chapter.