Leviathan (21 page)
Authors: John Birmingham
And running through the middle of this environmental disaster was the Tank Stream. Instead of the sylvan brook described by the First Fleet writers, Macquarie found an open drain, little better than a sewer in parts, polluted by wandering animals, industrial waste and ignorant householders who washed their filthy clothes in the sandstone tanks already befouled by the ashes and garbage they had dumped upstream. Gone were the little white beaches, the stands of acacia and bunches of wild spinach, replaced by toilets, slaughterhouses and tanneries. Having reimposed order in the civil universe, Macquarie bent to the same mission in the physical. He passed an order in February 1810 banning the use of the tanks for washing and authorising the seizure and forfeiture of any animal found wandering nearby. It had little effect and in September he was forced to issue a much longer order banning all animals, noxious trades and householders from use of the water. He further outlawed the dumping of rubbish in the streets, as it inevitably found its way into the town's only water supply, and ordered the magistrates âto pay the strictest attention' to enforcing these edicts.
A month later the fluctuant, ill-contrived paths and trails over which passed all of Sydney's traffic, along which capered so many of its pigs and goats, and onto which was tossed so much of its garbage, were paid the honour of being officially turned into streets by a stroke of the Governor's pen. He had ordered them widened to fifteen metres, including a footpath on both sides, and banned the construction of houses without authorisation by the town surveyor. The same order attempted to round up the town's anarchic population of stray farm animals, authorised the constabulary to shoot any dogs found attacking people or horses, and for good measure reinforced the Governor's previous injunction against the general populace letting off their own firearms in and around the town, especially on Sundays. The main thoroughfare, leading from Dawes Point to the Brickfields and beyond â a riotous unfenced barnyard, the haunt of murderous packs of dogs and itchy-fingered gun-toting colonists â until then variously known as High Street, Spring Row and Sergeant Major's Row, was renamed George Street in honour of the colony's barking-mad sovereign. Street signs were erected along the unmade tracks and everybody was told to stop using their old names. The Governor announced that he intended to clear some ground near the administrative quarter, which would be called Macquarie Place, in line with his cheerful habit of naming everything he could get away with after himself. He moved the old overcrowded market square away from the Rocks back up George to Market Street, which would in turn run down to a new wharf at Cockle Bay. A swathe of open ground looking down on the town from the east became Hyde Park and the brick-makers in the adjacent pits were banned from digging for clay there.
These were all small but significant steps towards realising Phillip's vision of imposing âorder and useful arrangement' on a savage coast. By 1810 brute creation was no longer manifest in the wild land, untouched by cultivation, but rather in the âtumult and confusion' wrought by the hands of men, by their greed and rampant appetites, checked by nothing more than the feeble angels of their better nature. Macquarie was both informed by Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress and driven by a baser personal desire to mould the coarse clay of this settlement into something finer, and preferably named after him. It was simultaneously a civilizing mission and a soothing balm for the soul of a proud man whose clan had ruled their own distant world for most of a millennium and only recently fallen from grace. Roads and bridges were just the start, the framework of the complex urban set piece he would will into existence.
Macquarie knew, however, that will was not enough. He would need skilled men to fully realise these dreams. In his first letter to London he had asked for a professional architect to be sent out, but none was forthcoming. Perhaps the closest thing he had at first was his own beloved wife Elizabeth, an adventurous, confident woman, who arrived in the colony as qualified as anyone in architectural design and probably more so in matters of taste and landscaping. A copy of Gyfford's
Designs for Elegant Cottages and Small Villas
had sailed with her to Sydney and from it came house plans for the Judge Advocate and the Colonial Secretary. Her influence was important in shaping the Orphan School at Parramatta, the gardens of Government House and the design of the Domain, where generations of Sydneysiders have ambled along the roads she laid out and caught the breeze off the harbour from the sandstone bench which bears her name. But even her untutored gifts were not equal to the grand stage of her husband's vision and it was not until Lieutenant John Watts and the convict forger Francis Greenway arrived in 1814 that he could call on men whose talents matched his aspirations. Watts, a family friend, had been formally trained as an architect and the Governor quickly set him to work on military hospitals, barracks, a church and old Government House at Parramatta. But it was Greenway, the urger, the manipulator, the insolent, conceited, self-aggrandising genius, to whom Macquarie turned to realise his grandest schemes and, often, his biggest whitest elephants. Peter Bridges neatly abstracts their relationship in
Foundations of Identity
.
It was an odd partnership but one of mutual advantage, Macquarie had discovered in Greenway an architect whose skills and creativity were tuned to his own ambitions, and Greenway had a patron who could offer him opportunities for the realisation of his professional advancement. His position as a convict did not prevent him from freely proffering his professional advice and suggestions for all sorts of grand projects ⦠they shared a deep streak of vanity and tender self-esteem, both rejected opposition to their visions as obstacles created by plodding minds to be righteously rejected and failed to discern that the architect's more grandiose schemes were figments of an unreal ambition.
Macquarie's own imagination wasn't averse to the odd booby flight. One of Greenway's more important early tasks was to pronounce the last rites over a project the Governor had hoped would prove an immense ornament and benefit to the town, as well as to his own standing, but which degenerated into an embarrassing circus. In early November of 1810 the colony's Acting Commissary, a sort of chief storekeeper, had signed a contract with D'Arcy Wentworth, the Principal Surgeon and Superintendent of Police, and two merchants, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley, to build a new hospital on a site commanding the high ridge to the east of the town. It was a huge project for an infant colony, a monumental investment of scarce resources which would, when complete, overshadow and totally dominate the miniature village below. A structural symphony in three movements, the hospital consisted of a main building nearly ninety metres long with walls over half a metre thick, and two smaller but still substantial separate wings, which now serve as the Old Mint and the core of Parliament House on Macquarie Street. With hundreds of rude little mud huts and tumble-down, jerry-built cottages still blighting the face of the town, the hospital would sweep aside the doubtful, disreputable circumstances of Sydney's birth and carve a message deep into the ancient sandstone beds on which it lay: the might and power of Imperial Britain had arrived and none would stand before it. No warped, disjointed cabbage tree logs would go into this building. No greasy, leaf-choked mud would be smeared on its walls to keep out the wind and rain. Cedar, mahogany and cut stone would hold up the massive edifice and deny the elements. Wide verandahs would encircle the buildings, the upper level being supported by columns of solid stone, recalling the classical forms which adorned the first great Western city-states.
At least that was the plan, for which the contractors received eighty oxen for slaughter and the exclusive right to import spirits into the colony for three years. Unfortunately none of them were builders. The only tradesmen they could find were totally unsuited to such a huge, complicated undertaking. Nobody had really mastered the difficulties of using local materials. And the town's other merchants went into a tailspin over the import deal, some of them already having valuable shipments on the way. Long story short? It was a cock-up, with the contractors losing money and the job itself botched beyond imagining. Garnham Blaxcell was so deep in the hole with his creditors over this and other failures that he took flight for England but fetched up in Batavia where he drank himself to death within a few months.
Nor did Macquarie escape unscathed. He was beset by critics on all sides â the skinflints in Downing Street who would have spent nothing on the colony if at all possible; the contractors in Sydney who were being ground into the earth by looming financial disaster; and those nattering pointyheads common in any small, isolated castaway society, especially one so thoroughly riven by factional warfare for most of its short and miserable existence. In April 1816 Macquarie turned to Greenway for help. The convict draughtsman inspected the works as part of a committee which reported that the contractors had committed a number of gross and âmost serious' violations of their agreement. The foundations of the main building, upon which the colossal weight of the whole rested, were in an appalling state. The basement wall, rather than being almost a metre thick, was only forty-six centimetres, and made of thin ashlar, much of which was already âin a dangerous and mutilated state requiring immediate attention'. With water seeping into the basement the decay grew worse every day. The boundary wall was in a âshattered state', with no level base ever having been laid and the whole length in danger of falling into ruin. Many of the stone columns were already split. Rather than being made of single continuous pieces, the roof beams had been cobbled together in three separate sections âthereby making them quite useless'. If anything went wrong in the basement, as seemed inevitable, the roof, the walls and colonnade would come crashing down on the patients and medical staff. Other minor problems included dry rot in the floor, and gutters which were about to blister and crack in the sun. In the end, rather than recommending increased funding as requested by the builders, Greenway said they should pay a penalty of £10 000.
Greenway's own first foray into the built environment was on a much smaller scale but met with immeasurably more success. The lighthouse he raised in the form of a âsturdy Doric tower' on South Head was far removed from the plain, utilitarian sentinels which guarded the coast of England. Immensely pleased that something was going to plan for a change, Macquarie granted his new architect a conditional emancipation. The tower, predictably, was named after the Governor. Greenway's first project within the town was the Hyde Park Barracks which still stands next to one of the old hospital wings he so ferociously criticised. When completed, the
Sydney Gazette
described it as a noble structure, beautiful at a distance but conveying a sense of towering grandeur on a closer approach. Greenway's clean lines and elegant dimensions, the obvious quality of his materials and the harmony they evoke between the art of design and the demands of execution are still a silent admonition to the dog's breakfast of the old hospital next door. Columns askew, brickwork confused, a mishmash of shoddy, half-arsed incompetence, the hospital benefits from recent renovation and a heavy patina of old age which renders modern onlookers indulgent and less critical of an old trollop's charms, especially when viewed within the context of the ugly, neo-brutalist monster boxes which have stamped their heavy jackboots all over that part of the legal district in recent decades.
Between 1816 and 1819, when their whole act came to a shuddering halt, Macquarie and Greenway laboured mightily to remake Sydney's image in line with their own occasionally fanciful ideals. Greenway's pencils flashed over plans of churches, courthouses, barracks and a new, monumental Government House. Macquarie continually rode out to lay foundation stones, visit building sites and dedicate the ornaments to the civilization he was raising all around him. Jacques Arago, ploughing up the harbour with Louis de Freycinet's scientific expedition of 1819, was taken aback by the progress.
The appearence of homes standing in cultivated clearing on the harbour's wild shores recalled elegant chateaux in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. European fruit trees and trim sweet smelling hedges had usurped the place of the Australian bush, and in the midst of prodigious and bizarre nature long avenues unfolded magically and led to small dwellings carefully embellished by ingenious art.
Arago thought that Sydney made âa charming picture', its villas of cut stone, decorated with sculptures and fine balconies, contrasting strangely with the old wooden houses which were vanishing so quickly. Wandering around the better districts, the Frenchman could find nothing âto proclaim that this town, already so beautiful, is the work of but a few years'. The flatteries of Arago were just what the dynamic duo liked to hear, but in the end the condemnation of the Bigge Report was what they got instead.
JT Bigge was a lawyer, a former chief justice of Trinidad and a scaly old toad. An arch-conservative, he was despatched to Sydney by the Colonial Office to investigate whether the convict system was still the âobject of real terror' originally intended. Well attuned to those wealthy landholders who saw the convicts as indentured slaves, Bigge stepped ashore a few weeks before Arago, cast his eyes over the same charming picture and enthusiastically took to it with a large ugly nail-studded club. Bigge knocked seven kinds of hell out of Macquarie's administration and one of his first targets was the Governor's public works program. In this he was ably assisted by the testimony, sworn or otherwise, of men like Gregory Blaxland and John Macarthur. Blaxland was all for building good roads to and from his own property but he âsaw little virtue in fine public buildings in a pioneer settlement'. They âgave ships' captains entering the harbour a false impression of prosperity and hampered the establishment of a useful and profitable agricultural base on which to build the colonial economy'. They were simply ânot necessary for this generation', a view firmly subscribed to in London. Macarthur, whose habit of chewing up and spitting out difficult governors was becoming a little compulsive, employed âall his influence in London to destroy the Governor's reputation in official circles and to precipitate his recall'. He relentlessly brown-nosed Bigge, who returned the favour by pushing Macarthur's line that New South Wales's future lay in the hands of wool producers, âmen of real capital, with estates of at least 10 000 acres each, who would maintain transported convicts as their labour force and keep them landless and in proper subjection'.
Macquarie, who had naively expected Bigge to vindicate his administration, found himself increasingly marginalised and under attack. His relationship with Greenway deteriorated as the ego-maniacal architect unwisely tried to play both ends off against the middle. It was a great relief to the tired, dispirited Scot when he learned, at the end of 1820, that his third request to resign had been accepted. He and Elizabeth sailed for home in February 1822, waved off by huge cheering crowds of people who had benefited from his reformist programs. Greenway, who now had to face his legion of enemies without a protector, soon fell out of favour and was forced back into private practice. He wasn't what you'd call a people person and he struggled to make a living. He died farming poor swampy ground on the Hunter River and was buried without a tombstone or marker in a lonesome field outside East Maitland.
As Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie stood at the rails of the
Surry
to accept the best wishes of the town's lower orders they could at least take some consolation from the changes they had wrought on that strange remote little world. The life of the town was still cupped within the intimate folds of the valley which climbed away to the south. But where they had once surveyed a desperate, muddy outpost whose organising principle was the will to power rather than the rule of law, they left behind a well ordered, prosperous sea port. The imposing lines of the General Hospital which receded with each pitch and roll of the
Surry
's deck may have reminded Macquarie of the perils of immoderate ambition, but for all its faults it marked out an axis along which layers of power were steadily accumulating. The colony's legal and medical professions were drawn there to the hospital and law courts. They built fine houses, chambers and offices around Hyde Park, and opportunistic merchants soon set up shop to serve them. Further south commercial activity was accelerating at the intersection of Market and George Streets, where Macquarie had moved the town markets in 1811. Private warehouses spread along Sussex and Kent Streets to store the increasing volume of goods unloaded at Macquarie's Cockle Bay Wharf. In all, well over a thousand buildings covered the ground where black ghosts crept between the memory of trees, along the banks of the dying Tank Stream.
That much abused rivulet had withstood the depredations of the English for a little longer than its surrounding ecosystem or the Aborigines, but like them it was doomed. None of Macquarie's orders had arrested its decline, which accelerated on his departure. By 1824 Sydney's water supply had become a threat to public health. In February of that year an aging surveyor by the name of John Busby arrived to solve the crisis. It took him until 1837, by which stage he was over seventy years old. The tunnel which he drove through four kilometres of sandstone, from the Lachlan Swamps (now Centennial Park) to Hyde Park, meandered about like an old wino. Busby's critics said he didn't care to get down and dirty with his rough convict workforce and consequently the excavation's line of advance travelled along the path of least resistance, or in whichever direction the miners' noses were pointing when they swung their picks and shovels in the hot, cramped confines of their tunnel. Even after completion supply was never certain â especially when mains and public fountains were run off the bore â and the town's health suffered from the liberal use of lead piping. With the Tank Stream ruined there was no other source of fresh water until 1859. Indeed, the city's enormous thirst was not properly quenched until well into the twentieth century, with the construction of dams on the Upper Nepean. Until then the city's water supply was erratic at best and nonexistent at worst. The failure of the system, particularly in summer, was not uncommon and when water did flow it was often discoloured, foul tasting and crawling with aquatic life. The Water Board's history quotes the example of a Canterbury man who kept a sieve on hand in the early 1930s because he âreceived a supply of freshwater shrimps every time he turned on his tap'. Centipedes and eels were also frequent visitors to the kitchen sink, and in 1932 the
Telegraph
reported on a Paddington man whose tap emitted a giant wriggling âGorgian worm'.
Rogue prawns and giant worms were more inconvenient than life threatening. The leitmotif of nineteenth-century Sydney was much heavier: a parched, stinking city beset by desperate water shortages and choking under a mountain of human waste. With no universal sewerage system in place, thousands of cesspits dotted the landscape, often consisting of nothing more than holes dug into the porous topsoil, filled with fecal matter, topped off and started again a few metres away. In Waterloo the ground was so thoroughly contaminated by the 1870s that the Sewerage and Health Board predicted the whole district would soon be unfit for human habitation. Drinking wells were sunk into this spongy, poisonous earth and such sewerage outlets as existed vomited their noxious brown sludge directly into the harbour. The authorities were not unaware of the problem. In
Nineteenth Century Sydney
, David Clark reports the case of a Balmain man who escaped conviction on a charge of drunkenness because he told the magistrate he had nothing to drink but beer. The court considered this a reasonable excuse. (In an eye-bulging footnote Clark also tells the story of the Albion Brewery whose beer was much appreciated for its âdistinctive' flavour; a product, it transpired, of the hideously polluted ground water in the brewery's reservoir draining through the Devonshire Street Cemetery.)
Notwithstanding the indulgences of Balmain magistrates, Sydney's awareness of its own physical degradation in the late 1800s seemed to have been clouded by wilful blindness, as the city tried to ignore the savage forces which burned at the heart of its fantastic growth. In 1878, when thousands of demonstrators rampaged through the Chinese quarter to protect their way of life from the yellow peril, a big wedge of the city's population already lived in conditions just as appalling if not worse than those found in any opium den. Like the underclass of London however, they were all but invisible to those who went about their lives in the better part of town. Even though their homes lay next to each other, and the stench of the lower orders must have wrinkled the noses of consulting surgeons in Macquarie Street and the well-to-do merchants of the Rocks, the city slums were simply allowed to fester for decades.
When Busby's bore was finished in 1837 it serviced a town not too dissimilar to the one Macquarie left behind. One major change was that Woolloomooloo Hill, which we know as Potts Point, had been carved from the bush atop soaring cliffs to the east of the Domain. It was Sydney's first suburb, an exclusive retreat for a handful of colonial worthies who could afford to remove themselves from the increasingly unpleasant atmosphere of the town. A number of conditions imposed on the landholders ensured that only the brightest stars in the colony's tiny firmament got to twinkle on the ridge. John Busby had an estate there, as did the Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell, Supreme Court Justice Sir James Dowling and the colony's High Sheriff Thomas Macquoid. Each land grant was to have just one villa on it, worth no less than £1000, set back at least sixty yards from the road and facing towards Sydney. There was no artless Georgian false modesty about these buildings. Showpieces of a new indigenous elite, they proclaimed their owners' wealth and import with all the bombast and florid styling available to the designers-gone-wild of these Regency and Neo-Gothic piles. And just in case the unwashed masses huddled back in town didn't get the message, the Hill's stylish residents hacked away every vestige of native fauna so that their handsome temples shrieked their significance from a blinding canvas of bare sun-blasted rock. Thomas Shepherd, a landscape gardener, took his betters to task for their madness, saying,