Arthur had suffered no serious illnesses in the years leading up his appointment with history, so we can only guess at his reaction to being seized by dizziness, a headache and a sharp pain in his stomach as he manoeuvred a van through the city around about lunchtime on that very hot Friday. He was shaken badly enough to lie down for a spell when he reached the warehouse he’d been heading for, although he was not so badly affected that he couldn’t finish his shift. Later that afternoon, still racked by gut cramps and a headache, he noticed a small lump high up on his left thigh, near his groin. He left work about an hour before sundown and, on reaching home, drank some castor oil, vomited prodigiously and took to his bed. There he lay, thirsty and feverish, with his head pounding and pain spiking through his stomach, while the lump in his groin ached continuously. The city’s medical authorities, alarmed by the spread of plague in nearby Pacific ports, had been waiting for just such a case. The Board of Health’s chief medical officer and president, Doctor John Ashburton Thompson, personally examined Payne three days after he had swooned at the reins of his wagon. He found a worrying mark just near the Achilles’ tendon, ‘a circular spot about 3 mm in diameter’, coloured a dark, angry red. ‘This observation,’ he wrote, ‘suggested that the infection had been communicated by puncture at this spot, and that the inoculation was most likely to have been effected there – at a part of the foot which was well covered by the boot the patient wore – by an insect, namely, by a flea.’
For Thompson, a world authority on leprosy who had fought an outbreak of dengue fever in Queensland and typhoid in Leichhardt, this was the moment of detonation. Sydney’s slums, as Professor Smith’s committee had discovered, were swarming with fleas, many of them resident upon the bodies of millions of giant, happy, well-nourished rats. The collapse of the inner city’s wharf districts’ sanitation systems had provided an almost perfect environment for the mass production of these rodents. In describing their favoured hangouts Dr Thompson also described the conditions more than 100 000 people like Arthur Payne lived in. Rats prosper and breed in the dark and intricate recesses of ill-constructed or decaying buildings, he wrote. They burrow and play in warm piles of household refuse; in basements, cellars and storerooms where rotten flooring sits just above the natural soil; in stables and in dung heaps. They can always be seen at night in lanes and alleys, however well-paved, hunting for food in discarded refuse. They sneak inside the home through holes and gaps. Or they just march in through open doors and windows. They are attracted by heaps of lumber and organic refuse which, rumbled Thompson, are too often allowed by local authorities to grow like topsy in backyards and vacant lots. They always live amongst legions of fleas and bugs ‘for dirt, decay, darkness and filth favour them at least as much as they favour the presence of rats …’. And they threatened the occupants of every dwelling nearby, whether in good order or not. For while the plague took some of its victims from the sort of premises Thompson described, it fell on even more homes which were kept in a good and fair state but which were doomed by unsanitary methods of connection to the sewers, or even by simple proximity to them.
Despite Thompson’s own confidence, the theory that fleas transmitted the plague bacillus was not widely adhered to in 1900. In fact in some circles it was considered kind of out there with the flat-earthers and moon-of-cheese crowd. Rats were acknowledged carriers of the plague, but the juggernaut of Victorian science hadn’t quite made up its mind whether the illness travelled by air, water or simple touch. Thompson, however, was as sure of the flea’s role as he could be, and he thought that the city’s best long-term defence lay not in the wholesale slaughter of rats – although this was important – but in attacking the man-made conditions which allowed them to flourish.
In spite of Thompson’s best efforts, the attack was a little slow in starting. The city’s medical practitioners were asked to immediately report any cases of plague or anything even resembling plague. During an inspection of the wharves on St Valentine’s Day, a customs officer reported finding an unusually large number of dead rats around Huddart, Parker and Co’s facility on the eastern side of Darling Harbour. Seven rats were seized there and found to be infected. The following day Dr WG Armstrong, one of Thompson’s colleagues, inspected the wharves and told the owners to start cleaning them up and destroying the vermin. Nearly a month later, when Thompson himself toured the area, he found that little or nothing had been done. The wharf owners were told to get their shit together or they’d be quarantined. In fact the medical men wanted to evacuate the whole area, but it was the focal point of colonial trade and closing it would have been like shutting down all of Sydney’s docks and airports for a couple of months today.
While the city’s commercial, political and medical interests contended over their response to Payne’s infection, the plague spread; nine cases in the first three weeks, then twenty-two in the next fortnight. By the sixth week the epidemic was established and would rage until August. Two thirds of the 303 victims went down in those last two months. The disease struck quickly, the infected falling from good health to severe illness within an hour. Chills, shivering and acute headaches announced the arrival, sometimes in company with intense pain in the back and lower abdomen, sometimes followed by them. Victims first vomited up all the contents of their stomachs, then continued heaving a green or blue bile. Their faces flushed, their eyes suffused, they often began to feel an aching or pricking in the lymph glands. Constipation set in, if they were lucky. If diarrhoea ensued it was almost always a very bad sign. Sometimes the most moderate onset was rapidly fatal. One man simply lost his appetite for a day or so. He went to the office where he worked as a clerk, left for home at midday with a fit of colic and had turned up his toes by ten that night. Another man rose at six, had breakfast, washed, dressed, sat by his kitchen fire and was found dead at 9.30 a.m.
If they made it into the second day, the patient’s symptoms became manifest and gradually more intense. More often than not, unlike Payne, they couldn’t raise themselves from their beds. Their eyes closed over, their complexions grew pallid or livid or, in a few severe cases, sallow or yellowish, while they emitted a peculiar smell. A thick white coating covered the tongue. The skin grew hot and dry or, in the worst cases, cold and damp. Their temperature rocketed, pulse quickened, speech blurred, some passed into coma while ‘in others, more commonly, delirium commenced’ with a furious excitement and they had to be restrained as they struggled to flee their beds, tortured by delusions and sleeplessness. By this stage, for many, their beds consisted of a cot on the hot, bleak shores of North Head, where the government had established a quarantine station. There victims and their contacts were strictly isolated from each other. Contacts bathed and changed their clothes and were detained for five days. Convalescents were discharged when they’d had a normal temperature for ten days, provided they had no unhealed sores.
The plague reached its maximum, intimate intensity for those it touched during the third day. Complete prostration and muttering delirium ensued; frequently stupor or coma intervened, and if bad diarrhoea set in at this point it meant the deep-six for you. The tongue turned brown and dry. The exhausted heart beat with a weaker, more rapid pulse. For many it simply stopped beating and never restarted. In those cases, as Thompson explained in a passage of sombre beauty, the bodies of patients at North Head were consigned to a specially engaged undertaker. The joints of the coffin were rendered watertight. The bodies were wrapped in a sheet soaked with disinfectant. The lid was screwed down, the coffin itself was enveloped in a coarse, wet, disinfected cloth and delivered to the quarantine depot. ‘It was … there buried without further precaution in sandy soil, on a steep slope falling to cliffs above the Pacific, and at a part of the grounds far removed from common use.’
A hundred and three succumbed to this first attack of the plague. That the toll wasn’t greater is a tribute to the work of John Ashburton Thompson and his staff. They marshalled what forces they could and swept through the plag
ue zone, scouring and cleansing it of a century’s accumulated filth. On 1 March a poster was released by the Department of Public Health, in both English and Chinese, which warned: ‘Plague is present in Sydney. It has been introduced by diseased rats, and there is great danger of it spreading still further.’ It warned everyone to be on the lookout for rats, because as soon as they started to die off in one place, or realised they were being trapped and killed there, they quickly moved on. It warned householders to take care that their doors were not broken, to close them at night and to make sure that rats couldn’t wriggle past sewer traps into the home. Readers were told to gather all scraps of food, bones and vegetable matter and either burn them or secure them in a strong box, to leave no water where rats could get at it and to kill any rats that entered their premises. ‘Dead rats found about premises should not be touched until they have first been scalded with boiling water where they lie,’ the poster cautioned. ‘They should not be taken up in the hands but with tongs; they should be burnt.’ Panic ensued, of course, with the health department besieged by thousands of frightened people demanding a shot of the city’s scarce antiplague serum. They invaded the department, ‘packing the staircases beyond the possibility of movement and at imminent risk of a disastrous accident’. The building itself, complained Thompson, was unapproachable because of the large crowd which gathered outside and ‘desperately resisted displacement’.
By 23 March the government had finally been convinced that whole blocks of the city had to be closed and given over to work gangs who would clean the streets, lanes, yards and houses. Thousands of men – sanitation inspectors, rat killers, cleaning staff – were sent into the plague-struck areas. Hordes of people were evacuated as the teams burned off piles of lumber and dragged away tonnes of garbage, ashes, dung and stable bedding. Well-kept houses were limewashed from cellar to attic. Woodwork was scrubbed with carbolic water. Carpets were torn up, floorboards removed and replaced with ‘good floors, properly closed jointed and caulked …’. Stone, brick and earth floors were thoroughly scoured. Drains, gullies, sinks and toilets were flushed with hot water, then flushed with carbolic water, then dressed with chloride of lime. The ramshackle, makeshift buildings and sheds which housed so many of Sydney’s workers were simply pulled down and removed. Nearly 4000 houses were thus inspected and cleansed, to the great annoyance of the displaced occupants. The local member of parliament, Billy Hughes, faced the wrath of his suddenly unemployed, homeless constituents when he visited a quarantined area. A crowd gathered at the barricades and screeched and howled at him, one man threatening to tear his limbs off and throw the dismembered carcass into a plague ship. Hughes, who later disparaged the cleaners as a pack of drunken desperadoes ‘hired by a tyrannical Government to carry out the bowelless edicts of the Health Department’, wrote that one woman tearfully informed him they had whitewashed her piano.
The plague and its side effects fell heavily on these people. Their rage at being tipped out of their hovels, compounded by the loss of waterfront work, is understandable, even if a little shortsighted. Although the plague spread beyond the slums, killing a handful of people in Manly for instance, its blow landed hardest in that wedge of the city which had been doomed from the moment Arthur Phillip consigned the convicts to its barren slopes. The demolitions which saved the greater part of Sydney amplified the process of squeezing the poor into smaller, denser and dirtier ghettos. When the plague flared up again the following year, it killed another thirty-nine people, largely from the same area. In 1907, after minor outbreaks in every year since the first, Thompson’s last report stressed once again that the only way of controlling the plague was to keep man and rat separate and the best way of doing that was not by killing the rats but by ‘improving the construction of buildings’. And for the first time in well over 100 years the authorities seemed to be listening.
As is so often the case with transplanted arriviste societies, the opinions of foreign worthies were important. London, Paris and to a lesser extent New York were all emerging from the dark chrysalis of the nineteenth century as strikingly transfigured urban showpieces. Paris had spent fantastic sums on reconstruction in the decades since the turmoil of 1848. Following municipal reforms London was increasingly coming to look like the capital of the world’s preeminent power rather than some Hogarthian waking nightmare. And even in the home town of hyperautonomy and extortionate greed, New York City’s Art Commission had an absolute right of veto over any planned public development. In contrast Sydney was home to a number of widely travelled and well-informed public figures who were only too aware that her creaking frame simply could not support her destiny as the second city of the British Empire.
Private interests had so effectively usurped control of the city that the twentieth century dawned on a bustling port which seemed to be an experiment in the civic utility of true anarchy. Part of the blame for the plague lay in the hopelessly decayed infrastructure of the waterfront, itself the result of 100 years of unplanned development by competing self-interested private businesses. Also at fault was an uncontrolled building industry which rested on a rock-solid foundation of riotous land speculation. All was not darkness however. As the plague boats beat their melancholy passage up the harbour to the quarantine station, the same reformist energies which lit up Paris and London were sparking to life in Sydney. The Sydney Harbour Trust was created in February of 1901 to administer the port and launch a massive public rebuilding program. Municipal councils became active in slum clearance and waste management while conducting a wider debate about forming one overarching body to run the whole city. The urgency of these issues found expression in a Royal Commission established in 1908 to report on the city’s transport system and built environment.
Robert Gibbons neatly summarises the contemporary deficiencies of the metropolis in Twentieth Century Sydney. The city and the North Shore were still cut off from each other. The harbour was badly congested and polluted. The suburban railway system stopped at Redfern until 1906, and then Central, leaving the city’s streets congested by tram traffic. Train lines didn’t even run through most of the eastern and western suburbs. Atmospheric pollution was uncontrollable. The streets were ugly, narrow, dusty and followed no logical pattern. Slum clearance mostly just moved the problem elsewhere and new suburbs were as unplanned as the old ones. It was widely recognised that all of these problems were due to weak regulations and a lack of cohesion amongst under-resourced public bodies. There was, says Gibbons, consensus about what needed fixing. The disagreement was in the details.
The 1908 Royal Commission was tasked with providing a grand plan under which these sorts of problems could be tackled. Aesthetic considerations were also to play an important role in its deliberations. Thomas Hughes, the city’s lord mayor, was named president of an eleven-man panel which included aldermen, engineers, a former inspector-general of police, reps from the Institute of Architects, the Master Builders Association and the real-estate lobby. According to Gibbons they were nominally representative, reasonably expert, well travelled and well informed. They conducted the country’s first true planning enquiry, producing a report of exceptional quality which recommended major changes to the road system, the construction of a bridge linking the city with the North Shore and an underground electric railway loop in the CBD, linked to expanded suburban services. The contrast with the reports of the previous generation could not be starker. Where the observers of the city’s slums in the late nineteenth century could do little but reel at the problems they encountered, Tom Hughes’ men stuck squarely to the task of grappling with them. Their report didn’t unleash an avalanche of public funds to sweep away the city’s ills. Years would pass before the first train rumbled under George Street or across the Harbour Bridge. But many of their recommendations did eventually move from the realm of wishes into the world of concrete and steel, raising a modern metropolis in the process.
The grand scale and refinement of this future city could already be discerned
in Walter Liberty Vernon’s neoclassical Art Gallery and State Library, which both sent their massive Greek columns skywards in the decade after Federation. Vernon was also responsible for Central Station, which displaced thousands of corpses from their not-so-final resting place in the Sandhills Cemetery, and which Tom Hughes’ commissioners envisaged as the western anchor of a monumental avenue running from Circular Quay up a widened Macquarie Street and into a majestic amphitheatre of buildings at Belmore Park. Before the Bridge and the Opera House were conjured up as the symbolic talismans of Sydney, the city suffered a want of epic, man-made iconography and the commissioners were attending to its beauty as well as its utility. (In those days the two were not exclusive.) In their final report they wrote that while public works designed to alleviate the city’s traffic problems should take precedence, ‘the importance of Sydney as the chief metropolitan city of Australia demands that improvements designed to add to its beauty and attractiveness shall have the fullest consideration’.
They quoted DH Burnham, a respected American architect, who enthused about the ‘delightfulness of a city’ as an ‘element of the first importance to its prosperity’. The Harbour Trust’s mammoth waterfront redevelopment between 1907 and 1922 was very much a project in this mould. In Graham Jahn’s Sydney Architecture, Trevor Howells places the Woolloomooloo Deep Sea Wharf and the Walsh Bay Finger Wharves at the extremes of marine building technology and on the edge of a design revolution which saw the state’s obsession with neoclassical forms eroded by the quaintly named Arts and Crafts movement. A reaction to ‘the aesthetic, social and political crises’ of the Industrial Revolution, the movement ‘railed against the architectural sterility or outright stupidity of thoughtless historicism … where a railway hotel such as George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Hotel impersonated a Gothic cathedral, or a hallway heater masqueraded as a mediaeval suit of armour’. The city’s new wharves reflected this turn to utilitarian simplicity, as did the woolstores which grew like topsy nearby. The largest structures in Sydney at that time, their ‘ironbark post and beam internal structures wrapped in muscular load-bearing and unpainted face brickwork expressed the nobility, simplicity and genius of functional architecture’. Out in the ’burbs these changes found expression in the Federation cottages and later the Californian bungalows which spread over the former pastoral estates of the colonial elite.
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