Miller’s Point Sydney from the Flag Staff Hill

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The best colonial view of Millers Point in 1844 by this important Australian artist, with the Lord Nelson Hotel clearly named on the right. Rare. Miller’s Point at the time was an isolated village and difficult to access until Argyle cut opened in 1846.

By the 1840s the terrain was lightly populated, with workers’ cottages near the wharves and fine houses of wharf owners and merchants adorning the elevated streets. But with access to town still difficult, Millers Point remained isolated from and, socially, a cut above, its neighbour, The Rocks. This distinction was reduced, and access improved, once the high rocks were hewn through with the creation of the Argyle Cut in 1846.

At centre of the lithograph was the last remaining wooden windmill in Miller’s Point: By 1822 there were three wooden windmills erected on the high ground there, west of Sydney Cove, apparently run by a local character, Jack Leighton. Known as ‘Jack the Miller‘, he met an untimely death in 1826 when he fell, ‘in a state of intoxication’, from a ladder leaning against one of his mills. His original mill was near today’s Bettington Street, on the high ground just past Dalgety Terrace. The second mill was built on land granted to Joseph Underwood in 1817 ‘for the purpose of erecting a windmill thereon‘. It was situated west of present day Merriman Street and was demolished in 1842 and replaced by a terrace of three houses. 

The third windmill (the one in the lithograph), in the Merriman Street area, was still standing in the 1840s on land owned by a Mr Davis. The date of its disappearance is uncertain.