Established in November 1788 as “Rose Hill,” Parramatta is the third-oldest British colonial settlement in Australia. For at least 40 years it stood at the centre of labour, industry and agriculture in the fledgling colony of New South Wales. The children born and raised there went on to shape the wider colonial project, from John Batman in Melbourne to Hamilton Hume and roads. For generations, Parramatta was also a place of exchange between colonisers and First Nations peoples, particularly the local Burramattagal (Darug) people, but also wider networks reaching Wiradjuri Country and Māori communities from across the Tasman.

Forty years of heritage research and large-scale archaeological excavation have documented much of this history, but almost all of it site by site; developer-funded archaeology is, by its nature, bound by lot boundaries. This aims to look at the town as a whole, by following the people, labour and things that moved between and beyond those boundaries to sustain a colonial township.

Building an infrastructure for the past

Rather than starting with a single excavation, we started with land, specifically, with every recorded allotment or lot granted or leased around Parramatta up to around 1820. It sounds simple, but the documentary record for this period is notoriously incomplete. Grants and leases were often poorly described, rarely mapped consistently, and land sales went largely unregistered until the 1820s. Many Parramatta town lots in this period were held under an informal, permissive system with no central record at all.

We went looking for these missing lots anyway. Over 40 town leases issued between 1804 and 1809 don’t appear on any surviving map. Many farm grants were later cancelled and superseded, quietly dropping out of the parish maps historians usually rely on. By combining high-resolution cadastral mapping, early parish plans, and original grant and lease registers, we reconstructed a database of 679 grants and leases, with around 500 of them checked directly against the original register texts (see below).

This approach is called a Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI), a way of thinking about historical sources not just as data to be mapped once, but as reusable infrastructure that can grow over time. Every grant and lease was linked, wherever possible, to the people who held it, drawing on muster records and biographical databases. Because most named landowners were men, these linkages matter; they let us bring the women, children and other householders who lived on these lots back into view.

Mapping relations: a shop, a ledger, and a neighbourhood

Land tells us where people were, but not what they did, who they knew, or what moved objects through their lives. For that, we turned to a remarkable surviving source, the day-book and ledger of Rowland Hassall’s Parramatta store, held by the State Library of New South Wales, in the Hassall Family Papers 1793-2000 collection. These record thousands of individual purchases between 1803 and 1804. Every transaction describes what was bought, what it cost, and who bought it, which offered us a way of tracing relationships across the landscape. The transcription of these records are still in progress and you can help the project by assisting with transcription through the State Library of New South Wales website.

Around mid-January 1804, three very different Parramatta residents each visited Hassall’s store.

Thomas McKenzy, a barber and emancipated convict, had been transported from London over a decade earlier. In 1803 he traded his skills rather than coin, agreeing to “shave and cut the hair of the whole [Hassall] family” in exchange for tobacco and rice.

Sarah Brabyn, married to a military officer but one of the few women to hold her own town lease, bought candles and cloth that travelled home with her to George Street. Her purchases speak to a household shaped, quite literally, by things.

Captain John Piper, a wealthy officer with a long history of colonial trading, moved in an entirely different register, such as silks, kid gloves, fine cloth, sometimes sold on to other gentlemen like D’Arcy Wentworth and Simeon Lord. His purchases and on-sales chart the reach of a colonial gentleman’s credit and connections.

Behind even the most ordinary purchases lay much longer chains of labour. A packet of “Otaheite Pork,” “Castle Soap” or “Hyson Tea” carried with it the unseen work of people far from Parramatta, in circumstances of production we rarely think to trace. Mapping these transactions doesn’t just show us who had money, it shows labour, both forced and unforced, moving through a household, a store, and a much wider colonial and global economy.

Where HSDI meets archaeology

Sarah Brabyn’s home stood on a “convict hut” allotment, a structure originally built to house ten convict men, which was excavated by GML Heritage, exposing the footings of her cottage, a well, and the artefacts of daily domestic life.

Archaeological evidence in early colonial Parramatta is often frustratingly sparse, characterised by shallow features cut into soil that are hard to read in isolation. But when we can connect these archaeological features back to a name, a household, and a set of documented purchases and relationships, the excavation archive stops being an isolated site and becomes part of a much larger, moving picture of the town.

Where this is heading

This pilot project is deliberately lightweight. It is a small, shared database that nonetheless establishes the data structures needed to scale up. There is a great deal more to draw in, including more Hassall store book records, population and stock musters, land transaction registers, newspapers, and letters that could be examined to extract and geolocate people and places. Each addition could improve our understanding of how colonisers, convicts, and store loads of things were bound together through work.

We’ve deliberately left space in this project for Indigenous-led research into the colonial cadastre itself, a set of records that, as historical geographer Cole Harris put it, functioned as “colonial tools” of dispossession as much as administration. We see real potential for this infrastructure to support critical,

Acknowledgements

This project has benefited enormously from the generosity of others. The Hassall store records were transcribed by volunteers via From the Page through the State Library of New South Wales and students from the University of New England, including Denise Caddy, Natalie Garratt, M Forster, Aldo Van Heeswijck, Elizabeth West and Jacky Young. Jaki Kennedy (née Baloh) generously shared her 2010 honours research and data. Sharne Harrington and Elizabeth West assisted with the project, and the UNE Convict History Research Collective supplied additional data. D’Gluyas acknowledges the support of the 2024 Dr AM Hertzberg AO Fellowship from the State Library of NSW. Pitt’s research was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Australian Laureate Fellowship (FL200100144) and the School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW Sydney.