Then the rich tones of the piano, or some other musical instrument, are heard gushing forth from the open windows, accompanied by the sweet melody of female voices, plaintive, or lively, blending in the general harmony. Beautiful ladies, dressed in white, may be seen sitting upon the verandahs, or lounging on magnificent couches, partially concealed by the folds of rich crimson curtains, in drawing-rooms which display all the luxurious comforts and magnificence of the East, intermingled with the elegant utilities of the West … Fairy like forms flit before the light, affording now and then a moment’s pleasure by a glimpse of their lovely features ’ere they disappear. And the lightly sounding footfall, and the merry laughter of happy children, add still more to the pleasing variety of sounds which float upon the evening breeze …
Not to be outdone by these delicate urban harmonies, the State replied with its own powerful symphony of monumental design. Between 1864 and 1868 the Colonial Architect, James Barnet, completely reworked the diminutive Australian Museum into a massive public temple, fronted by soaring Corinthian pillars and finished with the sort of intricate, expensive detail which was bound to make a lot of know-nothing yahoos in Parliament squeal like stuck pigs. Barnet’s museum redefined the dimensions of the city in a way not seen since Macquarie’s ill-fated hospital, taking a smalltime provincial backwater into the big league. Then in 1866 Barnet started work on a project which would dwarf it completely: the General Post Office. Still a major landmark in a city which has grown exponentially, upwards and outwards, the GPO was an undertaking as important as Utzon’s Opera House a hundred years later, and just as controversial. But it was even more significant in terms of the footprint it left on an infinitely smaller, simpler Victorian city. Here was proof – manifest in millions of tonnes of exquisitely carved rock raised over the grave of the Tank Stream – of the might and power of Imperial Britain, proof of the triumph of her people and their sciences over brute creation, and proof that the destiny of a small white Christian nation was to rule this giant land amidst a sea of lesser races. Those shameless self-promoters Macquarie and Greenway would have approved. Unlike them, however, Barnet was able to ride over the enemies who massed in front of him. When he was finally white-anted out of office in 1890, 1000 new buildings stood as monuments to his long career, from dozens of minor projects like suburban post offices and schools, to other major set pieces such as Customs House, the Lands Department Building, the Colonial Secretary’s Building and the Exhibition Buildings in the Botanic Gardens, a wonder of their day and since lost to a fire.
The change in the face of Sydney over these years was not restricted to individual buildings. The boundaries of the city suddenly became incredibly mobile after decades of incremental advance. A feedback loop of increasing wealth, immigration and industrialisation pushed the envelope of settlement out over the dry horizons which had imprisoned the colony’s first settlers. Steam-powered trains and horse-drawn trams delivered workers to the CBD from ever further away as the city splayed its fingers down the train line, opened in 1855, to Parramatta, south along Botany Road, north atop the ridge to Hornsby and out through Paddington in the east. Harbour-front suburbs such as Balmain, Glebe, Mosman and Watsons Bay grew in tandem with the private ferry services which made them possible, while Manly was established as a healthy retreat for the better-off. Their ranks swelled as the long boom filled the pockets of thousands of skilled tradesmen, professionals, merchants, miners, money-movers and industrialists, all of whom were as keen as mustard to get away from the city’s slums. They enriched another group, real-estate speculators, who have plagued the city ever since. Those perennial winners, the old money families, who had grown fat on generous land grants, now lined up for a second bite of the cherry as they subdivided their estates and ran up thousands of terrace houses over their old cow pastures. Lines of terraces marching down a hill became a signature of Sydney at that time, from the mean, airless little prison cells knocked out for the lowest sort of workers to the grand, multistoreyed fancies of the nouveau riche. The fever of those times, the rocket-rush, head-spinning vitality of such growth was beautifully caught by James Inglis at the end of the 1870s in Our Australian Cousins.
The overflow of bricks and mortar has spread like a lava flood, over the adjacent slopes, heights, and valleys, till the houses now lie, pile on pile, tier on tier, and succeed each other row after row, street after street, far into the surrounding country; and the eruption is still in active play, and everywhere the work of building and city extension proceeds at a rapid pace. The invasion of construction has bridged the harbour, and laid out streets innumerable on the North Shore: masonry crowns every island in the spacious basin – every projecting buttress of rock maintains a pedestal of wall and gable and roof. Verandahs overrun the heights, and chimney stacks peep out from the hollows. The sand drives are covered with cottages, the very marshes have a crop of dwellings, that are constantly springing up, like mushrooms … Everywhere the sound of workmen’s tools is heard, all through the busy day. Brickyards are worked to their utmost capacity; iron foundries are taxed to their greatest powers, sawmills and joinery establishments are in full activity, and at present the building trades are in constant and vigorous employment.
However, Inglis, unlike some of his contemporaries, was not completely blinded by this glorious display. He complained that land had become so valuable that open drains were boxed with timber and covered by little wooden cottages, ‘nurtured in corruption and redolent of putridity and decay’. As the middle class raced away into the burbs, the position of the underclasses in the city centre grew worse, for even as the city’s population was falling, its density was increasing. The abyss between the winners and the losers yawned wide, dark and deep. When Samuel Mossman was spruiking the advantages of colonial life to his London readers in 1862 he tempted them with descriptions of the lunchtime fare available to Sydney’s working men; ‘soup and fish, roast and boiled, as much as any man can eat’; turtle from Moreton Bay; beef and mutton at twopence per pound; wild turkey from the plains; ducks and pigeons, rolling in fat; sweet and juicy vegetables; and smiling black-coated potatoes from Tasmania, the finest spuds in the world. Given the toxic swill which the workers of the old country had to force down – wilted, rotten vegetables and rancid meat (such as a pig, weighing ninety kilos, which was found dead and decayed, then cut up and exposed for sale by one butcher at Heywood) – it’s not surprising Mossman should trumpet the tucker of the harbour city. But sadly, had he ventured from the cafes and dining rooms of George Street down into the warrens of the poor, he would have found a world remarkably similar to the worst rookeries and wynds of London or Glasgow.
The slums which the Herald had detailed during the early part of the 1850s had not been swept away by the subsequent decades’ tsunami of affluence. In fact, they sank further into hopelessness, victims of official neglect and their own population boom. In Nineteenth Century Sydney, Max Kelly points out that even as settlement spread further from the city centre, the centre itself became more densely populated. Surry Hills, which had been a thinly populated sand-blown wasteland during Mundy’s tenure, had a population of 23 000 by 1871, and 42 000 by ’91. In the former valley of the Tank Stream, steeply rising demand for commercial property led to a rapid increase in land prices and forced a massive shift from residential to business use. And yet the numbers of people living within the city continued to grow, drawn by the wealth which was making their lives a misery. As the hovels of the working poor around Darling Harbour were razed to make space for new warehouses, shipping offices and bond stores, the poor just moved themselves into the nearest hovels which weren’t being demolished.
Kelly describes it as a truism of the nineteenth century that as populations rose, the quality of inner-city residential life took a dive. The only qualification he makes is that Sydney had never housed its working population properly. The fetid slums of the city’s golden age were not a case of once-adequate housing falling to pieces under pressure, becaus
e unfortunately most of the housing built from the 1850s through to the 1870s was crap even when it was new. Labour and materials were expensive; the economy was running at white heat; and most developers were building as quickly and cheaply as possible, for profit rather than posterity. The Herald’s 1851 exposé was just one of a series of investigations into the awful state of Sydney’s housing, none of which, in the end, counted for squat.
In the late 1850s William Jevons, a gifted Renaissance type, made his own single-handed survey of the city’s suburbs and housing. An economist, logician, meteorologist, photographer and writer, Jevons would take his notebook and camera on long solitary walks through the parts of Sydney most respectable folk studiously avoided. He found the same pinched, dirty faces in the same stinking back streets extensively chronicled by the Herald seven years earlier. The city authorities had done little or nothing to remove the canker from their midst. The lower streets of the Rocks were still a festering slum of ‘horrible intensity’. Sewers and gutters were unknown and ‘the drainage of each house or hovel simply trickles down the hill, soon reaching, as the case may be, the front and back of the next lower house’. More often than not it fetched up against the walls of the lower house, soaking through to the foundations and floors below. Some dug trenches around their homes to divert the sludge, effectively surrounding themselves with filth which brewed up in the sun’s warmth every morning and which was kept ‘in a constant state of moistness by new accretions of liquid filth’.
In Redfern he found that curious arrangement, so common in Sydney, of all the classes being thrown in together; tall, spacious terraces along Pitt and Cleveland Streets surrounded with native fig trees or Norfolk pines, wretched hovels lining Botany Road, log huts everywhere in between, and an entirely new suburb rising on the black sandy hills of Sir Daniel Cooper’s Waterloo Estate to the south. This, he said, was something you could only see in the New World, the sudden appearance of a whole town, the boards of its houses still raw with sap and sharp splinters. Nowhere but Australia, however, could you find such a collection of ‘hastily erected frail small habitations, devoid of even a pretence to ornament and in many or most cases belonging to, and built by those who inhabit them’. It looked more like a military camp than a permanent town or village. Most of the homes consisted of little more than two rooms and were constructed of rough timber, canvas, corrugated iron, rubble, packing crates and, in some cases, glass bottles. The one thing they had going for them was space. As long as there was enough distance between their flimsy walls to permit a free flow of air, disease and contagion were less likely to strike. Unfortunately, as the building of Sydney accelerated through the next thirty years, open space was quickly bought up and buried under ever-increasing tonnages of bricks and mortar.
A year after Jevons’s freelance investigations, a Royal Commission parroted his findings. A year after that the Legislative Assembly despatched a committee to walk the same streets and come to the same conclusions. As Max Kelly wrote, there was no doubt that here were slums of the most abject kind. A lack of sanitary inspection and an absence of health laws, population pressure, land-sweating by landlords, rising rent levels and a falling supply of inner-city accommodation, all combined to deepen the slum problem. The committee’s chairman, Henry Parkes, found working-class accommodation ‘deplorably bad’, with many of the older tenements being ‘unfit for the occupation of human beings’. A section of Ultimo Road was described as consisting of ‘human slaughter houses’.
Fast forward another decade and a half and the Health Board’s report into Sydney’s sewerage and water supply recounts the same depressing litany of overcrowded, tumble-down shanties tucked away within the folds of the emerald city. Decades of frenzied growth, the first burst of urban sprawl, had compacted life at the centre to a point where one house had a yard, a metre square, surrounded on three sides by seven-metre high walls. At the corner of Market and Clarence, the committee inspected a row of weatherboard humpies, variously used as a butchery, workshops and residential premises. If you wanted to know how long colonial timber could last until it decayed into powder, they quipped, these places would satisfy your curiosity. They contained just enough solid timber to keep them standing, but not a splinter more. One house in particular grabbed their attention, representing as it did ‘the ne plus ultra stage of dilapidation’. It contained two small ground-floor rooms with a rickety ladder climbing into the darkness of a sleeping nook under the roof. Originally a weatherboard cottage, the inspectors couldn’t say what it was now, so much rubbish having been tacked on during patchwork repairs. Boards eaten out by white ants had been papered over or covered by scraps of tin. Upstairs, countless layers of rotting wallpaper curled down from the roof, a ruined tapestry clogged with cobwebs and dust. One sorry mattress lay on the floor, the only furniture in the house, which was otherwise crammed with piles of old clothes. Needless to say there was no drainage from any of these hovels. The city’s poor were still swimming in filth. In Glebe, where the gutters were choked by dead dogs, cats and chickens, bones, offal and decaying vegetable matter, the committee found a three-room house with broken floorboards and scarcely a single pane of glass in any of the windows. The toilet had collapsed into its own cesspit. It had no door, not even an old sack, and anyone wishing to use it had to crouch over the spot where the seat used to be, holding onto the doorposts which remained, in full view of the neighbourhood.
The committee members, drawn from the ranks of Sydney’s comfortable, self-satisfied burghers, found themselves mired in ever more horrifying sinks of poverty. Led by Professor John Smith, an expert chemist of ‘cultivated intellect, extraordinary patience and industry’, they plunged into a secret world, guided by missionaries and guarded by police. It was far removed from the liberal certainties of their lives. These were celebrated by the Herald on Australia Day 1876 when it preached about the rareness of poverty in a city, where ‘the many have plenty as well as the few’ and where ‘we are not entirely free sometimes from the danger of having too much’. This land-of-plenty thesis ignored the pale riders of disease which stalked the city’s poorest quarters. The 1870s witnessed an alarming rise in mortality rates, particularly amongst Sydney’s children who were, according to the government statistician, ‘literally decimated’ by diarrhoea and atrophy, pneumonia and bronchitis, diphtheria, convulsions and measles.
The Herald’s bumptious optimism must have rung hollow to the committee as they picked their way through hundreds of treacherous alleys and lanes and ‘rows of mean looking, ill-ventilated, poorly drained tenement buildings, all seemingly crammed to bursting with the city’s poor’. Reading their reports, I was struck by how often their descriptions simply shuddered to a stop as the degradation overwhelmed their ability to describe it. Sometimes I could almost see them standing there, gape-mouthed in confusion, completely baffled by the awful scenes in front of them. One such occasion was at a house in Abercrombie Lane, an evil, constricted, otherworld passageway which the Herald had visited twenty-five years earlier and found as alien as the forbidden city of Peking. The Herald had been worried then by the prospect of some wild revolutionary fervour seizing the minds of the masses huddled within. They had been so completely cut off from ‘the confident gospels of prosperity and order’, so thoroughly debased by their miserable circumstances, that even this conservative broadsheet admitted they owed no loyalty to a system which thrived on their misery. Apprehensively entering the home of a cab driver named Ryan, they discovered him with his wife and three children in a room below the stairs. There were no windows to let through a breeze and consequently the atmosphere was dominated by the piles of human excrement which lay on the floor. Ryan and his wife were both drunk, the latter sitting on a wooden box with a child in her arms, mother and child completely naked. As the inspectors entered the room she simply drew up an old skirt from amongst the dung piles and held it against herself. The rest of the furniture consisted of a broken chair and a table on which a few cups and glasses l
ay beside a rum bottle. The couple were too drunk to answer any questions so Smith’s men pressed on. Upstairs they found heaps of old rags and what might have been a mattress but was now just a ‘bundle of rotten flock and rags’ with two women sleeping on it. An expedition into the kitchen was cut short by hundreds of fleas which suddenly swarmed over them. Their strait-laced Victorian minds reeled at such deviance. Wedded to the mythology of the times which emphasised the benefits of hard work, abstinence and submission to the strictures of a rigid hierarchy, they could only wonder, like many before them, at the evils which would germinate in such an environment. In the end, however, it was not a revolutionary malady but a physical one which came roaring out of these crowded, filthy slums. After decades of neglect and wanton folly in the high offices of the city, nature took its course. On 19 January 1900, the plague arrived in Sydney.
That Friday dawned bright and hard over a city which had sprawled out across two hundred and fifty square kilometres and which was climbing towards a population of half a million people. The sandstone basin which had lain empty and undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years was rapidly filling up. As the sun swept gently over Port Jackson’s heavily wooded northern shores, a thin wiry man made his way from Ferry Lane in the Rocks down to the wharves and warehouses of Darling Harbour. Ferry Lane was, and still is, just a paper cut in the massive sandstone ridge overlooking Walsh Bay, and at that time 10 Ferry Lane – four rooms, an attic and a basement – was home to Arthur Payne, a thirty-three-year-old wagon driver of fair complexion and nervous temperament. Like many of the lower class he still lived within walking distance of his workplace, unable or unwilling to meet the price for a train or tram ride from the suburbs.
Leviathan Page 20