Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Melbourne suburban house plans, from Sands & McDougall, Melbourne Directory (1885). Top left: ‘Wooden house to be built for £150’ (1 bed); top right ‘Wooden house £250’ (2 beds, bathroom and veranda); bottom left: ‘Brick Dwelling £1100’ (4 beds and servants’ quarters); bottom right: ‘Brick Cottage £500’ (2 beds)’.

  The suburban ethic was transported wholesale to the Australian colonies. Indeed, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ was taken as the anthem of the Victoria stand at the 1880 International Exhibition, as low-density Melbourne championed the virtues of rus in urbe living. As in the mother country suburbs, the same faux rural name-plates were hammered on to houses, the intense focus on domestic improvement and gardening, passionate concern for family life and clearly demarcated gender divides. ‘Nearly everybody who can lives in the suburbs,’ explained Twopeny. ‘It is strange that the Australian townsman should have so thoroughly inherited the English love of living as far as possible away from the scene of his business and work during the day.’60 And as in Britain, the clerks and professionals were connected between the downtown and the shoreline by a highly effective transport system. Just as the Metropolitan Railway Company and the Great Eastern Railway (under pressure from the 1883 Cheap Trains Act, which necessitated the provision of workmen’s fares) opened up London’s suburbs to working-class commuters, so from the early 1880s the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company started to connect Melbourne’s outer edges to the urban core. By 1891 Melbourne’s 76 kilometres of double-track line was the world’s biggest and most efficient integrated cable system, carrying nearly fifty million passengers a year, with trams passing in some places once every four to five minutes, into the leafy suburban enclaves.61 This was in addition to the railway lines which had opened up, in the 1850s, from Flinders Street and then Spencer Street stations, to take the wealthier Melbournians out to their beach-side retreats. ‘A quarter of an hour will bring you ten miles to Brighton, and twelve minutes will take you to St Kilda, the most fashionable watering-place,’ boasted Twopeny. ‘Within ten minutes by rail are the inland suburbs, Toorak, South Yarra and Kew, all three very fashionable.’62 And on the back of the tram and train networks came further housing developments and land speculation, sending the boundaries of the metropolis way beyond Port Phillip Bay.

  Yet it would be a mistake to regard the Melbourne suburbs as dormitory commuter-villes. What Sidney and Beatrice Webb dismissed as a ‘muddled and unsystematic organisation’, with its ‘23 local authorities, called 8 cities, 7 towns, 2 boroughs, and 6 shires’, was, in fact, the basis for a remarkable degree of suburban pride.63 Just as the outer London boroughs of the later nineteenth century bedecked themselves in town halls, parks, museums, fire stations, libraries and swimming baths as monuments to their civic worth, so Melbourne’s confederation of suburbs cemented their identities through public institutions and municipal monuments. ‘Though the suburbs of Melbourne are in fact parts of the town,’ commented Anthony Trollope, ‘they seem to have built on separate plans, and each to have had a ceremonial act of founding or settlement on its own part, – being in this respect unlike suburbs, which are usually excrescences upon a town, arising as haphazard as houses are wanted.’64

  Part of the attractiveness of the Melbourne suburbs was to be found in their contrasting characteristics. So the inner suburban, working-class district of Collingwood (the most heavily populated neighbourhood, christened in honour of Admiral Lord Collingwood, who commanded the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar) had little of the café Boho-chic its fast-gentrifying streets have today. Instead, it was described as ‘radical and riotous’: ‘The shops and public-houses have a mildewy look about them. In class and character they are something between those of Whitechapel and the Edgware Road, joined to an evident tendency to run to a state of seediness.’ Nearby Fitzroy, by contrast, was ‘conservative and quiet’. Edwin Carton Booth thought there was ‘a good deal of the solemn respectability of a small cathedral town about Fitzroy’. Richmond was even smarter. ‘The shops and shop-keepers have a comfortable and contented look, and in many respects Richmond on the Yarra-Yarra has a strong family likeness to Richmond on the Thames.’ Surmounting them all was St Kilda, Melbourne’s answer to Bombay’s Malabar Hill. ‘Its residents are among the most wealthy and best known of the merchants and professional men of the metropolis’, who were drawn to the glorious local beaches, ‘exceeding in beauty and extent the beaches of Ramsgate, Margate, Brighton and Eastbourne, all put together’.65

  The suburbs’ autonomy was underscored by the individuality of the domestic architecture. The feverish creativity of nineteenth-century British design was brought to bear on the mansions, semis and villas of suburban Melbourne – Scots Baronial, Venetian Gothic, Indo-Saracenic, Moorish, Spanish and, most favoured of all, Italian Renaissance in rendered stucco. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens had enjoyed taking a humorous swipe at the expense of the lower middle-class, suburban affectation for over-decorating homes. Deep in the south London suburb of Wandsworth, the solicitor’s clerk Wemmick boasted a tiny little terraced house, which was then festooned with Gothic windows and a flagstaff. ‘The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.’ So too in Melbourne, homes became castles – with titles such as Kew, Windsor, Balmoral and Buckingham – as the suburban classes expressed themselves and their colonial identity through a proliferation of towers, verandas, balconies, summer houses and conservatories . Even the smaller cottages of Richmond, Carlton and Fitzroy bedecked themselves in cast-iron tracery and stucco decorations. And, whichever suburb you headed into, there was a tangible urge to be as English as possible. When J. A. Froude drove round the Melbourne environs, ‘among endless suburban residences, like ours at Wimbledon’, he could not but comment on their desire ‘to surround themselves with graceful objects, and especially with the familiar features of their old home – oaks, maples, elms, firs, planes and apple-trees’. Another visitor, Henry Cornish, thought the ‘snug villas and cosy retreats’ of suburban Melbourne ‘remind you strongly of Clapham’. Clara Aspinall was more inspired and suggested that sunset on a summer’s day at St Kilda could, with a little imagination, remind one ‘of the East and West Cliffs of Brighton, in Sussex’.66

  A suburban palace: Enderby, South Yarra, residence of William J. Mountain Esq. in south Melbourne (1888).

  Alongside the allure of a seaside Sussex town, the escalating sanitary crisis affecting the inner city was also propelling residents into the suburbs. For ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ had also gained the soubriquet ‘Smellbourne’ as a result of both its antiquated sewerage system and the untreated filth emanating from the bay’s slaughterhouses, brass foundries, timber yards, boot factories and brick plants. Melbourne’s plentiful human waste poured into the Yarra, where it mixed with ‘large quantities of bloodstained fluid from the city abattoirs’ and ‘the contents of intestines from gut factories’ to turn a fast-flowing river into something ‘now little better than the main sewer of a large city’.67 As the otherwise laudatory Charles Rooking Carter put it, ‘here before the eyes of the public, a foul-looking and still more foul-smelling fluid runs its daily and appointed course – a filthy compound of liquids discharged from factories, dyehouses, workshops and private dwellings – emitting vapours which are anything but “odorous” – especially in hot weather’.68 With the wind in the wrong direction the stench could sometimes waft all the way to the leafy enclaves of Malvern, South Yarra and Kew. ‘I was staying at one time in a handsome house where the atmosphere of the sitting-rooms was, at certain times, and more especially in wet weather, so obnoxious, that we could not remain in them, feeling that we were inhaling poison,’ exclaimed Clara Aspinall.69

  Those left behind in the inner-city districts, or proximate suburbs of Collingwood and Flemington, faced housing conditions just as unpleasant as the insanitary st
ench. ‘I know from experience something of the chronic domestic dirt which prevails amongst the lower classes in the manufacturing towns of England,’ wrote the British doctor J. E. Neild, ‘but nothing that I have ever witnessed in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in South Lancashire, equalled in repulsiveness what I have found in Melbourne.’ Of particular horror was the cottage death-bed of a local bootmaker. ‘The utter filth of this place was beyond description … It was literally not fit for a pig to live in, and the body of the man who had for some time lived in it was a great deal dirtier than that of many pigs.’70 As Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens had explored the underworld of London’s Seven Dials and Jacob’s Island, so Melbourne’s growing army of social scientists and journalists started slumming it along Little Bourke Street to expose the hidden terrain of colonial Victoria.71 Suckled by the miasma of Melbourne’s polluted lanes and sewers, brought up in criminal habits, crowded together with no conception of family bonds, this urban residuum constituted an embarrassing and dangerous threat to the city’s reputation. ‘On the breaking out of the first French Revolution, fifty thousand human beings came forth from the various holes and corners of Paris,’ wrote the hack John Freeman, in Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (1888). ‘We, too, have a dangerous class in our midst lurking in holes and corners away from public gaze, where they mature undisturbed their plans against society.’ Their abodes were the little streets running off the great boulevards, where they coagulated in ‘tumble-down wooden shanties … dirty, alive with vermin, close and foetid, with the sharp pungent odour of decaying wood ever appealing to your nostrils’.72 The young men inhabiting these slums were the dreaded ‘larrikin’, or ‘colonial rough’ – Melbourne’s answer to the ‘hoodlum’ of San Francisco or Artful Dodger of Dickens’s London. ‘The “larrikin” is an embryo ruffian, a boy in years, but a man in vices,’ explained Isabella Bird. ‘He gambles, cheats, drinks, chews, smokes, sets outhouses on fire, rifles drunken citizens’ pockets, insults respectable women.’73 In another diagnosis, ‘he is generally a weedy youth, undersized and slight, but like all Australians, who are cast in a lanky not thickset mould, he is wiry and active. He has a repulsive face, low forehead, small eyes, a colourless skin, and irregular discoloured teeth.’74 They came out at night and, like ‘pariah dogs’, hunted in a pack. They were the scrawny, flashy, cowardly ne’er-do-wells who haunted the Hoddle Grid and drove decent families into the suburbs.

  Rubbing up alongside the ‘larrikins’ of Little Bourke Street were the equally indigent Chinese, who had migrated to Victoria in their thousands in the 1850s to work the gold-mines and then drifted back to Melbourne when the rush receded. To the urban chroniclers of Outcast Melbourne, they formed another component of an inner-city eugenic sink. ‘The smell of roast pork comes from several Chinese eating-houses. Here is a Chinese drug store with mysterious preparations on all sides; dried lizards and shrivelled up snakes,’ recalled John Sutherland of his journey along Little Bourke Street. ‘But the Chinese in Melbourne are mostly of the poorer sort. They spend the day in hawking through the suburbs, and they crowd into these narrow lanes after dark to gamble and smoke opium.’ Charles Rooking Carter thought that the ‘flat and tawny visages, peculiar dress and manners’ of the city’s Chinese denizens ‘form one of the singular sights of Melbourne’.75

  Even the suburbs had their divides. As we have seen, the inner-suburban neighbourhoods of Collingwood and Richmond, South Melbourne and North Melbourne, endured their share of pollution and poor housing. And whilst there was no Dark Town versus White Town apartheid in colonial Melbourne, there was certainly a yawning distance between the upper reaches of Kew and the tight terraces of Flemington. For the most part, aside from the growing Chinese quarter, the urban separation was based on class and money, not race and religion. The key dividing line was the Yarra River – almost a cordon sanitaire, as one historian puts it, between working-class and middle-class Melbourne.76 North of the Yarra, the neighbourhoods were low-income with high-density developments and heavy levels of industrial smog. South of the Yarra and then eastward along the coastline, the houses became villas, the air fresher and the vistas more beguiling. The omnibus system and train network, combined with boosterish municipal councils and speculative private developers, augmented the separateness of these wealthy suburbs from the urban problems of downtown Melbourne. And when Melbournians thought about their cultural identity, it was this suburban, domestic civilization – as much as the fine public institutions and bustling dockyards of metropolitan Melbourne – that they celebrated. ‘The mansions in the fashionable suburbs are only less gratifying evidences of the prosperity of the people than the thousands of pleasant cottages which one sees on every road within a few miles of the city,’ declared Victoria’s official prospectus at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London.77 ‘People even of moderate means live in the country air and have gardens and pleasant houses,’ agreed Trollope. ‘On two sides, south and east, Melbourne is surrounded for miles by villa residences.’78 What they had so successfully nurtured at Port Phillip Bay was a distinctive urban form, a middle-class conurbation based upon social mobility and an almost Garden City-like combination of country and city.

  This was why the authorities so abhorred the curse of ‘larrikinism’ and the spectre of a British-style urban residuum of which it reminded them. As a result, they were always keen to maintain that the worst of Little Bourke Street had nothing on the rookeries and tenements of Berlin, Marseilles or London. ‘Nowhere is there any sign of poverty or anything at all resembling Stepney [East London] or the lower parts of an European city,’ Richard Twopeny stated firmly.79 Indeed, it became an increasingly popular trope to compare the expensive, cramped, unhealthy lives of British residents with the clean living of Victoria. The 1892 novel Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill chronicled the journey of the grand but impoverished Cavendish family from nervous, class-ridden London to Marvellous Melbourne and their realization of an alternative colonial future. After travelling the length of mighty Collins Street, they head south-east to the home of their generous uncle Piper in the suburbs of South Yarra: ‘the carriage turned suddenly off the main road through two wide-open gates of wrought iron, and rolled swiftly and smoothly up a broad and perfectly-kept avenue. To the right lay a lawn as soft as velvet pile, dotted with flower-beds.’ And then there was the house. ‘At the foot of the flight of steps leading up to the verandah, upon which the great entrance-door seemed to open by magic as the carriage approached, stood two mighty marble vases, whence trailers of the scarlet passion flower, now little but a mass of light-green foliage, threw out long tendrils that twined themselves around the balustrade.’ Such wealth and space were in stark contrast to the pollution, overcrowding and genteel poverty of life in the mother country. ‘To the Cavendish family it seemed large enough as they approached to have held a whole row of London terrace-houses of the cramped kind to which they had been accustomed.’80

  There was an intense pride in the suburbs of colonial Melbourne and the domestic, familial culture they secured. In contrast to Britain, there was very little of that snobbery and venom towards suburban living: no angst at the extending tentacles of the city; no fear of sprawl or lower-middle-class vulgarity. This was the liberal author Charles Masterman on London’s swelling tide of suburban commuters: ‘A turbid river of humanity, pent up by the narrow bridge, is pouring into London; aged men in beards and bowlers shambling hastily forward; work girls, mechanics, active boys, neat little clerks in neat little hats shining out conspicuous in the rushing stream … The abyss is disgorging its denizens for the labour of the day.’81 In Melbourne, by contrast, such suburban industriousness was a testament to the settler spirit, the natural beauty and the egalitarian, affordable living offered by the White Dominions. Towards the end of John Sutherland’s account of Victoria and Its Metropolis – Past and Present (1888), he uses the scene of Flinders Street train station at rush hour to paint a very different picture of a virtuous, bourgeois, suburban c
ivilization steadily taking shape before his eyes.

  For the great crowds that descend Elizabeth Street are people who have finished their day’s labour, and the mind follows them to many a suburban home, the cheery meal, the expectant children, the social evening; and exults at the wide ocean of happiness that underlies the turmoil of human lives. And the scene is picturesque. The tram-cars lit with fairy-gliding lights of many colours; the clock tower with its shining face; the wreathing smoke beyond, and the lines of tapering masts against the feeble glow of the western sky, all contribute to the striking effect of a most characteristically metropolitan prospect.82

  PLAY UP AND PLAY THE GAME

  In the steady application of the Flinders Street commuters were the germs of a startling, new notion: that the racial strength of the Empire was now more likely to be found in far distant colonies than in Great Britain itself. There was a growing concern that living conditions in Britain’s polluted cities were undermining the nation’s inner Saxon fortitude, while at the same time the Kiwis, the Aussies, the Canadians and the Cape dwellers were only growing in stature. ‘A race of men sound in soul and limb can be bred and reared only in the exercise of plough and spade, in the free air and sunshine, with country enjoyments and amusements, never amidst foul drains and smoke blacks and the eternal clank of machinery,’ mulled J. A. Froude in 1887. Thankfully, in its fit of absence of mind the British Empire had prepared precisely for this eugenic crisis by extending England across the world.

  English enterprise had occupied the fairest spots upon the globe where there was still soil and sunshine boundless and life-giving; where the race might for ages renew its mighty youth, bring forth as many millions as it would, and would still have means to breed and rear them strong as the best which she had produced in her early prime.