Surgeons Court

The Rocks was once riddled with laneways connecting one section and level to another. Only a few of these narrow thoroughfares remain, but they reveal many secrets about the origins, growth and development of Australia's first colonial maritime village. 

Surgeons Court was named by the Sydney Cove Authority in the 1970s due to the close proximity to the site of Sydney's first hospital.

Many of the 736 convicts who survived the voyage of the First Fleet from Portsmouth, England arrived suffering from dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, and typhoid. Soon after landing Governor Phillip and Surgeon-General John White established a tent hospital along what is now George Street in The Rocks to care for the worst cases.

Subsequent convict boatloads had even higher rates of death and disease. A portable hospital which was prefabricated in England from wood and copper arrived in Sydney with the Second Fleet in 1790. Present-day Nurses Walk in The Rocks cuts across where the early hospital once stood.