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Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood by Grace Karskens

by
September 1999, no. 214

Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood by Grace Karskens

Hale & Iremonger, $34.95, 240 pp, 0 868806 666 4

Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood by Grace Karskens

by
September 1999, no. 214

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

Robyn Annear reviews 'Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood' by Grace Karskens

Inside the Rocks: The archaeology of a neighbourhood

by Grace Karskens

Hale & Iremonger, $34.95, 240 pp, 0 868806 666 4

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