Leviathan (23 page)

Mundy was to overcome some of these initial misgivings about Sydney, however, conceding that the growth of the city during his first two years was enormous. A new suburb sprang up on either side of William Street where just recently ‘the belated diner-out might have fallen among bushrangers'; whilst the valley of Woolloomooloo, which had contained just one large villa on his arrival, was soon overrun by ‘a forest of chimneys …'. The same chimneys impressed the hell out of George Butler Earp in 1853 when he remarked that the traveller landing in this new metropolis would find it hard to convince himself he was in a strange land, so faithfully did all these belching smokestacks recreate the industrial airs of home.

The thickening smoke which hung in the humidity of Sydney's long summers signalled the death of the old, intimately scaled town. More and more chimneys would climb skywards in the next decade, until Mundy's concrete forest had spread across the entire city, colonising it so completely that in photos of Sydney from that time the most striking feature is the amazing number of smokestacks befouling the air. Bent backs and straining muscles were quickly replaced by steam power in the city's economic engine room. Thousands of furnaces burned millions of tonnes of wood and coal as the industrial revolution, which had gestated for centuries in Europe, swept Sydney in a few short years, bringing with it the choking smog. The wealth of the continent was there to be stolen, and scores of new industries sprang up in response. Construction, manufacturing and transport, the sinews of a modern industrial state, all grew freakishly in size and complexity as the colonists created their replica of an advanced civilization on the rough foundations of Arthur Phillip's convict settlement.

While steam powered the changes of the next thirty years, they were paid for by gold and wool. The discovery of gold in particular jacked the Australian colonies into a wild, rampaging energy which lit up the southern skies and drew legions of the hopeful, the desperate and the crazed from the dark recesses of the old world. The national population more than doubled, from four hundred and eighty thousand in 1850 to over a million by 1858, with more migrants arriving in two years than had convicts in the previous seventy. This explosion of national wealth was reflected in the blossoming of the built environment. The rich still lavished their treasure on luxurious private homes, but now they were so rich they could flaunt their power in the public sphere as well. Fantastic, raw, swaggering wealth declared its own glory in the granite and marble grandeur of the Commercial Banking Company's old premises in George Street at the bottom of Martin Place, in elegant glass-roofed consumer arcadias such as the Strand, and in the proliferation of gentlemen's clubs such as the Australian and the New South Wales at the big end of town. Macquarie Street, which housed the Australian Club, was adorned with a string of stylish Italianate terraces. John Askew, who visited the city just after Mundy left, described the area as the ‘West-end of Sydney'. He liked to walk through the district of a summer's evening, ‘about an hour after sunset, when the drawing-rooms are in a blaze of light'.

Not to be outdone by these delicate urban harmonies, the State replied with its own powerful symphony of monumental design. Between 1864 and 1868 the Colonial Architect, James Barnet, completely reworked the diminutive Australian Museum into a massive public temple, fronted by soaring Corinthian pillars and finished with the sort of intricate, expensive detail which was bound to make a lot of know-nothing yahoos in Parliament squeal like stuck pigs. Barnet's museum redefined the dimensions of the city in a way not seen since Macquarie's ill-fated hospital, taking a smalltime provincial backwater into the big league. Then in 1866 Barnet started work on a project which would dwarf it completely: the General Post Office. Still a major landmark in a city which has grown exponentially, upwards and outwards, the GPO was an undertaking as important as Utzon's Opera House a hundred years later, and just as controversial. But it was even more significant in terms of the footprint it left on an infinitely smaller, simpler Victorian city. Here was proof – manifest in millions of tonnes of exquisitely carved rock raised over the grave of the Tank Stream – of the might and power of Imperial Britain, proof of the triumph of her people and their sciences over brute creation, and proof that the destiny of a small white Christian nation was to rule this giant land amidst a sea of lesser races. Those shameless self-promoters Macquarie and Greenway would have approved. Unlike them, however, Barnet was able to ride over the enemies who massed in front of him. When he was finally white-anted out of office in 1890, 1000 new buildings stood as monuments to his long career, from dozens of minor projects like suburban post offices and schools, to other major set pieces such as Customs House, the Lands Department Building, the Colonial Secretary's Building and the Exhibition Buildings in the Botanic Gardens, a wonder of their day and since lost to a fire.

The change in the face of Sydney over these years was not restricted to individual buildings. The boundaries of the city suddenly became incredibly mobile after decades of incremental advance. A feedback loop of increasing wealth, immigration and industrialisation pushed the envelope of settlement out over the dry horizons which had imprisoned the colony's first settlers. Steam-powered trains and horse-drawn trams delivered workers to the CBD from ever further away as the city splayed its fingers down the train line, opened in 1855, to Parramatta, south along Botany Road, north atop the ridge to Hornsby and out through Paddington in the east. Harbour-front suburbs such as Balmain, Glebe, Mosman and Watsons Bay grew in tandem with the private ferry services which made them possible, while Manly was established as a healthy retreat for the better-off. Their ranks swelled as the long boom filled the pockets of thousands of skilled tradesmen, professionals, merchants, miners, money-movers and industrialists, all of whom were as keen as mustard to get away from the city's slums. They enriched another group, real-estate speculators, who have plagued the city ever since. Those perennial winners, the old money families, who had grown fat on generous land grants, now lined up for a second bite of the cherry as they subdivided their estates and ran up thousands of terrace houses over their old cow pastures. Lines of terraces marching down a hill became a signature of Sydney at that time, from the mean, airless little prison cells knocked out for the lowest sort of workers to the grand, multistoreyed fancies of the nouveau riche. The fever of those times, the rocket-rush, head-spinning vitality of such growth was beautifully caught by James Inglis at the end of the 1870s in
Our Australian Cousins
.

However, Inglis, unlike some of his contemporaries, was not completely blinded by this glorious display. He complained that land had become so valuable that open drains were boxed with timber and covered by little wooden cottages, ‘nurtured in corruption and redolent of putridity and decay'. As the middle class raced away into the burbs, the position of the underclasses in the city centre grew worse, for even as the city's population was falling, its density was increasing. The abyss between the winners and the losers yawned wide, dark and deep. When Samuel Mossman was spruiking the advantages of colonial life to his London readers in 1862 he tempted them with descriptions of the lunchtime fare available to Sydney's working men; ‘soup and fish, roast and boiled, as much as any man can eat'; turtle from Moreton Bay; beef and mutton at twopence per pound; wild turkey from the plains; ducks and pigeons, rolling in fat; sweet and juicy vegetables; and smiling black-coated potatoes from Tasmania, the finest spuds in the world. Given the toxic swill which the workers of the old country had to force down – wilted, rotten vegetables and rancid meat (such as a pig, weighing ninety kilos, which was found dead and decayed, then cut up and exposed for sale by one butcher at Heywood) – it's not surprising Mossman should trumpet the tucker of the harbour city. But sadly, had he ventured from the cafes and dining rooms of George Street down into the warrens of the poor, he would have found a world remarkably similar to the worst rookeries and wynds of London or Glasgow.

The slums which the
Herald
had detailed during the early part of the 1850s had not been swept away by the subsequent decades' tsunami of affluence. In fact, they sank further into hopelessness, victims of official neglect and their own population boom. In
Nineteenth Century Sydney
, Max Kelly points out that even as settlement spread further from the city centre, the centre itself became more densely populated. Surry Hills, which had been a thinly populated sand-blown wasteland during Mundy's tenure, had a population of 23 000 by 1871, and 42 000 by '91. In the former valley of the Tank Stream, steeply rising demand for commercial property led to a rapid increase in land prices and forced a massive shift from residential to business use. And yet the numbers of people living within the city continued to grow, drawn by the wealth which was making their lives a misery. As the hovels of the working poor around Darling Harbour were razed to make space for new warehouses, shipping offices and bond stores, the poor just moved themselves into the nearest hovels which weren't being demolished.

Kelly describes it as a truism of the nineteenth century that as populations rose, the quality of inner-city residential life took a dive. The only qualification he makes is that Sydney had never housed its working population properly. The fetid slums of the city's golden age were not a case of once-adequate housing falling to pieces under pressure, because unfortunately most of the housing built from the 1850s through to the 1870s was crap even when it was new. Labour and materials were expensive; the economy was running at white heat; and most developers were building as quickly and cheaply as possible, for profit rather than posterity. The
Herald
's 1851 exposé was just one of a series of investigations into the awful state of Sydney's housing, none of which, in the end, counted for squat.

In the late 1850s William Jevons, a gifted Renaissance type, made his own single-handed survey of the city's suburbs and housing. An economist, logician, meteorologist, photographer and writer, Jevons would take his notebook and camera on long solitary walks through the parts of Sydney most respectable folk studiously avoided. He found the same pinched, dirty faces in the same stinking back streets extensively chronicled by the
Herald
seven years earlier. The city authorities had done little or nothing to remove the canker from their midst. The lower streets of the Rocks were still a festering slum of ‘horrible intensity'. Sewers and gutters were unknown and ‘the drainage of each house or hovel simply trickles down the hill, soon reaching, as the case may be, the front and back of the next lower house'. More often than not it fetched up against the walls of the lower house, soaking through to the foundations and floors below. Some dug trenches around their homes to divert the sludge, effectively surrounding themselves with filth which brewed up in the sun's warmth every morning and which was kept ‘in a constant state of moistness by new accretions of liquid filth'.

In Redfern he found that curious arrangement, so common in Sydney, of all the classes being thrown in together; tall, spacious terraces along Pitt and Cleveland Streets surrounded with native fig trees or Norfolk pines, wretched hovels lining Botany Road, log huts everywhere in between, and an entirely new suburb rising on the black sandy hills of Sir Daniel Cooper's Waterloo Estate to the south. This, he said, was something you could only see in the New World, the sudden appearance of a whole town, the boards of its houses still raw with sap and sharp splinters. Nowhere but Australia, however, could you find such a collection of ‘hastily erected frail small habitations, devoid of even a pretence to ornament and in many or most cases belonging to, and built by those who inhabit them'. It looked more like a military camp than a permanent town or village. Most of the homes consisted of little more than two rooms and were constructed of rough timber, canvas, corrugated iron, rubble, packing crates and, in some cases, glass bottles. The one thing they had going for them was space. As long as there was enough distance between their flimsy walls to permit a free flow of air, disease and contagion were less likely to strike. Unfortunately, as the building of Sydney accelerated through the next thirty years, open space was quickly bought up and buried under ever-increasing tonnages of bricks and mortar.