The Rocks is Sydney's oldest neighbourhood, a compact grid of sandstone laneways tucked beneath the Harbour Bridge. The name comes from the rugged cliffs and rocky shoreline that greeted the colony's first arrivals in 1788, and the stone itself is 200 million years old. Its earliest residents were convicts, who built the cottages, warehouses and pubs still standing today.

The area's history is rarely tidy. Long considered a slum, it was dominated in the late 1800s by a gang called the Rocks Push. In 1900, bubonic plague prompted demolition of 3,800 houses. More followed for the Harbour Bridge. What survived was eventually renovated.

VoiceMap's audio tours trace the neighbourhood's convict origins through its original laneways, including the Fortune of War, an 1828 pub built by a former convict turned wealthy businessman, and Nurses Walk, honouring the unpaid convict women who staffed the colony's earliest hospitals.