Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE

  In few cities was this affection for England, and the aspiration to be part of a Greater Britain, more apparent than in Melbourne. In 1878, some 3,000 Melbournians had turned up at the Town Hall to a rally in support of Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policy against Russia in the so-called ‘Eastern Question’. ‘These meetings will convince the Earl of Beaconsfield and his colleagues of the strength of the imperial sentiment, even in the most distant portions of the Empire,’ the Melbourne Argus loyally reported, ‘and will help, we hope, to invigorate the feeling in England in favour of a closer union between all its members, and of the transformation of Great into Greater Britain.’36 Similarly, Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887 ‘was celebrated in Melbourne with an enthusiasm that was not excelled in any part of the Empire,’ wrote the Melbourne banker and man of letters Henry Gyles Turner.37

  Accompanying the public culture of imperialism was an urban fabric highly conscious of its imperial affinities. ‘Melbourne spreads around over an immense area of ground,’ wrote Mark Twain, touring Australia on a lucrative speaking tour, in the aftermath of the mid-century improvements. ‘It is a stately city architecturally as well as in magnitude. It has an elaborate system of cable-car service; it has museums, and colleges, and schools, and public gardens, and electricity, and gas, and libraries, and theatres, and mining centres and wool centres and centres of the arts and sciences … In a word, it is equipped with everything that goes to make the modern great city.’38

  The sense of colonial prowess was captured first in the Old Treasury Building (now City Museum) at the top of Collins Street, constructed in the late 1850s to guard the gold coming in from the Victoria mines. Today, its underground vaults house a social history of the gold rush, but in the mid-nineteenth century their secure enormity symbolized the city’s prosperity. The building’s youthful architect, John James Clerk of the Public Works Department, instinctively knew that the style which would best capture that sense of mercantile, civic enrichment was Italianate. Like an Antipodean Strozzi Palace, the colonnaded arcade, loggia and elaborately detailed pediments of the Old Treasury Building hinted at the kind of commercial city-state which newly minted Melbourne might like to aspire to. Its natural accompaniment was the Melbourne Club, down the hill at 36 Collins Street. With its elevated stucco front and vast windows, this exclusive private members’ club (still very much gentlemen only) could have been lifted straight from St James’s in London. The ‘massive simplicity of its freestone walls’ suggested ‘a plain, unvarnished potency of some sort’. And when complemented with its full-liveried servants, racquet-court, library, and ‘very fair table’, it was the toast of every traveller’s sojourn and a symbol of Melbourne’s growth from grubby gold-town to civilized metropolis. ‘The luxury within, the dinners of a dozen courses, the iced champagne, and the evanescent bewitchments of French cookery’ were all a sharp rejoinder, one commentator thought, to the ‘slab huts, the damper, the fat mutton, and the milkless tea to which these same portly gentlemen did honour, with good open-air appetites’ some forty years previously.39

  ‘With regard to their public institutions, the colonists are like children with a new toy,’ Richard Twopeny unkindly observed, ‘delighted with it themselves, and not contented until everybody they meet has declared it to be delightful.’40 So each visiting dignitary had to take in the Public Library (‘a noble building of Corinthian architecture’, housing some 63,000 volumes); the New Law Courts (all 130 rooms, with a 42-metre-high dome modelled on Dublin’s Four Courts); and the classical-cum-Second Empire architecture of the Elizabeth Street Post Office. Added to which were the other civic hallmarks of a Victorian city – Athenaeums, Mutual Improvement Societies, Mechanics’ Institutes, Trades Hall Literary Institutes. Then there was the stately, neo-classical Parliament House (‘the grandest in the Empire outside Westminster’, in imitation of Cuthbert Brodrick’s Leeds Town Hall) and the Town Hall itself, with its Birmingham-style clock-tower campanile and Second Empire mix of Italianate and Gothic styles.41 (Today, the Town Hall’s gas lamps and civic emblems, its masonry and roll call of former mayors instantly evoke the municipal pride of the 1860s, but with no proper use for the building beyond occasional concerts it has the sad feel of a fading regional theatre: a modern-day Nellie Melba would not debut here.) Close by, the Gothic Revival – or ‘Gothic transitional’ (part Early English, part Decorated) – reaches an apogee in the three spires of William Butterfield’s St Paul’s Cathedral, one of the Empire’s finest contributions to Decorated Gothic, whose polychrome stonework, naturalistic masonry and Tasmanian blackwood provide a soaring testament to the architectural capacity of colonial Anglicanism. Outside its walls the rush-hour chaos and dingy grime of Flinders Street station fills the Melbourne streets, but inside the cathedral visitors and worshippers are immediately transported back to the age of Pugin and Ruskin, the Oxford Movement and the Gothic Revival. Without ever visiting Australia, Butterfield picked the stones from examples sent back to England, and the polychrome interior is rightly regarded as the Victorian architect’s final masterpiece.

  St Paul’s Gothic spires offer a distinct contrast to the institution of which Melbournians were themselves most proud – the Royal Exhibition Building. Commissioned for the 1880–81 International Exhibition,* the architect Joseph Reed plundered a medley of European styles – from the German Rundbogenstil (a round-arched mode drawing upon the Romanesque and Lombardic) to Norman buttresses to ornamental Italianate. But what really mattered was the massive central dome beneath which an exhibition space could be shifted about depending upon the event. This double-shelled dome, the largest in the southern hemisphere and higher than London’s St Paul’s, was a symbol of Melbourne’s ballooning ambitions, while the accompanying Tuscan palazzo designs sat well with the aesthetic of the nearby Treasury Building.42 ‘Altogether the public buildings of Melbourne do the greatest credit to the public spirit of the colonists and the thoroughness of their belief in the future of their country,’ concluded Twopeny. ‘There is certainly no city in England which can boast of nearly as many fine buildings, or as large ones, proportionately to its size, as Melbourne.’43

  It even had its own Boboli Gardens. ‘It is of vital importance to the health of the inhabitants that there should be parks,’ thought Melbourne Town Council. ‘Experience in the mother country proves that where such public places of resort are in the vicinity of large towns, the effect produced on the minds of all classes is of the most gratifying character.’44 In 1833, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Walks had urged Britain’s industrializing cities to open up their tight, urban terraces and narrow, unhealthy courts to public parks. The first fruits of reform came with John Claudius Loudon’s Derby Arboretum in 1840, and in the ensuing decades Manchester, Liverpool, London and Birmingham would gain free, open, public spaces as a means for the rational improvement of the working masses and a touch of inner-city aestheticism. In Melbourne, they were even more ambitious and in 1846 opened a Botanic Garden on the south side of the Yarra River, ‘affording free instruction to the labourer and mechanic, as well as to the clerk and showman’.45

  The Gardens’ success was down to a planting system which subtly appeased the bifurcated identities of the Victorian colonists: fine, old English elms, oaks, planes and poplars along with an array of indigenous Tasmanian blue gums, hoop pine and Moreton Bay figs. To complete this Anglo-Australian scheme was a Firewheel Tree – native to the Australian rainforests – as planted by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) in 1920. ‘The heaps of rustling leaves, as they chase each other on the gravelled walks, give an English air to the scene,’ wrote one nineteenth-century visitor, ‘which is, however, soon dispelled by the sight of a well clad gum tree, the feathery plumes of the tall pampas grass, the graceful fronds of the tree fern.’46 Accompanying the naturalistic landscaping, there was a highly technical programme of plant breeding, herbarium and seed banking run by the overbearing direct
or, Dr Ferdinand von Mueller. Today the Gardens are a well-used public park and high-end corporate venue, but in the 1870s there was a great deal of grumbling that Baron von Mueller had allowed his passion for botanical science to get in the way of providing a suitable pleasure ground for picnicking families. Too many conifers; not enough planting beds – ‘more in the nature of a scientific herbary than a recreation ground and botanic garden combined’.47 The conservative-minded Anthony Trollope thought the gardens spacious but not charming, ‘and the lessons which they teach are out of the reach of ninety-nine in every hundred. The baron has sacrificed beauty to science, and the charm of flowers to the production of scarce shrubs.’48 By contrast, Clara Aspinall thought the Botanic Gardens ‘excessively pretty’.

  The grounds are undulating, and green with British vegetation, and command a view of Hobson’s Bay and the town in the distance. The first time I saw them, on an exquisite March day, it did not require a very powerful stretch of the imagination to try and realise the idea that it was Mount Edgecumbe Park in which I was standing, and that I was overlooking the Bay and town of Plymouth.49

  And playing the role of Mount Edgcumbe House – the stately home in the midst of Mount Edgcumbe Park in south-east Cornwall – was Government House, the official home of the Governor of Victoria complete with an explicit imitation, in fine white stucco, of Queen Victoria’s Osborne House. After its construction in 1876, the residence provided another sense of English affiliation, reminding each visitor of Her Britannic Majesty’s ultimate sovereignty.

  The 1880s marked the defining years of what the London journalist George Augustus Sala christened ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ – a decade of rapid population growth (from 281,000 in 1880 to 500,000 by 1890), soaring land prices, housing bubbles, railway boondoggles, new coal and copper prospectuses, and cheap money raised on the London markets. ‘The winter season of that year [1887] was made memorable to the rising generation by brilliant illuminations and imposing pageants; official and social entertainments crowded upon one another … everybody believed in 1887 that he was making money, and on the high road to affluence,’ remembered Henry Gyles Turner.50

  As with Bombay, the boom would soon turn to bust, and the overstretched Melbourne economy crashed spectacularly in the late 1880s – but it was one swell party while it lasted, as carriages bowled along Collins Street and Melbourne’s theatres, concert halls, dinners, dances and conversazione bloomed. ‘Melbourne is one of the gayest places in the world,’ gushed Clara Aspinall, ‘and the ladies and gentlemen (those in the gay circles) are the most indefatigable, and I believe the most accomplished, dancers in the world.’ There were luncheons at Picnic Point in Brighton; archery parties at Government House; balls for the Royal Navy officers lately arrived into port. Richard Twopeny concurred: ‘If you are a man of leisure you will find more “society” in Melbourne, more balls and parties, a larger measure of intellectual life’ than in drab Sydney. In short, ‘the people dress better, talk better, think better, are better’. Charles Rooking Carter concurred:

  I have seen the ‘Row’, in Hyde Park, and Regent Street in London; the Champs Elysées in Paris; the great square of St Mark’s, Venice; the Corso and the Pincian at Rome; and the Toledo at Naples; and in the matter of dress, I would undertake to match the ladies of Melbourne against the fashionable dames who frequent the promenades in question: in short, they dress in the extreme of fashion.

  And what was so comforting for any new arrival in town was, like Hong Kong before it, how familiar the social scene felt. ‘Party followed party, and it was English life all over again: nothing strange, nothing exotic, nothing new or original, save perhaps in greater animation of spirits,’ wrote a relieved Froude. ‘All was the same – dress, manners, talk, appearance.’ John Freeman, the Melbourne chronicler of high and low life, agreed: ‘The social habits of the Melbourne people are British in every sense. We are fond of dinners, parties, balls, picnics and social gatherings of all kinds.’51

  Only one visiting party seemed to find Melbourne society unsuited to their tastes. On a tour of municipal systems around the world, the austere Fabian couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb progressed through Victoria in the late 1890s. There they found the upper chamber of the Legislative Council ‘the most reactionary in the British Empire’ and the state legislators, ‘a mean undignified set of little property owners, with illiterate speech and ugly manners’; they were horrified to discover Labour Party politicians ‘playing billiards and smoking, evidently finding life extremely agreeable under the Capitalist system’. Astonishingly, given their disagreeableness, the two municipal socialists were then invited to a series of Melbourne dinner parties held in their honour. ‘The houses and entertainments have been of the same type, costly and pretentious, wines and expensive food being lavishly supplied,’ the ingrates grumbled. And while the Webbs did agree with Richard Twopeny that Melbourne men were a cut above their Sydney counterparts, ‘the women, alas! are equally intolerable, untrained minds, over-dressed bodies, and lacking in the charm of physical vigour or grace of manner’. Perhaps because he was from a less puritanical wing of the socialist movement, the Marxist radical Henry Hyndman disagreed with the Webbs. He thought he had ‘never lived in any city where the people at large, as well as the educated class, took so keen an interest in all the activities of human life, as in Melbourne … Art, the drama, music, literature, journalism, wit, oratory, all found ready appreciation. The life and vivacity of the place were astonishing.’52

  The summit of Victoria society was then as now the Melbourne Cup. Just as in Bridgetown, Bombay, Hong Kong and Cape Town, ‘wherever a community of the Anglo-Saxon race pitch their tents, one of the first things they think of is a race-course’.53 Come November, Melbourne turned into the ‘Mecca of Australia’, according to Mark Twain, as every man and woman who could afford the expense ‘begin to swarm in by ships and rail, and they swarm thicker and thicker day after day until all the vehicles of transportation are taxed to their uttermost … and all hotels and lodgings are bulging outwards’. On race day, Guy Fawkes Day (that most British of national fête days), the Flemington Course was a resplendent sight.

  And so the grand stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of colour, a vision of beauty. The champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy, everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change hands right along all the time … and when each day is done, the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race in the morning.54

  Even the unappreciative Sidney and Beatrice Webb appeared to enjoy their day at the races. After spending a little time on the ‘Flat’ – alongside ‘thousands of working men’ – they quickly made their way up to the Hill, ‘ending up in the Governor’s Box in which were gathered all the Governors and Governesses of Australia’. Quite the thing.55

  IN SUBURBIA

  For all the urban energy of the Hoddle Grid and the champagne lunches in the Flemington boxes, the essence of Melbourne was to be discovered a few kilometres away in the villas and mansions of its fast-expanding suburbs. ‘A walk down Collins Street or Flinders Lane would astonish some of the City Crœsuses,’ explained Richard Twopeny.

  But if a visitor really wishes to form an idea of the wealth concentrated in Melbourne, he cannot do better than spend a week walking round the suburbs, and noting the thousands of large roomy houses and well-kept gardens which betoken incomes of over two thousand a year, and the tens of thousands of villas whose occupants must be spending from a thousand to fifteen hundred a year.56

  Whilst Cape Town would only later develop its exclusive suburbs of Constantia and Plumstead, Melbourne sprawled outwards from its inception, combining a central core with a growing constellation of suburban villages stretching along the shore line. In this, Melbourne very accurately reflected the shifting topography of British cities during the latter half of the nineteenth century. ‘The greatest advance of the decade is shown,’ reported the journalist Sidney Low in 1890,

  not in the cit
ies themselves, but in the ring of suburbs which spread into the country around them … The centre of population is shifting from the heart to the limbs. The life-blood is pouring into the long arms of bricks and mortar and cheap stucco that are feeling their way out to the Surrey moors, and the Essex flats, and the Hertfordshire copses.57

  The roots of Britain’s suburban efflorescence were variously cultural, economic and technological. Its origins could be traced back to the Protestant evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century, with its emphasis upon the virtue of domesticity, the homely sphere of the wife and the sanctity of the hearth. In its aftermath, there emerged a growing emphasis upon the sinfulness of the city in contrast to the capacity of a separate, suburban lifestyle to nurture a godly family. This thinking would blossom, during the mid-nineteenth century, into that remarkably sentimental cult of the Home. ‘The great store that the English still set by owning their home is part of this powerful sense of the individual personality,’ wrote the London-based Prussian diplomat Herman Muthesius in 1904. ‘The Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house. Here, in the heart of his family, self-sufficient and feeling no great urge for sociability, pursuing his own interests in virtual isolation, he finds his happiness and his real spiritual comfort.’58 ‘Home, Sweet Home’ became the motto for millions of middle-class suburbans as, The Times reported, ‘the habit of living at a distance from the scene of work [has] spread from the merchant and the clerk to the artisan’.59