Leviathan (22 page)

The ‘desart' of Woolloomooloo Hill, as it was known, would eventually be improved by carting in soil on which familiar English gardens could grow. In the town, meanwhile, growth and decay raced on in tandem.

With the notable exception of the upper-class decampment to Potts Point, the boundaries of Sydney did not move much during the 1830s or early 1840s. Feverish construction went on inside the town limits, however. British capital spun off the Industrial Revolution at home, funding the growth of the pastoral industry here and encouraging the migration of thousands of workers. The simple, primary structure of the city's economy evolved into denser, more complex forms as professionals, service workers, middlemen and ten-percenters all set up shop in the nooks and crannies of a maturing system. As land values climbed, the wide open lots of the town's early years were chopped and diced into smaller packets. Second storeys appeared above shops and offices, often providing living space for the proprietors working below. Footpaths were gradually eaten away as frontages crept out to claim all the available space. Mercantile power folded around the markets which Macquarie had moved south, animating the streets around the intersection of Market and George with an unrestrained, almost American energy.

James Maclehose's 1839
Picture of Sydney and Strangers' Guide
left its readers in no doubt about the speed of the change overtaking the town. Maclehose wrote that ‘up to a comparatively late period' Sydney was little more than an insignificant village of bark huts, themselves little better ‘than the rude wigwams' of America's barbarian Indians, and certainly inferior to the huts of African savages. Maclehose defined the southern outskirts of the emerging city as ‘a ridge of elevated land, known as the Surry Hills', and the western limits as ‘a beautiful and extensive salt water lagoon' of more than two miles in length. Most of the city's industrial wealth was concentrated in Sussex Street, which ran alongside Darling Harbour. At least eight flour mills could be found on the harbour's western shore, while the east was taken up by ship-and boat-building yards and a dozen or so large wharfs, all of them constantly busy with vessels either landing or taking on cargo.

George Street, the retail corridor along which so much of this cargo would travel, had only recently been levelled and finished with granite. Its western reaches, past the markets, had been regraded to alleviate the problems of a dangerous climb and descent of Brickfield Hill. About 28 000 cubic metres of sandstone and soil was sheared off the top of the hill and used to lengthen the plane of ascent, all by manual labour. Running parallel to George, Pitt Street displayed a dimorphic character, with the commercial sector near Market Street boasting ‘three of the largest and most extensive Manchester warehouses in the colony'; while south of Park Street small cheerful cottages surrounded by bright gardens and shaded verandahs pleased the eye and recalled ‘the rustic beauties of Old England'. Maclehose noted that the ‘gentlemen of the law' found the southern end of Elizabeth Street ‘to be very convenient' because of its proximity to the Supreme Court, and increasingly, although he does not mention it, because of the large number of taverns which had sprung up so the wig-wearing vultures could refresh themselves at their leisure. Of the city's poorer areas he had less to say. There were some fine merchants' villas in the Rocks, high up on the ridges where they were safe from sewerage run-off, but the rest of that district he dismissed in short order, saying that ‘the roads and foot-paths are in such bad repair, and so filthy, that no respectable person will pass through them if avoidable'. And avoided they were. Many of the ramshackle huts which infested the rocky slopes had survived, sort of, since Macquarie's time or earlier. Essex Street was so steep as to be ‘almost impassable for wheeled carriages' and in such poor repair that even pedestrians had to be exceedingly cautious when climbing it. Argyle Street's precipitous narrow passage was ‘so completely overrun with the filth which is discharged from the upper streets' that it had been largely abandoned as a pathway with people ‘generally preferring to go a distance, rather than encounter the abominable stench …'.

The retreat of the city's respectable classes from these slums, the way they held their breath and averted their eyes when passing was, in a sense, a remarkable triumph of will. By staring fixedly at their large and extensive Manchester warehouses, by tending the rose beds in their cheerful cottages and proudly surveying the mercantile fleets which plied the waters of the harbour, the better part of the city simply wished away the malignant chancre which had erupted on its own body. During the latter half of the 1840s the generous spreading of the city at its limits was accompanied by an intense compacting of its rotten core. Two maps prepared by William H Wells neatly illustrate this process. The first, drawn up in 1842, depicts the semi-rustic port of the Maclehose guides. Ninety percent of the built environment was contained within a long thin wedge running back from the harbour to Campbell Street. The elite enclave clinging to the heights of Darlinghurst was a major outpost. A couple of dozen desultory shacks stood around Surry Hills and a number of brewery workers' homes straggled out along the line of road we now think of as Broadway. For the most part, though, Sydney was still boxed up inside a tight grid of streets which never quite seemed to sort themselves into any sort of system. By December 1850, when Wells released another major map of the city, it had begun to metastasise. If his first chart presents a rough sketch of the future city, this latter one is closer to a formal blueprint. A great swathe of free ground still marked the Domain and Hyde Park, but the empty vistas which filled so much of his previous drawing had been buried under new streets and suburbs such as Chippendale, Kensington, Strawberry Hills, Balmain and Paddington, while the centre of town had become a dense, tangled warren with lanes and alleys driven into the core of city blocks by builders desperate for space.

The city's population had climbed towards 50 000. The luckiest of them lived in spacious villas with water laid on and servants to tend to those indelicate domestic duties, such as disposing of master's bodily wastes. The middle classes lived harder and closer in townhouses, cottages and terraces. With no staff to clean and carry for them a good deal of their time and money was spent procuring enough water to keep house in the modest but exacting style demanded by emerging Victorian morality. The rest of the population, the vast majority in fact, lived in dwellings squeezed onto the lower slopes of the Rocks, into the dark, threatening tenements of the city proper and around the emerging industrial zones to the west. In some parts of town, such as Sussex Street, the different classes were all tossed in together as the great black engine of capitalism progressively mowed down slum housing, replacing it with more valuable commercial and residential property. In one of a series of articles devoted to the state of Sydney's sanitation in 1851, the
Herald
described Sussex Street's appearance as grotesque. Handsome cottages with well-tended gardens were bracketed by rotting wooden shacks; while single-roomed hovels, little more than packing cases in the last stages of decay, rubbed up hard against luxurious newly built townhouses.

The relentless pressure of development bulldozed great heaps of the poor into increasingly filthy, crowded slums like Durands Alley. Forty squalid houses in an unpaved, undrained dogleg lane near the junction of Goulburn and Pitt Streets, the
Herald
's correspondent described it as a ‘vile place' fit only for keeping pigs. It appears on Wells's map as a narrow, crooked shaft bored deep into a dense mine of abysmal little hutches. It survives in skeletal form today as Cunningham Street, with the same broken V shape, the same claustrophobic atmosphere and just a hint of the original ambience provided by a brothel and Club X porno shack at the Pitt Street junction and, on emerging into Goulburn, a melancholy strip, home to the handjob specialists of the Eros Theatre.

The first inhabitants of Durands Alley – as many as eight of them sleeping in rooms less than four metres square – afforded the
Herald
's man the grim pleasure of seeing just how low human beings could descend. He found them one Monday morning with bound-up heads, black eyes and bruised, smashed-in faces from their weekly boxing match held each Sunday in the thick sludge of decaying offal and shit which passed for a pavement outside their homes. Later on Monday they would creep down to the Haymarket to bash and rob bullock drivers and country folk in town for the sales. The
Herald
warned that, like ‘certain loathsome reptiles', their sort ‘only come out at night from these dark recesses'.

In a few short decades the enterprising colonists had managed to recreate, in places like Durands Alley, the very same conditions which had filled the English prison hulks of the 1780s. But for the middle and upper classes Sydney's slums were another country. As Henry Mayhew had written of the English lower orders, the degradation of their lives were ‘utterly unknown among the well fed portion of society'. In February 1851 the
Herald
– already comfortably settled into its role as the mouthpiece of well-fed Sydney – said that one of the underworld districts it visited was as foreign to the city's respectable citizens as Peking ‘or the Empire of Japan'. This slum, whose ghosts now sleep beneath the massive concrete foundations of the Macquarie Bank and the neo-Romanesque marvel of Burns Philp's old headquarters in Bridge Street, was hemmed in by the rear of commercial premises on George Street and the last sad trace of the Tank Stream. The history of the stream seems to have been lost to the
Herald
by then, for nowhere does their writer refer to it as anything more than a wide open sewer. In it, bloated animal carcasses – mostly rats, cats and dogs – putrefied under the summer sun in a foul soup of human excrement and rotting garbage. The smell assaulted the senses from Hunter all the way down Spring Street to the quay.

The roving packs of dogs and hordes of near-feral goats which had driven Macquarie to distraction had not been in the least affected by his efforts. Thirty years after he left they still ruled the streets. Colonel GC Mundy, who arrived in 1846 as Deputy Adjutant General to the military forces in the Australian colonies, complained that the city's thoroughfares were ‘infested by an innumerable host of apparently ownerless dogs' which ranged at will through the town, tormenting and terrifying all. Any horseman who rode at a pace faster than a trot was certain to draw a riotous pack of the ‘lawless brutes' to his heels.

Mundy, who served in the colony for five years, had been less than impressed during his early days ashore. In spite of the harbour's many charms, its lovely islands, its sweeping bays and headlands crested with handsome villas, there was, to his eye, ‘something singularly repulsive in the leaden tint of the gum-tree foliage, and in the dry and sterile sandstone from which it springs'. Mundy conceded he would have been astonished at the wealth of George Street were it not for the earbashing he'd received from his fellow passengers on the way out. Natives of Sydney, they had sung its praises ‘in so loud and high a key' that on arriving, Mundy could not help but be disappointed.

He also came, of course, with the impartial eye of a disinterested outsider. Unlike his fellow travellers, Mundy had no emotional investment in the young outpost and was only too willing to peer beyond colonial spin and boosterism. The lighting and paving of the streets were ‘a disgrace' and the sewerage ‘shamefully bad'. Hyde Park was ‘merely a fenced common, without a tree or a blade of grass' and the barracks housed a bunch of flea-bitten crims rather than a proud regiment. The city was still overrun by goats; just one ‘conspicuous item of the Sydney street menagerie'. Like the dogs they rambled everywhere, invading any garden with an unlocked gate. In a few seconds, roses, sweet peas and carnations were ‘as closely nibbled down as though a flight of locusts had bivouacked for a week on the spot; the flower-beds dotted over with little cloven feet, as if ten thousand infantine devils had been dancing there …'.

An old India hand, he was also contemptuous of the local architecture which was totally unsuited to a semitropical climate. The houses of the respectable classes he dismissed in a withering blast as ‘barefaced, smug-looking tenements, without verandahs or even broad eaves'. Even the most handsome and comfortable villas were crowded with expensive, overstuffed furnishing, as opposed to the practice in most warm countries of using only the plainest and hardest fittings in otherwise bare rooms. He found the view from his own quarters in the city's legal district most disagreeable