Kogerah was a place where blackbutt, red gum trees and others stood tall and in abundance, like quiet sentinels surveying a pristine harbour. Believed to mean ‘place where the rushes grow’, Kogerah was and is Gadigal Country.

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The windmills which once stood on the high ridge of Potts Point and Darlinghurst, offered newcomers from distant lands a first glimpse of Sydney Town as they sailed through Sydney Heads and surveyed the coves along the harbour.

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In the 1810s Sydney Town began at Circular Quay and ended at Liverpool Street, and Darlinghurst was ‘little removed from the primeval forest’ with ‘out-in-the-country homesteads or farms.’

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In 1852 a solicitor, his wife and seven children fled the bailiffs and left their large house outside London, England, setting sail for a new life in Sydney. Soon they would be promenading in the Botanic Gardens, enjoying a box at the opera and playing card games with Sydney's most eligible bachelors.

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Opened in 1889, the rink was styled and decorated to emulate the Imperial Palace of Japan. It was illuminated by electric arc lights and gas chandeliers, and patrons saw themselves in large mirrors on the walls around them, gliding across the room.

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Established in 1880, Mr and Mrs Booth's 'Water Cure Establishment' claimed to treat everything from rheumatism and heart palpitations to kidney disease and indigestion.

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'Many an honest father and mother have cursed the hour when the law countenanced such hells upon earth as these...'

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