Author: Thomas Bowden
Bowden, Thomas, 2025 The Long Look Back: Lifestyles of the working-class in 19th century South Australia, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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This thesis interrogates what an assemblage of glass artefacts recovered from the central cesspit at the Rookery, Adelaide, reveals about working-class life in 19th century South Australia. The Rookery is a tenement housing site and, having only had limited previous research, its archaeology provides a wealth of information about the lifestyles of its inhabitants, and an insight into 19th century working-class people’s lives in Adelaide more broadly. This study recognises that working-class people were necessarily participants in the capitalist consumer economy, but that their relationship to it was not purely purchase-consume-discard. Instead, it considers the impact that frugality, adaptation, recycling, and personal taste had on the acquisition of glass artefacts and their ultimate disposal.
For this, 1004 glass artefacts from the Rookery central cesspit were recatalogued, identified and classified. The catalogue data was processed quantitatively to understand functional types, likely contents of bottles and jars, manufacturing techniques, kinds and styles of buttons and beads, and relative dates for manufacture, use and disposal. The data reveal that the central cesspit was filled with artefacts between the 1860s and 1880s, corresponding to known historical renovations on site. One of the limitations is that a shared cesspit contributes to the anonymisation of the site’s inhabitants, and, given the turnover of residents, makes it difficult to associate specific artefacts with individuals. Another was that not every artefact could be positively identified and therefore some were placed into broader categories such as ‘bottle’ or ‘tableware’.
Across 13 contexts, 861 fragments provided a Minimum Number of Vessels (MNV) of 446. Bottles (including stoppers) were the most common item, whether counted by fragments (708) or MNV (353). When considered by likely contents, alcohol bottles (not including spirits) were the dominant product, constituting 36.94% of the MNV, followed by pharmaceutical items (15.29%); non-alcoholic beverages, salad oils and sauces, spirits, perfumes, inks, cosmetics and ‘other’ were all less than 10% of the overall MNV. When compared to other working-class sites, such as Port Adelaide, the percentage of alcohol and spirits at the Rookery (40.23%) aligned more closely to a single-family cottage (33.51%), than a multi-family tenement (68.63%). This challenges previous ideas about the Rookery’s ‘slum’ nature, such as its portrayal in contemporary newspapers as a hovel and one of Adelaide’s many dens of vice. This ‘slum’ stereotype of lowly, moral-less and idle drunkards living in overcrowded, shabby and unhygienic housing had become common in 19th century Australia and was frequently invoked in reference to larger poor working-class neighbourhoods such as Little Lon in Melbourne and The Rocks in Sydney.
Archaeology can help unravel the complexity of 19th century capitalism and its impacts on working-class people in an Australian context. It is becoming more apparent that capitalism affected people differently, often on as simple a basis as where they lived – even within the same city. Some individuals moved in and out of poverty over the course of their lives, but archaeology on sites like the Rookery proves that sweeping generalisations are unhelpful at best. The Rookery assemblage is the record of the experiences of people who were forced by circumstances to live in cheaper housing, some for a short time and some for many years. By comparing their situation with that of other working-class people, a richer understanding of how capitalism, poverty and class was felt at the individual level in South Australia can be developed.
Keywords: historical archaeology, working-class, glassware, lifestyle, slum, Port Adelaide, Adelaide, consumer goods, poverty
Subject: Archaeology thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2025
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Heather Burke