Rising damp: Sydney, 1870-90 9780195547504

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page vii)
LIST OF FIGURES (page ix)
LIST OF TABLES (page xi)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (page xiii)
AUTHOR'S NOTE (page xv)
INTRODUCTION (page 1)
Part I LIVING (page 11)
Chapter 1 URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE (page 13)
Chapter 2 TRAINS, TRAMS, HORSES AND HOUSES (page 51)
Chapter 3 NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY (page 69)
Part II WORKING (page 101)
Chapter 4 OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY (page 103)
Chapter 5 THE DAILY GRIND (page 139)
Chapter 6 MARRIAGE (page 169)
Chapter 7 ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE (page 197)
CONCLUSION (page 223)
APPENDIX (page 231)
NOTES (page 233)
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE (page 253)
INDEX (page 257)

Citation preview

RISING DAMP Sydney 1870—90

ee Shirley Fitzgerald

RISING DAMP Sydney 1870—90

Melbourne Oxford University Press

Oxford Auckland New York

; FS “)

For Kathryn and Thomas S 9 &

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associates in

Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia © Shirley Fitzgerald 1987 First published 1987 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission. Inquiries to be made to Oxford University Press. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Fitzgerald, Shirley, 1949— Rising damp: Sydney 1870-90. Bibliography. Includes index.

ISBN 0 19 554750 0. 1. Sydney (N.S.W.) — History — 1851-1891. 2. Sydney (N.S.W.) — Social conditions — 1851-1891. I. Title. 994.4'1031 Edited by Carla Taines Designed by Kim Roberts Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Limited Printed by Nordica Printing Co. , Hong Kong Published by Oxford University Press, 253 Normanby Road, South Melbourne OXFORD is a trademark of Oxford University Press

A YU iD- 223 lo

SOC

B15 07 CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | vii LIST OF FIGURES _ ix

LIST OF TABLES xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS _ xiii

AUTHOR’S NOTE xv INTRODUCTION _ | Part |

LIVING Il Chapter | URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 13 Chapter 2 TRAINS, TRAMS, HORSES AND HOUSES | 51

ao Pare Chapter 3

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 69

WORKING 10!

Chapter 4 OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 103

Chapter 5 THE DAILY GRIND 139 Chapter 6 MARRIAGE. 169 Chapter 7

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 197 CONCLUSION 223

— NOTES 233 APPENDIX 231

oO INDEX 257 BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE. 253

eee ILLUSTRATIONS

Inner city, Sydney, 1880 page xvi Circular Quay, 1870 facing page 16 Darling Harbour, 1890 facing page 16 Ragged School, Harrington St, The Rocks _ facing page 17 Darlinghurst (Fitzroy ward), c. 1875 facing page 17 Woolloomooloo, 1870s _ facing page 32

Chinese market gardeners, Botany, 1880 facing page 32 Redfern (1867) facing page 33 Coogee Beach, c. 1880-90 facing page 33 Ferries, Circular Quay, 1890 facing page 48 The North Shore, c. 1875 facing page 48 Traffic congestion, Pitt St, from King St facing page 48 Double-decker tram, 1881 facing page 49 George St lunch time congestion, c. 1880 facing page 49 Advertisement for land sale, Hurstville, 1884 58 Terrace houses, Woolloomooloo and The Glebe facing page 64 Myrtle Grove, High Street, Marrickville, 1884 facing page 64 West Sydney houses: Lynch’s Court, c. 1875 and Charlotte Place, c. 1875 facing page 65

Cartoon: The Model Alderman, 1882 72 Town halls: Redfern, 1870 and The Glebe, 1880 facing page 80 Dr George Frederick Dansey, City Health Officer facing page 8| Municipal fish market, 1881 facing page 8| Richard Seymour, Inspector of Nuisances facing page 8|

Sketch from ‘A New Year’s vision’, 1880 87 | J. Forsyth and Sons’ Tannery, North Shore, 1889 facing page 96 Vil

viii RISING DAMP: SYDNEY 1870-90

Water shortages in Sydney suburbs, Woollahra, 1880 facing page 96 The Glebe Island abattoirs, 1870 facing page 97 George Kiss’s horse bazaar facing page 97 Cartoon: Domestic Economy, 1883 107 Cartoon: The Possibilities of Colonial Life, 1883 108

Workers, P.N. Russell & Co. Works facing page 144 The industrial landscape, Bathurst Street, c. 1870 facing page 144 Goodlett & Smiths Pottery facing page 145 Mort’s Dock and Balmain houses, 1874 facing page 145 Metal workers, Atlas Engineering, 1878 157 Advertisement, J. Booth and Co., 1880 facing page 160 George Street North (Broadway), 1884-5 facing page 161 Farmers Department Store, 1882 facing page 161 Bennett’s Coach Factory, Camperdown, 1877 161 Paid work for women: matron of the Prince Alfred Hospital, 1889 186 Cartoon and comment on advertisement for a proper wife, 1884 188 Advertisement for cure-all vegetable compound 190 Houses: Annandale, c. 1885 and Queen’s Place, c. 1875 facing page 192 Interiors, 1891 facing page 193 Housing: Queen’s Place (?), c. 1875 facing page 193 After the exhibition, 1880 facing page 208 Darling Harbour, 1871 facing page 208 Warning to working-class women of the dangers of factory work, 1880 facing page 209

Camp of the ‘unemployed’ at Ryde, 1887 214 Cartoon: What It Will Come To!, 1883 218

FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Population distribution, Sydney, 1871 and 1891 14 Figure 1.2 Sydney metropolis, 1870 17

Figure 1.3 Metropolitan electorates 19 Figure 1.4 = Population growth (’000) of metropolitan electoral districts and city wards, 1861—91 20

Figure 1.5 City of Sydney, 1880 22 Figure 1.6 Redfern district, c. 1870 28 Figure 1.7 | Paddington electorate, c. 1870 31 Figure 1.8 Balmain and Glebe districts, c. 1870 33 Figure 1.9 |The new suburbs, western Sydney, c. 1890 35 Figure 1.10 The new suburbs, southern Sydney, c. 1890 37 Figure 1.11 Social structure, metropolitan Sydney, 1871 40 Figure 1.12 Distribution of Roman Catholics, metropolitan Sydney,

1891 44

Figure 1.13 Living space, metropolitan Sydney, 1891 46 Figure 2.1 | Sydney’s transport system, 1890 56 Figure 4.1 | Occupations of males and females, NSW, 1861-81 111 Figure 4.2. Occupations of males and females, by industry groups,

1861-91 112

ix

a

%

’

: +

TABLES

Table 1.1 Population density, selected built-up municipalities of Sydney, 1871 and 1891 21 Table 1.2 Municipalities containing high percentages of Irish and Roman Catholics, 1891 43 Table 1.3 Distribution of Protestants and Roman Catholics, metropolitan Sydney, 1871 and 1891 48 Table 2.1 Fares and wages, Omnibus Company, 1887-94 60 Table 2.2 The number and location of women in selected occupations, metropolitan Sydney, 1871 64

Table 3.1 Crude death rates, NSW, 1871-90 97 Table 3.2 Infant mortality rates, NSW, 1871-90 97 Table 3.3 Crude death rates, NSW, city, suburbs and country districts, 1871-90 99 Table 4.1 Skilled occupations, numbers employed and proportions (%), NSW, 1861-81 113 Table 4.2 Males employed (numbers and proportions (%)) in various jobs, Sydney, 1887 and 1891 115 Table 4.3 Age at marriage, males and females, 1870 and 1887 119 Table 4.4.1 | Birthplace relative to occupation of males Se :By 3FN 7oe? .Fy n:CSEENe, otgp , arenee Aes: wee SRT .ss ary a3 etA . a.°oe Ps we or rene Ss: AEe rn oe .'era ‘wote sh Pe. se |PAR? ot hos, sSX iy EO EB. Cee 1-PEAS s:$4 S g °° st SR eS Ceres) ; : S - . “ Bet UO EEA So Sg See hc PERE RIII ei Sh eg SRP TPT Se ot i a SC ”mae ea7soo 0PooMes -. wore CN nN SE “ye iuts Bee ee“ en .Loh Sos, Ado ape Deeey Ua San Tyyrs :ne”;as..Bet on :ME ..igfo 3SUN :Sige aThe iEoore lot Tot .i :-aaeatine a Ces tet etl, we mo ~ ares vo Se gS Mews oe + an "os Sy a, 2m°.se ;ooPa eo er gs La >: aoe Dao Sex ee .. OEE —_: ae SOR REESE nS amit ooRRP ReGRAN See - .SRS mo we RETR SESE SRS CER Nepepee ROE ISR ORS SSSoSe ee ee pl Nise OF UU iS ee! . BRS Be Se RRR oS RENMEI PTE IE eM gcee ES Oe USE SoERR RE RO Nee ny saSee ENaDe anTecate Pane : Ds ORS tats Saar 3 SNE an : nSP S8SEAG ewe gsrend es : oo ea DS ae OF RRS Se ORR a Semaine OE Se TSR ays nase PTESY LRQA EE eS otwee eee gn Se we

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What did it feel like, attending this school? Ragged School, Harrington St, The Rocks

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Peete ted goer Ba ee en ce TRAIT Se ed opi hode oa ee RDG SORE ere am ee Se a OM - CL OS RS Darlinghurst (Fitzroy ward), c. 1875: fine houses on the right, the city centre on the left — within

walking distance. There is ample scope for infilling.

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 17 jaan a ers semntmmeacmmmaemnecmsttaetets iia SEAS ES SSeS SASS aaa asa aaa aaa aaa tata eaaamadadasaaasaaaaasaaaaaaaasaaaaaaamacamaadaaaaasaasaaamaaasadaaaaaaaaaaaaamaamasaadagaaaaaaamasmaaaadaacaamadcaaaaamaaaamasasamasasaaamamasaacasaasamsacsasasaammcmmmasaaad

Harbour were both rocky and heavily wooded, becoming less so towards the village of Ryde and the Field of Mars.* Development followed the sandstone ridges, and avoided the gullies, especially where they were steep, as on the North Shore. In general this resulted in a preference for the south-west of the city. Any discussion of the role of the Parramatta railway in encouraging suburban development must also recognize that this land, capped with shale and less rugged than many areas, permitted easier building.

/ \ ‘4

Figure |.2 Sydney metropolis 1870

L Manly © — Village settlements | Five Dock — Other areas mentioned in text The Spit ~~ — — Municipal boundaries BALM — Muneipalties

Middte Harbour

_o South Head Lone Cove River y oT. LEONARDS Watson's

\ AY Ss , pOR ; \

, Fa*”EAST ST. LEONARDS Bay RYDE | St Leonards 7Y

\‘ HUNTER’ HILL O x. & ;_ SNe Bison's Point VICTORIA 1 t

Five Dock BALMAIN , /

‘~ A\

(

. CITY OF SYNDEY§-/ ' ‘ wee’ WOOLLAHRA J a ‘\ PADDINGTON | eo “Oy ; LEICHHARDT ¢ _! Nem seller ye” ter 6 > (1871) fren Fa ETON yt Wwavertey Orramatie = SAN nip = 2] REDFERN 1 ( ue Ashfield @ Petersham =VO CAMP ar oN we - ® 7 a“u-> i 8 it Randwick @ Enfield peor NEWTOWN | \\ Sg}

t -? ‘NON \ ‘ if fST.PETERS Gm me dente Cook's /» \\ Rwver 4 Tempe ‘ a ook. Botany ‘

camterbs s Macdonaihown @: nee RANDWICK

nterbury (MARRICKVILLE 97” ALEXANDRIA | an Coogee

we Ss / \

{ WEST BOTANY " ‘A

‘

\ BOTANY

0 2 3 ' BAY ‘

\

Cece nenienmeeens «Miles ’

j

yen SL (

i

J

,

Peis" U

é;

18 LIVING

From a twentieth-century perspective it is easy to assume that the harbour was a barrier to urban growth, and this is frequently asserted as an explanation for the tardy development of the North Shore.” However, the early and sustained growth of population on the Balmain peninsula, linked

to the city by water transport, casts doubt upon this assumption. It is probably true that in terms of travelling time, and certainly in terms of comfort, ferries were competitive with omnibuses,° and the tendency to consider the harbour as a complicating factor in the development of Sydney indicates a lack of historical perspective. The construction of roads was often primitive, upkeep minimal, and access was not always possible

to many of the land-locked suburbs in bad weather. Contemporary evidence suggests that it was the nature of the terrain that restricted development of all areas of the North Shore except those with easy access to the. harbour. Early in Sydney’s development, the area south of the city was almost

totally neglected for residential use. The exception was the Randwick Heights, which, being elevated and well drained, did not share the general

characteristics of the area. The growth of Redfern as a working-class suburb in the 1860s, and the movement into Alexandria and Waterloo in the following decades was related to the presence of extensive swamps, which had attracted industry to the area from early times. The Botany Bay catchment was divided roughly into two halves, with the eastern half reserved for Sydney’s water supply, and the western half used by industry.

Occupation of the water reserve was precluded until the close of the 1880s, when the water supply from the Nepean became operative, and the

Botany swamps were thrown open to industry. The presence of these swamps also created a psychological barrier to settlement further south, although beyond the Cook’s River the swamps gave way to very passable land, physically attractive as well as easy to build on. In 1891, Sydney, with 383 283 citizens, accounted for 34 per cent of the

inhabitants of New South Wales. Since 1871, its population of around 135000 had almost trebled, and its share of the colonial population had risen by about 8 per cent. Growth had been rapid and steady throughout

the period, with some acceleration in the 1880s. The direction and intensity of expansion had been uneven, as figure 1.4 indicates.

In 1871, over half the metropolitan population lived within the boundaries of the city proper. While the 1870s witnessed a doubling of the suburban population, the city too continued to grow rapidly, increasing its

population by 35 per cent during the decade. In 1881 the suburban population exceeded that of the city, but only by about 20000. It was the 1880s that was the decade of the suburbs.

The rate at which growth occurred may best be highlighted by considering the fact that the two electorates of Redfern and Balmain in 1891 contained more people than the whole of the city in 1871. The most

rapidly growing electorate in the 1880s, Canterbury, far exceeded the

growth rate of any electorate in the previous two decades, and the

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 19

Figure |.3 Metropolitan electorates*

tS Mies GIPPS: , Sv} 2 I

| BOURKE

DENISON g ! FITZROY * | MACQUARIE EAST

jm~——— SYDNEY WEST /~ SYDNEY ,/

va COOK PHILLIP

SOUTH SYDNEY

Moore Park

ls Miles

0 5 Mil bah | | So ST. LEONARD'S re , ¥ pene pod | =

Ss

BALMAIN CITY y OF

t GLEBE Siena 4 PADDINGTON

CONCORD Pa! NEWTOWN La ‘

,—7{

et ¢ REDFERN = Fo ( j

ST. GEORGE

BOTANY BAY

*Strictly, these ‘electorates’ were ‘registry districts’ until the Electoral Act of 1880. Registry districts pre-1880 and electorates post- 1880 covered the same area. The exceptions were, in the city, South Sydney, which was added to East and West Sydney, and, in the suburbs, Concord

and St George, which were amalgamated to form Canterbury. A more precise map of electoral districts proclaimed under the 1880 Act is located in the Mitchell Library, Lands Department map M3 81L { 8fbe/1880/1.

ita 20 ; , 20 LIVING

Figure 1.4 Population growth (’000) of metropolitan electoral districts and city wards, |86!—91

|86|

1871

1189]

#1 = Wards

ro ‘ Se se 1

eee eet Psa aa afg ‘3 si, TAS FaBS ES"san$ a 3 #ueSea3gale ‘ y2 BS et a: 3. 0 AG 3S i a5 q BRS

60 ; 50 186 | < 187

Cook Philip Bourke Macquarie Fitzroy Gipps Brisbane Denison

‘000

South Sydney East Sydney West Sydney

70

Electorates

188 4 ¥ ; 40 1!89! Sg aN

30 i : % i ‘ ay ! 20 3 a 2 z ie 5, y Ud

" ae. as ae : x¥ %iy, ne 3+ os. 4 53 | +3) 4 a i ASS, 3 ag 3 : t ar ; :

Balmain Newtown StLeon’ds Glebe Canterb Redfern Padding'n *There were no ward figures for 1881. Note: Figure 1.3 shows the location of these electorates and wards. source: Based on NSW Census, 1871, pp. xii and xlii (table 3); 1881, pp. xi—-xii; 1891, p. 8

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 21

accelerating growth rate of the suburbs may be seen in the fact that in the 1860s no suburban electorate as much as doubled its population, in the

1870s three electorates managed to do so, and in the 1880s all of the suburban electorates did so, except Redfern. In contrast, the city grew more slowly, but steadily, in the 1860s and 1870s, increasing its population by about one-third in both decades, but in the 1880s it grew by a mere 6.8 per cent. Consequently by 1891 the city housed only 29 per cent of the metropolitan population compared with 65 per cent in 1871. Given the limited area of the city and the rapid growth of Sydney, such a redistribution of population was inevitable, and the changing role of the city is perhaps better illustrated by considering not the size but the density of the population. Table |.1 Population density, selected built-up municipalities of Sydney, 1871 and 1891

Municipality 187 189 | Sydney (city) 29.9 37.4 Newtown 8.9 36.8 Population/Acre

Paddington 10.246.9 44. Redfern 14.5 Darlington 25.0 61.9

Source: 1.A. Coghlan, General Report on the Eleventh Census of New South Wales, Sydney,

Government Printer, 1894, p. 12

In 1871, as table 1.1 shows, most of the crowded areas of Sydney would

have been in the city, while by 1891 this was no longer the case. The Darlington figure is a useful one, because it relates to a small suburb almost

entirely given over to housing. Parts of the city and inner suburbs would have had pockets at least as crowded as this. If the crowded areas of Sydney were no longer virtually confined to the city in 1891, it was nonetheless true that the city was more crowded in 1891 than it had been in 1871. However the population of the city had probably peaked sometime during the 1880s, and was in decline by 1891.’ Figure 1.4 records the areas of the city that had experienced a population decline as housing was replaced by business premises. In 1870, the city was visually different from its suburbs because it was

older. In fact, visitors were often surprised at its apparent age, like Anthony Trollope, who observed that ‘the antiquity of Sydney . . . strikes an Englishman as being almost absurd’.® This illusion of antiquity was no

doubt reinforced by the lack of building regulations, as well as by the city’s varied topography and haphazard street plan. Of the city itself the impression produced upon a visitor fresh from the rectangular formality of a younger capital in a neighbouring colony is that it is uncolonial, and

free of the dreadful newness and the garish rawness which characterize most Australian centres of population.”

22 LIVING

Many of the buildings standing in 1870 were of weatherboard and iron,

which rapidly deteriorated in Sydney’s climatic conditions, and one of the most striking visual changes over the next twenty years was the replacement of these with brick and, in the case of public buildings, stone structures. There was a clear social cleavage between the east and west of the city

in 1870, a cleavage that is emphasized rather than dissipated by a consideration of occupational figures for the whole metropolis. '!° The notion that the wealthiest ‘chose’ to reside in the suburbs did not apply to Sydney in 1870. Bourke ward was second only to Woollahra in the percentage of

professionals and domestics it housed, and on these criteria, the three eastern wards rank with the best suburbs. In these three too, the proportion of unskilled workers was among the lowest. Conversely, the western wards ranked with the lowest of the suburbs, for although Brisbane and

Gipps housed more professionals than some of the outlying, sparsely populated suburbs, Denison and Phillip did not attract many to their Figure 1.5 City of Sydney

N x 3 Ls Km O S wy FORT

S MACQUARIE

a

Ss

* eridee ©) Ss 0 | INNER DOMAIN S 5Q 8 Sclad POTTS ©

228 = POINT Yo

v\\ \o Bl |x CRICKET

% vl | ¢ GROUND x = lx| 3 COWPERT ~~ WOOLLOOMOOLOO PYRMONT Z a\ King st Perris] = OUTER \WHARE HEIGHTS é ORY=} DOMAIN

QUARRIES & Marke, St i 4 S

I& MARKETS 5] oy ° S] HYDE William St. ?

© Oo

Ga, ULTIMO S | 8) PARK Vy ESTATE \ erpoo ot “yy

& OY e 5 | \ mouth Hag Re ” () DARLINGHURST

Rd. e

HAYMARKETS GAOL

Parramatta SYDNEY £ TERMINUS o

|A

PRINCE ~ a

ALFRED SURRY HILLS OPARK

es ort Cleveland St. g

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 23

precincts, and all contained a high proportion of unskilled workers, especially Denison and Gipps, which had a higher percentage of unskilled workers than any other area of the metropolis. Unfortunately, the census

for 1891 does not give us an occupational breakdown with which to compare these figures but all other descriptive evidence indicates that this distribution persisted. Visually, the social differences between east and west were unmistakable. Well-heeled people who worked in the shops and business houses along George and York Streets probably seldom ventured further westward, but if they did, they would soon have found themselves, if not in

a different world, at least in one considerably meaner and dirtier than their own. City white-collar workers, taking in a harbour view or enjoying a stroll in a park or garden in their lunch break, naturally walked east. The visual impact was greater if west Sydney was approached from Darling

Harbour, as it was every morning by commuters on the Balmain and Hunter’s Hill ferries. Behind the squalid structures and fevered bustle of the wharves of the coastal shipping companies, rows of cramped terraces and crooked streets came into view, jammed between factories, flour mills

and the gasometers of the Australia Gas Light Company. This area contained some of the worst slums in Sydney, many of them old, ill drained, badly ventilated and overcrowded. Then, abruptly, beyond these, the skyline was dominated by a different kind of architecture, signalling different activities and social ways — in 1870 the towers of St Andrew’s Cathedral, church spires and a few solid commercial buildings.

In the following decades the domes and clock towers of an increasing number of public buildings and a new Sydney Town Hall enhanced the urban skyline. By 1890 some of these slums had been cleared for factories and business houses, with Brisbane ward having a high negative growth

rate, but whether living conditions had ameliorated for those who remained is a moot point. Certainly, the wharves did not improve. In 1870 the western wards — Gipps, Brisbane, Denison and Phillip — housed almost half the city’s population in considerably less than half the area, especially given that much of Denison’s population was crammed into the southern end of the ward, around George Street, and not on the

Pyrmont peninsula which was still dotted with sandstone quarries and. erazing sheep. This western section, the oldest settled portion of the city, contained most of the largest factories and workshops, as well as many small establishments and retail businesses. It was here that Sydney was at its busiest and noisiest. As the coastal trade and intercolonial grain trade both centred on Darling Harbour, the streets adjacent to the wharves attracted most of the metropolitan flour and timber mills as well as several

coal depots and lime kilns. Engineering works originally concerned primarily with ship repair work also located here, as did numerous subsidiary workshops a bit later — foundries, galvanizing works, wire

makers, and chemical works. Aerial pollution was enhanced by the presence of several tobacco factories, in the Kent and Clarence Street

24 LIVING

area, and Sydney’s only woollen mill was in Sussex Street. The food and drink industry was more ubiquitous than many others, but there was a concentration of these industries in West Sydney with several biscuit and confectionery factories, as well as the Colonial Sugar Refinery and Tooth’s Brewery. Some bootmaking, notably Davenports and Forsyths, was carried out in the vicinity of the Haymarket, along with several large saddleries and numerous small repair shops concerned with the maintenance of both animals and conveyances involved in the carrying business, both local and country. Behind and among all of this lived 35 000 people in 1870, with a great many more working there in the daytime. In the mornings a few whitecollar workers might be seen emerging from the pockets of substantial

housing located in the elevated, well-drained portion of The Rocks (Gipps), but none of the other wards contained many white-collar workers, and none contained higher than the metropolitan average of skilled workers and hired hands. These people, heavily employed through-

out the district, lived elsewhere, and came in to work, usually on foot, for even if they could have afforded the fare, the western part of the city was badly served by transport. Skilled workers who did live in Gipps and Brisbane included many the census was pleased to call ‘miscellaneous’

— occupied at rope and sailmaking, and at the ships’ providores and chandler’s shops that dotted the area. Timber workers were numerous in these two wards, and also in Denison, where metal work and quarrying dominated. In Phillip, leather workers were numerous, as well as those in ‘stone and earth’, many of whom would have been employed at Goodlet and Smith’s pottery.

The large scale of much industry here meant that within the skilled occupations, most worked for wages and few were self-employed. Added to this, well over half the self-employed were needleworkers, and while these were undoubtedly skilled workers, they were exploited and remunerated as

if they weren’t. The vision of those women, struggling along Goulburn Street with their latest allocation of shirts and coats, anxious to resume the long hours of eye-straining work that barely paid the rent on one of the ‘wretched hovels’ or ‘just tenantable’ cottages that graced this region, does

nothing to enhance the real status of the census category of ‘skilled’ in West Sydney. !! While many people who worked in these western wards lived elsewhere,

those who did live there almost certainly worked locally, and a high proportion of these were unskilled. In Denison and Phillip it is true that there were significant numbers in ‘petty bourgeois’ occupations, but the census’ failure to distinguish between producers and retailers, and the presence of many food factories in Chippendale and along George Street would have meant that many so-called retailers were in fact unskilled factory workers.

An attentive observer of life would have seen here all that was most brutal in a nineteenth-century port city, existing cheek by jowl with the

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 25

‘respectable poor’ who lived in this neighbourhood because this was where the work was. Here the underworld and marginal carried out their business transactions, and the transient poor found their sixpenny lodging houses,

but it was also here that frugal housewives shopped at the markets and bargained with street hawkers. In the evenings, while some men lined up at the soup kitchen in Dixon Street, and others settled down to a bout of drinking and brawling in one of the district’s many public houses, middleclass teachers tried to instil a little middle-class knowledge into the wise heads of children who had already spent a day working before coming to

the Ragged School in Harrington Street. And in many cottages and terraces the sewing machines kept hurnming. In general, the city provided far more jobs for women than the suburbs in 1870, and so many families lived here because they needed all members of the household to work in order to survive. By 1890 there would be fewer families living here, the

percentage of children to adults would have declined and the ragged schools, though expanded in number, would have moved to the suburbs. It has already been suggested that George Street, which separated Gipps and Brisbane from Bourke and Macquarie, was in fact a real dividing line in terms both of status and function. This central part of the city housed few unskilled workers, but a large proportion of skilled, especially selfemployed. In 1870, the suburban location was still a choice of the future

for many clerical workers who lived close to their work, even in this

central business district, and Bourke’s high percentage of clerks, merchants, bankers and professionals reflected the concentration of business and commercial houses in this area. Similarly Macquarie contained a high proportion of shopkeepers, many of whom no doubt lived and worked in the same building. However total numbers living in these

central wards were much lower than in the four western wards.

There were, in addition, several industry groups that shunned the Darling Harbour location, and chose instead the centre of the city. The printing industry located in Bourke ward, in Hunter, Pitt and Castlereagh Streets, in close proximity to the commercial houses, while the clothing industry was to be found primarily within the block bounded by George, King, Market and Pitt Streets. The Old South Head Road (Oxford Street) also had a nucleus of clothing firms offering cheaper goods, as did the Haymarket district, while the markets themselves still supplied the very poor with their clothing. Many clothiers, drapers and hatters employed tradespeople in workshops on the same premises as the store, although much of this work was carried out in the workers’ homes. These concentrated not in the central district, but west and east of it. The third main industry to locate east of George Street was coach-building, centred on Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets, and again along the Old South Head Road. East of Bourke and Macquarie, past the business district and the public

buildings, was the residential ward of Fitzroy, physically separated from the rest of the city by Woolloomooloo Bay, the Domain and Hyde Park.

26 LIVING

Trollope, in 1872, referred to the ‘combined towns of Sydney and Woolloomooloo’, adding that ‘Woolloomooloo has become almost as big as

Sydney and much more fashionable’.'’ This is borne out by the high percentage of professionals and domestic servants living in Fitzroy. Parts of

Darlinghurst and the elevated Woolloomooloo Heights east of Victoria

Street (Potts’ Point), cut off from the rest by cliffs, housed some of Sydney’s wealthiest citizens, and in 1870 many of the properties were still large. Around Cowper Wharf, however, which was the centre for small coastal traders and also for Sydney’s fishermen, a different society existed. In the early hours well before the dawn, the fishermen would be bringing in the catch. Some would come from as close at hand as the little fishing

village that had existed for fifty years at Botany. Others came from Newcastle and Port Stephens to the north, or Shoalhaven to the south of the city. In 1870 the fish were unceremoniously, and unhygienically, sold on the wharf itself. The opening of the city corporation’s new fish market in Plunkett Street in 1872 improved the character of the area somewhat, but the markets were always associated with rowdy characters and riotous behaviour. '? The suburb of Woolloomooloo was not in fact very heavily populated with fishermen, although it had long been associated with the smells and sights of fishing. The big semi-circular wharf was the site of sawmills and timberyards and at the numerous sheds in varying stages of decay which dotted its perimeter you could have a boat built or hire one, in exchange for money, or a percentage of the catch. This was not the location of the chandlers’ and bond stores which served the needs of the big ships, nor of the docks and engineering works which signalled a new marine technology. Woolloomooloo was small time, serving the needs of small men. On the cliff tops of the heights overlooking the bay were many substantial houses, but in 1870 the streets immediately adjacent to the bay and back towards William Street were tightly packed with fairly new and fairly mean labourers’ cottages, and a sprinkling of larger houses which had seen finer days and were currently being occupied by many more people

than had ever been intended.'* This area was very convenient to city workers who had only to cross the Domain to reach the central business district, but in 1890 it was in marked social decline. Like The Rocks in West Sydney, this area became the location for the street larrikins who became a symbol of social disintegration in the 1890s. The last remaining area of the city was Cook ward (Surry Hills). In occupational structure, it was not dissimilar to the metropolitan pattern, with slightly more blue-collar workers, slightly fewer domestics, and more workers in what the census termed ‘the superior arts’ — watchmakers, lithographers, jewellers and the like; Cook and Fitzroy together accounted

for over half this group. On the other hand, ‘miscellaneous’ skilled workers were more numerous in Cook ward than any other skilled category. This too included highly skilled workers like French-polishers and upholsterers, but it also contained male clothing workers. Given that

there were clothing workshops in the vicinity, and given that Cook

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 27

contained a higher percentage of needlewomen than any other ward, we must suppose that most of the miscellaneous male workers were employed in this industry. As with West Sydney, the number of genuinely skilled workers in Surry Hills was not as great as the figures suggest. This was an area of rapid city expansion, both in the 1860s and the 1870s. Much of the building was therefore of recent construction, with small terraces on narrow streets the most usual form. However, as construction preceded drainage, parts of this locality were far from satisfactory, especially where the land was low-lying, adjoining Redfern. It came

in for some criticism from the Health Board in their 1876 report on housing, partly because numbers of the houses were poorly constructed, in

one case of ‘anything that would hold a nail’,!? but more importantly because much of the housing suffered from lack of drainage. It was, in their

opinion, an area where fever was common. By 1890 it was a slum. It is clear from figure 1.4 that the various city wards experienced widely differing fortunes in the period 1870 to 1890. The central business district

showed negative growth while the more peripheral areas continued to attract population. South Sydney, the least populous area in 1871 held the greatest number of residents in 1891. Beyond the city of 1871 were suburbs which housed even fewer people

than the city itself. To the south was the district (later electorate) of Redfern, with the municipality of the same name adjoining Surry Hills.

Redfern had been subdivided as early as 1842, and by 1871 the early makeshift houses of the post gold-rush days, resembling ‘the huts of a wooden encampment’!® shared equally with a growing number of solid brick terraces — a foretaste of the dominant structure of many of Sydney’s suburbs in the next decades. Although easily within walking distance of

the city, Redfern was far from built out. A stroll through this district would have taken you past many vacant allotments, dairies, and over sandhills dotted with cabbage-palms. In the east, the land was swampy, as

was much of Alexandria and Waterloo, which marked the beginning of the Botany Bay catchment area, with its outstanding powers of water retention (figure 1.6). This was the most rapidly growing region of Sydney in the 1860s, and the people who were moving into the sandhills and swamps where land was cheap and unattractive were unmistakably working class. There was a

small pocket of good housing near Cleveland Street, but overall, bluecollar workers far exceeded the metropolitan average, reaching 74 per cent

of the workforce in Alexandria — a suburb with not a single doctor, clergyman or lawyer. In this electorate, those who claimed to be employees, rather than self-employed or employers, far exceeded the metropolitan average, indicating that this was a region of large factories and workshops.

The terrain encouraged the location of fellmongers, tanners and the like, with William Alderson, the largest woolwasher, tanner and bootmaker employing perhaps 300 men, women and children in 1870. The

28 LIVING

same natural features had led to the creation of extensive nurseries in Redfern long before it became a suburb, and these gardens were probably the only attractive feature of the area. A Sunday drive to view Baptist’s

camellias and Magill’s dahlias was sometimes recommended by local guidebooks. Presumably this outing would have been most acceptable if

the weather was not too wet, for then the roads became boggy and sometimes impassable, and not too hot, for then the smell of the flowers

may not have adequately compensated for the stench of the local industries and Shea’s Creek, which, in addition to taking tannery wastes, acted as an open sewer for parts of Surry Hills. Other significant employment was to be had at small-scale brickmaking

in Alexandria, Sydney’s only ropewalk in Waterloo, and in metal- and wood-based industry, especially at Hudson Brothers, a large timber firm in Redfern. Figure 1.6 Redfern district, c. 1870 gar? Sydney Terminus

_ — Mumaipal OS Alfred | SURRY HILLS KcIpa ry bounda Qi Prince

ates scent = ~-4-4 RED — Municipality Park

TEMPE — Village or suburb

Y lderson’ oe| REDFERN — Trt tr @ 3sAlderson's Lachlan Swamps

a 440). SERS {2-3' Va Alderson’

2 2 GE 0 en a Baptist's § Tannery

\ \\ f ,

\ 27 (3 nn, ) Woolwash

vw A (ay of NEWTOWN ‘ ( Forsyth's WATER RESERVE

““4% / wf' * Ls 1 c tpOe—-—-— — G S i: TIN TOWN 4

MACDONALD f ALEXANDRIA TOWN /wamp wl wanerke (|iea " r © w a t Af \ 1 %

= t \w\ > Bs; jpbrick mkine _ & RANDWICK

Children's « \\ -Mw. ea é3 WATERLOO fe \ Asylum Randwick

ST PETERS wy Us ! ez &e@ @ Sf §

MATL cemoe ) COLE LTT

BOTANY

a: Source: Based substantially on map published with Sands’s Sydney and Suburban Directory, 1875

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 29

In the southern reaches of the electorate in 1870, settlement was sparse. A few noxious traders worked in the village of Botany, which also housed a number of fishermen. Market gardens intercepted the wastes along the Botany Road, where daily the Chinese gardeners could be seen walking into the city with their huge baskets of vegetables slung across their backs.

The eastern region formed part of the Sydney water reserve, and was therefore unavailable to industry, so that few people lived there, with the exception of an Aboriginal fishing community at La Perouse,'’ a woolwash at Maroubra and, just south of the Randwick Children’s Asylum, a

settlement variously called Tin Town, Irish Town or Struggle Town. Interestingly, the 1871 census, which went to considerable lengths to isolate village settlements, made no mention of this one, although ‘unruly

subsistence communities ... among the sandhills of Alexandria and Waterloo’ existed at least by the mid century. !® The people of Tin Town,

‘who prefer this life to institutions’, and who made a living of a sort by selling flowers and watercress at the city markets, lived in hovels made of

jam tins and whatever other waterproof material could be gathered together. Similarly, the Aborigines were ignored. During the 1870s a few Aborigines had lived at Circular Quay, in the government boatshed, and the La Perouse ones came into the city regularly to collect food rations, but by the 1880s these visible symbols of European conquest and con-

sequent degradation of the native people were being systematically removed from sight. This was achieved by providing rations at La Perouse, and by forcibly resettling Sydney Aborigines in rural areas. !” These fringe urban settlements symbolized the contempt Sydneysiders felt for this part of their city. It was, in effect, the city’s back doorstep, which housed its human rejects as well as being a useful dumping ground for its nightsoil

and location for its more objectionable industries. By 1890, this was an ‘old’ industrial area, and its character had changed somewhat. Redfern municipality had been drained and almost built out, and the noxious traders who had located there when legislated out of the city, had mostly moved further south, into Waterloo, Alexandria, Botany and beyond. This area boasted many small, ill-constructed cottages, most of them wooden, copious surface drainage and heavy pollution from both human and industrial waste to the Shea’s Creek. In fact, it may have been that by 1890 the rapid proliferation of factories in the region was slowing, with investors beginning to look elsewhere, as the state of the waterways

deteriorated.*° Added to this, there was no sign of a railway, especially after the advent of the tram, which reached the Botany terminus in 1882. This encouraged settlement of workers in the two new municipalities of North Botany and Botany, but it was no encouragement to industry, which had to rely on carts to transport its scoured wool, hides, leather and the produce of the market gardens along the Botany Road to the city. On the other hand, it was not ease of transport or proximity to the city that had encouraged industry to locate here in the first place, but the presence of the swamps, and once the Nepean water supply for the city was

30 LIVING

fully operational, the Botany water reserve was thrown open to industry in

1896, and there was an upsurge of noxious trading activities in the region.”!

The industrial newcomer in these decades had been signalled back in 1870, when the first locomotive was delivered from the newly opened government railway workshops,’” but during the 1870s most contracts were put out to private firms. These original workshops were replaced by a larger complex at Eveleigh which began operations in 1886—87,7? and the

railways rapidly became the major employer in the district. At the same time, this enticed other metal-based industries to the area.

East of the city, things were different. The sandstone ridge rose unevenly to the South Head, transversed by deep gullies, and from Rose Bay on the harbour side to Bondi on the ocean side was a broad low-lying sandy region, interspersed with swamp. Ever since the South Head Roads were built at the commencement of the colony, the heights commanding views ‘infinitely more lovely’ than most of Britain’s beauty spots, in the opinion of Trollope, had attracted wealthy residents with a desire for the rural life. Small villages were established early on at Double Bay and

Watson’s Bay, and at Paddington, adjacent to the military barracks. Paddington electorate, comprising Paddington, Woollahra, Waverley and most of Randwick, was a markedly different area from that of Redfern to

its south, not only in its physical aspect, but in social terms. Waverley and Randwick had been slow to develop, partly because road links were not always reliable. Both contained attractive elevated areas, but the approaches involved traversing difficult and occasionally swampy ground. By 1871 Randwick’s population was under 2000, with almost half

of those being children in the destitute asylum. Since the days when Wentworth and company had hunted imported deer with imported hounds on the Randwick Heights,’4 the area had been associated with recreation, and its casual population swelled on race days, or on fine weekends when picnickers at Coogee defied the Randwick council’s regulations, and actually went swimming.’? Waverley contained only 1377 people and was generally considered to be ‘retired’. Its beaches were, in 1870, not included in the holidaymaker’s itinerary. The more populated Woollahra clearly emerged as Sydney’s most prestigious suburb. In 1871 the concentration of professional and substantial commercial interests was

higher here than anywhere else in Sydney, with percentages for these occupations more than double the metropolitan averages, while all bluecollar workers were underrepresented, the unskilled obtaining their lowest

metropolitan score. Domestic service was the group that exhibited the biggest variation from suburb to suburb, ranging from 5.8 per cent, in Alexandria to 38.8 per cent in Woollahra. Only four suburbs scored over 25 per cent and these eastern municipalities of Woollahra, Randwick and Waverley were three of them. The area was residential of the highest quality notwithstanding the occasional noxious trader. Large estates and mansions proliferated, where

RAIN SEA, SAITO STO Ht URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 31

the wealthy, using water from their own wells and stabling their own means of transport, sought refuge from the city. It was here that the ladies of Sydney were ‘at home’ in the afternoons, and here that servants bowed

and curtsied their way through numerous social events calculated to

0Jbe4|e)ae/| / / yO i/al?‘| !||SL | i_t/ r 3 \ ir

uphold the best ruling-class customs of ‘the old country’. Paddington, adjoining Woollahra and the city, was one of the most Figure |.7 Paddington electorate, c. 1870

to South Head

RAN Municipality RAN —— Village or suburb iy

_--~ —— Municipal boundary

Ll} Mile

> ROSE BAY fe - DARLING, pouBLe if

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= gardens \ Ze. y° ia_=7 PADDINGTON 6 bi» t+~ward J / upper { cS , pat’ QS aw Z7 WAVERLEY ;

~~ > | Ata

ee .I 4\7’.* 3> to. ~ bed ne se mo !“ai .P -i7 : e a a ‘ ;oa” i.a'..4tae ;tes :iz _ Ses ! Ot $.ps ae a “ i a.PE , @, re . _ o . : : ane . io . ad or ek ae wate Pea ~~. .er“. -Po . TORN Ge aA RAE ae ee ce | ee rene Sete BEE ON Sy fee PRE wo hs, ee ya : : . . + By NEE Se SS BORE Re eI Tbe EEE TS se pga SRL oad eT PASS RSE SO PE ORO ETI hE Eeey Hd ae be So . sap hOk stylalie . ::. ae - 4Pe wo : :tSae renee: >x, _.. .REG sie on :SP 8ANA ve,pit a itte Ses Pak’. wes aeBa ea ok EPS EP aes.ea aren : iMa Ne wt Es EGS 5 Ne pkPe oe: aLAD pt: Piai Pare es pM er oe eTBe. a7: canes [teps : Nou ooee Bale SS GS RNS ahs,

ee RR ee REY at ST - . + ~ _ aan meet oe See ene : . wy “aLsees ogg cp, : wee a Sta?

+ he ;

enw AK ms . a he ae : . i ore . :. .— ~ a“ — . o™ -

- * omg OD .

. Cty Bhagat ee Egg a aSa Kshs. * ssi SSS SS . .. oy a wo Na rea a ¥> Redfern — industry, housing and swamps

a a a a a yd gr my Ter Spry gy rp ey er rol yyy rp rg ES a ls

a . "sy . ao a a a ad ..

e fe r 5 e ‘ Ms &, + oo .

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he . 4.« “oy y.REA a.:.a. ramp, 4[ae mA io ee) 3 a “os = Lye : ; r eo) 4) !“.~w (IME: famed ff fm BY | s 4 f — } “aS P . . d ‘ mr ae oF 2 ae” yet ge > et | A’ ls. : F tg ye WL . ; / mY AV 8: . it: : =vtMeg tn -SB a “y at. ee_—.. ‘me . . *. .7 Pt Tks mae ., awat %. aa we Ngaay Mm witg ? an ~ ~ $.~~ oe, eI . le, ~ 4 *%,. * Ah... L 7 . oe frie, . ~, a.~ ~ —_ pow oeMe ey“ . -% o ., ‘ . “3 Ss — ail wae ; ~~. uy: > ei enna ~. : hed : + og ghMOY “oe me woos onete . ; >xtrepeataaend a ae 4 wee ag aa yO By . cote eae ; Ct a” oO tEe, »an ae st~r _. _ a RS

ga eens wer ceneneit pea a‘. ,= 72 . f*fo*aw aoe, Bo — ary oDet ..we rar Morne aa: ;leneo ak — tg ee he eres 5 y arom, —x a.’~~,k

Lee . ¢ , it rt r% A ; a MN 4 oe Pa, 4

ey, 7 Abian.. Fee me, wis “ . an “ , ‘ . ee i

. PRL Aincs ‘ +4*¥sees > —‘ wr aAt * Tote an

«

Coogee Beach, Randwick municipality, c. |880—90

URBAN SPACE, SOCIAL SPACE 33

West Sydney with its transient population and slum housing, Balmain housed ‘respectable’ workers, whose names are closely linked with the militant trade unions of the 1880s and the formation of the Labor Party in the 1890s. Places like Paddington, which grew up over these two decades might be called ‘suburbs’, but a place like Balmain, with its Workingman’s

Institute, School of Arts, and annual regatta, its jumble of architectural styles and building materials, could lay claim to the title of ‘community’. Like Balmain, Glebe contained a range of industrial activities includFigure |.8 Balmain and Glebe districts, c. 1870

RAN — Manepalty nea

GLEBE — Village or suburb

oe

f "RA eH INE WIE Hse si

Lp S BIRCHGROVE ao

UY, Mort's Dock. LA

BALMAIN Darling v1 5ep\

~ AV o

= (ro mnNa ee: PYRMONT Booth's mills e on"

Ss eee = waa’eee: i, SE Se Pee ae. ~_*Luan ee oFen

~* mo-oF— a — me RB a Ee am eee ae eS la cee

rE de eee UF Mg 4a:F age aintaeoy . ~ oi _;Fala ee _ Ma lg Roce = —ye By Neh “ae oS.io SO. | Sina re *. “’i _«Saat ~ SG oo eee a —_~* .‘. g YE eeo ee ees pee ‘rett3P eemee ie xAire TreaTRS oO, +temmenmereeenermies " io id pecans os ne= \.~ wet _.Re: on fo i nea| ae | } afe3 }' =Sie. ey . '—

ae ee, HE -{ 2 — a | Pee |BA a v wwii z ‘\ ; - ¥ #1 > oy : ‘y“he = ‘ae Wi_ Rie: 4 ty eo wat, .av

oh, ,i wes « . 2 ye aoa{ \ae\ De Rene, rae erase S- = wg o~ SNF 0 Le ee nn meneame es remem Sh file «Wa a i Sat Sent? ree Gis - al ,

' _Double-decker tram, 1881

* S ai . (eye . ‘thee oe ye Bd abe —e Breer SR of Se ee !y}Gey oA b. ¥’. aa ‘\a a,- fA oe&¥“ Ame ; ee _Ry te weet oa Ts MeEA x3 4.-_ oe ‘kes ‘ ‘ Soe 5 cae3fr|aome t ’ it OY £ ‘\ bee ‘ ‘ : . Yor ,*:

wowa ETI Deebee Assay as TT Tz mnie " bat 4 TTF & tienen *~ . 7 ne fea=_Yi| bo : HL mae?) ape 7t /1ee: .

} on ~ aan agee ral “yt. me, ° re4x a “ Fj i a ae . ° coe | et,we,banat ape “gag mn oe me ene +e.bY ~ apes hk ir ny 4 , te a a tA ee ne . te ~~. poet oe; nadia OS ae re " : wee Ae a tak Te oS loan. mos 7™. oa aie re & oO Se oe they wetapen . conan met +Y. . ‘ai me *.oe

-ane -x *. ve! , ‘t : + ~ poe ad ty OS: eee -— - ne ener . pe |

‘.‘

ewe %or.ie, MMB . “. ong * -. et aac » ke ,HRS oe * * “ere “ . 1, he row ; oe pe : ;4 Mera ge oe ei BR ; or cat a a Si i 7 oh ; alll : o re m td; » A ns - : f, as ot ol *. . " . :

ELM ee, . poe stp. ye 7 wo ng heed Rea BORON ty fora an " ees Ee ee’. Rg: me “Mee of

:.a “iyaRSC as = i ° . os : |~—e Os , ~ ,-Y*ant ~ . oe anes &Jaat wy “a" 3f+i;i.“,>W , .“Pie OS 4wee ree. *» ™ ’ *ny . 7-— oS cs od ;

, “AL Wr a y as Pes .. Sse :.. eo ata ad, anes” rad f’ .y ‘é5a © oF"thay eS. LsFAR: i tee ol 3 > we . Os ARS ke ee pte” y “gk y ia x aod A nemoe tae .oerry: a “, ;PG BG Bi PE xyes re ee “ewe toe . Sal oo te,Re o usi"3Pg ; ‘ ’1 - =ok ; 3 es=; she foe eo Ae? pe ecg ag Ban: he % " " = ®: a Ne “4 Ph Sa a S. ‘ al . ‘yy - Wg ".{¥ _

The ubiquitous terrace house, Woolloomooloo. Insert: not the north of England, but ‘At The Glebe 1

ee CN - : .Jjane oR ee aa ae _ ee BB Ss ’ nl ra RB eee a SE peg ee oon ee . . fase ae orn ae aeBig rir: ‘—.x. ¥. po er re PON a ES . ESS a:RePee REN kescog, tt sn twndnee ea note .ce PRES. SS SS ACY RGN SER RR ROE

“Sad A Bh ak

«6 eR SIRE EMER TE Ses om eS ett ota ai ea aay Roa 7 wey fhe a 3 6 ae ag y

ae, a een i 50 ieee woe = E -ting . ay a. re et ye = ce NI sO Sol gt ee SOE ee 7s ee /i INS. Lar fags 3 oa a. es — {ey on eg ont. ‘ i € ee ” y ; % 7 . an as Raat "y . . mh > tome ———wt ‘3 peer . ... Mak ER ‘ a =~ . . . a = :fe a SOBRE ew So ; ge coma ~ * inn roe _ eo Bons , FG pre “ \ ren ara hoy a é . aes a. OS ae > yian NR? ™Seer. ¢ 2em wae t !y ‘4 aot, ow - = ; ow @ | ea Mi at ae: iz vate a ES | ca ” y Ay’ . ,

as § . to Bos . t h . wae pose at —_—— : 4 as ew oS 8. we ave, Wt | ee ee ae ~ al

Mrromgh ' whi ge romney . ; \ ‘ ad — ° yr £ oh: ‘ ; BS ree, Oe : a? ea : c = n oo ;¥ — ?, Lo. " vain == wee. joa +o . ” . la SP ° ‘ ¥ | " NN . 34 ~: , " : ‘ _ | ~ ‘nil : 4 . : . _ Lye xf Ss in 7 : # re zat ”.lU(Y : : a fe fm --i: »f * “ . ° . ' ‘ “ak: ty i ,~~ . . , ‘ : — = c v., ~ 2 Fo i ~ r~ ; me ° b be ¢ Pe : — : 44 ; SA, a 7 ep — m. aN . “9 — . 4 4 f A ; 7 a ve ‘. . ’ . o BA “ ~ . Te « A i ry * . ef _ + ——, . ~wnns “/ «..‘} a+. “, Sead .-Me -_ yom ; > -~. . . ‘m 2 ma . Ve. > ‘ . ee bd al . . . s , A 7 . : . A ee : : Se. : 5 eas ta y -—_: £ wv”. o . . ; petl 5 3 — hd ‘ 5 eC ; . E-ene? ad Smee ° . , . Pn, a, ° ° Fa Se ° mma. . ~ . P : Ta CURE en A ? 3 we . roy wt aims are vases . . “os ¥ aes so y ‘ . . . ° . gta tree 7 we t , ar ae fe i *. om“anFr2058 Sa .a aeee Ree gk ry Y \ R-Fr : aaa h% ~~as Peare. ..araey :a6~~ ame pk ”aas | ‘ae wo od ‘ wee rr. .ee Ld eej “ aot . ~ ie bee eo So . “" . ° ~ ° we way aon i * OG NG ie a.”» $ +- at. 44 ee ‘4». 14oete~CO ae .Ses +2 Ma vw he #4va. BSS

he Be =X \ —_—y =© SNA : Ber ag 2 aON ha ¢: “~an, SN . ~~ R Sad Rl = ao . *iWrite \ - epee , we : aor

Preetens ~ a: . aa ° "iyfo.oS as EN ~ool "-Rie..a»"‘a“ Phe ae ad * a ta 2 ? Ls9S é: ar ; Eb: & See Hi : ° ’ " OSE. “Spat a rey. aa “ ~ + Or am De Oe ol ” . - . ? Wits SAN . \y. ” wee wf . » DR * ‘ K, Nrane Pry ath, As ps Mean

OA RS pic, Se ee

)+

“ue

” 3 . aoe im met cast ° Saenger a Cot an NOT nel " mo A noe , . - *. aeeonnsPI“rm ers:** okra S-a*,. -he . .fy . wt eo: es 4 ery . wy . e ’“3 vos ae 7 _ ~.>4*. - nee , : gee tbe em FLO a ae A aa . AM, Wsees ~ aoe

ena ae a. asi wa Se, ~ mete, tl “= : rea oer -~ | . em * a . .* o ' ee. . . Tr "ain Tagen d Bose . ~e.” ~ ee te wy ~ * took o . “

nd ir 3 eae Fe Si I -: . ae : toes _ e

West Sydney h Above: Above: 's Court, Cl SStreet, c. 1875 Below: Charlotte est Sydney houses. Lynch's Court, offoff Clarence Place, c. 1875

TRAINS, TRAMS, HORSES AND HOUSES 65

There is another way of looking at these phenomena. The city, with its omnibuses, factories, jumbled land uses and its female workers, increasingly came to represent an old form of economic organization. The suburbs,

on the other hand, with their trains, ordered streets and private social ways represented a new order, where women were not only freed from paid

labour, but excluded from it, and from the life of the city. For all its shortcomings, there may have been some women who preferred the city, where living was more public and women less closeted. It was not just that suburban living made paid work impossible logistically, but that female

labour was inimical to all that the suburbs stood for. Or so Mrs Nevin found out, when she went to teach at the Kogarah Public School in 1882. Having four children to support, and no husband, she symbolized much that the suburban mentality devalued. Several years after her arrival in Kogarah, the railway passed through the area, and the Minister for Public Instruction was waited upon by a deputation of men who claimed that Mrs Nevin was an incompetent teacher, who should be replaced — not by just

anyone, but by a married, male teacher. The school inspector who investigated the complaint found that Mrs Nevin was both efficient and well liked. He pointed out that the gentlemen concerned all owned land around the Kogarah railway station, which they believed would sell more readily if a male teacher were in charge of the school, and to its credit, the Department of Public Instruction did not remove Mrs Nevin. When the local historian who recorded this story observed that ‘the coming of the railway almost meant the going of Mrs Nevin’, he was perhaps being more

profound than he knew.?! Most paid work for men and women was in the city, but increasingly, men could work in the city and live in the suburbs. For them, the train meant increased choice of environment, while for women it meant a narrowing of activities and a distancing from the public life. For men, the city could now become a place of work, while for women, city life, paid work and poverty, became inextricably linked. Leaving Mrs Nevin in her hostile suburban environment, and returning

to the city slums, we might want to ask what happened to them, in the years following their exposure in this 1876 report. Some were demolished,

but it was the expansion of industry and the growth of commerce, not legislative intent or civic concern that resulted in the removal of some of the worst slum housing in the 1880s. Decisions over which houses were to

be knocked down were more frequently made on the basis of market considerations than from concern for public health or city improvement issues. When the City Nuisance Inspector, Richard Seymour, gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Urban Transport in 1890, he produced an inventory of housing stock, and many of the buildings he mentioned were the same ones condemned by the committee of 1876. St John’s buildings, off Sussex Street, for instance, which had been described as having no windows, poor drainage and stinking in 1876, was home still for forty-six people in 1890. Seymour estimated that the two wards of Gipps and Brisbane housed 14 132 people, while the 1891 Census found

66 LIVING

15559 people in the area, a few less than the 16 238 of 1871. Naturally, landlords were unenthusiastic about maintaining properties while boom conditions increased the likelihood of them being sold for non-residential purposes.

Following the 1876 report, it had seemed that some of the worst

problems of substandard housing were going to be tackled. In 1879, the City of Sydney Improvement Act was passed. The Act, which was introduced as a private bill, and passed by a government that showed little real

interest in it, provided that the city corporation would make by-laws concerning building practices and appoint a building surveyor to administer the act. The Sydney Corporation Amendment Act which was accordingly passed in the same year contained a more extensive building code than had operated previously, and empowered the mayor to order

demolition or repairs to ‘ruinous or dangerous buildings’. Under the Improvement Act an ad hoc Improvement Board was also appointed, which acted as a court of appeal, and could hear complaints against actions by the council, or by the council against private citizens. Initial enthusiasm for this legislation led to considerable demolition activity in the next few years, with 350 buildings being pulled down by 1881. By 1887 some 1500 buildings had been dealt with, but after that

demolition orders fell off, and very little was done. Not all of these buildings were houses, as the totals included outbuildings and commercial premises. There was no provision for resettlement of persons whose houses

were demolished, and no discussion of systematic redevelopment of precincts or upgrading of whole areas of unhealthy housing such as was beginning to occur in England, so these demolitions were unlikely to make much of an impact on the slum problem. Presumably the people whose lives were so disrupted moved elsewhere in the district, or into the nearby

suburbs, and into similar dwellings. In any case, the final numbers involved were too small to have made any significant difference. One newspaper summarized the performance of the Improvement Board in 1887 as ‘most pathetic ... Seven years of uselessness and expense to the

country.” By 1890 the board had almost ceased to function, and in 1894 became defunct when the colonial government did not renew its grant. Clashes had developed over the respective powers of the board and the corpora-

tion, and within the corporation, between the rights of the elected officers, through the mayor, and the professional administrator, the building surveyor. A select committee was set up as early as 1880 to consider the functioning of the board, and initiatives to amend the legislation to give more power to the board occurred throughout the 1880s. At the same time, the corporation was actively seeking a redrafting of the building regulations in the 1879 Act but all of this fell on deaf ears

inside the legislature. Confusion surrounding the meaning of the Improvement Act was somewhat reduced by a legal decision in 1885 which ruled that power to deal with buildings ‘in a ruinous state and dangerous

TRAINS, TRAMS, HORSES AND HOUSES 67

to the public’ only applied to buildings that were structurally dangerous, and did not give the board power to deal with insanitary or overcrowded buildings.’? While this clarified the issue, it also put paid to any notion that the legislation could seriously be used effectively to deal with slum

clearance. In fact, in its capacity as board of appeal, the Improvement Board often appeared to be championing the cause of the slum owners by holding up demolition orders of the council. The Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News reported, for example, in 1888, that fifteen houses of wood and iron, formerly a store at the foot of Liverpool Street, had been condemned in 1886 by the corporation. The Improvement Board upheld an appeal on the condition that alterations were carried out. When these

were not done, there was a second condemnation,and at the time of writing the article, a second appeal was proceeding. 4 The undoubted indifference of the New South Wales parliament to the question of urban housing ensured that very little was done in the 1880s to make this legislation work. Certainly the many sins of self-interested or incompetent councillors cannot be pardoned through reference to inadequate legislation, nor would the legislation, had it worked, have solved the problems of slum housing, for poverty cannot be demolished, but there is very little in the details of this bit of legislative history to indicate that the problems were in any way being tackled seriously at governmental

level.°? It does seem that there was a genuine attempt by the city corporation to set up surveillance of new buildings and to remove some of the worst dwellings after the 1879 legislation, with some of the poorest

areas, like Durand’s Alley, Robin Hood Lane and parts of lower Kent, Sussex and Clarence Streets being cleaned up. At the same time, however, the council became notorious for its involvement in the creation of

some new slums, on the Blackfriars Estate, built on reclaimed land adjacent to Blackwattle Bay, which a few years earlier had been called Blackwattle Swamp. In 1878 the developers Hardie and Gorman laid out part of this land for subdivision, with streets and lanes which contravened the minimum widths of 60 feet for roads and 20 feet for lanes stipulated in the 1879 legislation of six months later. Even under previous, more lax legislation much of the estate was illegally subdivided.® Further, it seems to have been at odds with the Blackwattle Bay Land Reclamation Act of 1878, which directed that all reclaimed land was to be reserved because it

was considered to be too ill drained to be a healthy environment for houses.?’ The Hardie and Gorman request in 1880 that the council form the roads on the subdivision was refused following advice from the city solicitor that the subdivision was illegal and from the surveyor, that the drainage problems would probably be perennial. Nevertheless, subsequent years saw numerous houses erected on this land, and although the subdivision had never been approved, the council accepted rates from it. The area was regularly flooded and the houses were widely described as being some of the worst in the city. They received a good deal of surface drainage from the surrounding suburbs, and the sewage of Redfern, Newtown, some

68 LIVING

of Waterloo, George Street West and The Glebe discharged into the harbour, almost at the front doors of the houses, so that the stench was dreadful.?®> According to the Herald, the council was prepared ‘to encroach upon the rights of the public, and in the very teeth of the law sacrifice the public interest, when it [was] its special duty to protect both’.

The editorial went on to observe that whatever credit the corporation had accrued by its efforts to clear the city of unfit premises was cancelled by this episode.’ Two years later the colonial legislature was considering a bill to clarify the council’s right to collect revenue and improve this estate.

It passed through the lower house but was blocked in the Legislative Council, which referred it to a select committee after a heated discussion

in which Thornton, an ex-mayor of Sydney claimed that it should be

called ‘An Act to perpetuate the evil and the abomination of the Blackfriars Estate within the City of Sydney.’©° If fully told, this saga would make a fascinating study of incompetence

and probably corruption. It has been briefly outlined here merely as a cautionary tale, lest anyone be tempted to assume that the passage of the City of Sydney Improvement Act necessarily led to an improved city. It need hardly be pointed out that none of the suburban municipalities bothered to avail themselves of this Act, although there was provision for

suburbs to be included under it. There were, in 1890, no building regulations of any consequence operating in the suburbs, and very few within the city. Far from contemplating sewerage construction, as the 1867 Municipalities Act empowered them to do, many councils had not got around to condemning cesspits and installing a pan system of sewage collection.°! By about 1890 there is a glimmering of a suggestion that the colonial

government was beginning to take the problems of urban planning seriously. The first resumptions of privately owned wharves at Circular Quay were underway, although it took the outbreak of bubonic plague a decade later to force a real clean up of the wharves. The creation of Martin Place alongside the post office, which opened a thoroughfare between George and Pitt Streets, and the unsuccessful but far-sighted Metropolitan Street Improvements bill, which would have provided for the resumption and remodelling of whole precincts, were indications that in high places urban problems were being aired. The colonial government had been slowly taking up more urban issues, and it is not difficult to argue that the 1870s and 1880s saw the beginnings of a trend towards more centralized government of the metropolis. On the other hand, this close examination of the functioning of the government in the areas of urban transport and building regulation highlights just how reluctant and partial this trend was. In the decades of rapid, unbridled expansion, boom conditions were fuelled by a careless legislature, and the consequences for Sydney’s citizens

were often negative.

Chapter 3

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY Who can conceive of a community of civilized folk .. . with deliberation, wilfully, constantly pouring all their filth into the beautiful blue basin which nature has provided at their doors, making of Circular Quay a pestilent sink, of Darling Harbour a jeculant swamp, fouling, polluting slowly destroying ... We build exhibition palaces to advertise ourselves to the world

[and] ... houses by the score .. . with silken hangings, and velvet upholstery and all the luxuries of life within, and the unutterable foulness without.'

It was fashionable, especially around 1888, when the city was celebrating the centenary of its birth, to pay homage to the nineteenth-century god,

Progress, and to assume that the recent years of prosperity had been associated with improved urban conditions. Sydney appeared more prosperous and more ordered, as roads were slowly made and improved, buildings aligned and street lighting installed. Grand public buildings,

which were conspicuous by their absence in the 1870s according to English and Melburnian observers, were very much in evidence by 1890

— buildings like the Lands Department in Loftus Street, with its substantial tower, topped by ‘a wonderful onion-shaped verdigris copper fantasy’,~ and the General Post Office, which had been extended grandly in 1886 after considerable legislative activity to give it space to grow. Most amazing of all was the Sydney Town Hall in George Street, described by the architectural historian J.M. Freeland as ‘the lollipop building ... the epitome of the sugared town halls of the Victorians’.* Along with these public buildings were erected the solid private business houses, stores, retail shops and churches which stood as symbols of prosperity and growth. These buildings, especially the public ones, were reproduced again and again, as municipalities were formed and formalized by the addition of a town hall and a post and telegraph office. Those built early in the period, like Redfern’s Town Hall (1870), were often utilitarian buildings while those of later construction reflected the growing wealth of the suburbs in their fondness for exuberant embellishments and sheer size (for example, Balmain Post and Telegraph Office, built in 1886, with a clock tower at

one end and a dome at the other, and a fair number of colonnades and 69

70 LIVING

gargoyles in between). The arrival of a suburb at the age of maturity was

often gauged by consideration of whether its post office was deemed important enough to warrant a clock tower. However, it is not merely such symbols of progress that make an urban

environment, and although they cannot be discounted as_ potential generators of positive civic pride, or providers of aesthetic pleasure to Sydney’s inhabitants, their existence was clearly not sufficient to justify claims of progress. In many other ways, the quality of the urban environ-

ment regressed during these years of economic expansion, as rapid population growth and housing development outstripped the provision of amenities likely to preserve the health of its citizens. Of course there are

certain judgements involved in deciding what might be counted and

discounted in any discussion concerning the quality of the urban environment. How can the construction of a new town hall, complete with the finest organ in the empire* be compared with the increasingly high levels of contaminants in the water supply? Or how does one balance

, the intermittence of a water supply against the somewhat improved ratio of houses to people over the two decades? The quality and freshness of the fish which Sydney’s women cooked almost certainly improved after the

city council built new markets in 1872, but the quality of red meat slaughtered at the increasingly overcrowded Glebe Island abattoirs may have deteriorated. In choosing to discuss ‘the public health question’ —

the provision and quality of water and sewerage and the control of industrial pollution — the focus is on issues that were not only intrinsically important, but were central to the concerns of many of Sydney’s citizens at the time. It was widely argued that the provision of these things was crucial to the well-being of the population, and widely believed that the public health was worsening. The development of policies and practices in these areas must be seen in

the light of the nature and structure of the authorities governing the metropolis. Though ostensibly a democracy, the rulers of New South Wales were an élite, preserved by the absence of payment for members of parliament. In so far as they were entrusted with the governing of Sydney, it was also true that they were an élite of rural interests, or of city men of substance, whose interests in developing Sydney were often diametrically opposed to the interests of most of its citizens. In relation to Sydney, the decision to leave the day-to-day running of the city and suburbs in the hands of local governments was possibly the most far-reaching decision ever taken by the New South Wales legislature, and it is profoundly important to consider why the colonial government chose to endorse this method of urban government. Local councils were frequently unable to provide adequate services, because the regulations covering municipalities, enacted by the colonial legislature, gave them inadequate powers. Politicians were ostensibly and vocally: committed to

the idea of decentralized, municipal government and yet their alleged aversion to centrality did not play a large part in the formulation of

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 71

colonial railway policy, or in the provision of education. It was often claimed that by removing the need to attend to the trivial requirements of localities, parliament would be free to make laws for the whole colony, and yet it is difficult to envisage the roads and bridges constructed in rural areas under the auspices of the Department of Public Works as any more or less trivial than the same things constructed by local government.’ More importantly, the far from trivial provision of a water supply and sewerage system for the metropolis was vested in the city corporation for most of the

period under consideration. Its inability to provide these enormously costly public works was the cause of a great deal of public and journalistic concern throughout the period, because, as the Herald said, ‘the health of the people is the first concern of the state’.° There was undoubtedly a drive for economy of expenditure by the close of the 1880s, but in the decades before that it would be difficult to argue that spending on the part of the New South Wales government was niggardly. This was, after all, a period of massive injections of British capital into the colonies, and New South

Wales governments had become very adept at asking for, and getting, huge loans on the London stock market for what subsequently often appeared to be the most profligate of projects. There is no paradox in colonial politicians establishing municipal governments that they then failed to fund adequately — both actions register the lack of real interest that the legislature controlled by pastoral and merchant interests took in the fate of the people of Sydney. Even if none of this were true, the fact that parliament was comprised of a series of factions, none of which were able to hold office for long, meant

that much of the life of successive parliaments was tied up with power struggles, while the business of governing the colony took second place. Before the 1890s and the advent of the Labor Party, well in excess of twothirds of the bills introduced into parliament failed to become law, while from 1870 until 1890 there were sixteen separate ministries, some of them lasting no more than a few months.’ Elections were fought around largely spurious divisions between free trade and protectionist factions, and while

the latter groups tended to attract the urban vote, there were rarely any election issues of direct relevance to urban voters. The few pieces of legislation passed in this period that addressed specific urban problems,

like the City of Sydney Improvement Act of 1879, and the Width of Streets and Lanes Act of 1881, were usually introduced privately. The city was administered under the City of Sydney Corporation Act of 1857 continually amended, while suburban councils could levy rates and

administer by-laws under the 1867 Municipalities Act. The City of Sydney Corporation Act gave wider powers to that body than did the Municipalities Act to the suburban boroughs. The city was entrusted to supply water to the entire metropolis, and was required to appoint a city health officer, while the suburban councils were more restricted in the issues with which they dealt. A number of the older suburbs had been incorporated under an earlier and unworkable Municipalities Act of 1858,

72 LIVING

LL. it, An i. 7 a od , aan ‘a woe a—_~my\h4 .iaeq| >1{ 77" { yf . «fe J7a)7Z SA: ae o> f. ay[ie (fe aR i,k'a:a5—cs= ,oo4 Lo* nN .” fig e ; fi ~— > e WE i Y-4 CAPA: — Ps OS a A y Cr, TE ; a, iy =." 1ASS) PR iis) 1S Mh. AB ap lili RO eed Quills : Vhs Ga .':,h4.! ; . - : Tobe -.

i RC in , il lig } = q

(iILY VA jfp) ull [ae j if A) IT " eSCERES ATLAS . SRS

“> ‘lyse tanteh Eh elHe aie oo tel oeFS USTiss SSESIS'S me Se

nn SS ee . = . Reo aiiee? ety i. we eleTT TS! i ana ae poar~+P HERR

_ “~~ “i . ,

His first acl as Alderman’. , Pe He carries onhis profession |

Ge OO CITE LY TT eS & mero WES ABM it ae, Na geee(OYE eerirvew 2 \C oT: sy on?

WK WeyTSN) (AREAgar Votre eek 4 HEA Zp. XX |SON icoetnely, hE) OF, ey”, hw , arRAGAN? GRANTED\ VE ip . (feeBad ——— UnVN ee 7a=NS ( &Theat wan”they mews —wooly BasantiA| =SySS"r\\yet NY NA CZF;

Mau Na (EA Sain ps \ 3M\S NuysNYY: BNE. ge SESS Ursses, Be sent Ve ; woe f NEES t they lel .& aS.a3" — ,iy‘ \Pn) oeet“Si: aoe u°2 Tha heyinve ;5 . _- ee ~Lacs>fmede C.MGs I] _--"

EOS ee ii — laa seo iF PN ee . Cost a . ° . 5 Allin Ds re _ ay)! -Wt. a eu wor Lyf \ \. gee TAN VAS SA ira |. WOON IEE ‘ . ' AT ey a A ee ‘77 f . | = iy anes TS recognition o f —— —— SS)=. “fit a 6 Oo LNtheih aT hale vepras y. A. It — = =e services.

cena nan eee ee at ~ ott a ~ > ~ oS —~ / .a 777 HiWNsoe ay -7 F-dadZe \ O49(ae y Rime! it woN SS Wyse

AV wode & | tS Z Hla Oe ave hi 7, FEN

AY A\ TT : Cig SG YTUL be ‘Le DF \. fi Nit Ay ul fh: .. wh. B\> yO, Se= Ke 53;,511

| RY Vy: HRT } ax BA i-- FA VV BRM - ‘(CANS

S_ BY ( RU Sse=VA BY 7q VF Mi |S r= \py dt Oe dl | ie 5 = hNS 2s (22 Va WEP 4) A /O>\-

--otwe ANU Wes) =: | Wp aia . = at Ye J == ’ aw Al ° er mo gg oe eee He keopt bis promise ( t ° He promiser efteens fe ofthe o lytbe esl, jegairements by taefePee Auspeli ONS Io

One view of municipal government (Bulletin, | 1 March 1882)

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 73

and reconstituted as boroughs in 1867, at which time there was a rush to form additional municipalities. The immediate advantages included a government subsidy and the right to negotiate loans to the extent of fiveyears rateable value. The story of municipal government is a major study in itself, and varies from place to place, but from the newspapers and parliamentary reports of the period 1870—90, it is very difficult to concede

that local government was for the good of the citizens of Sydney, and difficult to avoid concluding that the initial enthusiasm for forming municipalities was motivated by a desire to ensure that the incorporated areas were left to their own devices and developed in ways that most benefited the landholders, subdividers and manufacturers. The incorporation of Kogarah is a good case in point. Kogarah was incorporated in 1886, after two years of protracted nego-

tiations over the issue of whether it should be incorporated at all, and where the boundaries should be. There was no upsurge of civic pride in a

well-defined area, but much toing and froing over which area would produce the greatest benefit to the interested parties. Incorporation was at the ‘will and initiation’ of the citizens, and the mechanics of becoming a municipality involved raising enough local interest, usually via public

meetings, to put together a petition to the colonial government, which then considered the merits of the case, and normally granted incorporation if there was a strong local demand for it. Local interest was very freely defined, however. The population of semi-rural Kogarah in 1884 consisted of a few fishermen, a lot of market gardeners, several poultry farmers and nursery men and a number of tradesmen — stonemasons and a few labourers possibly associated with the small brickworks of Young and Cross on Hurstville Road. There was also an Aboriginal settlement in Vista Street, off Rocky Point Road. Of the forty people who gathered at the Gardeners’ Arms, Montgomery Street, on Monday, 7 April 1884 to discuss a number

of local issues, almost certainly none were women or Aborigines, and probably very few were gardeners, labourers or fishermen. People who spoke at this and subsequent meetings, however, included James Todd and John Whitehead of the city, and H.G. Swymy, of Randwick, all owners of freehold land in Kogarah. This meeting was not specifically about incor-

poration, but at the end of it a committee was formed to ‘watch local matters and to take steps to ensure the progress of the district’.” Motions were passed in favour of excluding noxious trades from the area, in protest

over the disgraceful state of the main roads from the Cook’s River to George’s River and for a railway in the same area. The first issue, that of

the noxious trades, was in response to the rumours that the Stuart government was possibly considering the George’s River area as a noxious

trade site, while the interest in roads and the railway was summed up by

Joseph Carruthers, one of the prime movers for incorporation, who observed at one meeting that they all knew that if they wished to induce people to build there they would require to show them roads and other conveniences of civilization. They should not wait

74 LIVING

until there were two or three hundred houses in the district before taking any steps for the formation of a municipality. '°

The motive for encouraging the rail to go all the way to the George’s River was to prod the government into keeping to schedule with the line, for there was widespread feeling that it had been too much delayed. When

it was finally opened as far as Hurstville on 15 October, the Herald described the area as ‘a beautiful resort’, an ‘arcadia’ which would be of enormous benefit to the people of Sydney as a recreational area. Some

men, however, hoped that the railway would bring about the rapid ‘metamorphosis of arcadia into suburbia. The first petition in favour of

incorporation was followed by one against, and one meeting for an incorporated Kogarah was followed, within a fortnight, by another at Hurstville proposing a joint municipality with that area. Landholders (presumably with land in Kogarah), fearing that rates would be dissipated over the larger area, argued that small municipalities were always the most flourishing. Finally, when a petition for Kogarah, without Hurstville, was gazetted in July 1885, a dispute broke out over part of the boundary with

West Botany (Rockdale) and after incorporation was finally granted, complicated and not very friendly negotiations continued with this municipality for several years over boundaries.'! Clearly, suburbs were being made, not through the growth of ‘community’, but by individuals like Joseph Carruthers, who were angling for the deal most likely to benefit

their own financial and landed interests. He was a young solicitor who ‘made investment in land a sideline’, and a few years later, in 1887, he went into parliament at the top of the poll for the seat of Canterbury. In his maiden speech he called for a tramway from Kogarah to Sans Souci,

where he lived.'* In 1889, when he became Minister for Public Instruction, he immediately took steps to have a larger school built at

Kogarah. Later, when he became Premier of New South Wales, he continued to be closely associated with the district — ‘he had a lot of

sway, and could get anyone a job’, as one local resident recalled.'’ Carruthers worked for Kogarah and Kogarah worked for Carruthers. This story of incorporation could be repeated over and over for other districts and would-be districts of Sydney. Although there was a rush to form municipalities, there was no rush to

provide adequate staff to administer them. Nuisance inspectors were sometimes appointed jointly, as in the case of Redfern, Alexandria and Waterloo, which employed one man between them in 1875,'*-or they were not employed at all, as in the case of North Willoughby, where no

nuisance by-laws were gazetted in the 1870s, the municipality being ‘perfectly free from nuisance, unless it might be a drunkard or two’!? — this in a local government area that contained Forsyths’ tannery, for many years the largest on the north shore. And officers who made the mistake of being too zealous could experience brief careers. When B.J.F. Leahy was made inspector for Manly in 1888, he kept a diary which detailed his many

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 75

exploits in the pursuit of stray animals and naked bathers, both of which were apparently numerous in the township. During his sixty-seven weeks

in office, as well as impounding many animals and inspecting many premises, both private and commercial, he managed to bring sixty-four people to prosecution at the Water Police Court. After his resignation in August 1889, the new man to be appointed was officially advised by the aldermen to tread more carefully, and to warn people in preference to impoundment and prosecution. However, it is not merely a question of whether municipal officers carried out their duties conscientiously or not that is of relevance to this discussion. All the enthusiasm and energy in the world could be of little benefit if a scientific understanding of the causes of, and appropriate

methods of dealing with health problems were absent. Add to this inadequate funding, and lack of support from elected officials of councils, and there was enormous potential for chaos in the area of public health. For instance, the hard work of Mr Leahy did not really touch upon the sewage and drainage difficulties that Manly was beginning to experience in

the 1880s, and although he made frequent references to these problems, he was powerless to do much about the situation. The council buried its nightsoil on the Steyne Beach and at various spots along the Pittwater Road ‘at the very doors of residents’ according to an old resident — ‘the

stench from them is unbearable ... Manly a health resort, forsooth a plague spot’.'°

In the municipal world, the two people whose work impinged most heavily on the public health question were the nuisance inspector and the health officer for the City of Sydney. A brief diversion into the day-to-day

activities of these two gentlemen will serve to show how genuinely inadequate was the municipal approach to public health questions. The city health officer for the whole period under review was only a part-time adviser to the corporation. He also carried out a private practice, so that the most important thing about the city’s health officer was that for much of his time he did not work for the council at all. When he did, Dr George Frederick Dansey, who held the position from 1870 to 1888, when he was dismissed, appears to have been conscientious in his work. His own practice was in crowded West Sydney, and before immigrating to Sydney in the 1860s, he had been a doctor in working-class areas of London, so he

was acquainted with urban health problems at first hand, and appears to have made a genuine effort to activate the city council in the cause of sanitary reform. One of his duties was to confirm the judgement of the

nuisance inspector, himself not a medical man, in cases of suspected unsound foodstuffs and the like, and there is no evidence of Richard Seymour, the inspector, finding Dansey unwilling or unavailable for this

type of inspection. It was Seymour’s complaints about Graham, the previous health officer, refusing to act on these requests that caused Graham to be dismissed by the council in 1870.!’ Dansey, with Seymour,

inspected and reported on many premises, factories and shops, and he

76 LIVING

undoubtedly knew a great deal about the state of Sydney’s health. His quarterly reports to the council sometimes referred to recent trends in Britain, and he read the Lancet as well as English newspapers, but for all that, his understanding of the causes of disease did not keep up with the

latest developments in germ theory, and he continued a miasmatist throughout. This in itself is not a point of criticism, because even though Pasteur’s work was done in the 1860s, the ideas were slow to filter through the medical profession, and the miasmic view of disease — that disease was spread through noxious vapours (miasmas) — was probably still held by most medical men and certainly by most laypeople throughout this period. It was not unusual for doctors to espouse an eclectic view of disease

transmission, preferring whatever explanation seemed to best suit the occasion. The miasmic world view correctly led to widespread concern for

the disposal of rubbish and human waste, and, again correctly, to a preference for elevated residential areas over low-lying or poorly drained areas. (Typhoid was often simply called low fever.) On the other hand, it also led to an over-dependence on olfactory detection of disease, and a tendency to believe that where there was no stench, there was no danger. The following exchange between Seymour, who probably ‘learned’ his medical assumptions from Dansey, and a member of the Health Board,

seems to be a discussion concerning a meticulously well-documented redistribution of rubbish about the city. It illustrates both the miasmic view and the misguided actions it could cause. What is the quantity of refuse which is removed by the Corporation weekly in their carts, do you know? Yes; for the present week ... 1,007 loads of street sweepings, 432 loads of house rubbish, 25 loads of refuse from the city markets, 36 loads of stuff from earth closets’ and 190 loads of street refuse from gully shafts, making a total of 1,690 loads for the week. Dead animals for the same week, 542; of all sorts — fowls, rats, cats, dogs etc. I have a book (producing it) which shows everything

— the street it was found in, and where it is taken to. What becomes of these 1,690 loads of rubbish? A great deal of it goes to the City Common; some of it goes to Harris Street to fill up large holes, some of it goes to

Macquarie Street for the same purpose, ... to the Domain ... to Wynyardsquare, and some to the Flagstaff. Is it offensive, in your opinion? It is offensive for a day or two, but after that it is not. You can pass along Wynyard-square without being offended by it.'®

Dansey himself told the same committee that open drains were unhealthy, especially when being swept, as this stirred up the odour, and that the residents of West Sydney, who often got low fever, would benefit

if a method could be found ‘to destroy the smell’ associated with the Darling Harbour sewer outfall. His quarterly reports to council were discursive diatribes against the evils of landlords, baby-farming, overcrowded and dirty housing, the state of the Lachlan Swamps, adultc.ated food, and the weather, which ‘tells severely on some constitutions arriving here from colder climes’. His advice to immigrants was to ‘combat the

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 77

change by carefully regulating their mode of life, manners and customs’, !”

hardly the kind of thing the city council could take action on. He advocated fresh air for babies, compulsory vaccination for smallpox and model lodging houses. Although sometimes he recommended specific areas where council could take action, and occasionally it did, it is not difficult to see why many aldermen thought his ‘services’ amounted to

little more than a generalized attack on council inadequacies. In the context of widespread mistrust of ‘the engineers and men of science’, much of his advice was ignored,”° and landlord and manufacturing interests on

council were positively hostile to his office. Early in his career as health officer, Dansey did score one major success. In March 1871, Dansey re-

ported to the council at length about an outbreak of typhoid fever in Islington, London, which had been scientifically traced to a single dairy. This, he said, proved that typhoid could be linked to a single food, and with an amazing leap of logic, suggested that in the case of Sydney, the food was fish. Therefore, argued Dr Dansey, the council ought to build a fish market. He went on to describe the current method of marketing, which involved tossing fish on to the wharves at Woolloomooloo, where they were sold to buyers who washed them in the ‘filthy blackish water’ near the sewer outlet in the bay, before carting them off to retail outlets. Soon after this, the council voted money for the construction of municipal

fish markets, which were built on the corner of Plunkett and Bourke Streets, in Woolloomooloo, and opened in 1872.7! In 1888 the building was remodelled and extended so that it was, according to one observer, ‘the largest and best appointed in the world ... with the exception of the celebrated Billingsgate’.*” In view of the fact that the council had control of the city’s produce markets, the building of a fish market is not surprising in itself, although the commodious and substantial nature of the building

is perhaps a little unexpected, given the relative unimportance of this industry to the total trade of wholesale foodstuffs within the city. The preference of residents for red meat, which was cheap, and the widespread lack of interest in fish was often remarked upon by contemporaries. But what is really surprising about the fish markets is that Richard Seymour, the city’s nuisance inspector, attended the markets every morning, from

about 5 a.m. for twenty-five years in order to auction the fish. This procedure took about three hours, and sometimes more. As nuisance inspector, Seymour was one of the most highly paid officers of the corporation, receiving £650 a year at the time of his dismissal in 1896. His brief was to abate nuisances, and encompassed a vast range of activities, from inspecting sewers and drains, houses and factories, to surveillance of businesses associated with the preparation and sale of food, traffic control and the mammoth task of administering his scavenging department. The work of removing human rubbish and animal excreta from a city which housed ever-increasing numbers of horses, employed almost 300 men in

1890 (and that was after cutbacks in expenditure had led to retrenchments in the previous two years), was enormous. 23 In addition, there was a

78 LIVING

sub-inspector, thirteen house inspectors, staff to supervise the licensing of porters and, after 1886, the administration of the Dairies Supervision Acct. And with all the never-ending work which such a job could generate, the nuisance inspector spent a good part of each day in Woolloomooloo selling fish. Whenever I am tempted to half-believe the claims of civic officials concerning their interest in maintaining a healthy city, [ think on Richard Seymour. Seymour can best be described as a law-and-order man, who exhibited very little understanding of the causes or solutions to the problems he dealt

with. The great numbers of prosecutions he brought before the police courts indicate that he was probably hard working, but the nature of the prosecutions suggest that his regime probably did little for the long-term healthfulness of the city. Many of the prosecutions were for loitering, or conversely, for ‘crossing intersections at a pace faster than a walk’, and for

trivial offences which were more a matter of littering than of causing serious nuisances. On the decision of the council, he did instigate a serious

house-to-house inspection system in 1873, when 3207 houses were inspected and many prosecutions made for nuisances, especially those related to overflowing privies, and defective drainage. Seymour reported to the corporation that he had not expected ‘to find matters so extremely disgusting ... the wretchedness, filth and misery observable in too many instances is indeed a matter to be deeply deplored’.** This was a somewhat surprising admission for someone dealing with these matters on a daily basis. A year later, with another 8000 houses inspected, he reported that

great improvements had occurred, that closets were cleaner than the previous year and that premises were not so crowded. This seems an unbelievably positive result, and one that hardly accords with the Health

Board report of 1876. At the beginning of 1875 he reported that few prosecutions were necessary because ‘the general state of cleanliness has been remarkable ... the occupants, finding that they are punishable for filth, consequently use their endeavours to escape from prosecution’. His expressed hope that improvements would continue ‘until the evils now existing shall have been completely remedied’ indicates a total failure to understand the complexities of the process involved.*? Unavoidably, given the limited powers they had at law, the poorer residents of Sydney were often fined for minor offences against cleanliness, while the landlords who failed to maintain their premises remained largely untouched.”° The years of house inspections do not appear to have produced any records useful either to historians or to Seymour’s successor, who observed in his

first annual report to the council in 1896 that it occurred to me that more satisfactory action was necessary with regard to house-

to-house inspections. I therefore obtained a map of the City, showing the boundaries of the respective wards. These latter I subdivided into sections or blocks, and defined the areas, together with the duties of the officers in respect

thereto ...

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 79

— basic stuff for a practice that had been occurring for years. It was possibly true that, as Seymour claimed, the mere presence of inspectors encouraged some citizens to remedy some nuisances, but the tenor of his reports suggests that in Seymour the council had found an officer who would work diligently but ineffectively, skirting around the edges of the

city’s pollution problems. Newspaper comments were often to this effect,“’ and more importantly, this was also the assessment of J. Ashburton Thompson, the government health officer who became increasingly exasperated at what he believed were the corporation’s attempts to undermine the work of the board and the health of the citizens. At the end of the 1880s, Thompson, whose understanding of the mechanics of disease transmission was on a different plane to Seymout’s,

was producing detailed reports on the outbreak of typhoid and other diseases, carefully analysing specific environmental factors involved in each case, and in the process exposing the inadequacies and sometimes the collaboration of various municipalities. In 1890, he tabled a report in the

Legislative Assembly concerning building sites on made ground, which accused the city council of playing a positive role in creating nuisances. Referring to an ill-drained area in Redfern, where ‘several S.M.C. carts were seen to tip refuse’, he then launched into a spirited attack on the corporation, and in particular, on Seymour. With especial reference to the City Corporation, it must now be pointed out that

they have always been ready to tip garbage, on request, wherever a greedy landholder or other misguided person .nay wish ... this principal corporation may almost be named the chief offender against the public health ... All the care and cost expended to secure a pure water supply and safe sewerage are here to be nullified by an illegal, but practically unavoidable, collusion between municipal councils and housebuilders ... the poorer classes are the sufferers while the rich reap the profit, whether they be incorporated bodies, or landowners.

He cited examples of ‘monstrous accumulations’ behind Victoria Barracks, and at Centennial Park. In reply to these accusations, Seymour did not deny that it happened, but he saw it rather in terms of getting rid of large and unsightly or dangerous holes, although several years earlier he had confided privately to the council that he did have some problems with

this kind of thing himself: there were nightsoil men who refused to bury their loads as instructed, so that if he trod on it, he sank ‘to some depth’.” Poor Richard Seymour. No wonder he retreated to the fish markets. When the corporation sacked Seymour in 1896, they replaced him with his subinspector, at a much reduced salary, and at the head of a reorganized and

much smaller department. This was done in the context of a general economy drive in which several officers were sacked, but the nature of the reorganization which occurred then does suggest that Seymour may have become a problem even for a council that once valued his timid approach to nuisance inspection. By 1890, local councils could point to miles of roads made and footpaths

80 LIVING

laid, as well as to numbers of parks dedicated and in at least one instance, street trees planted.’? Although these activities need not be sneered at, it remained true that in the most vital areas of government delegated to the local authorities — those of regulating building construction and land subdivision and of nuisance suppression — all the evidence points to widespread negligence and considerable corruption. In any case, the idea

that local government lets the people of an area determine their own destiny does not even begin to make sense unless the residents and the ratepayers are substantially the same people. This was not true for Sydney. In the city, in 1886, for instance, there were 22 140 houses and 132 846

residents, but only 7946 ratepayers. In many suburban municipalities,

certainly by the end of the 1880s landlords outnumbered owneroccupiers. °° In the context of an unconcerned colonial government, local interest groups manipulated local government for their own benefit. To

substantiate this claim fully would require detailed analysis of the composition and activity of councils over time, but there is no doubt that interested parties were active on local councils, like John Young, who was a major landholder and building contractor in Annandale, and became its first mayor, or the various members of the family of the Forsyths’ tannery in Willoughby, who were mayors or members of that council. Landowners and speculators were interested in ensuring that future subdivisions could

occur with a minimum of expense or regulation. Property owners and landlords were interested in ensuring that rates be kept to a minimum, and in discouraging projects such as sewerage works, where the cost would fall to the owner. Manufacturers were interested in polluting the environment

as freely as possible, and in ensuring that nuisance inspectors were not over-zealous in their work. At best this led to a cycle in local government composition: a reforming council might take control if things got too bad;

this would lead to increased prosecutions, which would stimulate manufacturers to get their representatives into power; increasing laxity of control would encourage a reformist trend. The colonial government, in

the face of increasing urban chaos and growing public ill health, was reluctantly forced into providing the services it had hoped to delegate to local government. The widespread acceptance of the view that disease was transmitted

through stinks had the general effect of focusing attention on public health problems, rather than on personal hygiene. A correspondent to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1885 did suggest that a ‘backyards’ commission was what Sydney really needed, but the main interest continued to be with

the public health.*’ By the 1880s there was more knowledge of germ

theory and a greater understanding of the spreading of disease by contagion, symbolized by the building of the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Little Bay in 1881, to isolate the victims of a smallpox epidemic. The knowledge that it was not odours that caused disease, but germs airborne and waterborne, continued to focus attention on the problems of water disposal, but increasingly, interest was focused on what was happening

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NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 81

underground, as well as on the surface. One result of this was growing alarm at the state of Sydney’s water supply. From 1859 to 1886, Sydney’s water was supplied from the Botany Swamps. As early as 1852 other potential schemes were considered, including the Nepean River scheme which was eventually developed. *”

Nevertheless, the city corporation, which had the responsibility of supplying the water, persistently listened to the advocates of the Botany supply, not least because the colonial government consistently failed to vote the council enough money to cope with anything more far sighted.°*° During the 1860s the supply had been intermittent, but the building of a series of dams and reservoirs at Crown Street and Paddington made the supply temporarily more secure, though in the dry months of many years the flow was limited to a few hours a day. Most of the city, and parts of Redfern and The Glebe, had been supplied by the end of the 1860s. In the next few years mains were extended further into Redfern, and to Waterloo

and Camperdown, and by 1878 a new pumping station at the Crown Street reservoir was delivering water to most of Paddington. By the beginning of 1882, Marrickville, Petersham and St Peters in the southwest and part of Leichhardt and Balmain were supplied, while a new reservoir serviced the elevated areas of Woollahra by about the end of 1881.°** There had been almost a 100 per cent rise in water revenue between 1876 and 1882, but supply did not keep pace with suburban development, and there was never any suggestion that it should be supplied in any but closely built-up areas. Until the mid-1870s, the city council could provide water mains only after receipt of a petition from

residents, and then only if no counter petitions were received. In Waterloo and Alexandria, petitions from residents were countered by petitions from absentee landlords.’’ When they were given power to lay mains at their own discretion, it was still not compulsory for individuals to

connect, so that in the case of rented accommodation, the needs of residents could still be ignored by landlords. Most houses that could be connected were, however, and every additional pipe laid put more strain on the Botany scheme, so that by the 1880s supplies were frequently partial and intermittent. The government had reluctantly conceded by the end of the 1870s that Botany was a stop-gap measure only, and the loans estimates for 1879 included provision for a water supply scheme from the Nepean. In 1884 supply was again limited to a few hours a day, and in 1885 there were fears that it would give out altogether. In this situation, Hudson Brothers, of Granville, were commissioned to supply timber fuming and temporary pipes to bridge the gaps in the Nepean scheme — an expensive outcome of the government’s bungling and procrastination over the provision of water for Sydney. An upsurge of pipe laying followed the completion of the Nepean scheme in 1887, but for most of the years of

this study, water supply was from Botany. It would be possible to tabulate the lengths of pipe laid over the twenty years, and on the basis of the findings it would probably be possible to

82 LIVING

argue that Sydney, compared with other nineteenth-century cities, was not remiss in the provision of water. The metropolis could boast about 86 miles of sewers and almost 25000 sewered houses by 1890, when a city such as Melbourne could boast of none.*© However, it would be more to the point to discuss the quality of the services, rather than to take comfort from their extent. The issue of water quality was one that increasingly came to dominate discussions of the state of Sydney’s public health. From the beginning of the 1870s, Sydney’s newspapers were commenting on the

high death rates occurring in the metropolis, while Dr Dansey, in his quarterly reports to the city corporation, never failed to comment on the number of deaths, especially infant deaths. In typical style he tended to proffer a vague rag-bag of explanations for this, but he was anxious to link it to, among other things, defective water and sewerage provisions. In 1871, he was warning that ‘every year, yes, every day, the impurities will be increasing’ in the water supply, as houses encroached upon the Lachlan Swamp catchment, and in 1872, with prophetic accuracy, warned that the outcome of simply pouring more and more sewage into the harbour would be ‘an attack of the Plague or Cholera (asiatic) which sooner or later will come’.*’ The first widespread public concern over these issues surfaced in 1874, a depressingly wet year, which saw an unusually high incidence of disease in Sydney. By the beginning of 1875, the statistics issued from the Registrar-General’s Department, by which the city’s papers

placed so much store, announced that in January, the number of deaths had exceeded the number of births. 1875 did eventually prove to be the year of highest infant mortality ever recorded for the colony, with a rate of

194 per 1000 in the city. Coghlan, the statistician, later recorded that: ‘Sydney was troubled by an extraordinary visitation of sickness; children

died, stricken by diarrhoea and atrophy, pneumonia and bronchitis, diptheria and scarlatina, convulsions and measles. Its children were literally decimated.’*®

The Sydney Morning Herald, always vocal on the issue, and accepting

the validity of the concept that health was directly related to external environmental factors, was actively engaged in highlighting the filth of the city and the inadequacies in the provision of water and sewerage. Seymour, at the corporation, responded to the rising public concern by becoming defensive, and reporting that all was well on the sanitary front. ‘It is impossible that there can be ten thousand yards full of festering

putridity in the City as erroneously stated in the public papers’, he claimed, as his men had been working overtime to ensure the city’s cleanliness.°” Increased corporation activity in the area of nuisance inspection and prosecution was reinforced by magistrates, who became less lenient in dealing with offenders. Seymour found that the results of cases

he had summonsed before the police courts ‘were more satisfactory recently ... since certain articles appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald’.*° The colonial secretary, who claimed he had received ‘numerous

representations respecting sickness and death alleged to have been

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 83

occasioned during the last few months by the unclean state of the city’, appointed the Sydney City and Suburban Sewage and Health Board in April to inquire primarily into problems associated with the sewerage system, but also more generally into ways for ‘protecting the health of the

inhabitants’. This board submitted twelve exhaustive reports during 1875/76, concerned not only with sewerage, but with the water supply, the organization of the abattoirs, slaughtering, the regulation of noxious trades, and crowded dwellings and factories (see chapter 2). The findings of the board were published in the press, and discussed over many middleclass dinner-tables by men and women who were becoming increasingly despairing of a legislature that seemed determined to do nothing. The poor did not need to read it in the newspapers, as much of the board’s reporting

merely detailed life as they knew it. The widespread public agitation which both forced the government to commission these reports, and followed their publication, makes it quite clear that many citizens were deeply troubled about the state of the urban environment. The board’s angry reports detailed instances of filth and disease on all sides, related primarily to defective water supply and inadequate care over the disposal of sewage. The fact that Sydney had any sewers at all at this time is sometimes taken as an indication of advanced urban facilities, but Sydney’s residents must have had their doubts when the board reported that many of the closets were connected directly to the water mains (that is, without the water first discharging into a cistern), with faulty valves, so that the water supply was directly contaminated with human excreta.*! The sewers discharged untreated matter at five points around the city into the shallow waters of Port Jackson, a reality well known to those who lived

nearby. The most offensive of these was located at the foot of Liverpool Street, an area well-endowed with insanitary, and in some cases, unsafe houses. Many houses in this and other poorer areas of the city were not connected to the sewer. These relied on pans and in some cases cesspits were still used. These were common in the suburbs, where municipal

authorities had no power to regulate them unless they were literally overflowing into the street, thereby causing a common nuisance. Kitchen and other slops usually ran into surface drains, to which privies were also often illegally connected. Drains were not always sealed or continuous,

permitting seepage into the soil, as did most cesspits, which were intentionally not watertight. Many low-lying areas were reported to be saturated with sewage, as well as covered with houses. Water supply in these areas was sometimes provided by tanks, but ground wells were still common. The worst areas were examined, with special attention being paid to Shea’s Creek, and the ‘Sugar Company Creek’, which drained Darlington and parts of Redfern and Chippendale. Both were found to be little more than open sewers carrying, in addition, industrial wastes. Reports were made concerning cow-keeping in the

centre of the city, cattle droving through the suburbs, and illegal slaughtering of animals by butchers unwilling or unable to avail

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themselves of the city abattoirs. These too were the the subject of a long | report which revealed that they were badly managed, cursorily inspected and a direct cause of pollution to the harbour which received without

treatment all the blood and some of the offal from the slaughtering operations. Meat was distributed about the city in open carts and, more offensive, offal and butchers’ leftovers were carted to the boilers-down in the same fashion. *?

One influence on urban health that did not attract much discussion in these reports, or elsewhere, was the horse, which was a major cause of street filth and a major reason for those 1007 loads of street sweepings cited earlier as having been removed from the city streets in one week in 1876.

The street cleaning proficiency of the city corporation workers was criticized from time to time in the press, and removal did present real difficulties, given the narrowness of many streets, and the congestion of

traffic.** In 1870 there were licensed in Sydney 180 omnibuses, 40 hackney carriages, 184 cabs and 120 drays, in addition to numerous private vehicles. The introduction of trams only slowed down the rate of increase of horse-drawn traffic, which did not begin to decline in volume

until well into the twentieth century. Wood-blocking was used as a method of street paving after 1881, and there was some initial disquiet over the health aspects of this, especially with the early construction techniques, which left a dirt-trapping gap between blocks, but by and large the problem of horse dropping was not a major topic for discussion in the

nineteenth century.” No doubt everyone agreed that dust and manure made life unpleasant,

especially when the wind blew, but in fact, being fibrous and low in nitrogen, horse dung contained fewer parasites than other forms of excreta, and was a less efficient breeding ground for disease. Those with a miasmic understanding of the world may even have taken comfort from

its lack of odour. In wet weather, the dung would give off the smell of ammonia, a chemical not disassociated from cleanliness in the nineteenth-century mind. It was widely used as a fertilizer — the Sydney

Tramways and Omnibus Company received £387.19.8 from sale of manure from its Glebe stables in 18874? — and in general tolerated as a fact of life about which there was little choice. The reports of the Health Board encouraged the government to step into the realm of water and sewage control, although this had little effect

on Sydney in the years with which this study is concerned. Further, virtually every piece of legislation concerning public health issues which was discussed or enacted in the next two decades stemmed directly from

these 1875-76 reports. The immediate result of the reports was the passage of two Acts. The first, the Water Pollution Prevention Act prevented the direct connection of water closets to the water mains, while the Nuisances Prevention Act gave municipalities the power to regulate the construction, location and maintenance of cesspits and closets, and also the deposit of nightsoil. As a result of the board’s recommendations

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 85

the city sewer outlets were also carried deeper into the harbour and building outlawed on the recently reclaimed Blackwattle Swamp.* The speed with which this legislation was passed through parliament might at first suggest that there was legitimate concern for the health of the people of Sydney. Against this, however, must be placed certain considerations.

Firstly, the authorities had been aware of the sewerage-water mains connections at least since May 1874, but only acted when the public were also aware of it.*’ In any case, the Water Pollution Prevention Act dealt with this problem superficially, and ignored all the others raised by the board in relation to the sewers and the state of the water supply. Secondly,

the Nuisances Prevention Act was to be administered entirely by the municipal authorities without the colonial government having any rights to intervene in cases of neglect, and thus was virtually an extension of the 1867 Municipalities Act. Even ignoring the fact that local governments

were not renowned for their zealous administration in such matters, sewerage and drainage lines knew no municipal boundaries. The Act did,

in fact, make provision for municipalities to act in concert (clause 6) indicating that the government recognized the problem. It must also have been known that local councils usually jealously guarded their separate rights. The reluctance of the colonial government to become directly

involved and the decision to delegate authority to local bodies long remained major stumbling blocks to the improvement of Sydney’s environment. The nature of the issues canvassed by the Health Board makes it fairly clear that they envisaged the end result would be a comprehensive public health act. With nothing approximating such an act achieved, the next few years saw various attempts to have single issues dealt with through separate pieces of legislation. In the realm of building regulations, the board’s exposure of slum areas, especially in the city, combined with the

fact that the city corporation had no powers to compel even repair of buildings, let alone demolition, led to the virtually ineffective City of Sydney Improvement Act of 1879. Unsuccessful agitation for other legislation included attempts at regulation of factories and lodging houses and the sustained effort to remove or restrain the noxious trades, which will be discussed in detail below. The decision of the legislature to vote £1087 000 for the upper Nepean water supply in 1879 and the passage of the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Act in the following year had farreaching consequences, but did not make any practical difference to things

until the end of the 1880s. For a while, the appearance that things were being done resulted in a lull of interest in the public health issue, but the outright failure of some of

these efforts, combined with the minimal results from what legislation there was, led to a second surge of interest in the public health question in the mid-1880s. The growth of knowledge about bacteriology heightened

this concern, as it was gradually recognized that much of the previous effort had been misdirected. So for instance, while most citizens probably

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still held their noses while they passed Moore Park, where the corporation

dumped its nightsoil and garbage, in order to avoid inhaling ‘noxious effluvia’, growing numbers were coming to realize the real problem lay in the soil. How much of this garbage reached the Lachlan Swamps, part of the city’s water supply? The encroachment of houses into the catchment

area, not to mention industrial activities and local church cemeteries, were gradually being seen in a new light. It was not only shortage of water in 1885 that was of concern. Compared with the quality of the water from wells in private yards though, the town supply must have been excellent. During the summer of 1884—85 there was a heavier than usual outbreak

of typhoid fever, so that by the beginning of February, with two of the worst ‘fever months’ still to go, the hospitals could take no more cases. *°

The Herald was waging an all-out campaign in the hope that the high incidence of the disease, which was a few years ago ‘an occasional visitor’ _but now ‘an inevitable companion’, would stir the government to action.

Issue after issue recorded instances of disease, municipal neglect, contaminated water and milk supplies, the state of cesspits, ‘that terrible

invention’, and so on, as well as reports of an international sanitary conference held in Sydney, and lectures on Pasteur and bacteria, with the occasional reference to ‘deadly gases’ thrown in for good measure.*? By May the Bishop of Sydney had publicly entered the political arena, by preaching ‘the promotion of the sanitary condition of life’, and had told a public meeting at Randwick concerning sanitation in the borough that:

‘the laws of health were simply the laws of God. If they neglected the preservation of the health and lives of citizens they were guilty of a serious moral crime.’”° It was clearly meant as a warning not only to the citizens of Randwick.

The Stuart government was finally stirred into introducing a public health bill in early September 1885, but it had not been passed when the government fell in October. Between October and the end of February 1886, there were two separate ministries, primarily engaged in what the bishop politely called ‘trials of strength’.”’ In the meantime, another summer and another outbreak of typhoid came and went. Around this

time, activists in favour of a public health bill found an ally in J. Ashburton Thompson, the government medical adviser under the Board of Health. This body had been set up to administer the Infectious Diseases Act of 1880 and it had been anticipated that its powers would be extended under the Public Health Act. In the interim, its medical adviser, who had

little real power, but who was a good communicator, bombarded the authorities with reports of typhoid, detailing where and how the disease broke out. One such report in February 1886, on an outbreak in Leichhardt, traced the infection to a dairy which was served by a well and which was located so as to receive the drainage of two cemeteries. Nightsoil in the area, including the dairyman’s, was buried in backyards. Citing this report, the Jennings government introduced a Dairies Supervision Act in 1886. It was basically one section of the proposed Public Health Bill, and

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 87

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In a page of sketches of ‘A New Year's vision’, this was labelled ‘a new broom much wanted in Sydney’ (Illustrated Syndey News, 24 Jan. 1880)

was criticized because it was piecemeal. ‘If disease can be distributed through the medium of milk, it can be distributed through the medium of water ... The bill does not grapple with the evil. It attacks a little branch, and not the main root.’”” On the other hand some members fought to have even this partial legislation dropped, including Sir Henry Parkes, who responded to being told that there was a British law of 1879 relating to the same issue by observing that ‘the tendency of English legislation was to regulate the very

life out of the citizens’. Sir Henry apparently preferred other forms of death. In endeavouring to explain why this provision alone, from the many of the health bill, was made law, a cynic might be tempted to observe that the rich had their own supplies of water, while with milk, they took their chances like everyone else. This Act possibly improved the state of Sydney’s dairies, but more importantly, although the Act was to be administered by local government authorities, it gave the Board of Health the power to compel councils to comply with it, and was thereby the first

official recognition that local government could not be trusted to administer the law. The Board of Health was increasingly given such powers, and eventually incorporated under the Noxious Trades and Cattle Slaughtering Act of 1894. Finally, in 1896, New South Wales became the

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last Australian colony to pass a general public health act, half a century after similar legislation had been passed in Britain. By this time, colonial rule was substantially through its administrative wing, and government departments were becoming more bureaucratized and overtly independent

of the legislature. In this context, entrusting of the public health to an anachronistic board is indicative of the importance the legislature assigned

to it. In the meantime, the 1880s, drew to a close with no public health act,

and with Sydney still ruled to all intents and purposes by local government. The reluctance of the colonial government to enter this field reflected the contempt for Sydney’s well-being held by colonial governments, whose interests were not grounded in the urban sector. The real interests of the ruling class are nowhere better illustrated than in the case of one aspect of the public health question, that of the noxious trades. The term ‘noxious trade’ applied to any industry that created a stink,

especially if this was associated with the production of visible waste materials which were odorous. In common parlance, it usually meant tanneries and boiling-down works and other industries associated with the processing of animal hides and carcasses, although on occasions factories dealing with chemicals and tobacco were included within the definition.

The colonial statistical registers claimed that the term referred to industries ‘working on raw materials, the production of the Pastoral Interest’, but clearly this definition is inadequate, as many of these industries were supported by the urbanizing process, with inputs from the city abattoirs, suburban slaughterhouses, city butchers’ shops and eating

houses. Market gardens, piggeries and poultry farms either doubled as boiling-down works, or were located near such places for stock feed purposes, and the output of these establishments eventually found its way back to Sydney’s dinner tables. This cycle would occur in any large city, independently of the rural sector. Nevertheless, in New South Wales the rural products of pastoralism did contribute to the total urban output, and

it is important to recognize that the rural component became more significant in the last decades of the century. In the overall context of the public health, the noxious trades would have made a minimal contribution to Sydney’s total pollution levels in the

nineteenth century. However, these industries were believed to be an important cause of ill health, given the medical assumptions of the day. If disease was transmitted through noxious vapours, then nothing was more threatening than a tannery or a fellmongery, and clearly the community

was going to be antipathetic towards the noxious traders on miasmic grounds. One result of such antagonism was that a great deal was written and said about these industries. This information is considered in detail here because the treatment of the noxious traders illustrates very clearly the legislature’s lack of interest in the quality of urban life. As early as 1849, legislation was placed on the books giving the noxious traders ten years to remove their premises beyond the city boundaries. Not

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 89

all these manufacturers had moved by the early 1860s, when a group of

them petitioned parliament for compensation and for leniency in interpreting the law. This resulted in a select committee recommending there be no relaxation in the law, and the noxious traders relocated with varying degrees of good grace.’ Some, like James Forsyth, who moved to North Willoughby and ]. Vickery, who re-established at Waverley, had sufficient foresight to locate well away from the centres of population.

These tanneries became the focus of little village settlements, with workers’ housing provided by the manufacturers.?* Others were not so compliant. William Alderson, the colony’s largest tanner and fellmonger at the time, moved from Elizabeth Street to Bourke Street, Redfern, about 400 yards outside the city boundary. At the time this area was swampy and

fairly uninhabited, and Alderson claimed that he went there because of the abundance of clean water in Shea’s Creek, but it was not long before the urban population spilled over into Surry Hills and beyond, and the creek became fouled, a fact which Alderson attributed to the housing, and

which the residents attributed to the tannery. From the 1850s there had

been a general movement of noxious traders to the outer reaches of settlement, but the rapidity of urban growth in the 1870s meant that sooner or later population encroached on many of these factories, and the protection that isolation promised gave way to insecurity. Although local councils were far from rigorous in their application of common nuisance by-laws, from time to time they did prosecute, with varying results.?? Alderson, for example, who had a certain standing in

the community, got a case dismissed in 1876, on the grounds of insufficient evidence, although according to the press descriptions, the

evidence was overwhelming, ‘a nuisance on a gigantic scale ...

hundreds of tons of offensive and noisesome matter ... a lake of semiliquid filth of indescribable nastiness’.?° The Sydney Morning Herald implied that the Redfern council had prosecuted reluctantly, that the nuisance inspector gave a deliberately mild version of the facts, and that one of the justices who heard the case was a colleague of Alderson’s. A

second case brought against him that year, following considerable parliamentary and newspaper comment, was also dismissed. On the other hand, Berry, who made glue, was prosecuted by Botany council in 1881 and was induced to move his premises to the North Shore, where he was again prosecuted successfully in 1885. It may be conceded that the law was insufficiently involved, but it is not correct to assume, as several writers

have, that industrial pollution proceeded unfettered during the last decades of the nineteenth century.’’ Prosecutions were frequent enough to inconvenience the noxious traders and in some cases interrupted their operations. There were two reactions to this situation. The first was to stack the

councils. Some municipalities, like Randwick, constantly kept the noxious traders out altogether. Others never prosecuted. As late as 1887,

the Board of Health was in the process of bringing the Nuisance

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Prevention Act into force in some outlying municipalities which refused to bring their areas within the scope of the legislation themselves.°° By and large, the more solidly working class the suburb, the more tolerant was the local council of the noxious traders. Alexandria in particular, had a reputation for never prosecuting manufacturers, and at least one local

resident thought he knew why. Edward Williams, complaining of a boiling-down works on Mitchell Road, commented that the stench is dreadful and the rotten stuff the fowls and ducks is fed on no wonder there is so much fever in Sydney from the eggs and poultry they eat from here .. .

the Proprietors does not live here themselves they can afford to have country Residences but for poor people that is obliged to live here i think it is too much for them to put up with it. It is no use to Speak to the Aldermen of Alexandria they

pretend they have nothing to do with it ...”

Councils representing socially diverse groups were often ambivalent

about their attitudes towards the noxious traders. In Rockdale, for instance, elections were fought over the issue, and the security of the manufacturers waxed and waned with the changing factions in power. In 1892, McNamara’s, a large boiling-down works, was prosecuted after a council election in which the noxious trade faction had been thrown out.

Another boiler, Godfrey, was prosecuted in 1884, which possibly influenced his decision to stand for council in 1886.°°

This uneven treatment at the local government level helped bring about the second response of the noxious traders: agitating for protective

legislation at the colonial level. By the end of the 1870s, a Noxious Traders Association had been formed, and a spokesman, Alfred Fremlin, had gained a seat in parliament where he put their views on what was to become a widely canvassed issue for years to come, that of dedicating a noxious trades site, physically separate from Sydney, where housing would be excluded. This theme, with variations concerning details of administra-

tion was to recur again and again throughout the next decade. The conceived purpose of such a noxious trade site varied for different interest groups, but in general it was a case where the needs of the capitalist and

the community could be seen to coincide. Some of the larger manufacturers would no doubt have preferred a solution involving no prosecution,

but even Alderson, who could win against the courts, found that insecurity did not encourage manufacturers. His first preference was that they be ‘kept clear of being annoyed by those silly people ... those nonsensical people [who] ought to be put down’.°! But barring that solution, he agreed that a noxious trade site would help the situation. At worst (or as some manufacturers suggested, at best), the establishment of such a site would allow the noxious traders to continue their activities as noxiously as

possible, and this must have seemed preferable to the present situation,

where many of them did just about what they liked, but in diverse residential locations. A private member’s bill to create a noxious trades site was introduced in August 1881 by Fremlin, who himself embodied all

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 91

the conflicting interests that such a measure would serve. He was a fellmonger, and openly on the side of the noxious traders. On the other

hand, he had at one time lived in Botany, which he considered an unhealthy location, and had witnessed the suffering of his children from typhoid, which he attributed to the noxious atmosphere of that area.°” As

a member for Redfern, he cannot have been unaware of the legal proceedings against noxious traders in that municipality. The bill was lost on the casting vote of the speaker. The few members with obvious ties with the noxious trades voted for the motion as did most of the members representing metropolitan electorates.©* It was reintroduced in 1882, and as nothing had happened in the interim since the last vote, except that a few more manufacturers had been prosecuted, and a

few letters in favour of the idea had been published in the press, the government took the stalling procedure of calling for a royal commission. Fremlin’s angry accusation that if the commission hadn’t been suggested, a large majority would have voted for the bill, was probably a fair assessment

of the situation.” The royal commission took evidence from thirty-one witnesses, includ-

ing the city nuisance inspector, Richard Seymour, who tabled details concerning 108 premises. It was concluded that the industries were badly run, a danger to the public health, and recommended that a noxious trade

site be set up, either on the north or the south head of Botany Bay. In October 1883, with a new government in power and the force of a royal commission behind him, Fremlin again moved to have a bill brought in to establish a noxious trades site. The motion was easily carried, but parliament was adjourned later that year without any action being taken. A bill was finally introduced by Dibbs in September 1885. This was prefaced by a spate of prosecutions of manufacturers, and the opinion was widespread that the legislation was sensible and too long in coming. As the Herald,

which had backed the scheme for years pointed out, it was not a party issue, and ‘a sitting or two ought to prove sufficient for such a measure’. A

correspondent to the paper ‘in the trade’ observed that parliament deserved the thanks of both the public and the tradesmen, and warned that unless the bill is passed this session the gaols may have to be enlarged before the summer is over to make room for the large number of men about Sydney who will

probably be found guilty of pushing N.S.W. to the head of the export list for Australia.©

That summer, which witnessed widespread sickness and a high death rate, also saw an upsurge in concern for questions of public health, and in legal proceedings against polluters. The bill was finally introduced the

following year, and passed the lower house, amid claims that manufacturers were being harassed and that at least one tanner had ‘left the colony in disgust’. The bill provided for the resumption of 1500 acres at Kurnell, which, combined with Crown land, would provide a site of 3570

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acres. A buffer zone of 213 acres was to be planted with trees, land was to

be leased, and a railway was to be built into the area from the southern line.©© The upper house did not pass the bill, but referred it to a select committee, which found in favour of the concept, but preferred a site on the north head of Botany Bay. This may have been merely a delaying tactic, but it need not be construed that way. The construction of the Nepean water supply for Sydney had released the old dams at Botany for industrial use, and this did create genuine options that had not been available when the royal commission had recommended Kurnell. This change had not apparently been anticipated by the lower house, for, while the select committee was sitting, men applying for assistance under the Casual Labour Board set up in 1887 had been set to work clearing land on the Kurnell site, ‘in anticipation’, as Dibbs said, ‘of the bill I introduced being passed by the Legislative Council’.° The question of a noxious trades site then subsided for a few years, while agitation mounted for more comprehensive legislation to cover the public health issue. Access by the noxious traders to the old water supply dams

reduced the pressure for suitable, accessible land, and there was some relocation into this area, which was still only sparsely populated. The issue of a noxious trades site resurfaced again at the parliamentary level in 1892 following a local government election in Rockdale (West Botany) which had been fought around the question of these industries. The area around

the lower reaches of the Wolli Creek, and Cook’s River was home to a considerable number of noxious industries, but after the opening of the southern railway in 1884 the character of the region began to change. By

the time of the 1891 census the region of Rockdale and adjacent Hurstville and Kogarah had attracted in excess of 10000 residents, and there was considerable subdivision around the railway stations. Some of the residents of Rockdale clearly had visions of creating a resort out of the area and land speculators with those hopes persuaded the government to build a tramway to Sans Souci in 1887. As economic conditions became

depressed at the end of the 1880s, and with little sign of a resort developing, the inevitable tension over the presence of the noxious trades manifested itself in local elections. After the anti-noxious trades faction took power in 1892, a prosecution of William McNamara’s boiling-down works immediately followed. It was in this context, while a point arising from the McNamara case was being considered by the Supreme Court, that parliament debated the question of a noxious trades site for the last time. The debate, in April 1893, revolved more around the protection of manufacturers than around the question of a noxious trades site. Dibbs, the Premier, who had steered the bill through parliament in 1886 said he

no longer knew if Kurnell was still available, but indicated that the government would legislate, and in the following session the Noxious Trades and Cattle Slaughtering Act was passed. The provision for a noxious trades site was not included. The Act provided for the regulation by local councils, under jurisdiction

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 93

of the Board of Health, of such industries that might be gazetted ‘noxious’. Previous powers of councils to pass by-laws to control noxious trades were repealed, and the municipality was relegated to the role of administering

the registration, licensing and inspection of the industries. The Board of Health could override local decisions. Clearly, this legislation was part of the trend of extending the regulatory role of the state and curtailing the powers of local government. In this particular case, though, it is by no means clear that the intent of the legislation was to end mismanagement by self-interested councils which indulged the noxious traders. Much of the discussion over the bill had revolved around the plight of particular manufacturers, and the second reading was carried against the will of a

vocal and organized minority led by Carruthers, who argued that the legislation was motivated by ‘mock heroic sympathy for the noxious trades people’ and not by what he claimed should be paramount, ‘the preserva-

tion of the pubic health’. In 1893 he had spoken out against those who treated this legislation as if it were specifically to protect McNamara, who,

he pointed out, was a johnny-come-lately to Rockdale, having moved there only eighteen months previously, when homes were already built in the district. ‘People’, he had argued, ‘cannot be brushed aside hastily by

Mr McNamara, and the Premier cannot brush aside the rights of the people’.°> The Premier, on the other hand, said he had come to believe that ‘as a people, we are getting far too fastidious with regard to smells of this kind’, and made it clear where his sympathies lay by suggesting that while the legislation was being drafted, the Nuisance Prevention Act be suspended in certain districts, so that noxious traders would be outside the law altogether. This idea was unacceptable to perhaps most members, but Dibbs’s statement in 1894 that the ‘object of the bill is to prevent any harshness in the treatment of those who are carrying on noxious trades’ seems to have summed up the majority view. As one of the opposition put it, ‘the real reason for the introduction of the bill [was] not because some municipalities have allowed stinks to exist, but because certain municipalities have been over zealous in trying to put a stop to what they have

called stinks.”

Both in intent and in results, the 1894 Act favoured the manufacturers.

Municipalities had to register all noxious traders, but did not have the right to refuse registration, which increased the potential for the spread of

pollution, and there were instances of ‘aristocratic’ municipalities complaining that the Board of Health had issued licences against their advice. Establishments that did not comply with the regulations could have their licence revoked, but, in fact,.in the first year of operation, only one licence was revoked. ’° For an industry to come within the orbit of the Act, it had to be gazetted as noxious. This had led to much discussion in parliament, with some members fearing that unless the noxious traders were named, subsequent governments could ‘abuse honest trade’. On the other hand, the fact that noxious traders had to be proclaimed gave the government enormous powers to encourage pollution. The direction that

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things took is amply illustrated by considering the actual proclamations that were made. In 1894, all the industries associated with boiling-down

were proclaimed noxious, along with fellmongers, leather dressers, tanners, woolscourers and gluemakers. ’! Two months later fellmongering,

tanning and leather dressing were removed from the schedule, at the instigation of the executive council, and against strong protests from the Board of Health, which was ‘unanimously of the opinion that tanning should be retained on the list’. Several councils formally protested to the board that Sydney’s thirty-five tanneries should not be excluded. The Board of Health sought legal advice on their rights in this situation and were informed by the Crown solicitor that although the board was the body appointed to decide which industries be proclaimed, revocation could be made by the governor and executive council, ‘without any input from the Board of Health. It is hard to say why this recommendation was omitted ... but it would appear to have been intentional’. ’? At the same time that tanners were exempted from the Act, a deputation of piggery owners was told by the Premier, Reid, that they would not be subject to

the provisions of the Act ‘which only referred to the boiling down of sheep’.’? This must have been of considerable relief to numbers of small piggery and poultry farmers who also boiled-down. These small operations had always been considered noxious in the discussions of noxious trades

over the preceding twenty years, and complaints about them figure prominently in the correspondence received by the Board of Health. Two months later, in November 1894, fellmongers and woolscourers were also

removed from the schedule. The board in 1895 recommended that

woolscouring be declared noxious, backed by police reports on pollution created at establishments in Waterloo. Piggeries and poultry farms were not declared noxious until 1897, and tanners and scourers not until 1907.

In short, the Noxious Trades Act of 1894 applied to very few noxious trades. Finally, when the general Public Health Act was at last enacted in 1896, it included a let-out clause concerning nuisances: any accumulation or deposit necessary for the effectual carrying on of any business or manufacture shall not be liable to be dealt with ... under this Act .. . if proved necessary, and the best means available to prevent it being objectionable are used.

Had the planned noxious trades site become reality, Sydney might well

have gained a reputation for innovative and advanced industrial legislation. With hindsight we know that many of the fears expressed in the 1870s and 1880s about the noxious trades were misguided or at least indicated an inadequate appraisal of the problem. They emphasized the

evils of ‘stinks’, and while the elimination of unpleasant smells is of legitimate concern for its own sake, the associated fear, that odours gave rise to disease, was fallacious. The real dangers lay in the pollution of the

waterways, a fact that was gradually gaining credence in this period. Organic wastes of the type associated with the noxious trades could lead to

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 95

deoxygenation of the water, and eventually to ‘oxygen death’. The likelihood of this occurring is highest in inland waterways, less so in open bays and least likely if the wastes are flushed into the ocean. In Sydney,

areas at highest risk included Shea’s Creek and Cook’s River, and the upper reaches of the Parramatta, George’s and Lane Cove River. Less vulnerable was Botany Bay, and least likely to be permanently affected was the ocean. The proposed site at Kurnell would have utilized the sea for the disposal of wastes. Instead, the inland waterways and the inner reaches of Botany Bay were

the recipients of the by-products of the industries, while the abattoirs at Glebe Island continued to discharge wastes on to the shoreline of Port Jackson. Eventually some wastes were channelled into the new sewerage system, and new processes were used to convert wastes into fertilizers, but

such developments were not, by and large, in operation when these decisions were being made. In the overall onslaught of Sydney’s waterways, which received a good deal of the surface drainage and the primary sewage of the population, the role of the noxious trades was probably not great, although in a few waterways it was crucial. The point is that the legislation proposed in the 1880s would have contributed to the improve-

ment of the environment. The legislation of the 1890s did not. The Noxious Trades and Slaughtering Act may be seen as a victory for the manufacturers and a defeat for the health of the people of Sydney. These industries had moved from a position of vulnerability under the

Municipalities Act, through the potential inconvenience being forced on to a noxious trades site, which would nonetheless have been preferable to prosecution, to a position of virtual protection by the state. It would be a misconception, however, to see this as a victory for the manufacturers

only. With the deepening of depressed economic conditions in eastern Australia in the 1890s, every export shilling was needed, and the products

of the noxious traders were becoming more important export earners.

When Tonkin, the member for Bathurst, had first reintroduced the question of a noxious trades site in 1893, he placed the issue firmly within the context of the pastoral industry. Referring to boiling-down as ‘of great

importance in connection with our exports’, he went on to observe that ‘the pastoral industry is one of our greatest industries, and anything that is

injurious to it must also seriously affect the colony’.’* That being the case, it is difficult to avoid concluding that the Act was indeed motivated by a desire to repress municipalities ‘over zealous in trying to put a stop to _.. stinks’. By the 1890s, the link between Sydney’s noxious trades and the pastoral interest had been firmly made, both because stock was being slaughtered as the depression deepened and drought set in, and because scouring and boiling-down operations became increasingly centralized in Sydney in response to the extension of the railways in the 1880s. Quick and cheap freights combined with more efficient operations in the urban

plants favoured a port location. The number of animals slaughtered in

96 LIVING

1893 was more than double the number killed the previous year, and there was a dramatic increase in the number of hands employed in boiling-down in the colony and especially Sydney. Tanneries and woolwashing plants

enjoyed a similar expansion for the same reasons. Similarly, the meat preserving interests which established themselves in Sydney in the 1870s had become integrated with pastoral properties by 1890. Unlike Victoria, where meat preserving enjoyed only a brief success in the 1860s and early 1870s, Sydney’s firms continued to expand, in response to the growing need of Great Britain for more meat, as production was outstripped by a growing and more affluent population. If the noxious traders were not a powerful group, the pastoralists and the

urban merchants were. The decision to permit urban manufacturers to pollute the environment with a minimum of interference was not so much a sign of an emerging manufacturing interest as of a new arrangement in the imperial division of labour. The supremacy of the rural sector was not under challenge, but wool henceforth was to be joined by a more diverse range of exported products such as hides, tallow and meat. Insofar as the rural interests needed the noxious traders, the law would encourage their activities, and concern for the health of the citizens and for the environ-

ment of Sydney would have to be pushed to the background. The best method of assessing the healthfulness of Sydney during the years to 1890 is the method its citizens used — that of considering the death statistics. This does not imply, as they often implied, that there was a direct and simple relationship between the health of the citizenry, roughly measured by the incidence of death, and the state of the environ-

ment. Other considerations, like the standard of medical care and nutrition were obviously relevant, but there is no reason to suspect that these altered significantly during the period under consideration. T.A. Coghlan, listing the death rate of various European countries in the 1890-91 edition of The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, recorded a rate of 14.74 deaths per thousand for the decade 1880-839, compared with 18.93 for Britain and rates considerably higher for other European countries. (Needless to say, Coghlan’s figures referred only to the white settler population of the colony. If the Aboriginal death rates had been considered that would have been another story, and one that raised so little interest in the nineteenth century that no figures relating to it were kept.) Figures in an earlier edition suggest that the death rate had fallen slightly in both Britain and New South Wales over the period 1871-90, but more so in Britain. Coghlan’s comment on these figures was that ‘considering the favourable environments of the population of New South Wales, the matter for surprise is not that the difference is so great but that it is not greater’.’° In fact, the death rate for New South Wales outside the metropolis was considerably below the colonial average, as table 3.1 indicates. Annual death rates were also published for other European cities, and

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NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 97

although Sydney was usually low on these lists, the death rate was notable for its similarity to many British cities, and in some years it exceeded that of cities like London and Birmingham. ‘© Somewhat surprisingly, Coghlan found this comparison ‘satisfactory’. Intuitively, Sydney’s death rate might be expected to be considerably lower than that of British cities, given the

high proportion of migrants who settled in the metropolis, thereby swelling the ranks of the age cohorts least exposed to the risk of death. In the absence of a detailed analysis of the age structure of each population, however, the usefulness of crude death figures is limited, and it would not do to give much credence to them, especially as Coghlan did not specify

what areas he included in each city population. Table 3.1 Crude death rates, NSW, 1871-90

city 22.22 suburbs 18.12 metropolis 20.21

deaths per 1000 of population

country districts | 3.00 NSW total 15.14 Source: T.A. Coghlan, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales 1890-91, p. 815

A more reliable indicator of the healthfulness of Sydney’s population lies in its infant mortality figures. This measure avoids the problem of variables in the death rate which may have arisen from demographic differences between populations. ”’ It also limits discussion to a population sample whose experience had been virtually wholly Australian, while the causes of the overall death rate would have been affected by conditions in the country of origin of immigrants. A few of Sydney’s infants would have been immigrants and some would have migrated from the rural parts of the colony, but in general families are least mobile when children are young. Infant mortality rates for New South Wales compared favourably with Britain, but the New South Wales total concealed enormous discrepancies between Sydney and the rest of the colony, as table 3.2 shows. Table 3.2 Infant mortality rates, NSW, 1871-90

city 117.6 suburbs 164.6 metropolis 153.2

deaths per 1000 of children under one year

country districts 92.0 NSW total 114.1 Source: T.A. Coghlan, Wealth and Progress of New South Wales 1890-91, p. 822

98 LIVING

For the closing years of this period Coghlan also published infant mortality figures for London, recording that in the decade 1881—91, when

England’s rate was 142.00 per 1000 and New South Wales was a low 119.64 per 1000, the rate for London was 151.10, while Sydney’s was a high 166.11. Once again, in view of the fact that the statistical boundaries of London were not given, any close consideration of these figures

would not be wise. In any case, London had a somewhat lower infant mortality rate than some other British cities. Nevertheless, these were the figures that were before the notice of the colonial public, and the general trend of these figures, and the enormous gap between the infant mortality of Sydney and the rest of New South Wales, was indisputable. Coghlan, putting the best interpretation on things declared: The general salubrity of the Colony may be taken to be well established, and if the

deaths of Sydney and suburbs, especially amongst young children, were not relatively more numerous than for the rest of the colony, New South Wales need

not fear comparison with any country. But to ignore Sydney’s condition was to ignore one-third of the colony’s

population, and it might be argued that the comparison with other countries was fearful indeed. The age structure of Sydney’s population favoured a low death rate, while it was commonly held that the colonies were superior to Britain in matters of environment and personal wealth — both necessary to maintaining good health. Any number of visitors to the colonies reported that Sydney was no Birmingham, choked with industrial

pollution, nor London with its foul weather, extensive slums and overcrowding. The official vital statistics told another story. Coghlan variously described Sydney’s high infant mortality rate as ‘a pathetic commentary on our civilization’ and more specifically ‘a pathetic

commentary on the absence of sanitary precautions’.’” The overriding importance of poor provision of clean water and adequate sewerage and drainage is supported both by the causes of death in the metropolis and the

geographical distribution of death throughout the twenty-year period. Diseases of the gut, such as typhoid, enteritis and ill-defined diarrhoea, figured prominently in annual lists of the causes of death, as did consumptive and wasting diseases. In contrast, many deaths outside the metropolitan area arose from accidents such as fractures or poisoning, encouraged by isolation and scarce medical services. For instance, of the 972 deaths by

accident in 1890, only 214 occurred in Sydney. Not only was the urban death rate higher than the rural, but more of those deaths were caused through sickness and disease. Table 3.3, which records the death rate at five-year intervals, emphasizes

the divergence between city and country. The gap between the city and the suburbs is wide in the 1870s, with the city exhibiting a much higher death rate. Part of the explanation could be that the city contained more old people than the newly formed suburbs, but this does not get over the fact that deaths of young children were also more numerous in the city. It

NUISANCES, NOXIOUS AND NASTY 99

might be suggested that the city housed the poorer citizens of the metropolis, who were less healthy. Unwanted children were more likely to be born in the city (for instance at the Benevolent Asylum) and were more likely to die at birth, through inadequate care or intent. All of this was possibly true. However none of these possibilities explains the reversal of the 1880s, when deaths of children under five in the suburbs exceeded those of the city and in fact reached a higher proportion than the city ever

experienced. Actual infant mortality was higher in the city than the suburbs in all years to 1890, except 1876, when the rate was almost the same for both. This superiority of the suburbs was not maintained throughout the infant years, it seems. During the 1880s the death rates of young children in the city fell substantially. In part the suburbs’ higher death rate was due to an overall higher birth rate, but this had been the case throughout the twenty years, not just in the 1880s. Table 3.3 Crude death rates, NSW, city, suburbs and country districts (per 1000), 1871-90

Metropolis Country NSW

City Suburbs Total Under 5 years

1871-75 75.45 56.35 66.28 30.55 39.78 1876-80 80.52 74.43 TIAS 35.80 46.36 881-85 6/.// 77.20 73.35 35.99 46.63 |886—90 56.45 80.95 58.12 31.68 40.04

Over 5 years

I871—75 [5.94 8.87 [2.72 9.25 10.2 | 1876-80 16.82 8.97 12.82 9.86 10.73 1881-85 14.76 10.80 12.56 9.50 | 1.40 |886—90 11.66 10.5 10.93 8.49 9.27 Total 1871-75 24.69 16.46 20.9 | \2.77 14.99 |876—80 25.4 | 17.63 21.46 13.96 16.10 1881-85 21.49 20.2 | 20.77 13.46 15.70 |886—90 17.36 18.26 17.94 11.82 | 3.80 1871-90 22.22 18.12 20.2 | | 3.00 15.14

Source: T.A. Coghlan, Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, 1890-91, p. 818

The reasons for this trend are not immediately obvious. Perhaps middle-

class suburban women were weaning children earlier than in the city. Certainly there was concern over early weaning, and medical men advised

against doing it in summer. Probably though, it was more a result of external factors. At the beginning of the 1870s the suburbs were far from built out, and in comparison with the city, had a reputation for sanitary living. Over the next twenty years the closer settlement which occurred without provision of adequate public utilities or sanitary regulations led to

100 LIVING

a deteriorating environment and the attendant worsening of public health. The publication of these suburban death rate figures made a deep impression on many people, like Francis Myer, who observed statistics tell us that we are healthier in the very heart of the city than on the heights of those beautiful suburbs, the end of whose ill-health has not yet been recorded. But what can they do to be saved? What remedies have one against typhoid, which may increase tenfold? What against cholera, which may any day intrude? ... The very essentials of a true civilization [i.e. sewerage] have been forgotten in the foundations of these places.°°

In the suburbs, cesspits and local dairies continued to flourish, while in the city, sewerage became general and milk was more often supplied from country sources.®! Further, in the city, slowed growth rates meant that

such environmental improvements as occurred were not immediately eroded by additional population pressure. Table 3.3 suggests that the overall death rate was falling by the end of the period; but this trend was general for New South Wales. It cannot therefore be linked to factors internal to Sydney. In the years following 1890 the metropolitan figures improved, as did the water and sewerage facilities, once the Nepean water supply and the Bondi and southern sewer outfalls were taking effect, while rural figures remained unchanged.

Asa Briggs has argued that Britain’s stable death rate throughout the second half of the nineteenth century should be seen as a victory for ‘the sanitary idea’ of the noisy public health period of the 1840s and 1850s.°7 The same cannot be said for Sydney. Sydney was not an old city, with

centuries of bad planning and a large stock of ancient buildings to ageravate the problems of growth in the second half of the century. Nor

was the growth rate as uneven so as rapid as that of the neighbouring colonial city of Melbourne. The city’s rulers had access to the vast quantity of evidence of British public health enquiries of earlier decades. They also had access to large amounts of British capital which could have been used to alleviate the situation. It is not convincing to argue that the state of knowledge or the technological or financial wherewithal to have provided a more healthy environment for Sydney’s inhabitants was not available. It might be argued that governments only act on issues such as

these when they assume importance through public pressure. Yet the statistics just discussed were published annually, and there was any amount of public concern expressed at the state of affairs to which they testified. It

might then be argued that no amount of pressure was likely to move the inept New South Wales legislature to action. In any case, the mechanisms by which change is effected or retarded do not alter the fact that Sydney’s environment in the 1870s and 1880s was no healthier than that of many of

the older British cities from which many of Sydney’s citizens had emigrated in search of a better life.

Part li

WORKING

i £ «

a

: 4 ,

Chapter 4

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY Those who are industrious and careful in a very few years rise to be masters and employers of labour ... Every man has it in his power to earn a comfortable living; and if after he has been some time in the colonies, the working man does not become one of the capitalists his organs inveigh against, he has only himself to blame.' I do not want to tempt any poor man to go out to Sydney thinking to make his fortune there, for candidly, I don’t think he will, any more than he might in London.”

The notion that colonial life offered a sure method of social levitation for the hard-working immigrant, and inevitable material well-being for the native-born son, unless he was unremittingly indolent, was widely held throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. There were, how-

ever, more cautious assessments. Trollope, for instance, distinguished between the good chances of manual workers and the lesser chances for white-collar men, and Twopeny argued a careful line when he claimed that ‘the great tendency of Australian life is democratic, i.e. levelling ... The small tradesmen’s sons are going into professions, and the professional

men’s sons into trades.’? But, then it was only a few pages further on in Town Life in Australia that Twopeny made the statement at the opening of

this chapter concerning workers becoming capitalists. And that was always the tendency, to eschew caution and to eulogize the potential for social mobility. The idea that upward mobility was almost inevitable, and that ‘nowhere could a man rise in life so surely or so speedily as in these colonies’ ,* informed not only manuals for intending immigrants, for whom

it functioned as propaganda, but locally produced newspapers, parliamentary debates and building society prospectuses. At the end of the 1880s, with a major depression just around the corner, and real choices closing in, the centenary celebrations emphasized that mobility was still on the agenda. Numerous publications like W.F. Morrison’s Aldine Centennial History of New South Wales and Digby’s Australian Men of Mark

commemorated the colony’s centenary by recording innumerable individual success stories. Colonial achievement and upward social mobility were

assumed to be synonymous. (Women were not often mentioned in the 103

104 WORKING

context of mobility or of colonial success. It was taken as given that their

fortunes rose along with, and through attachment to, their menfolk.) Most social and labour historians have accepted the idea of social mobility as part of the conventional wisdom concerning late nineteenthcentury Australia. Robin Gollan assumes it is part of the labour situation, where manufacturers were ‘often enough artisans who had set up on their own account’, and where ‘the professional classes differed perhaps from

similar classes in older countries in that they included more who had seized the opportunities offered by colonial society to raise their social status above that of their parents.’? More recent studies have sometimes acknowledged that assumptions of easy upward mobility are problematic,

and in need of reassessment, especially by the 1880s.° However, the concept of mobility is still heavily enough entrenched for the consequences of it for Australian society to be in dispute. Traditionally, labour

historians like Fitzpatrick and Ian Turner have argued that upward mobility gave rise to manliness, personal pride and an end to the cringing, tug-of-the-forelock, working-class attitudes of Britain. In this scenario, it

is linked to the growth of the Labor Party and the spread of socialism. Humphrey McQueen directly attacked these historians on their own

grounds, claiming that ‘by revealing the contours of the economic, political and social forces operating within Australia, [he] showed how

these open and prosperous circumstances contributed to the ... ideological integration of the workforce into the consensus of capitalism.”

In other words, he suggests that Australians have been unremittingly bourgeois and that the feeling of independence which derived from their

upward mobility did not lead, as Russel Ward claims, to ‘mateship’ (strictly for men only) and the growth of socialist ideas, but to individual

self-assertion. McQueen argues for the Australian experience what is frequently asserted for the American experience — that class consciousness failed to develop because of upward and outward mobility. Frederick Turner’s famed ‘frontier thesis’, which argued that unlimited new land

associated with westward expansion dissipated social discontent and muted class consciousness, has been criticized as inadequate in that it attributed to the American frontier effects that derive from mobility in general, including social mobility. It was not merely the physical frontier that acted as a safety valve for frustrated workers, but the occupational frontier as well.® For Australia, the experiences of convicts who made good, gold which made poor men rich overnight and acres of untilled land which could potentially support a yeomanry, all helped to place labour aspirations firmly within the framework of capitalism. For the period of the

1870s and 1880s it is supposedly the boom conditions that permitted mobility to continue. None of this work, whatever its conclusion, has questioned the basic premise of easy upward mobility, nor set out to test its validity.

No one would dispute that examples can be found of many men, and occasionally women, who began life humbly, and rose to prominence in

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY {05

Sydney. Top of the list must come Sir Henry Parkes, oftentimes premier of

New South Wales, sometime newspaper proprietor, ivory turner and common labourer. It must have been a moving occasion for Sir Henry when in 1882 he visited Stoneleigh, in Warwickshire, and was invited by Lord Leigh to address the villagers, for Stoneleigh was the place of his birth, where his father had been a tenant farmer on the Stoneleigh Abbey estate.” Leaving the railway station to the accompaniment of a drum and pipe band playing ‘Warwickshire Lads and Lasses’, he must have been deeply aware of the reality of social mobility, for his own had been most spectacular, and no doubt informed his intolerance of social legislation pertaining to public health, building codes, factory legislation and other such abominations which cut across the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Lining up behind Sir Henry were hundreds of others, more or less spectacular, like John Booth, who had originally edged his way into the coastal trade by buying a boat on time payment, and by 1870 owned large sawmills and joinery works at Balmain, as well as country timber depots, and was shortly to enter parliament;!° Francis Wright, who had. spent his early life variously at sea, labouring in Sydney and following the goldrushes, eventually settled down into a carrying business which prospered

and spread, until Wright, Heaton and Company had branches in every major colonial town in New South Wales;'’ John Robertson, who set up in a small way as a coach-builder in 1845, employed about 100 men by 1878'* and Thomas Richards, who was apprenticed to the printing trade at about the same time, became Government Printer, on a salary of £600 a

year by 1870.'? The list of upwardly mobile citizens, or at least male citizens, is long, but it would need to be very long indeed before it could give validity to the claims of contemporaries that upward mobility was an option open to the majority of citizens. Against the success stories cited could be recorded the histories of others of Sydney’s inhabitants, like the sexton at Camperdown

cemetery, who held the position from 1848 until 1903, when he was succeeded in the job by his son — a solid example of occupational intergenerational stability if ever there was one.'* William Gillespie told the

commissioners of the Royal Commission on Strikes in 1891, ‘I am a labourer, at present labouring in the plastering trade; I have been in the colony forty-two years’, while George Garton gave the following information: I am a journeyman shoemaker. I am a member of the Boots Trade Union; . . . I was an employer of labour as a bootmaker for seven years, and I had over ninety Hands at work at one time. I had a factory, machinery and everything. | went out of the

trade in 1881. I have started boot manufacturing since then and failed again.’

It was the testimony of a small entrepreneur, trying to gain a foothold on the ladder of occupational success, and finding himself unsuccessful in an

industry which was becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer and larger capitalists. Then there was Mrs Bray’s father, name unknown, who

se eee 106 WORKING

was a jeweller in England, but after immigrating to Australia in 1883, worked as a fettler in Werris Creek. In 1887 the family moved to a tworoom cottage in Kogarah, and he subsequently worked on building the Sans Souci tramway, and in the railways at Redfern and at Hurstville. He

was killed in an accident on the lines in about 1895.!° As in every modern industrial society, the citizens of Sydney covered the whole spectrum from success to failure, but the direction in which the balance tipped is not easily established. On the surface, Australian cities in the boom years would appear to be fertile ground for upward mobility

and it is apparently beguilingly easy to take it as given. Lawson has claimed for Brisbane, for instance, that ‘because of continuing mass

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Upward mobility through urban expansion assumed (Bulletin, 27 Oct. 1883)

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 107

migration and economic boom Brisbane society remained fluid until the end of the eighties, and upward occupational mobility was common — many of the masters had themselves risen from the ranks’.'’ The assumption of a causal link between migration and economic boom on the one hand, and upward occupational mobility on the other, is often stated as a self-evident truth, although the connection is by no means necessary. The degree to which mobility is operative depends on a variety of factors. Most obviously, it is related to the shape of the economy, with some groups benefiting from new opportunities and others becoming the victims of rectracting opportunities. The actual extent of mobility, however, bears no simple relationship to structural changes in the economy, but responds

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108 WORKING

also to numerous other personal and social variables. These include the demographic factors of the age and sex structure of both the workforce and of the various social groups within the society, !® as well as the complexity

of social networks which earn some societies the reputation for fluidity while others appear closed. Further, in a society experiencing high rates of immigration there is considerable potential for a mismatching between the jobs available and the skills possessed by the workforce.

The intricate circumstances that give rise to mobility cannot be intuitively known, nor are they likely to affect all sectors of a society equally. Literary sources can be used legitimately to establish the prevalence of the concept of social fluidity, but any attempt to establish its reality must be based on a more rigorous methodology. In this chapter, [ study occupational mobility by ranking and analysing information on occupation gleaned from the marriage registers of 1870 and 1887. Before embarking on this though, it is necessary to confront the occupational data given in the New South Wales censuses. It is necessary for two reasons. In the first place, this information establishes the over-

all contours of the economy, and the extent of possible occupational mobility in any society is circumscribed by changes in the overall structure

of the workforce. The expansion or contraction of each industry group relative to the growth of the population gives some guide to the general dynamics of the occupational structure, and sets the limits within which mobility could have occurred. In the second place, familiarity with the way in which contemporary statisticians ranked occupations is one step in the direction of creating a useful ranking system for analysing the occupational data of the marriage registers. A more difficult, and also necessary way, of doing this is by studying the meaning of all occupations in terms of skills, wages, conditions, security and so on. It must be stressed that the status of any occupation is neither self-evident, nor static over time, and that to create categories or ranks which are somehow theoretically known, without studying the actual details of the jobs themselves may simply lead to neat tables of results that are historically misleading. Therefore, all of this work on occupational mobility should be read alongside the parts of the book which look at the detailed reality of actual jobs and workplaces in Sydney. The reader may have noticed that the focus has moved from a discussion of social mobility to one of occupations. The exclusive use of occupational

information to study mobility will not be without its critics, given that sociologists concerned with social stratification have produced a great deal

of research that emphasizes that occupation is only one variable among many used to ‘measure’ an extremely complex phenomenon — almost

infinitely complex, if it were possible to capture the intricate web of qualities and judgements that make up an individual’s status, as well as the more obvious indicators of wealth, education, and so on. Further it would be wrong to assume that the individuals’ assessment of their own social success would always be in individualistic terms. Often family and

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 109

community goals and achievements would be important, and mobility studies have been criticized for their bourgeois orientation of focusing on individual success, as if that ‘told all’ about the hopes and fears of real men

and women living real and complicated lives.!? Women more than men related to the issue of occupation (usually their husband’s) in a less direct way, and would be likely to view ‘success’ through a wider spectrum. The achievements or health or moral rectitude of their children, for instance, might be very important, and cannot easily be tied to occupation. Involvement in social institutions like the church, the mechanics’ institute and sporting organizations often enhanced an individual’s status in the eyes of

many others and often became a focus for people whose jobs were unrewarding or unvalued. Entry into local politics could be a way of attaining power far beyond that which occupation alone would have allowed, while too frequent entry into the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle or the Cricketers’ Arms could lead to a status far lower than occupation alone would have suggested.

Although all of this may be true, and may point the way to a more sensitive use of the historic records, in the end the question that historians must ask. is not how best may social mobility be measured, but given the elusiveness of the subject, and the paucity of the available source material, may they presume to measure it at all? In the case of Sydney, the destruction of census returns, the absence of personal income tax returns and the failure of lists such as electoral rolls to record useful information, severely limit the possibilities for analysis using this kind of information. In using occupational data though, I do argue that it is undoubtedly the best single indicator of status, and the variable that encompasses more completely the other variables.2° Quality of housing, property, the kind of neighbourhood lived in, and access to education are all tied to occupation in fairly obvious ways, and the criticism that occupational mobility is an excessively indivi-

dualistic measure may be countered by observing that there was overwhelming evidence that the economic success of the individual was a widespread expectation in colonial society, and a common method of shorthanding status. I will use the term ‘occupational mobility’, because that is what is being ‘measured’. The information can, however, expand our understanding of mobility, social fluidity and the implications of it all for class divisions and class consciousness, not as it stands alone, but in the

context of the rest of the study. Firstly, then, because the extent of possible occupational mobility in any society is circumscribed by changes in the overall structure of the workforce, the census material concerning ‘the occupations of the people’ must

be considered. A man who married in 1870 would have entered the workforce during the 1860s, or even the late 1850s, so the censuses from 1861 to 1891 must be examined. The task is easier said than done. There are enormous inconsistencies in the methods used to collect the data of these censuses, and most of the

110 WORKING

useful cross tabulations that might be hoped for, like occupation against age and against location, do not exist. In the 1881 census, which was destroyed in the Garden Palace fire before much of the analysis had been

done, there are no tables of metropolitan employment, and while the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1881 presented the occupational data under similar categories, the first two failed to adequately distinguish between ‘makers’ and ‘dealers’, thus making any clear division between industrial and commercial categories difficult, while the most satisfactory census, that of 1891, was compiled according to a classification ‘not based on any previous system’.”! Having said all that, and mourned the wastage of so much potentially exciting information, what can be gleaned from these records?

Figure 4.1 records the numbers employed in the occupational groups

from 1861 to 1881. The first census to record unemployment was in 1881, and at that stage it was not deemed possible that women could be

unemployed. Presumably, in previous years, the unemployed were recorded under the heading of the occupations they usually followed. There is no satisfactory method of comparing the figures of figure 4.1 with those for 1891. Some comparative figures were published, using the divisions adopted for the 1891 census, but the statistician pointed out that it was ‘a matter of considerable regret that no exact comparison can be

made between the occupations of the people in 1891 and at previous census periods’. The basic difference in the 1891 census was that it

attempted to group occupations on an industrial basis rather than according to type, so that, for example, the section headed ‘professional’ included the messenger boys at the law courts as well as the lawyers, the caretakers at the university as well as the professors. This is useful for some things but is entirely inappropriate to a study of occupational mobility. For whatever it may be worth, the 1891-style break down is set out in figure 4.2.

The most obvious thing about figure 4.1 is the extremely limited employment opportunities for women. They were totally excluded from many occupations, and being squeezed out of some in the 1860s, so that numbers employed had actually declined by 1871. This was particularly true in the rural industries, which were expanding more slowly than the colonial average, and declining for women, relating to considerable transference of farm management from women to men in the years following

the occupational upheaval of the gold-rushes. Overall, women were experiencing a contraction of work opportunities outside the home in the 1860s, with an increase in the numbers of children, and women labelled ‘dependent’. Greater numbers of children reflected the age structure rather | than that marriage rates were increasing. In fact, over the whole period 1861—91, the proportion of females who married was falling, and women were less married in cities than elsewhere, but nevertheless, compared

with Britain, Australian women were a very married lot.2* Domestic service was the only large employer of women, while the only expanding

AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 111 ae eee eee eee eeeOCCUPATIONS rea ener ence e erence

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112 WORKING

fields were teaching, related to the increasing proportion of children receiving tuition, and the public service, which was admitting women to its ranks by 1881. Neither of these was able to absorb more than a few women however. For men, employment in primary industry in the 1860s expanded only slowly, and the 1870s saw a continuation of this trend, with the numbers of men employed in grazing actually falling. The number of property owners increased more rapidly than the number of hired hands, suggesting Figure 4.2 Occupations of males and females, by industry groups, 1861-91

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OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 143

that new holdings were on average smaller, or at least were worked with fewer men. Mining declined in importance, rapidly in the 1860s and more slowly in the 1870s. Structurally, the reduced potential for alluvial gold fossicking, and the development of coal mining in the 1860s, and copper and tin in the 1870s, made the industry more capital intensive and greatly curtailed self-employment possibilities. These rural industries continued to be substantial employers of labour, but overall employed a declining

share of the workforce between 1861 and 1881. For men, the clergy, school teaching, the commercial ‘trade and commerce’, and the ill-defined ‘production and distribution of food’, all increased their share of the work-

force, but only the last two were numerically important. The division between skilled and unskilled in the census figures should be taken as no more than a rough guide to trends within the blue-collar group. Overall, male blue-collar workers (skilled, unskilled, domestic, seafaring and miscellaneous — which included transport workers) increased from 35 to 44 per cent, with the largest increase being in the ranks

of the unskilled (10 to 15 per cent). The most rapid increase was in the 1870s, when the unskilled and miscellaneous groups held first and second

place in terms of percentage increase. The growth of the miscellaneous group suggests an increasing inability of the census format to record adequately the occupations of a diversifying economy. Table 4.1 suggests that wood- and leather-based industries were declining, while metals, and to a lesser extent, stone and earth (largely building and brickmaking) expanded. Numerically, though, it was the wood-based group that was the largest employer of labour in both decades. The further breakdown of the census data for the skilled group into employing/self-employed and hired workmen/apprentices suggests that opportunities for self-employment were Table 4.1 Skilled occupations, numbers employed and proportions (%), NSW, 1861-81

Occupation Numbers Employed Occupation as a percentage of all skilled occupations

186] 187\| 188 | 1861 1871 188 |

superior | 129 [219 2587 5.0 4.2 5. |

metals 3097 4244 9 338 13.8 14.4 18.5 wood 5 550 6 267 10755 24.8 21.3 21.3 stone/earth 287 | 3601 7775 12.8 12.3 15.4 leather 3 502 5 188 6095 15.0 [7.7 12.0 other 2 305 3 492 6 400 10.3 11.9 12.6 females 3932 5 353 7 630 17.6 18.2 [5.1 (needlewomen)

Total 22 386 29 364 50 580 100.0 100.0 100.0 Sources: Calculated from NSW Census, |861, pp. 212-13; NSW Census, 1871, pp. 562—4; NSW Census, 1881, p. LXIX

114 WORKING

greater in the 1860s than in the following decade, although this probably indicates no more than the sluggish state of manufacturing prior to the 1870s. The rapid expansion after 1871 was associated with an increase in the percentage of wage workers as industry organized on a larger scale, with employed workers making up 88 per cent in 1861, 80 per cent in 1871 and 84 per cent in 1881. It was the wood-based industries which employed the highest proportion of wage earners, followed by the metal industry. The 1891 census figures in figure 4.2 suggest that women increased their

participation in the professional and industrial groups, but not markedly so. Overall, the proportion of women in the total workforce increased from 17.3 per cent in 1881 to 19 per cent in 1891. These figures underestimate female paid work insofar as partially employed women would

have returned themselves as dependent, and there is literary evidence which suggests a substantial increase in this work in the 1880s, especially in the rag trade. For men, the figures indicate that the steady growth of the

commercial sector observed for 1861—81 continued, and_ probably accelerated during the 1880s, as did the professional group, which included parts of the civil service. The rapid expansion of the skilled and

unskilled during the 1870s was not maintained in the 1880s, with Coghlan’s industrial sector, which contained the majority of these, declining from 24 per cent in 1881 to 20 per cent in 1891. However, this indicates the effects of the depression at the time of the census, rather

than a trend over the decade. In 1891, almost 5 per cent of the male workforce returned themselves as unemployed, but the percentage of unemployed labourers was 19 per cent, and of skilled groups engaged in the building trade, well in’ excess of 10 per cent.”? If the focus is turned to the occupational structure of Sydney’s work-

force, even less can be said with certainty. No Sydney figures were published for 1881, and the 1891 information is not comparable with that of other censuses. Tables for 1861 and 1871 give similar information as

that contained in figure 4.1. These indicate that relative to the whole colony, Sydney, predictably, employed disproportionately more people in commercial pursuits, as well as in the professions and the civil service. The leather trades were expanding more rapidly than other skilled areas, while both leather- and wood-based industries offered some scope for small men

to set up as masters. By 1891 Sydney, with one-third of the colony’s population, contained about half the professional workers, and well over half those in commercial pursuits, while those in domestic and industrial jobs were more evenly distributed. This discussion has done little more than to illustrate the paucity of the official figures of employment for New South Wales, and in particular for Sydney, in the period 1861-91, for although general trends are discernible, nothing approximating a detailed consideration of Sydney’s occupational structure is possible using census material. However, although the actual categories of the census of 1891 bear no

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY tt5

, ; 24 ; ;

relationship to a status ranking system, the published material lists in great detail occupations as they were returned in the original census returns, for

both the colony and the metropolis. It was, therefore, possible to reallocate all metropolitan occupations for men using the same ranking system as was used to allocate the occupations recorded in the Sydney marriage registers.“’ This resulted in substantial changes to Coghlan’s figures. For example, his ‘Primary Producers’ class, of over 8000 workers,

was reduced to 3000, with the rest being reallocated to horticulture,

clerical (government clerks working for the Department of Agriculture), semi-skilled labourers (domestic gardeners) and so on. The reallocated census figures then recorded the occupational distribution for the whole metropolis, while the marriage register figures gave the distribution for a sample of young men with an average age of twenty-six years. Discrepancies between the two results are indications that particular sectors of the workforce were expanding or contracting. A young workforce in any

sector was taken to be indicative of expanding opportunity, with easy entry. Conversely, areas where the percentage of young men employed was lower than the percentage of total population so employed indicate contracting opportunity and difficult entry. This exercise was not repeated for women — it would make no sense to do so, as marriage was the primary

occupation, and all paid jobs for women went disproportionately to the young. Given that the marriage register sample was small and that the 1891 census coincided with the onset of depression, the statistics recorded in table 4.2 can be merely suggestive. Allowing for the higher percentage of the marriage register sample in non-metropolitan occupations, it would appear from table 4.2 that entry into the professions and the higher echelons of the commercial world was easy, although entry into clerical occupations was not so. Skilled and Table 4.2 Males employed (numbers and proportions (%)) in various jobs, Sydney, 1887 and 1891

Category 1891 Census 1887 Marriage registers

numbers % numbers %

Professions 1718 1.4 28 3.0 Semi-professional 5 128 4.3 42 4.4

Commercial | 3 234 2./ 88 9.3 Commercial 2 25 /65 21.6 189 20.0 Clerical [2913 10.8 43 45 Skilled 34 389 29.010.3 2288624.1 Semi-skilled |2 247 9. | Unskilled 19937 16.7 93 9.8 Rural 3072 3.2 [53 [5.8 Source: Calculated from NSW Census, 1891, pp. 664—99, and marriage registers used on this study

116 WORKING

semi-skilled occupations exhibited similar proportions in both groups, while the number of young men engaged in unskilled work was proportionately lower than in the total male population. These results are consistent with the findings described earlier, and with the profile of an urban economy undergoing no radical changes, but with a strengthening and increasingly sophisticated commercial sector. In addition, the contraction of unskilled job opportunities suggests a qualitative growth of industrial activity. Sydney, in 1891, was a large city by any standards. Its important trading and administrative functions were increasingly supplemented by industrial growth to meet the needs of its own citizens and the

population of its large hinterland. Although country towns as a group expanded more rapidly than Sydney in some years during the period, their populations were small, and they all remained country towns. This was partly due to Sydney’s geographical position, partly to the timing of its

development and partly due to policy decisions. Sydney’s sheer size, coupled with its rapid growth, ensured that its economy became ever more varied and the types of jobs available to the workforce more numerous and complex. It would be tempting to assume that such an economy offered ample

opportunity for occupational mobility, with entry into white-collar occupations relatively open. However, it must again be stressed that the factors permitting mobility are complex. The only case in which a qualitative growth in an economy would automatically lead to upward mobility would be in a closed system, where the workforce replaced itself through reproduction, and no external people entered the system. Clearly such a scenario bears little resemblance to a nineteenth-century city like Sydney. City populations are in a continuous state of flux, and those entering the

workforce at any particular time are only in part the children of past workforces and social groups of that city. The direction of occupational mobility at the personal level may bear little relationship to the general

trends within a city’s economy. This was especially the case with a colonial city such as Sydney, where the ebb and flow of native-born citizens within the workforce was supplemented by a large percentage of

immigrants, coming from areas which themselves varied in terms of occupational structure.

The actual extent of mobility occurring in Sydney, as distinct from possible mobility inherent in structural changes in the economy, may be determined only by studying the careers of a large number of people — in this study it was marriage registers that provided the information. In January 1887, Elizabeth Turner went to the manse of the Devonshire Street Congregational Church, almost certainly on foot and probably in the evening, to be married to Walter Wink, a bricklayer. He had been born in England, where his father too was a bricklayer, and she was born in rural New South Wales, the daughter of a blacksmith. At the time of her marriage she was working as a domestic servant, and like her husband, was twenty-three years old. Recording this information in the marriage

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 117

register was probably not the most important aspect of that day for Elizabeth and Walter, but for a study of occupational mobility, it is invaluable. Tables 4.3—4.9(iii) are based on information extracted from the registers of about eighty Sydney churches for the years 1870 and 1887 — that is, at the beginning and end of the urban boom years preceding the 1890s crash. Details were gathered for 759 marriages in 1870 and for 1608 marriages in 1887 — about 55 per cent and 45 per cent of all Sydney marriages for those years, respectively. As well as permitting cross tabula-

tions of variables like birthplace, age, residence and occupation, the registers allow a study of intergenerational mobility as they record the occupations of the fathers.

It should be clear that for every marriage recorded, there are two marriages — his and hers. For most women marriage and occupation were not separate phenomena whereas occupation for men was an extra-marital dimension to their lives. The husband’s occupation was important to the wife, because his paypacket, his working hours and his social status helped to construct the contours of her marriage, and that marriage was her job. If Elizabeth Wink, née Turner, gave up domestic service after her marriage, and kept house and raised children for Walter, as well she may have done,

it might have been said that she no longer worked, but that would have been far from the reality. Partly to stress the argument that marriage was work for women, and partly so as not to burden the reader with too many tables, the discussion of women’s mobility is not included here but in the chapter on marriage.

In the tables,?? the ranking of occupations is comparable to that of chapter one. Rank 1 includes all professionals, semi-professionals (accountants, architects, teachers, etc.) those with substantial commercial interests (bankers, managers, manufacturers) and ‘gentlemen’. Rank 2

contains petty bourgeois occupations (shopkeepers, publicans, building contractors) and clerical pursuits (civil servants, clerks, shop assistants). It

also includes a few non-white-collar jobs requiring the possession of property, viz. market gardeners. Rank 3 is all skilled workers and rank 4 covers semi-skilled and unskilled occupations — factory workers, manual labourers, transport workers (not owners), domestics and caretakers. No

ranking system can ever be entirely satisfactory, especially when the information it is based on is as brief as that recorded in the marriage registers, and for this reason the use of anything but very broad rank categories would be misguided. The final category in the tables, rank 5, is not a rank in the true sense,

but includes all non-urban pursuits. Because the sample was of urban marriages, the majority of persons having rank 5 occupations were fathers

rather than sons. Although the original coding system allowed for a ranking of rural occupations, with divisions for owners, farm labourers and so on, the majority of marriage register entries simply recorded the occupa-

tion of ‘farmer’. This occupation could not be assigned a valid rank position, especially as it included men of diverse national backgrounds.

118 WORKING

The Australian squatter and the selector had little in common, in terms of status, and neither would have identified with the Irish tenant farmer. On

the other hand, to have eliminated them from the samples would have removed the possibility of considering the occupational fate of one very

interesting section of Sydney’s workforce, the first-generation urban dwellers. Therefore, non-urban occupations are included but the meaning of moves out of this category must be considered carefully. It is inevitable that, in these samples, the number of first-generation urban dwellers exceed the number whose fathers were in the non-urban category as there is no way of knowing whether a shopkeeper, for instance, lived in a town or not. However, in terms of occupational status ranking,

this procedure was consistent. Market gardeners, dairy workers, nurserymen and similar occupations often considered rural (viz. in the New South Wales census) were considered to be urban occupations in this study. Not only did these workers produce entirely for the city market, but in an era when transport of their goods was slow, they frequently located on urban land. Sands’s Sydney Directory for 1890 recorded as many as 362 dairies in the metropolitan area, 21 within the boundaries of the city proper. Other superficially rural land uses like the stabling of horses for omnibus companies and businesses were also common features of urban land use patterns. The vast majority of the men and women represented in these tables had been in the workforce for a substantial number of years. Most men of twenty-seven, the average age of first marriages in the 1870 sample, would have had well in excess of ten years working life behind them, and the samples can therefore be considered as those of a youthful, yet mature workforce. One of the criticisms levelled at sociologists who use occupational data from marriage registers is that the timing of marriage frequently coincides with the beginning of a career and the occupation recorded will often not be of as high a status as the one in which the individual could

expect to finish his career. This criticism is not as germane in the nineteenth century, where for most people schooling finished early and marriage occurred late. Some white-collar jobs, especially the professions, are possibly exceptions to this, and the youthfulness of the sample would

obscure some anticipated social climbing. This is discussed where relevant. It must also be emphasized that, because individuals tend to marry at similar ages, the samples are not of a random selection of members of the

community, but of individuals who would have entered the workforce within a definable time span, and under roughly similar conditions. The majority of those in the 1870 sample would have begun working during the late 1850s and early 1860s, those in the 1887 sample in the late 1870s and

early 1880s. Table 4.3, which records the distribution of ages in both samples, indicates, not unexpectedly, that most marriages occurred between the ages of twenty and thirty, and most of the calculations in this

OCCUPATIONS AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 119

1870 1887 Male Female Male Female

Table 4.3 Age at marriage, males and females, 1870 and 18877°

Under 20 6 64 [2 195 20-29 346 400 915 123 948 30-39 | 23 49 299 40 & over 39 9 88 38 Total 514 532 1314 | 304 Note: Table calculated from marriage register records where age was specifully noted (hence the discrepancy between male and female totals)

chapter have excluded everyone over the age of thirty-five in order to maintain a consistent sample. Mention must be made of the fact that the size of the sample, relative to the total population, also varies. Where the total population is the marrying population of 1870 or 1887, the sample size is about 50 per cent. (This would apply, for example, to a question such as ‘what percentage of English born married Australians?’). On the other hand, where the marriage data is used as a sample of the total population of marrying age, the sample size dwindles to about 2.7 per cent of the population between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and even if all marriages which occurred had been studied, it would still have been only about a 5 per cent sample. In such cases, it is expedient to perform statistical tests before inferences concerning the whole population can be made from the results obtained for the samples. It should be borne in mind that this discussion

relates only to the findings of the samples, and not necessarily to the population of marrying age. 7’

Finally, the term ‘immigrant’ is applied to everyone born outside Australia and New Zealand, regardless of the age at which they emigrated. Although this is the correct technical use of the term, it was not so used colloquially. An immigrant was usually a newly arrived migrant, a new chum. As the form of the marriage register did not require the parties to

state how long they had lived in the colonies, there is no way of segregating new chums from other immigrants. Common sense suggests that very few immigrants would have entered into marriage immediately on arriving in the colony, and the majority of the men in the immigrant sections of the tables would have been resident in the colonies for some time. This is all to the good, from the point of view of testing the validity of statements such as those of Twopeny, who claimed that inequalities derived from one’s personal background in the Old World were soon eradicated in democratic, socially fluid Australia. Table 4.4 indicates the distribution of the sample to the various occupa-

tional ranks, with respect to birthplace. The table suggests that the inequalities in status of different national groups did indeed exist, and

120 WORKING

Table 4.4.1 Birthplace relative to occupation of males PR eee Me mea?TS. Od Steed . . va ‘> *we "a .wie zl ¥ ~ws! | eg. Of

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_— oa re | Wie Metal workers, Atlas Engineering

1588 WORKING

the colonial factories generated. ”° In 1881, H.]. Windon, the secretary of

the ASE told a select committee on immigration, that there were in Sydney about 600 engineers, 200—230 boilermakers, 130 moulders and 70—100 patternmakers, as well as an unknown number of blacksmiths. The Statistical Register figure of upwards of 4000 in the metal industry

meant that the majority were semi-skilled strikers, labourers and apprentices.” In Windon’s view, there were only a few engineers unemployed in 1881, but there were many doing less skilled work.© Looking for work outside Sydney virtually meant going to Melbourne or Adelaide, and the considerable mobility of metal workers between these urban centres indicates a real shortage of employment.°! However, lack of skilled work was not the most obvious problem with the metal industries. More important was the recurring unemployment which beset the industry, as the small, isolated market generated uneven work. There were depressions in 1870—71, 1879—80 and in 1886—87. Following advice of its colonial members, the London executive of the ASE refused to issue travelling cards to members at the end of 1876, the year that the old established firm of P.N. Russell closed down suddenly throwing about 600 men out of work. The following year the Colonial Secretary advised the Agent-General to reduce the number of engineers emigrating ‘as there is not any prospect of employment, for engineers or moulders, or in fact for any workers in any branch of the iron trade’.®” The depression of 1886 was particularly severe, with several of the largest firms cutting back employment by more than 50 per cent. Mort’s, for instance, employed 1000 men in 1885, and 400 in 1886, while the Atlas Engineering Company went from over 350 to 200 in the same year,°? and many small ventures failed completely. When Thomas Dobeson left England in 1883, he had nine years of work experience behind him, six of them with one firm in Leeds as a millwright, and ‘incidentally, patternmaking’. He worked briefly for Hoskin Brothers, and then for Chapman’s, ‘leaving on account of slackness of work’. His unpublished ‘narrative’, which opens with ‘our work is like unto the grass

it withereth away and we have to go elsewhere to look for more’, was begun in 1887. It is a tale of a constant search for work in Sydney. His usual ‘tramp’ was about 18 miles a day, and jobs, when they were available,

usually lasted a matter of days or weeks. But the interesting thing about

Dobeson is that he sought employment in the construction industry, apparently discarding entirely his own trade. Compared to his steady work life in England, Sydney must have been a shock. ‘I am getting thoroughly disheartened’, he observed at one stage. ‘I am willing to take this country

for better for worse but it is all worse.’ And echoing the emigration handbooks he no doubt read in England, he ruefully commented that ‘you say we are in a splendid country and we have a beautiful harbour. Thats so but we cant eat harbours.’®* Contemporary literature is replete with references to the engineers’ high degree of organization and excellent rates of pay. The metal trades were

THE DAILY GRIND 159

often held up as an example of how excellent life could be for workers in

Australia, and on occasions it was claimed that their high wages and strident approach to industrial relations actually curtailed expansion in the industry. This line was argued by some employers, by the Sydney Morning Herald, and more recently by G.J.R. Linge. His case revolves around the point that companies like Mort’s, Vale and Lacey, and the Atlas Engineering Company were several times unable to fulfil their contracts to supply locomotives to the railways because of industrial unrest, although even on

his own evidence, problems with government contracts would seem to have been generated by a more complex set of variables. In particular, the unevenness of government offers of contracts led to large fluctuations in the demand for labour and made it difficult for employers to keep shops

tooled up for this work. Further, many of the parts were imported, and considerable problems were experienced in receiving orders promptly from Britain, especially where British firms were unhappy about tenders having been let to colonial firms at non-competitive prices. Having outlined these complexities, Linge nevertheless concludes that wages and the eight-hour

issue were vital in the industry’s inability to fulfil the contracts.°° On the other hand, Buckley has suggested that high wages were not a real issue, as he found little evidence that employers were trying to offset wage costs by increasing mechanization, which did occur, but only at a steady, expected pace. The boilermaker Johnson suggested to the commissions investigating strikes in 1891 that eight hours at rivetting with modern equipment was as much labour as ten hours had been previously, and ‘equally as profitable’, but the more general defence of the alleged high

wages was in terms of instability within the industry. Top rates were not always paid, but they were necessary according to John Talbot of the Trades and Labour Council, because ‘even in the best of times there has always been a few unemployed’. The tale of uneven work could be repeated for many industries. Flour milling tended to be seasonal, although towards the end of the 1880s the

importation of Canadian wheat evened out production.°’ The close structural links with Virginian production in the tobacco industry meant that output of the Sydney factories was erratic, as American prices and

New South Wales tariff rates continually altered the balance of profitability. In 1876 a threatened reduction in the difference of duty paid

on importing raw and manufactured tobacco resulted in protests not merely from citizens who hoped that ‘the principal solace of the labouring classes’ would not be more heavily taxed, but from tobacco workers ‘who have already spent and are now spending the most precious years of their lives in learning an honourable and useful business [and] would by such an act have their prospects blasted’.°° Aside from this ongoing uncertainty over levels of production, and hence employment, it was normal for work to be uneven, with a slack period of about three months in the year. In the furniture trade, occasional shiploads of American or British furniture were dumped on to the limited and already precarious Sydney market, and sold

160 WORKING

without a reserve price, causing the unexpected temporary closure of workshops.

Only in rare instances could an industry manufacture steadily, and the flow-on from this, in terms of workers’ conditions, was marked. Coachbuilding, for instance, had suffered from the importation of ‘job’ carriages

in the early 1860s, and from time to time American imports were ‘slaughtered’ at auction, but as early as 1866 it was claimed that two-thirds

of the local trade was in the hands of local manufacturers, and by 1870 only very high-class carriages were imported. Even this snob trade was

giving way to local production, and when Fitzgerald and Collins, of Castlereagh Street, manufactured a dray for the governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, in 1873, there seemed little excuse for anyone else to prefer the imported article.©’ Protected by distance, and by unique local conditions which made imported products unsatisfactory, the industry grew steadily at

least until 1886, when it levelled off until 1892. This growth occurred despite the increase of import duties on many articles used in the trade while carriages themselves went untaxed. ’° Buoyancy was reflected in the new showrooms several of the city factories built in the 1870s, as well as in the smaller workshops which began to dot the suburbs, especially those of

the rich. Work varied from rough structures like wagons for the railways, to ornamental status symbols for the wealthy. As the boom period wound down, this end of the trade became less viable, but nevertheless, for most of the years of this study there was as much scope for traditional craftsmanship as there would have been in a comparable British city, and in this, the industry differed from most others. Coach-builders were well paid, and the industry had a reputation.for employing some of the best workers in the city. Builders, painters and trimmers, all skilled workers, were recruited through apprenticeship, in distinct contrast to so many other industries where apprenticeship was dead or dying. Joinery machinery adapted to coach-building was well developed by the 1890s, but was never widely used in Sydney’s factories, and standardization was never achieved. The industry was on the wane before the industrial revolution reached it, and its craftsmen remained highly skilled throughout the nineteenth century. It was not so with most workers in manufacturing.

Compared with Britain or America, even the largest of Sydney’s factories were probably technologically backward in these years, but this is not as significant as the fact that, compared with what had gone before,

changes in the years following 1870 were rapid. The alienation of the worker which stemmed from erosion of independence and skills, associated with the ‘industrial revolution’ tended to be concentrated into a few

decades after 1860 in Sydney. The isolation of this urban place meant employment was uncertain in many industries, while in other areas, the very buoyancy of the economy resulted in deskilling through the practice of employing ‘improvers’.. For many, making second-grade articles de-

tracted from job satisfaction, and it was in these decades that trade

J. BOOTH AND CO... ~aPTMIBER:}IERCAANIS< RT PW DRI DCD AVY fe =~

Balmain Steam Saw Mills and Joinery Works,

a EE

Head Ofiice - - - BALMAIN, Town Depot - - MARKET WHARF.

SYDNEY.

! Pe «eeees oe a»: _ cae a” bos on “4 RE OD geet ~ a a TB ee, aes rae ae —~ a ry ee pi Cirasia “gatas }

a||||\‘

.Tee a! . = ae aN _4a re , , onde _ NA Yy ! ‘ aa: %a 7 | SRO 1859

N.B.--Every description of Timber, Doors, Sashes, Architraves and Mouldings, Galvanized Corrugated Iron, Turnery, &c., &c., always on heme.

Goods Delivered to all parts of Harbour by Water.

This 1880 advertisement illustrates both the importance of Sydney's waterways and the role of the large timber factory in removing skilled work from the building site

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cm pele te —CC we OULU eeee: OO —o—=ee ee eee ee—, x. eaa. A omegl See er eT ae me ge a eg te ee em ~ . Te ee eee ~ more orrenens “wey ~~ ee - ‘ 7 ” wt cee

: ae . ;»: .eg °on egWR 4 we > «| a ere Fo, ae ke ~. +; ,. ., -° a. . Eee rd ~* SEES owe LS an" a1?PSS, ve. «arin sas Hi Ee 4 si i Neat ae . < ee ad ‘ee we - Se RM the i ils 4a = a2 =, 4 ee Ja 7 : wo ort xe fas

; mI oe a tal. :

wSB oe hie appawe 2- {. {4tb! ?g?|aie Bn %,, Pa . ‘oe =2 a%| .pide 4 ' t { i : “Meee e| .+aan g gee teen rere

i ‘. + Bed te 5 ; es ae On tt le ; ' a x ng a 4 - ™ : ° . 7 '} 7 4 | + A» i “#6 ” ga Yo A. d ra , Ly . ie | . tay , : — 4 ‘ mi. Oh er | fd . . 7 SOR : . Re ie . ‘ ' | . Ad a = y “|

|odi.0ttC«e I --_—-|\KRuio=s 2 a . ee =z ay fF mee , ——_l . ar”.% . .-f pons ; Yet roel j§. ka De wan z .

Sa) “ced ne Ce i. RSAot ale afe ; a aee! a f ypOe | ks ‘$aee —_

-- ,=ageig "OR, Se FY igbe to.~6°Ts. Mere, ol 6s 3 =a ae ghlt oys umm aw 4

rs 7 - : +4 - ¥ es KS ater ey “*. . 5 PP pee .: ; sa ! fl wee LS 1 . 4SH rae ~“ ec? none =.aya) bo —_—. ae Madiats ieae ; -oe re., :-4 DoF ang ee: vim hte—a| es metny ™:,wn Ban, owe ’,ye \ °: vt e& :— :may , — nan we orn owe’ . “s . r . Sy! a WK eagh oe mea lk .uf_ ie a ane s * a .“a a -4A ..— omWe z -a.woe renee - ,eeSoa — eegttt 7 . e ocr

ES +" ~ Le ° - - , an 7St . ” el : —_— «< pfs . ; | niet “J eo :

gi a os ; _re. ~ -oo_.Berta mae anh ; ~ ‘ . -, -_ + .., ~ ~ ; , -) @ F ~ leet

No sewerage, not much glass and too much ventilation. Queen's Place (?), 1875.

MARRIAGE 193

The mother of this unfortunate child and also the father are members of the Protestant faith and attendants at St Andrew’s Cathedral. To avoid the shame that hangs over every women who stoops to folly, this night my intentions are to go to North Shore and from there to dive into eternity. *!

This particular woman had internalized the dominant ideology to the extent that she was going to punish herself for her crimes, while hoping that the baby would be found and nurtured. Of course, not all women who _ practised infanticide against their children had stooped to folly. Many would have been deserted and others just plain poverty stricken.

Infanticide took several forms. In the decade of the 1880s, the 107 unidentified babies found in the open and taken to city morgues would have represented only a fraction of infant deaths caused by deliberate murder, studied neglect, or perhaps sheer ignorance coupled with poverty.

The coroner’s verdict in the case of legitimate children who died in dubious circumstances was usually ‘accidental death’, while the category

‘still-born’ was widely used to account for infant deaths.4? Legal registration of still-births was unnecessary, and still-born children did not have to be buried. If a cemetery burial was desired, all that was needed was

a certificate signed by a midwife. It was common knowledge that some midwives made a practice of this, and given that they did not have to be registered, there was every opportunity for fraud, especially in the big anonymous city. Lying-in homes were not registered or inspected, and some had high proportions of ‘still-births’, according to George Mullins of the Sacred Heart Hospice, in Darlinghurst, who alleged that many existed ‘for the sole purpose of concealing the births of children’.* Another common method of infanticide was to hand the baby over to a spurious baby-farmer, who could elect to murder the child, or simply allow

it to waste away through neglect or malnutrition. These practices were officially acknowledged in the 1886 Select Committee on Registration of

Births, Deaths and Marriages, and were well covered in the press. Belatedly, in 1892 a Children’s Protection Act was passed, and if any proof was needed of its necessity, it came in 1893 when John Makin was hanged and his wife Sarah given life imprisonment after revelations in a murder trial which rocked the respectable members of Sydney society to its depths. The Makins had been disposing of babies for several years at least,

burying them in backyards all over the inner suburbs. Eventually the police located more than fifteen bodies.** Just as most midwives were no doubt honest, so many baby-farming operations were above board, and many women who sought their services did so out of a genuine need for child-care. A woman with a child would have found paid work difficult to find, but without the child she increased the chances of supporting herself, and the baby, through payment to the minder. Ironically, she might find work as a wetnurse, although by nursing someone else’s child, the risk of her own dying through infection from dry

194 WORKING

nursing was increased. This form of work must have caused untold heartache. The Ashfield Infants Home, established in 1874, where impecunious mothers could leave their babies while they went to work was

indicative of growing public recognition of the plight of many poor women. In similar vein, the boarding-out system for state wards, introduced in 1881, paid individual women in respectable circumstances

to rear the babies of mothers who could not support them. With hindsight, it might be asked why the state did not pay the natural mother to rear the child prior to the depression, which forced this reform in 1896. Briefly, the answer is surely that to give public assistance to women to survive outside the confines of marriage would be to undermine the whole ideology of bourgeois marriage. If it is conceded that the root cause of the practices of abortion and infanticide was often poverty, then anyone who is attached to the notion that Australian society was wealthy, in these boom years, compared to Britain, might be tempted to assume that the practices were not common. This assumption would be misguided. This behaviour would have been limited, by and large, to women inside and outside marriage who were in

severe poverty, and the mean level of wealth of a community tells us nothing about the distribution of that wealth. The tenor of newspaper comment and official enquiry suggests that abortion and infanticide were assumed to be widespread. Added to these subjective assessments was the fact of substantial geographical mobility, especially of men. Illegitimacy was a more or less common occurrence in the convict days and the riproaring gold decades, but by 1870 it was totally unacceptable and went against all the tenets of bourgeois family ideology. At the same time, the requirements of many men to be mobile made this expectation somewhat unrealistic.*? At the time of the 1891 census, there were 141656 couples

living together, 23915 wives whose husbands were not present in the house and 24647 husbands who were living without their wives. The greater number of married men living alone would suggest they had left their wives elsewhere, in another colony or in the home country. Alternatively, it could indicate that wives living without husbands found it more difficult to maintain households, and moved elsewhere, in with

relatives, or into service or on to the streets. Commenting on these figures, the statistician, Coghlan, stressed that ‘no moral or immoral significance was attached to the matter’, but nevertheless weighing it all up, he

felt he had to conclude that there was a lot of desertion going on. He guessed that of the 191500 women who had ever been married, about

35000 were widowed or deserted.*° The manager of the Sydney Benevolent Asylum, in his annual report to the board of directors the following year, was not so reticent in imputing moral significance to the ‘popular vice’ of wife desertion. Women who are found to be truthful, respectable, and good mothers, disclose that their married lives constitute a period of suffering and wretchedness which would

MARRIAGE 195

lead one to infer that they had been living with savages rather than civilized beings. And although these statements are given ex parte, a large amount of credence must be given to women of undoubted respectability. *’

Not all women were respectable, of course, and not all desertions were by

men, but the economic dependence that marriage created for women ensured that most of the movements would have been in that direction.

Marriage was the primary occupation for women and the only occupation to receive universal approval. In legal terms, it was a contract more binding and more uneven than any employer—employee contract could be. Even the domestic servant, who is often presented as powerless within the workforce, could, through the masters and servants legislation, use the law to some advantage in cases of extreme maltreatment by an

employer. Wives had no such access to the law. Divorce laws were introduced late into New South Wales, with the first Matrimonial Causes

Act of 1873 post-dating similar legislation in the other colonies by a number of years. Under this Act, the wife had to prove adultery aggravated

by cruelty, while the amending Act of 1881 allowed simple adultery as evidence. But desertion, drunkenness and cruelty, of far more significance

to women, did not become causes until 1892. It was after this 1892 legislation that there was a rush of petitions for divorce, although in no decade of the nineteenth century could it be claimed that divorce was the likely outcome of most unsatisfactory marriages.*® Although legal, it was

not socially acceptable to many, and the discussion and journalistic comment which surrounded the enactment of the divorce act in the second half of the 1880s would have made it clear to any woman that divorce carried with it a heavy social stigma. In any case, most women could not afford it. Those who did were likely to be women with some other work apart from marriage. According to Hilary Golder’s study of nineteenth-century divorce, in an age where most married women were ‘dependents’ at least half the female petitioners were breadwinners, usually married to skilled or petty bourgeois husbands. “The wives of the wealthy could not afford divorce.”*?

In other areas, the law did little for women. Physical violence, one possible outcome of the unequal economic relations embodied in most marriages, was rarely taken seriously by police, who were officially advised

not to interfere in ‘minor assaults’, which could sometimes result in death. °° And while the husband could leave nothing in his will to his wife if he chose, the wife’s possessions were not legally secured for her until the passage of the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1893. The earlier Act of 1879 had given her limited rights, over wealth she had accrued during the

marriage, but it was not until 1893 that property she brought to the marriage was retained by her.”! Legally, a married woman in New South Wales had less power than her sisters in England, although in practical

terms most women lived their powerlessness at a level where legal considerations were neither here nor there. Concepts like retrenchment or

196 WORKING

sacking are not usually used in relation to marriage, but they happened frequently, and a married woman who found herself deserted or widowed or possessed by an employer (husband) who paid her no wages in the form of support, was in a particularly vulnerable position if she needed to find viable work elsewhere in late nineteenth-century Sydney.

Chapter 7

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE

... the pinch is not so great here and there is not occasion for the strikes here that there is in England. | think that the working classes have not been so ground down as merely to leave them a bare subsistence such as the working classes have to put up with in England in many cases, and of course the general condition here is better.

This was the careful assessment of Mr Justice Windeyer, when asked to comment on the condition of the working class in the colony of New South Wales in 1891.' There are a great many contemporary evaluations of what might be called ‘living standards’, and many of them are not so measured as this one. Many painted life in the colony in glowing terms, and all of them argued, or assumed, that things were better in the anti-

podes than in Britain. This comparison with Britain, or often simply England, was a common thread running through observations about life in Australia, and this was not merely because of its obvious importance to the

many immigrants and children of immigrants whose very reason for leaving Britain was to escape intolerable or apparently irremediable situations at ‘Home’. It was recognized by liberal thinkers everywhere, regardless of their roots, that all was not well with large sectors of the society which the capitalist mode of production had created, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, social commentators whose special interest was the position of the workers within this system were carefully watching the new settlements of the empire, anxious to find evidence that things could be better. Their anxiety may have been motivated by a desire to vindicate the system, or by humanitarian concern for their less privileged brothers and sisters, but whatever the motivation, there had evolved 197

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by the 1890s a substantial body of literature on the subject. Mr Justice Windeyer, himself a native of Sydney, educated at The King’s School, Parramatta and the University of Sydney, was a liberal reformer whose

name is associated with such concerns as the extension of higher education and women’s suffrage. However, he did not have an intimate knowledge of living standards among Sydney’s workers, and in fact indicated that his assessment of their condition was ‘so far as I am able to judge by reading’.

He may well have read more about Britain than about Sydney. In particular he would have read about London. During the latter decades of

the nineteenth century the demise of the economy of the East End of London became assured, as traditional industries and workshops became increasingly unable to compete with the northern industrial centres. This trend was associated with a growing number of demoralized unemployed and casually employed men and women, whom many observers saw not merely as a blot on the otherwise prosperous and mighty metropolis, but as

a possible danger to its very fabric. Newspaper articles, lectures and sermons concerning the London poor abounded. Images of London slums, of fetid lanes and foul air, and London slum dwellers, unkempt, underfed and unruly, were firmly implanted in the consciousness of a great many middle-class people, including those who lived in far-flung outposts of the empire, like Sydney. Furthermore, anyone who read those newspapers or listened to the lectures and sermons would have been acquainted with the

theory that urban life led to the degeneration of the species. As one speaker put it to the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia at the close

of the century whatever may be said to the contrary, there can be no reasonable doubt that physical and mental degeneration is prompted by the influence of urban life. This view is universally supported by the highest authorities on sanitary science, who say that there is practically no third generation in the average tenement of large cities.’

The cities usually understood to be particularly susceptible to this malaise were the big ones — Paris and London. The notion of inherited urban degeneration was used to explain why so many were out of work and living in poverty in London’s East End, which had a high proportion of London-born. Within this theory, the immigrant worker became a key figure. According to Llewelyn Smith, a contributor to Booth’s Life and

Labour at the end of the 1880s, there was ‘a general inverse relation between poverty and immigration’, and he produced figures to correlate poverty with the London-born. That these statistics were subsequently shown to be fatuous is not as relevant as the fact that the idea was widely believed. Londoners were subjected to studies which showed them to be shorter, narrower and sallower than others, and by the end of the century, recommendations for their extinction through eugenics or their removal to the colonies were being discussed in the most respectable circles. By

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 199

then, however, the work of the social mapmakers, like Booth, had isolated

and assessed the extent of the casual poor, thereby dispelling fears that they may have been a political threat to society at large. Booth divided them into two classes, for instance, and estimated that less than 2 per cent of East London’s population could be labelled ‘vicious and semi-criminal’.

‘The hords of barbarians of whom we have heard, who, will one day overwhelm modern civilization, do not exist. There are barbarians, but they are a handful, a small and decreasing percentage: a disgrace but not a danger.’ Another 11 per cent he judged to be casual in the sense that they were only marginally employed or employable, disorganized and ineffec-

tive, sometimes intemperate in action and not always sober, but neither vicious nor threatening.’ But by then the mental picture of the appalling poverty and degeneration of East London was well and truly entrenched. In Sydney, the imagery was reversed, and the conditions of life were construed not merely as better, but often as opposite to conditions in Britain. This perception was necessary in order to appease the conscience of those who might have got some inkling of an understanding that it was capital accumulation and growth itself that generated poverty. If poverty was absent from the colonies, then ipso facto, its cause could not lie with the system. If urban places produced degenerates, then the rural nature of New South Wales had to be stressed. Many of the commentaries, handbooks and official propaganda did emphasize the rural character of the colony, and that, coupled with its high rate of immigration, removed it just about as far away as possible from the image of a London slum. Charles

Robinson’s New South Wales: the Oldest and Richest of the Australian Colonies, published under the imprint of the government printer in 1873, will serve as an example of the genre. In a section, ‘Agricultural Settlement’, subtitled ‘How To Get Land’, the writer claimed that the land acts offered ‘very great facilities for the acquirement of land by men of small means ... [Twenty-five pounds enable a man to acquire a homestead of 100 acres.’ A close reading indicates that, in fact, this represented only a quarter of the cost required for undisturbed occupancy, and nowhere is it made clear that 100 acres, a sizeable farm in English terms, may not have meant very much at all in New South Wales. Settling in was all very easy, as the climate was excellent, making permanent shelter for man and beast

alike unnecessary. Should a hut be required for the family it could be quickly built from timber on the property. The book does not discuss urban housing, so much a fascination in Britain, and while there is a lengthy section on manufacturing, the detailed references to Sydney, as so

often in these works, centres on recreation — the public holidays, the exquisite picnic spots, the beautiful gardens, the sporting areas and, as

always, the harbour. The observation that ‘future poets will find inspiration here for ages’, had perhaps more truth than the estimate that ‘at least three-fourths of the whole population’ actively visited these places on public holidays. While urban dwellers in Britain slaved in factory and workshop, Sydneysiders played. In his twelve-point summary of reasons for

200 WORKING

immigrants to choose New South Wales as a home, Robinson first notes that ‘there is ready employment for all classes of labourers and artisans’

and, second, that the cost structure is such that ‘the labouring classes throughout the Colony are as well fed, as well clothed, and live as comfortably as the middle classes in England’.* There are many such writings.

They stress the rural strengths of the colony, and they rarely discuss Sydney within the same parameters used to discuss British cities. If Mr Justice Windeyer judged from his reading that things were better in Australia, he read right, but he may have been reading fiction. In place of London’s grey skies and rain were blue skies and sunshine, with startling results. ‘The Australians boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and

every young face in the Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not more like that of the Peloponnesus than they are like the old Athenians.” The harshness of the northern winter was compared with the temperate winters of Sydney, almost invariably without reference to the fact that death rates were highest and sickness was widespread in Sydney in the hot humid summer months. Typically, in discussions of Sydney, it was the mainstream of the working class which was discussed, just as surely as it was the casual worker of London who captured the imagination. When ‘slummer journalism’ did

occur, it was received as just that — an attempt to get on to the English bandwagon, a derivative quest for sensationalism, only marginally connected to the real world of prosperous Sydney. While London’s poverty was expanded and extended to cast shadows across large areas of that city,

Sydney’s was reduced and restricted to a minimum. In place of the diminishing size of the Londoner was the expansive robust health of the colonist, and in place of the ‘otherners’ which Mayhew stressed when he referred to East London as ‘. . . a new land and almost another race’, there was the respectability and self-esteem which prosperity breeds. According to Robinson’s handbook, when Sydneysiders went picnicking ‘all appear well dressed, well provided with the most liberal and even luxurious fare, perfectly well conducted, contented and happy. Drunkenness is seldom seen, and riots and general disorder never.”° And when Anthony Trollope went to the races in neighbouring Melbourne in 1872 he was moved to record ‘I saw no one drunk; I heard no word that could shock any lady; I found no one rough, uncourteous, or displeasing .... All the world was decent and decently dressed.’’

A remarkable country indeed. Upon reflection, perhaps Windeyer confined himself to studying the works of the government statistician and the like, and read none of this, so carefully measured were his remarks.

Incidentally, Sydneysiders often thought otherwise on the drinking question. Injudicious consumption of alcohol had always been part and parcel of the way of life according to certain middle-class reformers, and by

the late 1880s, at the height of the prohibition movement, the conviction that hard liquor was overwhelming the population and blighting its youth was firmly entrenched in many minds, despite the fact that the Intoxi-

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 201

cating Drink Inquiry of 1887 found that consumption rates for beer, wine

and spirits had all decreased over the previous decade. Interestingly, Grabosky’s study on crime in Sydney, which shows high arrest rates in the 1880s, with drunkenness the biggest factor, argues that the phenomenon of drunkenness was usually attributed to affluence and a high standard of living among labourers, coupled with parental leniency, too much leisure

and miseducation. Two other explanations, economic deprivation and the deleterious effects of urbanization itself, were only occasionally mentioned. ®

I do not intend to begin to attempt a serious comparison of living standards, even between Britain and Australia, let alone Sydney and London — an exercise which would make little sense, given the very different realities of those two places. The central themes of this book — that conditions were deteriorating in Sydney, and that there was a large and widening gap between myth and reality concerning standards of living in Sydney — do not hinge on establishing a tight relationship between living standards in Britain and in Sydney. Nevertheless, the general acceptance

by economic historians of a high standard of living in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century does require some discussion of what

this might mean, in real terms, to the women and men who ‘enjoyed’ these conditions. A high standard of living is more usually stated than defined, although real wages, full employment and active trade unionism appear to be central to most discussions.

Concerning wages, the fact that lack of union organization among many factory workers meant that there were no effective fixed wage rates, is not often mentioned by compilers of wage indices. Most of these, from Wood onwards, are based on the Statistical Register figures calculated from information given by union representatives.” Wages were usually quoted as a range and, given their source, it is not unreasonable to assume that

the top of the range was the wage acceptable to the union, rather than what was actually paid. Most indices, including Butlin’s, rely on the arithmetic mean of these figures, thereby possibly overstating actual wages. More importantly, there appears to be a tendency to concentrate on skilled workers, and in the case of labourers, to quote wages of building and iron trades workers, although these were more highly paid than other

labourers. Alongside the stonemason’s 1ls a day and the _ builder’s labourer’s 8s, was the 5s many factory workers and day labourers earned for

longer hours, while wages paid to women and juveniles were well below this. !° Far more significant though, is the fact that none of these estimates

takes into account the casual nature of much work in the colony, and especially within the metropolitan labour force.

Casual work in nineteenth-century Australia has so far not been seriously studied, or perhaps, seriously believed in, because of the entrenched notion that labour was in short supply. The implication has been that, even if jobs were organized on a casual basis, they were so numerous, and workers in such demand, that the phenomenon can hardly

202 WORKING

have led to unemployment. And yet, we have the account of the New

South Wales statistician and Australia’s first significant economic historian, T.A. Coghlan, who lived in Sydney during this period. His description of conditions of labour conveys a clear sense of the temporary nature of work, when full employment one month could be followed by parades of the unemployed and public meetings demanding the cessation of assisted immigration the next. More importantly, for the purposes of

this study, Coghlan never fails to distinguish between conditions in Sydney and the rest of the colony, thus implicitly recognizing that the metropolis generated an economic life of its own, responding not only to vacillations in the fortunes of the rural sector, but also to conditions internal to its own growth. !! The question of casual work must always be considered at the local level. Casual labour was present in all nineteenth-century cities tied to the growing world economy, but its importance varied from place to place. General figures and estimates of economic activity for New South Wales or eastern Australia, or even details for Melbourne or Adelaide, will not be enough for an understanding of the incidence of casual work in Sydney. The extent to which casual labour operated within the Sydney economy can be guessed at (there can be no precise measure) by considering the role of the construction industry, the nature of the manufacturing sector, the port function of the city and the impact of the dominant activity in the hinterland, pastoralism. In summary, within the construction industry, the normal fluctuations in the building cycle were accentuated by uneven rates of immigration and by a large and erratic public building programme. Much manufacturing was undercapitalized, and utilized labour on a daily basis. Port work is always seasonal and irregular, but more so if the bulk of the cargo being shipped is primary produce of a limited range, and the pastoral industry impinged on the Sydney economy not only because of its widely varying labour requirements, but because the processing of its raw materials was also seasonal. Firstly, then, the construction industry. The total number of residential rooms in Sydney rose from 125000 in 1870 to 396000 in 1890, but this feat was not achieved without large long-term as well as annual swings in the rate of house building. Levels of construction rose until 1876 from a

low in 1870, then dropped into a sharp decline until 1880. This was followed by a dramatic leap in 1881, with 3704 new rooms added in 1880,

and 27856 in 1881. Activity remained high, but fluctuating until 1886,

when it was half what it was the year before. Another peak in 1887 and 1888 saw the building boom through to its conclusion.!* Factors influencing the pattern of construction have been the subject of considerable discussion. In part the trends were underpinned by the demographic factor of the so-called ‘kinked age distribution’ caused by the influx of immigrants in the gold decade. With the children of the gold-rush peak reaching the ages associated with marriage, house building was stimulated

in the 1880s. This activity in turn stimulated the economy generally,

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 203

leading to a shortage of construction workers, and hence led to high levels of immigration, thereby reinforcing the demand for housing. This demographic factor was more marked in Victoria, the gold colony, than in New South Wales, but it was nevertheless significant.

Other factors, like capital shortages until 1880, and changing tastes associated with rising incomes for some sectors of the population, are also

possible reasons for this pattern of house building.'* These long-term swings were effected through very capricious short-term variations in construction, and hence employment. Jackson has argued that there was ‘a genuine mobility within the industry which resulted from the small scale of the typical business unit, and the small amount of capital required for a

tradesman to set up in business on his own.’!*

By the same token, there was ample opportunity for such small businesses to fail, as many obviously did with the ending of the building boom in 1888. In 1891 Coghlan estimated that 15000 hands were avail

able in the trade in 1881, and 24000 in 1891, about half of them in Sydney. At the same time the number of buildings under construction was half that of 1881.!? In slack periods many so-called contractors were probably self-employed through necessity and not through choice. Further-

more, the general buoyancy of the industry during most of the 1880s encouraged the employment of improvers, which possibly depressed wages for the genuinely skilled, for although they were among the best paid bluecollar workers in Sydney, real wages did not improve during the boom, as

might have been expected. !° More disruptive, in that it magnified the unevenness of work available, was the large role played by governments in the construction industry. The ready — some said profligate — inflow of British capital into the colonies in the 1870s and 1880s had encouraged the colonial governments to be active in the borrowing and spending of capital so that onethird of all investment in the colony was a direct result of government activity. The primary recipients of public money were the communica-

tions systems, especially the railways, and the construction of public

been non-residential. !! |

buildings. In the 1880s up to two-fifths of building construction may have

The public service itself had gained a reputation for providing good

working conditions and hours, compared with the private sector, and with salaries for clerical staff that set the pace for white-collar work. However, this government largess did not carry over to the large numbers of people employed on government construction work. Contracts were tendered for by private interests, and workers were paid by them, and not the Public Works Department. The supply of government contract work was notor-

iously uneven. The construction of a major public building might be followed by a dearth of work in the months after its completion. The Garden Palace, for instance, located in the Botanic Gardens, was built to house the International Exhibition of 1879, and built in a hurry. In the space of eight months, a predominantly wooden structure with a floor area

204 WORKING

of a little over 74 acres, built on three levels, and crowned with a huge dome 100 feet in diameter, as well as machinery sheds, an art gallery and refreshment pavilion, was erected by 1500 men, working in three eighthour shifts, under arc lighting.!® The intensity of the work was necessitated by time constraints, and the building was completed just in time for

the official opening of the Exhibition. The inevitable aftermath of such frenzied activity was unemployment. A.K. Wilkins, an estate agent, writing about the Exhibition to a friend, observed in September ‘. . . there is great excitement just now in Sydney and it must be expected. But there are hundreds unable to get anything to do at all and there is nothing left to chew but starvation.’!? Everyone who visited the Exhibition had to pass groups of men standing outside the gates asking for work, and while John Plummer, journalist and

social commentator, might have felt that this lowered the tone of the affair somewhat, he had to acknowledge that ‘work was not to be had in Sydney’.”° John Young, who had the building contract for the Garden Palace, was not prepared to acknowledge that there was a shortage of work in Sydney in 1880, but tellingly, he did admit that he never needed to advertise for men. Furthermore, he was of the opinion that ‘men who come out and do not succeed are those who have been relying at home upon steady work upon one single thing, going through one routine in a certain way’.”! This sounds very much like an admission of unemployment.

In 1879 it was the Exhibition Building. In 1887, it was the completion of the Sydney water supply works. Erratic employment was a feature of all

government work. According to Coghlan, men directly employed on railway construction numbered 9810 in 1885 and only 504 in 1889, and he estimated that the total number of men employed by railway contractors

was 12000 less in mid-1889 than in 1885.77

When public money dried up in the 1890s, and contractors forced down

tenders in an attempt to gain scarce contracts, the wage rates paid to labourers became something of a public scandal, but even in the good times, this method of employing workers encouraged an unevenness in work availability and maintained the normalcy of employing labour on daily insecure rates. The nature of the work meant that much of the cost went on labour wages and the temptation for contractors to sublet and cut back on pay or increase hours was ever present. A sympathetic minister for works could see to it that tenders included a clause on wages and hours, but this was not government policy. The fifth Intercolonial Trade Union Congress in 1888 had called for the insertion of a clause in all government contracts providing ‘that the current rate of wages shall be paid by successful tenderers’ — an indication that they believed this not always to be the case.2> The unions would have preferred direct employment for workers by the relevant government departments, but the government was reluctant to become the employer, and of course contracting was the usual method of organizing work in private sector. The vigorous efforts of the

organized labour movement to involve the government in fixing a

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 205

minimum wage for labourers working on government projects became a reality in the 1890s once Labor members were elected to parliament, but in the 1890s it was not a question of getting the government to set wages, but only pleas that it pay current rates. This suggests that contractors had a reputation for paying less than private employers. It would be impossible to establish the degree to which this was actually true, and the extent to

which it was used as a political statement concerning perceptions of government duties in this area. Nonetheless, McCarthy’s speculation that private employers may have paid somewhat higher wages because of the ereater continuity of their work seems plausible.’* The unevenness in the availability of government contracts expanded casual work and allowed

private employers to take quick advantage of changing availability of labour which was sometimes scarce, but also sometimes plentiful. The second factor generating casual work in Sydney was the nature and organization of the manufacturing sector. Gareth Stedman Jones, writing about London in the nineteenth century, makes the point that the indus-

trial activity in that city was small scale, bits and pieces of everything, often seasonal or speculative and as such much more reliant on casual workers than the industrial areas of northern cities where mill work, for instance, was established on a larger scale, more capital intensive and less

erratic in employment practices. Sydney clearly fits better the London model than the Manchester model. Many of its factories were undercapitalized, with the main outlay being labour costs. Many factory hands were employed on short-term or even a daily basis. An inspection of Pascoe’s clothing factory in Wynyard Lane, in 1876, found 80 workers employed, but according to the management, the number sometimes reached 200. The uneven employment in tobacco factories has already been discussed. Cameron and Dunn’s factory employed 300 when in full swing, but at the time of this inspection most of the workers had been discharged.*? Irregular factory employment applied to boot factories, furniture shops and food processing industries as well as to clothing and to tobacco. Numerically, it was the clothing industry that was most subject to large swings in employment opportunities.

This industry was conducted in a variety of places and conditions. Employment was generally located in the city, in the workshops of the large soft goods and departmental stores, and in small dressmaking-retailing

shops. The larger firms sublet much of the slop work to contractors who often used less expensive upstairs rooms, converted churches, or makeshift premises as workrooms. Many of these were south of the commercial district, into Surry Hills, but locations did not stray too far from the city, as proximity to retail outlets and to a supply of cheap female labour was essential. In addition, an unknown number of outworkers were employed on piece-work in their own homes in the vicinity of these workshops. In tailoring perhaps up to two-thirds of the workers employed were working in their own homes.”° For many, the question of women working in the clothing industry was

206 WORKING

a vexed one, liable to generate wide-ranging and heated debate. A select committee set up to consider the plight of the unemployed in 1866, for instance, while pressing for more encouragement to manufacturing in Sydney, suggested that the lack of opportunity for work in the clothing industry was a cause of prostitution,’’ while plenty of others were happy

to argue that the two went hand in hand. In a situation of perceived shortage of domestic servants, many middleclass reformers and householders were anxious to extol the virtues of the safety and the educative value of the home as a fit workplace for females,

and to stress the evils of factory life, which led to immorality and unfeminine behaviour. Investigations into this industry are so overlaid with middle-class moralizing that it is often very difficult to find the facts. The ‘Industrial Census’ of 1892 contains an enormous amount of information

about tailoring and dressmaking but in addition, because the commissioners were sensitive to newspaper reports and rumours of immorality among workers and exploitation by ‘sweaters’ among employers, they were

at pains to disavow both. Subcontracting work through a number of middle agents, did occur, they said, but not to the point where it became inconsistent with ‘fair wages and perfect justice to the workers’.“® Wages were often insufficient, and work conditions ‘sometimes even very bad’, but they found no ‘dens’ or ‘hot-beds’ of infection like those spoken of in connection with the London sweating atrocities. Eighteen Jewish sweat dens were visited and found to be not too bad at all. These findings would seem to be at odds with the details that followed. The highest paid assist-

ants never earned more than 20s and more usually 16s a week, while improvers could earn as little as 4s. Apprentices, who were rarely taught anything in a systematic way, were taken on at 2s 6d a week, or sometimes at no pay at all, and instances of dismissal once the ‘apprenticeship’ was completed were widely complained of. Hours of work were not excessive in the tailoring factories, but in outwork and in small shops they could be,

and they almost certainly were in dressmaking, where overtime was obligatory and unremunerated. They concluded that rates of pay were sufficient to keep a single girl, but that ‘even when she can secure the best

paid work it is everywhere plain that the woman who has others dependent upon her can earn in reasonable hours no more than will be barely sufficient for her most pressing wants’. Such workers always worked at home on piece-work, and with average

earnings of 4syd an hour, a tailoress would have to work twelve or fourteen hours a day to earn 30s — which the commissioners judged was ‘about the smallest sum capable of supporting with decency herself and a

family of four’.2” It is not clear why this amount of labour, virtually impossible to achieve in a day cluttered with other domestic chores, was not deemed to be ‘sweated’, nor why the commissioners were anxious to play down this exploitation. No doubt it had something to do with their knowledge that employers in this industry were competing in a tough market against cheaper British imports — cheaper mainly due to the over-

ON THE MARGINS OF THE GOOD LIFE 207

all higher wage structure in Australia. Possibly it had something to do with their own beliefs that married women ought not to be independent, and that so long as the industry provided for single girls, the bulk of the employees, then justice had been done. Certainly, Coghlan, whose name

appeared at the end of the report, believed that the participation of women in the paid workforce was an unhealthy trend, and no doubt it was married women who were least acceptable to him. *° The refutation of the presence of sweating in the industry incidentally throws light on the question of casual work or underemployment. Con-

sider this explanation in defense of the argument that hours were not excessively long: In cases where work goes on throughout the night or for many hours with little intermission, it is certain that such a press of work is preceded and followed by slack times. If an order is required at short notice extraordinary hours are worked to finish it in time, but the mean duration of daily labour throughout the year is not excessive; and there is no question of coercion of the workers, who are tolerably

independent of control ...*!

One wonders how relevant the concept of ‘the mean duration of daily labour’ ever seemed to a seamstress out of work. As for being ‘tolerably independent of control’, that must have had little bearing on a situation of

total economic dependence necessitating taking work when it came. Presumably, it was the single girl or the woman working for pin money who might wish to forgo this excessive work, but the majority of girls were

employed in factories and workshops, where according to the report of dressmaking, overtime was the greatest grievance — ‘when 6 o'clock comes they will still be kept stitching wearily on till 7, 8, 9 or even 11 o’clock, before they may quit their work’. On these occasions, the wages they earned must have looked a lot less attractive than the piece rates which had been common in the industry a decade earlier. On the other hand, ‘their position became truly pitiable in slack times, when compulsory holidays are given to all whose services are not indispensible’. *”

The weeks immediately before Christmas were busy, while June/July and January/February were slow. ‘Compulsory idleness’ of tailors, the commissioners decided, amounted to about two months in a year, although

they confessed to some confusion on this point, with union officials claiming it could be up to twenty-two weeks. When times were busy, the method of extracting more labour in the factories was through compulsory overtime as there was no scope for taking on more labour in workshops already overcrowded, according to this census. Extra outworkers would

have been taken on also for these three or four months of increased output. Sinclair has shown that there was a falling participation rate for women in paid work in Melbourne in the 1880s, arguing that these were real constraints on the supply of women to the manufacturing sector, tied to high marriage rates and heavy demands for domestic servants, while Davison indicates that throughout the 1880s clothing factories in that city

208 WORKING

were getting smaller.°* The situation in Sydney would seem to be different.

Participation rates of women aged between 15 and 65 years did not fall, but remained steady at around 30 per cent for the whole period 1861-91,

and clothing factories expanded, hesitantly until 1882, but then more steadily until 1888, with a drop-off in 1889—90 and a rise again by the time of the ‘Industrial Census’, which reported ‘excessive supply’ in millinery, lack of employment and hardship in slack times. The deficient

supply of competent workers noted in the census was not attributed to labour shortages, but to labour surpluses, which encouraged improvers and generated ‘a superabundance of those at best but poorly qualified’.** The third generator of casual work within the Sydney economy was its important trading function, with its attendant dock work. It was impossible to ignore the fact that Sydney was a port city, with docks stretching from Woolloomooloo Bay in the east of the city, around to Pyrmont and into Balmain in the west. Their increasing importance would have been obvious to anyone who cared to monitor the growth in size and number of warehouses, or to observe the expansion of docking facilities. The Fitzroy Dock, the government establishment on Cockatoo Island, had been 300 feet long in 1870, but by 1886 it had been twice rebuilt, so that it was capable of taking ships of up to 475 feet long. It repaired naval ships, housed the smaller vessels of the Harbour and Rivers Department, and rented out its facilities to private firms. On the other side of the island, a new graving dock was built between 1882 and 1887 ‘capable of receiving the largest vessel afloat’. Mort’s Dock at Balmain had growing facilities and in 1886 added a new large patent slip to the two existing ones; several other slips and docks in the Darling Harbour area also expanded their facilities in the 1880s. °° All this expansion meant more construction jobs, more shipping and more wharf work. The whole of the length of Darling Harbour, on its eastern shore, was taken up by fifty privately owned wharves, in varying stages of modernity or decay. They ranged from small affairs which were simply jetties, taking small craft of around 60 tons, to large ones, like Frazer’s, known as the Grafton Wharf, which, in 1886 had a frontage of

430 feet to the harbour, and three piers, recently rebuilt, ‘capable of receiving and shipping cargo of any character and weight’.*° This complex contained fourteen warehouses, with a storage capacity of 44500 tons of cargo, and facilities for pressing 1600 bales of wool a day.

Traditionally, Darling Harbour had been the home of the coastal shippers, but much of the rapid expansion after 1870 was due to the overflow of overseas cargo trade from Sydney Cove. Coastal shipping was expanding, but only slowly, as the burgeoning railway system was beginning to compete with it for intra colonial trade, but there could be no doubt about the expansion of foreign trade. By 1890 there had evolved a clear delineation between the coastal ships, which used the southern end of the harbour, and the overseas ships at the northern end and around inte Walsh Bay. Reclamation of the harbour, which had been going on since

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