Leviathan (37 page)

Ten years of sniping and trench warfare commenced, with some early close-quarter work between Wentworth and the council over the role of the police during the election of 1843. Wentworth accused them of incompetence and bias, claiming to have seen the Superintendent of Police himself destroy one of his banners. Policing functions, where the state authorises its agents to mete out whatever violence it deems reasonable to maintain whatever order it thinks necessary, were just one set of powers the agri-business complex in the colonial Parliament was loath to see handed over to a lot of unwashed, lower-class yahoos. City council historian Shirley Fitzgerald characterises the relationship between these levels of government as a contest between colonial or State authorities ‘often ready to allocate administrative tasks but reluctant to hand over real power' and civic officials forever ‘going cap in hand to the legislature for more control, more manoeuvrability and more money'.

The act which established the council, or corporation as it was then known, gave it responsibility for controlling development and suppressing ‘disorderly houses, roads and pavements'. However, as Paul Ashton notes, while a city surveyor was charged with enforcing regularity and good order in the town, the colonial government, concerned not to impinge on the interests of private property, drew up an act which lacked any legal weight. Part of the problem, Fitzgerald explains, was that the city corporation could not create legislation, but only administer the act, which was altered at the bidding of Parliament. Successive corporation acts were more ‘administrative codes' than enabling legislation for a separate sphere of government. Vague wording further undermined their utility. Some of the council's so-called powers were not even laid out in its own legislation but salted throughout the Police Act, the Road Act, the Streets Alignment Act and the Building Act, themselves all fairly wobbly pieces of legal drafting. Thus any deficiencies which confronted council officers could not be remedied by their own aldermen, but only by appealing to ‘a conservative and dilatory legislature'. The subservient role of Sydney in this legislature – and incidentally a measure of the threat it was seen to pose to rural interests – was manifest in the rigged electoral boundaries which gave ‘an overwhelming preponderance' to wealthy rural voters.

Ashton cites the crumbling, awesomely potholed streets of the capital as a focal point of strained relations between these competing stakeholders. These weren't potholes as we understand them. One which opened up in Liverpool Street in April 1855 was four metres deep, while another which appeared in Crown Street a month later was about seven metres long and three metres deep. Later clashes over road works would erupt between the council and ‘the gas company, the government works department … the Water and Sewerage Board and the Hydraulic Power Company'. In December of 1844, however, Alderman Edward Flood complained that the colonial government had simply ignored the council's role altogether. The
Herald
had just that morning carried ‘a long notice of streets being opened by the Government at the north end of the town, of which the Corporation and their Surveyor had no knowledge whatever'. Flood, fined £50 after punching out a conservative lawyer who'd called the city's aldermen idiots, railed against Macquarie Street for refusing to hand over ‘all sums which had been raised by direct taxation on the citizens of Sydney'. He complained that Sydney's men in the Legislative Council, Bland and Wentworth, ‘did not perform their duty to the City'. Instead they simply represented the interests of certain wealthy individuals. Ashton cites this as a telling analysis of the State's view of Sydney, which existed only to channel ‘raw produce to the imperial power'.

Should the city fathers – there being no mothers, as Ashton quips – ever demonstrate ‘significant reluctance to facilitate the changing demands of manufacturing, industrial or finance capital', the representatives and beneficiaries of that capital stood ready to blade them. Dismissal was a ‘civic cornerstone', with the State or colonial cabinet putting a bullet into the city council on four separate occasions. Each sacking was ostensibly a result of incompetence or corruption, but beneath the camouflage lay the glinting steel of raw politics.

When cabinet first removed the aldermen in October 1853, it cited their failed attempts to engineer a permanent water supply and sewerage system for the town. Connections to the main line had increased; however, supply from the swamps had not been augmented. Hence summers were increasingly marked by rationing of the sludgy brown trickle which emerged from the city's taps and pumps. The council blamed the restrictions of its enabling act which denied it any power to raise adequate funds without ‘virtually forcing the Corporation into an act of fraudulent insolvency'. The city's income from rates was never going to cover the cost of its responsibilities, with a report by Councillor Thurlow concluding that ‘at present the Council has to contend against such gigantic ends, with such trifling means, that the contest is hopeless if not ridiculous'.

Macquarie Street hit back with its own investigation, which accused the council of incompetence and corruption. Its machinery was cumbrous, its controls inefficient, the mayor's allowance excessive, and the councillors acted ‘not with the desire faithfully to discharge the duties of the office, but to raise themselves to a false position in society'. They ‘used their position to improve their own property at public expense', and some ‘sought election chiefly to gratify their wives' ambition to attend a Queen's Birthday Ball at Government House'. Fitzgerald describes this ferocious report as lacking in any detailed proof, a credibility deficit the legislators simply made up for with bucketloads of innuendo. When the battle climaxed with the council's abolition, the state authorities effectively acknowledged the truth of Thurlow's earlier claims by empowering three administrators to borrow £400 000 for sewerage and water works, an amount nearly seven times greater than had been available to their predecessors.

This seething antagonism, an endless struggle for control of the city which continues today, was largely responsible for the decades of neglect which culminated in the plague outbreaks of the early 1900s. The council, reinstated in 1857, was well aware of conditions within the poorest quarters of the city. Its own health officers and building inspectors continually reported on the abysmal state of the slums and the pressing need to do something about them. Legally, however, they were virtually powerless. With awareness increasing through press reports and the work of investigators with the Sewerage Board, the council leveraged a City Improvement Bill into Parliament in 1877. It would have given the council power to condemn and demolish a lot of the buildings where the plague erupted later. However, a select committee in the Legislative Council – which was by that time the upper house of Parliament – cut the legs out from under the reformers. A chorus line of developers, slum lords and architects had danced through the hearings singing an old favourite of the MLCs – the bill gave ‘arbitrary and excessive' powers to the city and was an unconscionable imposition on the rights of property owners. The solution, for want of a better word, was to divide and conquer. The council's surveyor was given authority to identify dangerous buildings which should be demolished, but he then had to refer the cases to the separate and often hostile Improvement Board which was supposed to order demolition or repair. The board, consisting of a lot of self-interested ‘professional gentlemen', refused to order the demolition of slums for health reasons. Only if the actual buildings were in imminent danger of collapse would they allow the council to move.

The council twisted and turned, trying to get its way through work-arounds of the legislation, at one stage evicting the tenants of the worst slums while still charging the owners rates. A good deal of demolition was carried out in this way, but as it took place in the middle of a decades-long building boom, it is likely that commercial pressures would have seen those buildings come down anyway. The tactic of hiving off the council's powers and investing them in contrary, antagonistic bodies like the Improvement Board was a constant of the last century with, for instance, the Board of Transit Commissioners usurping council power over road traffic in 1873 and the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board taking over one of the city's most important and prestigious roles in 1880. In 1897, a dispute between the council and the telegraph department escalated to the point of the mayor threatening to deputise 500 special constables from the ranks of his staff to forcibly prevent the colonial authorities from digging dangerous tunnels in the city centre.

This divisive strategy continues today through a multiplicity of nonrepresentative boards and authorities such as the Roads and Traffic Authority, the Waste Management Authority, the Central Sydney Planning Committee and the dozens of bodies with conflicting responsibilities for the management of Sydney Harbour. All of these have in common their genesis in the corridors of Parliament House rather than Town Hall and all represent the ad hoc, unaccountable and occasionally desperate decisions of a long line of State governments which knew that to cede any real power to the city would enfeeble their own position. More importantly it would expose the lords of capital, be they pastoral, commercial, financial or digital, to the rude claims of the commons, the descendants of those unruly, disenfranchised drunks who tore up the town when they realised the city's powerful elite had walked all over them in the elections of 1843.

None of this is to suggest a hegemonistic structure to power in the city. Quite the contrary in fact. The defining image of power in Sydney is not of some exclusive cabal, manoeuvring in secret to realise its venal designs. Nor of a few discrete elites, playing remote Olympian games with their subjects. Rather, power is atomised and the field on which the powerful contend is a confused, contrary realm of fractured lines, uncertain alliances and shifting schemes. The Parliament which continually neutered municipal authority was itself constrained by the precarious and short-lived majorities commanded by successive governments. Party discipline as we know it did not exist, largely because the Labor Party did not then exist. Governments were led by more or less charismatic individuals such as Henry Parkes around whom formed shaky coalitions whose members often shifted allegiance according to their interests of the day. With no organised party to represent the interests of labour, a rough, laissez-faire liberalism prevailed. The great battles were not fought over State intervention in what were seen as private ‘social' affairs – such as poverty or health problems in slum districts – but over State intervention in commercial affairs through the promotion of either free trade or protectionism.

Members of Parliament were not paid until 1889, meaning only men of some wealth could afford to sit. Politicians such as Sydney Burdekin, a pastoralist with extensive interests in city real estate, including much slum housing, were not about to ‘tamper with market forces or the rights of property'. And with the day to day survival of their ministries being so uncertain, the premiers, who would later evolve into the de facto governors of the twentieth-century metropolis, were neither inclined to, nor capable of, wielding executive power for the good of the whole city. It should not be surprising that in such a place and time the battles went not to the just, only the strong.

 

One cold night in the middle of the Great Depression an unemployed bricklayer named Jack Acland realised that he could not feed his child. It was his first child, six months old, and there was no food in the house. In saying that, Jack was not exaggerating or being figurative. There simply was
no food
. Nothing. Not for Jack, his child or his wife Phyllis. He had just started on relief work, a primitive, infinitely more savage version of modern work-for-the-dole schemes. It was heavy, unrelenting physical labour which hollowed out already hollow men and left them moaning or weeping or simply shuddering in their beds in the morning. Jack had walked the five miles home from his first day with his mind in turmoil because payday, contrary to his expectations, was not until Thursday week.

Phyllis, he recalled, was ‘a bit desperate because there was no baby food left in the tin'. There was nothing for it but the street. He tidied himself and searched out the old violin which he had nearly pawned to pay for their wedding. Another lodger, who sometimes sold flowers, or tried to, offered to join him and ‘rattle the box'. Unfortunately it was a late shopping night, as he remembered, and every 100 yards or so down Parramatta Road some desperate bastard like him was already scratching away on a violin. The police had tired of moving them on. Jack wasn't unique, his plight was no more serious than anyone else's and there was simply nowhere to stop. They walked and walked, legs and back already protesting after the exertions of the day, and finally finished up at Marrickville. Jack's companion said, ‘Listen, mate, if you're going to play, you'd better hurry up. You've only got half an hour!'

Jack's knees started to shake. Then his whole body. He was standing by the gutter and all he could think of was one piece, ‘Play, Fiddle, Play', a recent hit. Jack Acland placed the cool, familiar form of the violin beneath his thin cheek and nervously drew the bow. Then he played and played and played. The same tune. Over and over again. Time dragged by. Traffic passed. Pedestrians ignored him. Nobody placed as much as a slug in their box until, at last, a little girl took a ha'penny from her father, ‘and two young girls come along and put in threepence each'.