G'day yet again, Fergie, Whilst contemplating slang and origins ... it does occur to me that "jug" remains ... in several slangs ... a non-specific word for a gaol. Most of the convicts transported to "Botany Bay" ( ... in fact - to Sydney, as Botany Bay was a pretty lousy prospect for either settlement or agriculture ... ) would have been initially 'housed' in tents ... while building simple wooden huts as the first Sydney dwellings. More 'impressive' official buildings were made of stone ... once easily accessible sandstone was prospected on the north side of Sydney Harbour ... and hewn by those same convicts - then rowed back to the growing settlement on the souther shore. The Hyde Park Barracks was an early example ... after housing the Governor and his coterie was out of the way. It's perfectly feasible that the first multi-story sandstone buildings would acquire the "stone" descriptor ... either in early Sydney - or the later Parramatta settlement ... intended to be an 'up-river' capital location along the 'London' lines. I will scan my cluster of elderly dictionaries ... and see if I can unearth some examples of terms that seem to resonate with the early (~ ' Convict') song vocabularies. Regards, Bob
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