The Sandstone Squarehouses of Macarthur: The Ultra Vires Blockhouses of Sydney Basin’s Dispossession
Bibliographic record
Abstract
South of Campbelltown, wedged between Sydney’s two great rivers, where the Georges and the Nepean almost meet is Macarthur. In the early 1810s, to go beyond Campbelltown was to leave the authority of colonial Sydney - a colonial ultra vires frontier. Here are squarehouses that date from the mid-1810s, some were built during the height of Sydney’s frontier wars, before the 1816 Appin Massacre, which secured colonial control over all of Macarthur. These squarehouses are archaeologically intriguing as they are almost square, not large, have thick sandstone walls, some have ‘slot openings’ and others small openings. Were these squarehouses built with a defensive premise in mind, the openings for use as ‘gunloops’ as much as ventilation? If so they would be architectural evidence of the frontier wars. The suggestion is that these small squarehouses, often overlooked as just an outbuilding in the homestead aggregation, were among the first buildings built on a property. If built on contested land, its presence would have acted as notification of a land claim, while its physical structure provided a bolthole from which one could defend life and property - a private blockhouse. Blockhouses existed right across the British settler empire, with common standards constructed for defence in frontier areas from South Africa to New Zealand, Canada and the United States. So it should be no surprise to find them at the beginning of colonial NSW and yet it is, and this raises questions as to why this distinctive colonial structure is missing in Australia. The placement of these squarehouses and the prospect of their loops - their surveillance isovists over creeks and valleys, would provide historical insight into the colonial consolidation of these landscapes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".