The Rise And Fall Of Marvellous Melbourne 9780522866797, 0522866794

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THE RISE AND

FALL of MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE

LOBARBARA~AGAIN AND ALWAYS MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd (MUP Ltd) PO Box 1167, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia mup-info@ unimelb.edu.au WWww.mup.com.au

First published 1978 Reprinted in paperback 1979, 1981, 1984, 1988 Second edition 2004 Text © Graeme Davison 1978, 2004 Illustrations © individual copyright holders (see Sources of Illustrations, page 372) Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2004 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Typeset in Malaysia by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd. Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group Designed by Sandra Nobes Cover illustration: A. C. Cooke, Melbourne 1852, from Mlustrated Australian News Supplement, April 1882 (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria) National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Davison, Graeme, 1940-. The rise and fall of marvellous Melbourne. Rev. ed. Bibliography.

Includes index. ISBN 0 522 85123 1. 1. Melbourne (Vic.)—History. 2. Melbourne (Vic.)—Economic conditions—1851—1901. J. Title.

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Preface to the Second Edition V

Introduction ] Part One THE CITY 18

Acknowledgements Xvi

1 ‘From Men to Money-grubbers’ 20 The Gold-rush Merchants—the Rise of the Agency System— the Mercantile Community—the Counting House and the Commercial Office—Problems of Succession—the Drift of Trade—Balancing the Books

2 “The Old Spirit ... Has Gone Out’ 47 A Sense of Disparity—the Pattern of Industrial Growth— ‘Captains of Industry’ —Apprenticeship in Decay—Industrial Conflict—Manufacturing in Depression—Class Formation and Industrial Development

3 “This Modern Babel’ 85 The ‘System’ and Its Enemies—Architects and Builders— Journeymen and Masters—the Torsion of the Market— the ‘System’ Returns

Cortents

4 Professions and the Public 114 Professional Status: the Attack from Within—the New Professions—Pyrofessional Status: the Attack from Outside

5 ‘A Great Quasi-mercantile Establishment’ 137 The Rise of the Patronage System—Civil Service Reform— the Boom and the Bureaucrats—Retrenchment and Reaction

6 The Social Dynamics of a Metropolis 158

Part Two THE SUBURBS 164

¢ Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities 166 ‘The Advantages of Country and City Life Combined —the Social Functions of Domestic Privacy—FPatterns of Residential Segregation—Factors in Suburban Growth— the Public Transport Revolution—the End of the Spraivl

8 ‘A City of Freehold Homes 212 A Home of One's Own —the Pattern of Ownership— Compulsory Tenants and Reluctant Landlords

9 Making Ends Meet 251] Foundations of a Plutocratic Society: the Structure of Means— Anticipatory Spending: the ‘Marriage Question —Patterns of Experditurc—the Depression: a Multiple Crisis of Means— Drastic Remedies—a New Fashion of Austerity

10 ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ 279 The Ideal and Its Critics—History and Prophecy— the Fall of the City and the Rise of the Rural Ideal

Afterword 316 Notes 323

Index 375

select SourcesBibliography of Illustrations365 372

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ree. The kise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne was a pioneering study in Australian urban history, published at a time when our cities had only recently

begun to claim the attention of academic historians. It enjoyed the success that sometimes comes when the author is lucky enough to hit on a great subject, was gratifyingly hailed from the first as ‘a classic’ and awarded the Ernest

Scott Prize, and has gone through several printings during the subsequent quarter of a century. I am grateful to Melbourne University Publishing for the opportunity to republish it in this new edition. Looking back, I am conscious of its defects and omissions, as well as its

durable qualities, and of how differently I would approach the same topic today. But every book is of its time, and rather than attempt a complete revlsion, and risk pulling at a thread that might unravel completely, I have made only minor factual corrections and stylistic alterations to the original text. Much, of course, has been published on the subject since 1978 and I have therefore sought to guide the reader into this writing, and to indicate where it challenges or modifies my own interpretation, by a series of short introductions to the endnotes to each chapter. I have also revised and extended the illustrations.

Twenty-five years on, I am better able to see the book as the product of the particular times and places, as well as the personal and intellectual

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preoccupations, that led me to write It. Knowing what went into the book may perhaps give the reader some insight into how it is now best read. In the following pages I describe, as well as memory serves, the experiences and ideas that shaped the book, and attempt, as much as vanity and hindsight allows, a reappraisal of its main ideas.

I cannot recall when I first conceived the idea of writing about the history of Melbourne, but awareness of the city’s past had been slowly growing since my childhood. My grandfather, Vic Hewett, was a self-educated printer and book collector. One Sunday afternoon he took me into his study, lined with first editions of Henry Lawson and other Bulletvn writers, and showed me his latest prize, a map of the first Melbourne land sales in 1837. We marvelled at the tiny prices paid for prime city blocks, and the heroic enterprise that had trans-

formed them, but gave little thought to the original possessors of the soil whose property had been sold. As a primary schoolboy, | walked from our house in suburban Essendon to the Aberfeldie State School, then almost on the city’s north-western fringe. On the way home, we dawdled down streets subdivided in the 1880s, and named after the city’s pioneers—Batman, Fawkner, Buckley—or in honour of the land boomers’ political allies, like local member Alfred Deakin and temperance campaigner John Nimmo.

More than half a century later, many of the allotments were still vacant. During the postwar building boom my father, a self-employed plumber, helped to fill them up with spec-built weatherboard and brick veneer cottages. Over the summer holidays I sometimes joined him out on the block, listening to the conversation of his mates, sitting on the newly laid floors of the haltffinished houses, pouring cups of strong black tea from a billy heated by a blowlamp. Perhaps it was then that I first heard the name of the notorious Tommy Bent, whose two-acre allotments were still being farmed along the Moonee Ponds Creek, and Jimmy Mirams, whose descendants stil ran a local timber yard. During the 1950s and 1960s Melbourne was in the midst of another of its recurrent booms. The nightmare of depression and war had receded, and the city entered an era of ‘golden dreams’. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ had been a cre-

ation of the lucky gold-rush generation and their spoiled children. The postwar boom was fuelled by a similar transition, from the depression generation to the luckiest generation of all, the postwar baby-boomers. The growth of the _ yi —

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capital cities, and the burgeoning of their suburbs, was a material expression of the new prosperity of the postwar years. For families like mine, who had

done it hard during the depression, these were truly abundant years. The brick veneer house, the Holden station wagon, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the Victa mower, and the Mixmaster brought a new level of comfort to Everyman and Everywoman. The advances of the 1880s boom—the spec-

built cottage, the cable tram, the push mower and the gas oven—seemed modest by comparison. By the early 1960s, when I entered university—the first of my family to do so—Australian intellectuals had just begun to subject the middle-class suburb to their ironical gaze. I read Robin Boyd's Australia’s Home (1954) and The Australian Ugliness (1963) and attended one of Barry Humphries’s first performances of ‘A Nice Night’s Entertainment’ (1962). As students of Australian

history, we read Russel Ward’s recently-published book The Australian Legend. | was excited by Ward's bold analysis of the Australian’s self-image,

and its roots in the bush ethos celebrated by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. I had known Lawson's writings since boyhood, when my grandfather gave me a copy of his selected verse and short stories. But I was puzzled by Ward’s insistence that the Bush was the only begetter of the Australian spirit. Why had Australian intellectuals, many of them city people themselves, invested the Bush with such romantic ideals-while regarding their

own cities and towns as no more than plagiarized versions of London and Manchester? From my angle, the Australian code of mateship was as alive and well among the men who drank their billy tea around a brazier on the subur-

ban frontier as it was among the shearers and stockmen of the Outback. If middle-class intellectuals saw the cities as provincial, was it because they were still tied to the apron-strings of Mother England and unable to see what was distinctive in their own urban environment?! Some historians are driven by the desire to inhabit other worlds, to make comprehensible the lives and mentalités of people far removed in time and place from themselves. Among my own generation of historians I honour the writings of Inga Clendinnen and Greg Dening, Bill Kent and Rhys Isaac, who have written about exotic times and places, enabling us to feel that nothing human is ultimately strange to us. My own calling, however, has been different: it is to reveal, as well as I can, the hidden dimensions of the familiar, the strangeness of places, institutions and ways of life that we Australians largely take for granted. In the early 1960s the Australian city was still, historically, largely terra wncognita.

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My teachers in the Melbourne University History Department helped to

feed my curiosity about our urban past. Jim Main introduced me to the writings of the English suburban historian Jim Dyos.- Norman Harper’s studies of Frederick Jackson Turner's ‘Frontier Thesis’ led me to reflect on the influence of the Australian urban frontier.’ Allan Martin directed me to Richard Twopeny’s perceptive Town Life in Australia (1883)! and supervised my honours dissertation, a study of class relations and institutional life

in the late-nineteenth-century working-class suburb of Richmond. The ancient historian John O'Brien, one of my examiners, and Weston Bate, who had recently published his history of suburban Brighton, had alerted me to the potential uses of municipal ratebooks for the social, as well as the architectural, historian of the city.’ Two pioneers of the emerging sub-discipline of urban history had visited Melbourne during my undergraduate years: the American

Richard Wade, author of The Urban Frontier (1959), and the Englishman Asa Briggs, whose Victorian Cities (1963) included a perceptive chapter on Melbourne. In a lecture at Sydney University, Briggs had pointed to the writings of the Chicago School of sociology and the British social survey tradition as sources

of theoretical stimulus for the urban historian.” Perhaps he repeated his advice in Melbourne, though I was also led to the same sources by Allan Martin's sociologist wife Jean who kindly drew up a reading list in preparation for my honours dissertation. They included American community studies, like

the Lynds’ Middletown, as well as the classics of the Chicago School of Sociology, such as Robert Park’s “The City as a Social Laboratory , Louis Wirth’s ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ and Harvey Zorbaugh’'s The Gold Coast

and the Slum. While there was much that seemed foreign in the Chicago tradition, I was excited by its vision of urban sociology as a study that could combine the ‘low-down’ of the local observer with an ecological understanding of the city as a whole. It was the beginning of a long fascination with the historv of urban social inquiry.®

History, I have long felt, is an outdoor as well as an indoor occupation. Talking and looking are as important as reading to the historian of the city. I got my first taste of historical fieldwork in writing my honours dissertation. For several weeks I sat in the rate office at the Richmond City Council, then still a fiefdom of the old John Wren machine, transcribing entries from the ratebooks and listening to the gossip in the adjoining ‘Welfare Office’ where Jimmy Loughnan held court. I walked the backstreets of the yet-to-be gentrified

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suburb, taking photographs, matching the shapes on the map with the shapes on the ground. One afternoon I was walking down Docker Street with an old canvas bag containing two cameras, as well as the hammer and screwdriver I used to carry out running repairs on my old Triumph roadster. I suddenly noticed that I was being followed by a car driven by two burly young men. As the car drew level one of the men jumped out, bundled me into the back seat of the car and began to go through the incriminating contents of my bag. ‘What do you think

youre doing?’, the young plain clothes detective inquired. ‘Historical research’, I meekly replied. ‘And how long have you been on this caper?’ was his incredulous response. The answer, of course, was that I'd hardly begun, but now I knew I was on the way. It took two or three years before I got the chance to take up urban history in earnest. At the end of 1966 I returned from Oxford, where I had detoured

into economics, philosophy and social theory, to the Australian National University in Canberra. My old Melbourne teachers John La Nauze and Barry Smith had recently arrived in the History Department in the Research School of Social Sciences and warmly supported my plan to write a PhD thesis on the

social history of Melbourne in the 1880s and 1890s. At Melbourne I had caught something of Max Crawford’s ‘synoptic’ vision of history as a study that attempted to integrate economic, social, intellectual and political influences. | doubt that a conscientious supervisor, preoccupied with ‘completion rates’, would now permit a student to run loose with such a broad topic; but La Nauze generously gave me my head.

While Canberra may now seem an odd place to attempt a history of Melbourne, there was much in the inter-disciplinary milieu of the Coombs Building to stimulate my project. On the day I arrived, John La Nauze took me

to the tearoom to meet the economic historian Noel Butlin. It was Butlin, in

his magisterial /nvestment in Australian Economic Development 18611900 (1964), who had first demonstrated the leading significance of urbanization in colonial economic development. He had just established an Urban Research Unit to study contemporary urban issues and had appointed Max Neutze and Patrick Troy as its first researchers. There had apparently been some discussion about whether the new student belonged in the History Department or in the new URU. ‘What are you interested in—things or people?’ Butlin gruffly inquired as we sipped our tea. ‘Both’, I prevaricated; ‘but people more than things’. If I had foreseen how much attention I would later

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devote to the history of things—buudings, clocks, cars, museums—perhaps | would have answered differently; but for the moment the issue was resolved and I stayed with the historians.” From my neighbours in Economic History and the Urban Research Unit, I caught an interest in the material aspects of urbanization and its intercon-

nections with the broader process of economic development. Noel Butlin subjected my first paper on home-ownership (the subject of chapter 8) to a bracing critique, but it was one of his colleagues, Patrick Troy, who gave me the confidence to persevere with research that ultimately overthrew some of Butlin’s own conclusions. From the labour historians led by Robin Gollan, I acquired the interest in labour processes and class relations, evident especially in chapters 3 and 4. Downstairs in the basement of the Coombs Building were the ANU Archives (now the Noel Butlin Archives) with their wonderful collection of business and trade union archives and their indispensable files of the Argus and Australasian. Upstairs in the departments of Sociology and Demography were colleagues like Frank Jones and Norma McArthur who

inducted me into the quantitative techniques reflected in my studies of occupational structure, home-ownership and marriage and birth patterns. Meanwhile, through their own studies of its intellectual and political life, my

supervisors John La Nauze and Barry Smith were guiding me towards an understanding of Melbourne's distinctive culture. Thanks to the ANU’s generous support for fieldwork, I was able to travel back to Melbourne for regular spells of archival research; I found that this alternation between total Immersion in the sources and reflection at a distance was an ideal way of gaining perspective on a topic that sometimes threatened to become unmanageable. ‘Urban history in the late 1960s was more an aspiration than an established field of study. There were few models, in Australia or elsewhere, for the

kind of interdisciplinary and holistic social history I was attempting; so inevitably I drew, eclectically though not uncritically, on my own reading and the ideas and interests of those around me. Oxford had confirmed my interest in the sociology of Max Weber and the writings of the Chicago School. These

became the primary theoretical underpinnings of my research, although | would supplement and modify them before the work was complete. From Weber I learned that economic and social change were products of powertful ideas and values as well as demographic and market forces. From the Chicago School, I learned to read the map of the city, much as an ecologist reads the landscape, as a vital clue to the process of urbanization. Urban history, especially in Britain, had strong affinities with economic and labour history, and I

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began work with the assumption that any understanding of the city as a whole should proceed from a close analysis of its economic base. I constructed Part I of the book, ‘The City’, as a series of variations on a theme: ‘the evolution of a provincial city towards the competitive, bureaucratic structures of an authentic metropolis’. The late 1960s was the heyday of ‘the managed economy’, when neo-Keynesian models of government inter-

vention were in the ascendant. We did not yet anticipate the resurgence of neo-liberal doctrines associated with the rise of Thatcher, Reagan and their Australian followers. I looked back to the 1880s as the heyday of free market capitalism, when the unregulated market became the organizational paradigm, not only for commerce and manufacturing, but for the professions and the burgeoning state bureaucracies. The whole society, I argued, was evolving

towards ‘more segregated, impersonal and competitive ways of life’. New technology, shifting patterns of world trade and finance and the demographic changeover between the gold-rush generation and their children all contributed to this shift; but more significant than any of these influences was the power of the market idea itself. The market, I believed—and believe still—is a powerful idea, not a fact of nature. The 1890s crash and the ensuing depres-

sion seemed to demonstrate the folly of a slavish adherence to economic orthodoxy. A century later, after another round of neo-liberal reforms, it’s clear that ‘the market’ has turned out to be much a more tenacious idea than seemed likely when I first published this book. Recently I heard a government minister support the proposed World Heritage registration of the Melbourne International Exhibition Building, arguing that it symbolized Australia’s early and eager embrace of ‘globalisation’. He had conveniently forgotten a few things—such as colonial Victoria's zealous adherence to tariff protection and restrictive immigration—but he was surely right in detecting some instructive parallels between the rapid social and economic transformations of that era and the convulsions of our own. In 1969 I returned to the University of Melbourne to lecture in modern

British history. One of my examiners, Hugh Stretton, had kindly recommended my thesis to MUP; but. writing lectures in two new courses, deputy editing Historical Studies, rearing three small children and renovating an old house all delayed revision and publication for several years. Shortly after | arrived back in Melbourne, Greg Dening succeeded Max Crawford in the chair of History and for two or three memorable years we shared an honours class on theory and method of history. I was stimulated by Greg’s ‘ethnographic’ approach to history, especially his interest in ritual and ceremony as a way in _ xj —

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which societies enacted their history. Putting theory into practice, we accom-

panied our students to the Anzac Day Dawn Service and talked to old soldiers at their annual reunions. If ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was a myth, how

was that myth enacted and sustained? | wondered. I decided to write a new introduction to the book, focusing on the opening ceremony for the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition, in which I would draw out the spoken and unspoken beliefs that inspired the gold-rush generation and their children. The early 1970s was an exciting and turbulent time in the university and the city. I graduated in Canberra on the day of the first Vietnam Moratorium and came back to Melbourne University to witness radical students barricading the university's administration building. The struggle spilled off the campus and into the surrounding suburbs, where students and academics led the movements to resist the Housing Commission's slum clearance program and fought plans for inner-city freeways.'" Early in 1971 I saw a performance of the Australian Performing Group's Marvellous Melbourne, a ‘vaudeville revision of history’ that projected the new radicalism onto the landscape of the 1880s and 1890s. The political mood inevitably influenced our teaching. With my colleague Don Mackay, I taught a course on British working-class radical-

ism that introduced me to the writings of E. P. Thompson, and later, with Weston Bate, devised an honours course on urban history in which we investigated the rise of the Labor Party in inner Sydney and carried out fieldwork ina still largely ungentrified Balmain and Pyrmont. Melbourne's radical moment echoed similar urban conflicts in Europe and the United States. In the wake of the 1968 Paris student uprising, Marxist sociologists were challenging the dominance of American paradigms of social inquiry such as the Chicago School. Cities, they argued, were not organic sys-

tems, but battlegrounds where rich and poor struggled over the means of collective consumption. Theories such as Louis Wirth’s famous essay on ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, they argued, had limited applicability beyond the

late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century capitalist city. Instead, they proposed new theories of the city inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels, refracted through the structuralist philosophy of Louis Althusser. As I revised my thesis, I reviewed its theoretical underpinnings as well as polishing its prose. There was much in these radical critiques that attracted me; especially their sharp focus on the class structure of the city; but I was also repelled by their formalism and apparent contempt for human agency.'' While the Chicago sociologists may have over-generalized their theory of the city, | decided that they still offered a valuable insight into the dynamics of the

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late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century city. I revised my thesis to give new emphasis to the interrelationships between urbanization and class formation, especially in chapter 2.'° Against traditional Marxists, however, I maintained that the conflicts of the 1890s were as much a crisis in the ‘relations of consumption’, expressed in struggles between banks and home-buyers,

for example, as a crisis in the ‘relations of production’ or the traditional shopfloor battles between bosses and workers. Some reviewers were critical

of the ‘dualism’ that was a residue of my attempt to graft Weberian and Marxist approaches; but theoretical consistency has never been as important to me as Imaginative reach. Part II of the book, ‘The Suburbs’, focused on the urban world outside the workplace. ‘Home and the World’, to use one contemporary’s phrase, were conceived as separate spheres, although, as I tried to show, the spheres interpenetrated each other to a marked degree. Peter Spearritt reflected the views of most other reviewers in finding this ‘the most exciting part of the book’, although Jill Roe thought my stress upon the gendered division between male

work and female domesticity betrayed ‘unilluminating attitudes towards female persons’. The book nevertheless became a useful point of departure for feminist historians probing the character of the Australian family, while the history of the suburb has been a focus of my own work to the present day.'”

Some reviewers seemed uncertain about how to respond to the theoretical stance of the book. Leonie Sandercock complimented me for eschewing the inclination of the ‘vulgar Marxists of today’ to dismiss home-ownership as a conspiracy against the masses’, but Michael Berry, in the most theoretically oriented review, was concerned that my stress upon the internal dynamics of

the city left too littlke room for the wider networks of imperial trade and investment that had created it." By the time I published The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, | was conscious of the many possibilities I had left unexplored. I recall proposing to John Hirst, then editing the journal Historical Studies, that I write an anonymous review, which I promised would be more scathing than any of my critics—a suggestion he fortunately rejected. Much of my research in the next few years I now see as an attempt to explore themes left undeveloped in the

book. The chapter of the book that most excited me in the writing was the last, on the genesis of the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ myth. Once I had embarked on it, I knew that it could easily have become a book of its own. Several of the topics I skimmed over in that chapter, including literary and visual images of the city, became the basis for later studies, while ideas of the city and the role

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of intellectuals in fashioning those ideas have been recurrent themes in my writing to this day.!? The ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ myth itself, partly through the influence of this book, has taken on a life of its own. Like Donald Horne’s ‘Lucky Country , ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was a title originally used with conscious irony, but like Horne’s title too, it quickly slipped its ideological moor-

ings to become a slogan for the very boosterism it sought to criticize. In the Afterword I trace its strange subsequent role in representations of the city. A significant gap in the book was a sustained discussion of Melbourne's less-than-marvellous underworld of crime and poverty. By the mid-1970s social historians were scouring census statistics, charity case-records, police files and vital registration records in an attempt to reconstruct the lives of the ‘inarticulate’ groups seemingly ‘hidden from history’. ‘History from below’, as we called it, lent itself to group endeavour, and over the next decade my col-

leagues and graduate students embarked on a wide reconnaissance of Melbourne’s netherworld. Chris McConville came from Monash University, where

he had studied under Ian Turner, with plans to write about Melbourne's larrikins and prostitutes. Shurlee Swain applied the case-work method she had learned in her other life as a social worker to a study of the city’s poor, based on charity records. David Dunstan, another Monash graduate, became the historian of the City of Melbourne and its long campaign to clean up a city known to Sydney-siders as ‘Marvellous Smelbourne’. John Lack had meanwhile begun work on his outstanding history of Footscray, Melbourne's new industrial suburb. Through the 1970s and 1980s we met in a regular interuniversity urban history seminar to discuss our work, and in 1985 we published a book of essays, The Outcasts of Melbourne, drawing together the results of our work.'” In 1977, shortly before the publication of Marvellous Melbourne, | was invited to join the Victorian Historic Buildings Council. Although I had written about the history of the building industry during the land boom and was fami-

liar with the townscape of the nineteenth-century city, in retrospect I realize that I was still visually almost illiterate. Like most historians, I had been educated mainly though the written word. Over the next decade, as I assessed buildings nominated for the Historic Buildings Register, listened to the argu-

ments of architects, architectural historians and planners, and made site inspections, I developed a deeper understanding of how the built fabric of the

city reflects its economic and social, as well as its architectural, history. I began to incorporate site tours in my teaching, and in 1980 I edited a book of walking tours, Melbourne on Foot, designed to introduce visitors and locals to

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the historic townscape.'’ More recently I wrote a guide to the ‘Golden Mile’, a ‘heritage trail’, modelled on Boston’s famous ‘Freedom Trail’, designed to introduce visitors to the tangible history of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. If I were to write the book again, I would pay more attention to how the city looked as well as to how it functioned. Meanwhile, I have sought to incorporate some of the insights I gained from my experience in the heritage business in a series of ‘picture essays’ incorporated in this revised edition. Joining the Historic Buildings Council was also my introduction to what later became known as ‘public history’.'® It led me on to diverse activities

as an adviser and commentator on material culture, national celebrations, museums, archives, family history and historical film, and to the development

of a graduate course at Monash designed to equip students to practise as public historians. While urban history is best studied in a comparative framework, with an eye on other cities as well as one’s own, there is no denying that local patriotism and civic commitments play an inevitable role in the way it is written and practised. Melbourne, for good or ill, has been my own city, and writing about its history has also been a way of joining and helping to sustain a public discourse about its present and future. Twenty-five years on, I am conscious of how far the myth of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ has both illuminated and, in some respects, distorted our understanding of the nineteenth-century city. In investigating what made the myth plausible to contemporaries, I was drawn to the demographic, technological

and social forces transforming the deep structures of the city. I was more interested in explaining how things happened than in apportioning praise or blame. ‘The boom’, I wrote, ‘ was not a conspiracy, but a contagion, not the sinister design of a few financial buccaneers but an ebullition of a popular desire for suburbanism as a way of life’. I was reacting, I now think too strongly, against muckraking histories like Michael Cannon’s The Landboomers. To understand all, it is said, is to pardon all; but to explain away the

sins of the land boomers was surely to pardon too much. In the 1980s and 1990s, we witnessed a new epidemic of corporate greed. With the rise and fall of Tricontinental and Pyramid, and then of HIH and One-Tel, many of the sins and follies of the land boomers were repeated. There’s no guarantee that history can inoculate us against such periodic madness, but it should help to do so. Amidst the many favorable reviews of this book, there was only one that

really stung. ‘Dr Davison’, John Molony wrote, ‘has probed “Marvellous Melbourne’ to her very core and done it splendidly. But in the end, she does not live.’'” Molony seems to have been looking for a book that evoked the city

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more strongly, rather than one that explained it more deeply. I could indeed have included more of the sights and sounds, the smells and textures of the city. | wish I had found more space, as I did in a later portrait of the Australian capital cities in 1888, for the lives of representative city-dwellers.-? And I Should perhaps have descended from the trains and trams to capture more of the vibrant life of the city streets, as Andrew Brown-May has so vividly done

in his Melbourne Street Life.’ But The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, after all, was a creation of a different time, when historians were more preoccupied with the logic of social change than the evocation of past times. It is now, I have concluded, beyond revision, though not beyond criticism. I offer it now, in this new format, with the hope that it may perhaps inspire a new generation of historians to inscribe their own version of this, one of our most durable urban myths. Melbourne, January 2004 G. D.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began as a doctoral thesis submitted to the Australian National University. It is appropriate, on the publication of this revised edition, to thank the University again for the opportunity it afforded me for three years uninter-

rupted research and writing. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in History Department, now the History Program, in the Research School of Social Sciences, for their stimulating company both then and on the many occasion since when I have been their guest. First among them I acknowledge my supervisors, the late John La Nauze and Barry Smith, for their encouragement and advice, then and on many other occasions.

A number of other people had a hand in the making of the book, but I would especially like to mention Weston Bate, Tony Dingle, Neville Hicks, Frank Jones, the late John McCarty, David Merrett, the late Max Neutze, the late Geoffrey Serle, the late Frank Strahan and Patrick Troy for their advice on sources and their comments on earlier drafts of the book. Many others, too

numerous to mention, have since shared their knowledge and enthusiasm about Melbourne's history with me; the footnotes to this revised edition indicate some of my debts. For encouraging me to publish my work I thank my doctoral examiners, Asa Briggs, Gus Sinclair and Hugh Stretton. Joan Campbell kindly permitted me to use material from her unpublished MA thesis in chap-

ter 8. For help in the preparation of the manuscript I am indebted to former — Xvli -

Acknowledgements

members of the secretarial staff of the History Departments of the Research School of Social Sciences and the University of Melbourne, especially Beverley

Gallina, Mary Marazzita and Lesley Dempster, and to current members of the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, especially Rosemary Johnston. Time has only reinforced my appreciation of the libraries and archives where | carried out the research for the book, especially the LaTrobe Library

at the State Library of Victoria, the National Library of Australia, the Australian National University Library and the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. I thank their professional staff for their unfailing help. I

owe special thanks to the staff of the Picture Collection of the LaTrobe Library, especially Mary Lewis, and to David Dunstan, for assistance in locating Ulustrations for the revised edition. With other Australian historians I have profited from the efforts of university and public archivists to conserve the records of commercial, trade union and state organizations. I mention in particular the collections of the Noel Butlin Archives of the Australian National University, the Melbourne University Archives and the Public Record Office of Victoria. Iam grateful to the Footscray, Hawthorn and St Kilda City Councils,

as they then were, for permission to consult their nineteenth century ratebooks. The kind hospitality of Mr and Mrs J. W. Read enabled me to consult the important collection of papers left by her grandfather, Hon. James Balfour,

which have since been deposited in the Manuscripts Collection of the LaTrobe Library. I omitted, on the first publication of the book, to acknowledge the support

of Melbourne University Press, now Melbourne University Publishing. It is pleasure, on the occasion of this revised edition, to thank successive directors of the press, Peter Ryan, John Iremonger, John Meckan and Louise Adler for their confidence in the book, and my editors, most recently Sybil Nolan and Ann Standish, for their meticulous and deft editing. My largest debt is to my dear wife Barbara who has shared much more than the writing and re-writing of this book. Melbourne, 1977, 2004. G. D.

— XVIll —

fa

Sag INTRODUCTION

Even before it was light, Melbourne was awake: on sailing ships and steamers moored along Queen’s Wharf, at stevedores’ depots on the quay, in locomotive engine sheds and cabmen’s stables, its daily routine had begun.' But to those who knew the city's moods—the weekday rush, the idle sabbath—this grey

October morning had a rhythm of its own, a springtide of movement and emotion that gathered force with the hours. While the middle classes were at breakfast, bands of workingmen began to filter along the main suburban thoroughfares. By ten o’clock over three thousand bootmakers, shipwrights, masons, printers and workers in other urban trades had formed up outside the Melbourne Trades Hall and, soon afterwards, they stepped out along Russell Street towards the Treasury Building. As they came in view the chief secretary, Graham Berry, appeared on the portico. For twenty years Berry had championed the city’s working classes in their struggle against the oligarchs of the Legislative Council, a conflict that had culminated, two years earlier, in a bitter constitutional crisis. In its wake the economic fortunes of the city had deteriorated—the ‘Berry Blight’, his enemies called it— and, for a time, Victoria ceased to be the ‘fine country for the workingman’ that Berry had aspired to make it. But the old political conjurer had turned one more trick: the government, he announced, would mount a great international exhibition to promote the colony's recovery. His opponents were outraged—

~ Je

Introduction

how could an ultra-protectionist like Berry pose as a friend of international trade?—but by opening day he had been vindicated.“ As they marched on towards Flinders Street, the artisans of Melbourne returned his salute with three resounding cheers. Nearing Swanston Street, the crowds grew thicker. Day trippers from the eastern suburbs poured from the gates of the Hobson's Bay Railway Station, blocking the narrow side streets and seizing every vantage point. At 11.20 the Princes Bridge battery opened a seventeen-gun salute, and a fleet of carriages, bearing the governor, His Excellency the Marquis of Normanby, and a party of visiting dignitaries, emerged from the Domain and proceeded down St Kilda Road towards the city. Only thirty years before, an exuberant publican had driven his coach down that same stretch of road blowing a trumpet and waving a Union Jack to announce Victoria’s separation from New South Wales. The small township was now, in 1880, a city of over a quarter of a million inhabltants, but it retained the dishevelled air of a frontier town. The city fathers closed down its most flagrant whorehouses, watered unsealed roads to keep down the dust, draped shabby corners with flags and bunting, but there was no concealing—least of all from the marquis and his English guests—what a rude,

practical-minded town Victoria's capital was. On they drove: across Princes Bridge, past the Anglicans’ half-built cathedral, along crowded Swanston Street towards the commercial centre. At the Town Hall, spectators overflowed onto the roadway, slowing the carriages down as they turned to climb Collins Street hill. The indefatigable artisans, drawn up now on either side of the road, cheered as the governor passed, then fell in behind like a rearguard of loyal guildsman. At the top of the hill, the carriages turned left. Across Victoria Parade, the

resplendent Exhibition Buildings soared above the saplings of the Carlton Gardens. Government economies had forced the Building Committee to lop one-third of its height from Joseph Reed’s ambitious ‘Italian Gothic’ design, and to prune all superfluous ornament, but its brilliant white facade and huge cupola gave the completed building a kind of bloated grandeur.’ Outside the main hall, in 30 acres of temporary annexes, foreign exhibitors were still completing their displays. Britain, with its familiar specialities—Manchester cotton and Birmingham tinplate—had the largest overseas exhibition, but Germany's solid ironwork and the Americans’ ingenious gadgetry showed that the first industrial nation was no longer invincible. Despite its illustrious rivals, Young Australia remained unabashed. New South Wales, fresh from its own exhi-

bition in 1879, displayed a huge slab of Illawarra coal and a portrait of Sir

~98

Introduction

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Victoria Welcomes All Nations’: entrance to the Melbourne International Exhibition

Henry Parkes photographically enlarged to heroic dimensions, while Victoria,

not to be outdone, stocked its ‘department of large attempts’, as the Argus ungraciously called it, with stearin statues from the Apollo Candle Works, phials of Joseph Bosisto’s eucalyptus oil and a pyramid of Swallow and Ariell’s biscuits.

By 11.30 the Great Hall was packed almost to capacity. The colony’s official establishment congregated in ceremonial splendour directly under the dome, while the nave and galleries thronged with droves of 10-shilling ticket-

holders. It was almost noon as the exhibition commissioners took up their places beside the fern-decked official dais. They were an oddly assorted group —politicians and civil servants, manufacturers and merchants, liberals and

conservatives, countrymen and city-dwellers—but they had one essential attribute in common. Born in the 1830s, reared in the ‘hungry forties’, every one of them, it appears, had left his homeland for the goldfields of Victoria in the early 1850s, just as London was winding up its own original Great Exhibition.* In their eyes, Melbourne’s growth was a thrilling fulfilment of their

—~ 3 _

Introduction

boyhood ideals, and in ripe middle age they naturally returned to the rites of the Crystal Palace to celebrate their own jubilee. Their retirement was drawing closer and, with it, a problem of succession. Years before, in the 1850s and 1860s, they had fathered a new generation of young Victorian natives and later, in the troubled 1870s, they had fought hard to secure their education. Now as this beloved generation came of age, an old question began to haunt them: ‘What shall we do with our boys?’ In the midst of the educational debates of the 1870s the novelist Marcus Clarke had given a cynical but prescient answer: °... make a Swindler of him’, educate him, give him a working knowledge of law and commerce and, with ordinary luck, ‘he will in five or six years accumulate an honourable fortune’.” Clarke had foreseen that in the free-spending atmosphere of a gold colony young men might acquire a desire

for wealth without their fathers’ steady-going industry. Sometimes fathers were able to ease their sons into secure partnerships or professions but, as some astute contemporaries realized, a relationship with so much prickly self-

reliance on one side and so much ungrateful dependence on the other was bound to be difficult. Mr Piper, the central character in ‘Tasma’s’ Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill (1889), is a commonsensical old butcher who by ‘hard work’ and ‘keeping his wits about him’ has finally attained the wealth, though not the graces, of a colonial magnate. His son and step-daughter, on the other hand, are so over-educated and extravagant that the old man lives in constant fear that he has ‘spent the best years o’ my life starving and scraping for a pair of useless, idle do-nothings’. Like Uncle Piper, many of the older generation had the plain man’s tendency to ‘lay down the law’, and the exhibition itself may well be seen as their attempt at graphic moralizing. ‘One of the great objects to be gained from the Exhibition’, explained one commissioner, ‘was its educational effect on the young and middle-aged of this Colony’.” A few minutes past noon the south doors of the Great Hall swung open, and the governor and his entourage approached the central dais. ‘Three verses

of the national anthem, and cheers for the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the royal family and the governor, and then the culminating moment arrived. For weeks Monsieur Caron, the exhibition's musical director, had been putting his

thousand players and singers through their paces. Now the tiers of whiterobed choristers rose to their feet and swung into the inaugural performance of the Exhibition Cantata. Caron’s score was a quaint pastiche of Sullivan and Verdi, while the words, by a Melbourne ironmonger and temperance lecturer, echoed the florid style of R. H. Horne’s ode for the earlier exhibition of 1866. A doleful evocation of the colony's primeval ‘Past’, accentuated with minor

~4

Introduction

chords and descending cadences, introduced a rollicking tribute to the ‘Pioneers’, who retired in turn to make way for the pastoral calm of the ‘Present’. The assembled Nations joined in symbolic chorus to salute the young

‘Queen of the Southern Seas’ who then bade them welcome to her ‘Feast’.

patriotic hymn: °

The climax came as soloists, choir, organ and orchestra Joined forces in a great

O Thou whose arm hath for our fathers fought Whose guiding hand their sons hath hither brought Lead onward till Australia’s land shall rise A greater Britain, neath these Southern Skies.

As the echoes died on the last unctuous amen, the audience burst into wild applause. Men stood and cheered and tearful ladies waved their handkerchiefs.

The ceremony was a Striking illustration of the tendency, noted by the great French observer of the voung American republic, Alexis de Tocqueville, for the rhetoric of young democracies to become ‘surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, exaggerated descriptions and strange creations’.‘ But to men as innocent of high culture as Melbourne's pioneers, it was a moving celebration of their lives. With the crowd still buzzing, the chief commissioner, the Hon. W. J. Clarke, rose to speak. Your Commissioners desire to draw the attention of Your Excellency to the

contrast presented by the scene here displayed and that which existed less than 45 years ago where Melbourne now stands. Then it was an unknown part of a comparatively unknown land ... Today you are opening an International Exhibition in a large city, where you are surrounded by

the accredited representatives of the great nations of Europe, Asia and America, and articles illustrating the growth, produce, manufactures, arts and sciences of the whole world, while this assemblage testifies not only to the wealth and culture but to the energy and enterprise of the colonists.

The governor replied in a torrent of cliches—‘grand project’, ‘rapid growth’, ‘enterprise, intelligence and industry —and at last, in the name of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, declared the exhibition open.

The International Exhibition was, as its laureate perceived, a ‘crysolite of time’—a prism that refracted Melbourne’s history in bands of bold emotional colour. It was a story with a multitude of uses to citizens anxious to measure ~5 —

Introduction

their attainments and estimate the trajectory of future development. In an atmosphere heady with the sense of progress, every civic address became a hymn to colonizing enterprise, each popular guide and catalogue had its gallery of ploneering heroes, and even the city’s rival newspapers offered their own competing interpretations of its history.

The Argus, the main organ of colonial conservatism, froze Melbourne's past in six nostalgic tableaux: the ‘sylvan solitude’ of 1800, the ‘primitive village’ of 1835, the tiny port of 1840, the modest town of 1845, the ‘topsyturvy city of 1852°, and the budding metropolis of 1880. In highlighting its founding years and consigning the rest to a barren postlude, the paper was being true to its readers among the pastoral and mercantile communities, who still looked upon the city as a noisome excrescence on a sustaining rural economy. Their view was correct enough in the 1840s when the booming pastoral industry, with its high productivity and low labour requirements, had created the town to handle its trade and supply its services. Even in the wake of the gold rush, when its population increased from 29 000 to 125 OOO in a single decade, Melbourne remained mainly a port, capital and communications centre. But by the end of the 1850s the pastoralists had been supplanted by a growing middle class of merchants, civil servants and professional men, and

thereafter the urban economy began to gather its own momentum and exercise a powertul influence on the countryside. To the Age, the voice of the gold-rush democracy, the stages of Melbourne's

srowth were conveniently marked by the six industrial exhibitions of 1854, 1862, 1866, 1872, 1878 and 1880, with their steadily rising indices of technological progress, factory production, tariff protection and urban culture. Here was a vision of city growth in the classic industrial mould, departing from the pattern of Manchester and Birmingham only by its reliance on external ignition

rather than the spontaneous combustion of a home-grown industrial revolution. By the early 1860s, the riverside suburbs of Collingwood and Richmond

had attracted a scattering of small factories and a population of immigrant tradesmen united in allegiance to the doctrine of protectionism. In Melbourne, urbanization under the pressure of the gold rush preceded industrialization.” Though manufacturing eventually made a significant contribution to the city’s economy (about 25 per cent of the male workforce in 1881), it never dominated Melbourne as it did the cities of industrial Britain. It grew, in the first

instance, out of agriculture and mining by forward linkages to primitive extractive industries like wool washing, tallow-making, brewing and flour milling, or backward linkages to the production of agricultural implements, _~ 6 —

Introduction

fencing wire and mining equipment.'® Many factories produced goods for the local consumer market, especially articles of everyday use such as food, clothing, boots and shoes, which would otherwise have to be imported from abroad. It is helpful, in attempting to uncover the sources of Melbourne's growth in

the 1880s, to identify new enterprises appearing in the city’s commercial directories. A high proportion belong, broadly, to the class of import-replacing

manufactures: asbestos manufacturers, bedstead makers, biscuit machine makers, chandelier makers, cooking stove manufacturers, gas meter makers, paint manufacturers, show-case makers, umbrella mounters, washing machine makers.'! Unlike a pure industrial city producing a single main commodity for export, Melbourne’s import-substituting industries generated a variety of subsidiary trades that further diversified and accelerated the city’s growth. 'By the early 1880s, however, Melbourne was leaving its trading and primitive industrial stages behind and gradually acquiring the broader functions of a fully-fledged metropolis. During the exhibition, local boosters had proclaimed it ‘the Metropolis of Australia’, and by 1883 R. E. N. Twopeny had dubbed it ‘the metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’. In 1888, Alexander Sutherland underlined the change when he asserted that Melbourne was ‘not only a city but most distinctly a metropolis’.!’ It was about to enter upon a period of dra-

matic physical growth, increasing its population in a single decade from 268 000 to 473 000 (1881-91).'* But becoming a ‘metropolis’ was more than a matter of scale, and to contemporaries the title signified that Melbourne had acquired an overwhelming hegemony in its region, a complex internal economy and a characteristically metropolitan ethos. Melbourne increased its share of Victoria’s population from 26 per cent in 1871 to 31 per cent in 1881 and 41 per cent in 1891. The goldfields had been losing population since the 1870s and they declined by a further 11 OOO in the 1880s.’ The old mining exchanges of Ballarat and Bendigo wilted before Melbourne’s new finance houses and exchanges.'® Many country foundries and engineering shops, flour mills and breweries closed down or moved to the metropolis where fuel was cheaper, distribution more efficient and markets much larger. Agricultural development flagged on the harsh frontiers of Gippsland and the Mallee. It would take heavy investment in railways and irrigation to open up new land; meanwhile the population of rural areas grew at only

2 per cent per annum during the decade.'' The railways, when they came, may have done as much to depopulate the countryside as they did to develop it. Under the so-called ‘Octopus’ Railway Act of 1883 the tentacles of Melbourne’s commerce and industry stretched to every section of the colony. In

_7-

Introduction

the eyes of jealous provincials, the city gradually assumed the appearance of a

monstrous wen, draining the countryside of its talent and vitality, leaving behind the carcasses of farms and townships. The city’s economic influence now reached far beyond Victoria itself. Is there [remarked Twopeny] a company to be got up to stock the wilds of western Australia, or to form a railway on the land grant system in Queens-

land, to introduce the electric light, or to spread education among the blackfellows, the promoters either belong to Melbourne or go there for their capital. The headquarters of nearly all the large commercial instltutions which extend their operations beyond the limits of any one colony are to be found there.!*

As the largest market, Melbourne naturally became the continent's main entrepot, and many of its larger merchants had branches to conduct their reexport business in other colonial capitals. The Riverina region of southern New South Wales had long looked to Melbourne rather than Sydney as its main port and market, and by the 1880s a growing number of its pastoral stations were controlled by, and supplied from, the Victorian capital. Further north, Queensland and Fijian sugar plantations and the cattle runs of the Darling Downs were largely financed from Melbourne, and its merchants and capitalists took a prominent part in the development of the New Zealand timber industry.'’ The discovery in the late 1880s of silver-lead deposits at Broken Hill reawakened Melbourne's old passion for mineral wealth, and once again its exchanges buzzed with the rumours of new finds and fortunes. By the end of the decade Collins Street and Queen Street had become the faucet through which a torrent of British capital irrigated the entire Australasian and South Pacific region. So far from being a meek client of the hinterland, Melbourne seemed to have become its smug proprietor. The city’s growing function as a centre of finance and communications was reflected in its occupational structure. The mercantile and industrial employments which had sustained the city for twenty years declined in relative terms, while tertiary occupations—transport, finance, communications, public administration—rapidly increased their share. Such an increasing ratio of ‘non-basic’ to ‘basic’ activities is a feature of most growing cities,-° but Melbourne, a sprawling metropolis remote from its main export and import markets, depended more heavily than most cities on transport and communication services, which grew by more than 100 per cent between 1881 and 1891. The city’s business directories registered the appearance of a new

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ES ONE aE FROM MEN TO MONEY-GRUBBERS The Gold-rush Merchants—the Rise of the Agency System— the Mercantile Community—the Counting House and the Commercial Office—Problems of Succession—the Drift of Trade—Balancing the Books

Despite its smiling facade of class harmony, the International Exhibition of 1880 was not welcomed by all Melburnians. For some it was a triumph but for others, like the city’s old commercial elite of merchants, importers and commission agents, it was the end of a golden era. Thirty years before, in the wake of the gold rush, these merchants had themselves been upstarts, challenging the ruling pastoralists for the leadership of Melbourne society; but now, a generation later, they faced fresh challenges that would all but extinguish their influence. In 1880 the ‘mercantile community’, as it still called itself, largely comprised the same two or three hundred firms that had dominated the colony's commerce in the early 1850s. It had taken them only three or four crowded years to transform the easy-going seasonal commerce of a small pastoral outpost into the vigorous exotic trade of a sizeable commercial city and to raise the tempo of business life by the introduction of an ‘infinite variety of Kuropean

importations’ and ‘modern amenities of dealing’.’ The gold-rush merchants were as cosmopolitan as their trade—Londoners, Glaswegians, Manchester _~ 20 _

‘From Men to Money-grubbers'’

men, German Jews and Americans—but by 1860 the rigours of business life in a topsy-turvy colony had welded them into a coherent elite. From the original point of settlement close to Queen’s Wharf and the Customs House their warehouses had spread into the riverside parts of Flinders Lane, Queen and Market Streets. Most were still young men in their late twenties and early thirties and many had set up house, aS newlyweds, on the slopes of a pleasant hill overlooking the sea at St Kilda. They had moved in much the same second-drawer social circles—the Mechanics Institute, the St Kilda Volunteers and the Vic-

torian Club—and acted as a united body of requisitionists in supporting the claims of fellow merchants to political office.

By 1860 some had acquired considerable fortunes although the highest social and political positions, symbolized by the Melbourne Club and the Legis-

lative Council, still lay beyond them. But twenty years later ‘colonial experience’ had achieved what wealth alone could not. Gold-rush merchants, like FT. Sargood and James Service, now occupied the highest political offices and the Melbourne Club had opened its doors; in the city itself they had no peers in wealth, power or reputation. For as long as they lived the

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27

The City

trading position of the older merchants was being eroded. Distance, to them, had been no tyrant but the very source of their prosperity; now, as the world closed in, their prospects seemed suddenly curtailed.

Despite these omens, Melbourne’s commerce continued to grow rapidly during the 1880s. The number of ‘merchants’ almost doubled from 1079 in 1881 to 1973 in 1891, ‘commission agents and factors’ increased from 528 to 998, commercial clerks from 3164 to 7330, travellers and salesmen from 759 to 1699.-" The appearance of a new generation of foreign competitors created a communication gap of a kind that had never troubled the pioneers of 1852.

No longer could businessmen expect to keep abreast of developments by informal conversation on the 4.40 to St Kilda or at lunch in the Australian Club. Changes in the scale and structure of commerce brought inevitable changes In its style.

In 1880 a new Commercial Exchange was opened. Situated in Collins Street West ‘within speaking distance of every merchant's office’, it ‘furnished a long-felt want in commercial circles ... a medium which will cement closer

the entente cordiale existing between our merchants, and put them au courant with the affairs of the world’.*’ The Exchange provided trade information for each of the colonies, shipping dates and manifests, railway times and goods lists, stock traffic, court lists, prices current, and a variety of services from letter copying to meals and haircuts. There was a full supply of colonial and overseas newspapers and trade journals, as well as a telegraph office, Reuter’s agency and telephone exchange. Melbourne sprouted trade journals in profusion: the Jowrnal of Commerce (fortnightly), the Australasian Trade Review (monthly), Coombs’ Circular Cmonthly) and, later in the decade, a

number of more specialized papers such as the Australasian Grocers’ Journal and the Australasian Ironmonger. Another sign of the supersession of informal networks of communication was the strong support among mercantile interests for credit investigation and private inquiry agents.~* Incorporated within the Commercial Exchange were the offices of the Chamber of Commerce, the official voice of the mercantile community. By the early 1880s the chamber was by no means a homogeneous assembly, including among its members ‘Freetraders and Protectionists, Importers and Manufacturers. ~° Its spokesmen continued to express the chamber’s limited objectives in the language of a Cobdenism which its members could no longer unitedly espouse:

~ 98

‘From Men to Money-grubbers’

The Chamber is not in any sense a political association. As individuals, we have no doubt our leanings and political sympathies; as a Chamber, we exist merely to further commercial interchange, to remove as far aS we can all disabilities and hindrances to commerce under which this colony may suffer.°°

Like their esteemed colleague James Service, who became premier in 1880, the chamber practically accepted protection as ‘the settled policy of the country’ and pressed instead for better port facilities, a new Falls Bridge, railway goods yards and wharf storages.*' It achieved stronger mercantile representation on the Harbour Trust and the Marine Board and fought a tenacious, and ultimately successful, battle for the improvement of the city’s telephone services. For years, indeed ever since the inception of its services in 1881, sub-

scribers had complained of the inefficiency of the Melbourne Telephone Company. Five years later, largely as a result of the chamber’s pressure, it was taken over by the Post Office. Almost immediately charges fell and the number of subscribers began to grow. By the early 1890s the chamber was pressing for the extension of telephone services to the other colonies.”° Better communications could ease, but not eliminate, the conflict implicit in a growing and diversifying commercial sector. In earlier times, when a dispute arose between merchants, the practice was to call upon an independent arbitrator, usually a discreet and fair-minded fellow businessman, who would approach the question from a practical, business point of view and resolve it

with despatch. Only when informal arbitration failed did merchants subject themselves to the costs and inevitable delays of the law.*” This practice worked well as long as the mercantile community indeed remained a community. But as numbers increased and relationships became less intimate, some members of the Chamber of Commerce were attracted to formalized tribunals of commerce on the European pattern.’ Others favoured attempts to reform and simplify the legal process, such as Dr W. E. Hearn’s proposed Code of Commercial Law.”! But despite the erudition of Dr Hearn, the influence of European examples, and the support of merchants in parliament, none of these schemes came to fruition during the 1880s. Though the members of the Chamber of Commerce were no longer unani-

mously in support of the free trade doctrines of the Manchester School, the chamber itself could not side-step the tariff issue altogether. Many Melbourne merchants were involved, directly or indirectly, in trade with other colonies—some in sugar plantations, others in the re-export trade, others as

_ 99 _

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manufacturers with potential intercolonial markets. Among the merchants there was a strong consensus that their own commercial interests, the preeminence of Victoria and its metropolis and—so the after-dinner speeches ran—the cause of Australian federation would be well served by a gradual relaxation of tariff barriers between the colonies. (Together, of course, they might maintain a high tariff against the rest of the world.) The Chamber of Commerce flirted with notions of intercolonial free trade during the 1880s, though its most strenuous advocates were the merchants’ old rivals in the Chamber of Manufactures.

The transformation of Melbourne’s commercial life was registered nowhere more vividly than within the merchant's own domain. The old-style Flinders Lane warehouse, with its plain stone or brick facade and simple division of internal space, reflected a practical, and highly personal, style of commercial

_— 30 —

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ER, SEVEN SUBURBAN DREAMS AND URBAN KEALITIES ‘The Advantages of Country and City Life Combined '— The Social Functions of Domestic Privacy—FPatterns of Residential Segregation—Factors in Suburban Growth— the Public Transport Revolution—the End of the Sprawl ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was a powerful urban ideal, but it generated forces that ultimately reacted against it. The harder Melburnians sought to live by the harsh dictates of the market, and to banish personal loyalties and sentiments from their workaday lives, the more vigorously they cultivated them at home. The boom years, when capitalistic enterprise flourished, also witnessed a resurgence of the sentimental cult of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. Alexander Sutherland, schoolmaster, historian and editor of the booster’s

bible, Victoria and its Metropolis (1888), found poetic inspiration in this dialectic between the spheres of work and home. Home, his famous English contemporary, John Ruskin, had suggested, was like a solid rock set in the midst of life's swiftly running stream. In his poem ‘Home and the World’, Sutherland invoked Ruskin’s image to urge his fellow Melburnians: So be thou in the world. So raise thy life On the one side swelling from the petty strife

—~ 166 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

Of men and business care; But on the other, where Thy Home extends the smoothness of its breast Sinking in trustful rest.’

The suburban home, Sutherland suggested, was the soul's stronghold against

the swirling pressures of the metropolis, the social mechanism by which personal values, expunged from the workaday world, established a haven of their own.’ As members of a society still mainly immigrant in composition and expatriate in outlook, Melburnians naturally looked for domestic inspiration to their national Home across the seas. Suburban imagery was derived at second hand from older English patterns. According to the standards of London's elite, the prestigious styles of living were, distinctly, town life and country life. Town life implied a town house—elegant, compact and close to the city centre. East Melbourne—‘the Melbourne Belgravia’ *—and Parkville were the nearest colonial equivalents. Country life, on the other hand, called for an estate and

a rambling country house set apart from other houses amidst groves and gardens. The homesteads of the Western District were as close as Victoria came to the ideal.’ From these aristocratic parents came the bastard ideal of suburbanism, with its splendid promise of ‘the Advantages of Country and City Life Combined’. The ideal suburban lot cast appreciative glances in both directions: Having Views of Surpassing Grandeur of both Land and Sea, that quite baffle description overlooking Hobson’s Bay, the Shipping, the You-Yangs, Steiglitz Mountains, the Dandenong Ranges, Malvern, Toorak and Surrounding Country Together with That Prodigious Growth, that Stupendous and Most Marvellous Monument of British Pluck of Modern Times, exhibiting Energy, Enterprise and Progress, the development of only some thirty-odd years that would do credit to the Growth of Centuries, that

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The Suburbs

are almost incredible for so short a time THE CITY of MELBOURNE and SUBURBS

with its Colossal Establishments and Buildings, with its steeples, spires, and surrounding Palaces, that are most astounding to Visitors and Distinguished Tourists without doubt destined to become the LONDON and PARIS of the SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE.®

According to convention, suburban houses were usually given country names— ‘cottage’, ‘villa’, ‘mansion’—and the names of many suburbs also had rustic overtones—Hawthorn, Burwood, Box Hill, Hawksburn, Armadale, Glen

Iris. Other suburbs were named after London's brighter satellites—Kew, Windsor, Camberwell, Ascot Vale, Surrey Hills. Naming houses was also popular ritual,‘ and the names householders chose often reflected their aspirations towards the forests and gardens of the ideal gentleman’s estate. ‘Dingley Dell’, ‘Arden’, ‘Forest Lodge’, ‘Coolena’ and ‘Fernleigh’ evoked ‘coolness and seclu-

sion and thick umbrageous foliage through which not a speck of diseasebreeding dust [could] penetrate’.® ‘Rosedale’, ‘Holmesdale’ and ‘Lowerdale’, on the other hand, offered symbolic shelter from the storms of business life. ‘After the tired city denizen has finished his day’s toil, a gentle [train] ride to his fond home is both cheering and refreshing. The jolting of cabs and buses

is dispensed with, the free air soothes the brain and sharpens the appetite. Life is thereby prolonged and the moral tone elevated.’ He came home to ‘The Rest’, ‘The Haven’, ‘The Anchorage’, ‘Mizpah’, ‘Sans Souci’, ‘Camelot’, ‘Beulah’ or ‘Nirvana’. There, discarding his city clothes, suburban man planted forget-me-nots and pruned the pittosporum with an innate appreciation of the ‘guiding principle’ that he should ‘make no shapes or lines which are not more

or less common in nature, for where streets, buildings and the ding-dong of city life provide so much that is artificial and discomforting, we should find in our gardens a shortcut back to nature and rest’.!" The division between Home and Work, nature and artifice, rested, as Sutherland’s imagery suggested, on a parallel division between the symbolic roles of men and women. Contemporary guides to domestic economy and household management provided detailed advice on how these roles were

supposed to be played out. The wife and mother, as Ruler of the Home,

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Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

conventionally represented a set of natural, non-pecuniary values, which stood in opposition to her husband’s immersion in the soul-destroying world of commerce. Like the sweet, soft odour of white roses transfusing through the atmosphere an influence of natural and spiritual beauty, so should the character

of Woman blend with that sterner, more practical nature of Man, and speak to him of a higher life, a nobler existence, than that of the busy commercial world in which he daily toils and strives for progress."

She was expected to merge her own identity completely with her role within the Home. “The home which is his [the husband’s] paradise, is your handiwork, your refuge, your pride, your castle, your very, very own, your actual self, a part of you inseparable. It is your heart and brain translated into the arrangement of daily life.’’’ Within the household she reigned supreme: ‘in

household matters the wife rules predominant and [the husband] should never interfere with her authority and government in this sphere’.'?

Her husband, meanwhile, launched himself daily into the ‘busy commercial world’. He was welcomed like a home-coming mariner, with ‘happy greetings by wife and children whenever he return[ed] from his struggle with the contending currents of the world’s seething sea without’.!4 Once at home he simply ‘lounged’, attended to the garden or frolicked with the children. His wife was forbidden to usurp his role as producer and provider. She should not even inquire about business matters, although she might listen politely if her husband wished to unburden himself. She was not to challenge his virtuosity, even in parlour games. Their evenings were spent in wholesome, unbusinesslike amusements, ‘a delightful commingling of confections, games, debates, wall pictures, songs, duets, suppressed mirth, and uncontrolled laughter’.'® In this ideal division of roles, child-rearing was an almost exclusively maternal responsibility. To the mother belongs the privilege of planting in the hearts of her children those seeds of love which, nurtured and fostered, will bear the fruit of earnest and useful lives.'®

The development of the powers of the mind and its cultivation are the work of a teacher; moral training is the work of the mother.

Some domestic tutors permitted the father to ‘join with his wife in all her efforts to instruct her children’, although he should ‘defer all matters pertaining

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The Suburbs

to their discipline to her, aiding her in this respect as she requires it’.!’ Other writers laid down an even sharper division of roles, advising the mother to present the children before their father only ‘as you do your table cloths, spotlessly clean, perfectly smooth, well-aired, and—when wanted’. Men who liked to have their children about were ‘dreadful nuisances’ who upset the mother’s carefully rehearsed domestic tableaux:

Let your children, then, practice every little attainment they acquire in readiness for the children’s hour, for the tume when the house-father gets the one reward of his day, in seeing their progress toward maturity. Induce him to bear with their little stammering efforts to sing or recite, their hesitating fingering at the last little tune on the piano, the bashful production of the first effort at needlework or boat-carving ...

Only as his sons approached adolescence and prepared to enter the ‘busy commercial world’ did the father finally and reluctantly participate in their upbringing.

You must cultivate and develop [your boys] so as to bring them nearer to their father, and you must drag him out of retirement, persuade him to shake off all feelings of lethargy, and even be satisfied with less business or income rather than waste the precious opportunities of turning your boys into good men."”

Here on the grim threshold of manhood, theory demanded that the separate spheres intersect. But practice set even narrower limits upon the suburban ideal. The picture of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ reflected in household manuals of the 188Qs is probably a treacherous guide to the ways in which families actually behaved themselves. It was, after all, a second-hand version of ideals first articulated in England half a century before. Colonial housewives may have loyally acknowledged the London standard while largely ignoring it in practice.'’ Its function was possibly as much to legitimize the husband’s daily struggle in the seething

sea of commerce as to prescribe exactly the domestic role of his wife; it is probably no accident that domestic sentimentalism reached its meridian precisely in the high boom years. In short, we must beware of mistaking ideology for reality.

Nevertheless, the suburban ideal of rus tr urbe, and the domestic ideals that supported it, appear to have circulated widely through almost all sections of Melbourne society. Household manuals illustrating its principles were — 170 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

published for clerks and prosperous artisans on &200-300 per annum as well as for the wealthy professional and business classes. New working-class suburbs offered ‘the health, pleasure and comfort of life in a cottage surrounded by its own garden ... with all the advantages of country life’.“° Most working-

men had little gardens attached to their homes, and even the back-street slums of Collingwood had potted ferns at the windows.*! A brass name-plate, a modest garden plot and a wrought-iron veranda might enable a small cottage, as well as a great mansion, to symbolize its owner’s aspirations to suburban respectability.

Whether the suburban ideal could actually be realized depended on the fulfilment of several material conditions. These included such things as a reasonably spacious single-family dwelling; a secluded garden setting; the security of home-ownership; and an income sufficient to support a family with some degree of comfort and leisure. This chapter considers the first two of these conditions—the home and its setting; the others—home-ownership and the ‘pecuniary style of life’-—are examined in chapters 8 and 9.

Visitors to Melbourne were impressed at once by its sheer physical extent. As a region of settled occupation it compared with the world’s largest cities, even though its population and economic significance were only of the second rank. Its great size and low population density correlated with the overwhelming preference of its citizens for the separate, single-storey, single-family dwelling. ‘Terraces and attached houses’, R. E. N. Twopeny observed, ‘are universally disliked, and almost every class of suburban house is detached and stands in its own garden’.** This love of domestic privacy was possibly a reaction against

the over-crowded houses and neighbourhoods of the industrial wens from which many Melburnians had originally escaped. It may have been shaped, too, by local influences such as the relative cheapness of suburban land and the rigours of the Australian summer. Whatever the causes, it was, and has long remained, an almost universal preference.

The strength of the ideal is vividly ulustrated by the short history of a doomed attempt to promote tenement accommodation in the European style. In 1885, George Coppin, entrepreneur and philanthropist, joined in partnership with Rev. Charles Strong, founder of the Australian Church and of a Collingwood Workingman’s Club, to launch an ‘Improved Dwellings and Lodging House Company’. The company erected a large tenement, including 39 family dwellings, between Lonsdale and Little Bourke Streets. The flats

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The Suburbs

Lge spt Se CF ae. — wih we a & os ee oe . = 4 oe Individualism rampant: suburban villas, Malvern, c. 1590

were designed expressly for working-class families from the inner city, so the rents were moderate (10s 6d to 12s 6d a week) though the rooms were larger than usual and fitted with running water, baths and laundry facilities. All the

amenities of a modest suburban home had been combined with the advantages of cheap rents and proximity to the inner city. The family dwellings were opened early in 1885, but three months later only nine had been let. The secretary reluctantly concluded that they were ‘not appreciated by the class they were intended to benefit’, and the Australasian explained that ‘the working man who can afford 12/6 per week would prefer to live in the suburbs, even if the accommodation were not so complete as in the improved dwellings’.~’ The family flats were therefore converted into lodgings for single men. Later in the year the siege of Khartoum and the well-publicised philanthropy of its doomed

hero, General Gordon, offered an opportunity to refurbish the tenement. Redecorated with a fernery, the lodgings, the proprietors hoped, might help to raise the tone of Little Bourke Street. But even then their fate was clear. Gordon House persisted into the twentieth century as a sixpenny lodging house for vagrants. Although ordinary workingmen clung to the independence of a detached

cottage, its size and setting may have denied them the full promise of the suburban ideal. The conventional home with its strict allocation of roles to husband/father and wife/mother called for the ample, segregated living space of a comfortable villa. Contemporary house plans vividly suggest the way in

which suburbanism as a way of life was measured out, room by lberating room. The accompanying diagram summarises the provision made in some standard designs of the mid-1880s." — 172 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

No. of

rooms

3 Sitting-room Bedroom Kitchen

oo Bathroom or or 2or3 + Pantry a 3 or 4

4-5 Sitting-room Parlour

o—6 Drawing room Dining room |

+ Scullery and/or

6+ Drawing room Study servants’ quarters

4 + nursery 2

The size of a man’s house was only partly determined by the size of his family: a 3-room cottage might accommodate as few as one or as many as eight

persons; a 10-room villa might house as many as twelve or as few as three.’ Variations in house size were primarily a reflection of the means and lifestyle of the people who inhabited them. The middle-class villa, with its spacious ‘drawing room’, ‘study’, multiple bathrooms and servants’ quarters, reflected a leisured style of living in which people took time over meals and trouble with

their appearance, showed consideration for each other’s privacy and practised individual accomplishments. By contrast, the artisan’s cottage, with its noisy, cluttered sitting-room and over-crowded sleeping quarters seemed to offer the home-coming husband common space without convivial feeling. For

his unfortunate wife its limits may have been even more oppressive. To achieve ‘natural and spiritual beauty’ in a tiny, lean-to kitchen with a primitive wood stove, a steaming copper and a portable tin tub would surely have chal-

lenged the grace of most women. It was an inhospitable environment that tended to throw all persons and functions together, forcing children beyond the mother’s supervision and into the street and affording her husband a powerful motive to forsake home comforts for those of the public house. Since rooms had such a vital effect on how people lived, houses were formidable symbols of economic and social status. As aman is judged publicly by the character of his attire, so, privately, are people by the appearance of their homes. Jones may have a substantial bank account but if he lived in a five-roomed cottage, it is not probable that his acquaintances will guess such to be the case; and so Jones will not be considered such a jolly good fellow as he otherwise would be.*° — 173 -

The Suburbs

Such assumptions pervaded contemporary social comment. In his classic account of Town Life in Australia, R. E. N. Twopeny surveyed a range of material lifestyles, from the ‘large house’ of the ‘wealthy colonist’ on £5000 a year and the ‘eight-roomed cottage’ of a young solicitor on 500-1000 through the smaller cottage of the ‘clerks and smaller shop-keepers on &300—400 a

year down to the ‘less pretentious and smaller’ 12s a week cottage of the ‘common labourer’.*’ In contemporary household manuals and the writings of ‘ladies’ columnists’, similar assumptions are spelt out prescriptively (see table 7). Rent was supposed to take about 15-20 per cent from all classes of income-earner, a proportion somewhat higher than the famous English expert on household economy, Mrs Beeton, laid down for her English middle-class disciples.”*

TABLE 7 Advised Rent as a Proportion of Total Income, c. 1885

Total income (p. a.) Rent (weekly) Rent as percentage

& & sd total weekly income

1000 3 30 16 850 3 00 18

600 2 00 18 400 15 6 14 200 14 0 18 160 100 16

Sources: £1000 CPerth’ in Australasian, 28 Feb. 1885); £850 CHousemother’, Australasian, 7 Apr. 1885); S600 CA Willing Worker’, ibid.); S800-400 CAn Old Housekeeper’, Men and How to Manage Them, pp. 117-18); £200 (John Anderson in Argus, 15 June 1880); £160 CAn Old Housekeeper’, The Australian Housewives’ Manual, p. 35).

These impressions are borne out by evidence of actual rents recorded in municipal ratebooks. There was close agreement between householders’ occupational status and the net annual value of their homes; so the style and distribution of houses makes a useful guide to Melbourne's social structure. The city’s housing stock seemed to reflect a prosperous society in which only the very wealthiest ‘upper ten’ of business and professional men were clearly marked off from the rest of the community. The bland uniformity of suburban Melbourne, with its rows of detached cottages, was the material expression of

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Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

the kind of property-owning democracy characteristic of post-industrial immigrant societies like the United States, Canada and Australia.””

To set off his comfortable villa, the proper Melburnian looked for a green and

secluded neighbourhood preferably exhibiting that trinity of auctioneer’s delights—tresh air, a pleasant view and a shady garden. These were romantic obsessions of the mid-Victorians, reflecting their revulsion from the stench, ugliness and congestion of the industrial city. (Even when nature failed, art provided smelling salts, picture postcards and conservatories.) Their appeal

was not only aesthetic, for contemporary science also reinforced the citydweller’s dread of ‘bad air’. According to the ruling miasmic theory, disease was communicated by the noxious vapours or gases that accumulated in damp, sheltered regions or where faecal wastes were deposited. So swamps, river flats and estuaries were seen as places to avoid, while wind-blown hilltops and seaside promenades were coveted as home sites.®? During the 1880s the miasmic theorists were slowly retreating before the Listerians with their new theories of bacterial contagion, but, for the time being, the fear of bad

smells and low ground remained strong in the popular imagination. Real estate agents interpreted suburban mortality statistics with an innocent disregard for nutrition, medical services, personal hygiene, education and age structures and with a ritual acknowledgement of the benefits of fresh air. So the fact that Footscray was foul and Hawthorn healthy was possibly as much a result, as a proof, of the miasmic theory.

Hills and sea frontages were also popular places to live because they usually gave access to a pleasant view. It is surprising now to discover how many modest allotments, long since enclosed by terracotta and flapping bed

linen, were once said to command panoramic views of all Melbourne, its suburbs, the bay and the Dandenongs. Auctioneers, masters of the seductive prospectus and artfully misdrawn location map, gently nursed the suburbanite’s awakening appreciation of semi-rural seclusion, conventional beauty and pride of ownership, by magnifying the tiniest sprig of foliage and foreshortening the most distant prospect of mountain or sea. Closer to home, the new settler looked for the leafy shelter and refreshing greenery of a private garden. The smooth sward of lawn, high hedge and welltended flower-bed were tangible expressions of Melbourne’s now legendary affection for privacy, good order and weekend pottering. When they found the

—~ 175 —

The Suburbs

world too much, refugees from the boom metropolis affirmed, with Candide,

‘wl faut cultever notre jardin’. Garden culture was vigorously promoted through new gardening magazines, while the tasks of the amateur gardener were eased by the introduction of new technologies, such as the mechanical lawn-mower. Good workable soil, standing trees and natural drainage soon became desirable features of the prime suburban lot.?!

Melbourne was fortunate in having an abundant supply of such sites. Through two of the city’s four main growth corridors there was plenty of easily

serviced land, well suited to suburban settlement. From the south-eastern banks of the Yarra a band of gently undulating, lightly wooded hills stretched eastwards towards the Dandenongs, promising rural tranquillity as far as the speculative eye could see. To the south, along Port Phillip Bay, the seaside suburbs of St Kilda and Brighton abounded in sandy garden soil, marine views

and invigorating ozone. Only in the northern and western sectors was the view less alluring. Immediately to the north and east of the city, in Richmond,

Fitzroy and Collingwood and westward along the riverfront towards South Melbourne, Port Melbourne and Footscray, the land was generally flat and subject to seasonal flooding—suitable, so it was believed, only for noxious indus-

tries and working-class housing. Further to the north, across the windswept, basalt plain that stretched from the Maribyrnong River through Essendon, Brunswick and Northcote to the higher reaches of the Yarra, the atmosphere was Safe but the soil glutinous and the terrain bare and uninspiring.

TABLE 8 Median Net Annual Value by Householder ’s Occupation, 1SS3S-1554

Occupation Median net annual value & n

Professional and managerial 72, (38) Shopkeepers and independent trades 31 (106)

Artisans 2) (123) Service and unskilled 17 (123)

Clerks and shop assistants 25 (31)

Not in workforce 39 (94)

Source. Municipal ratebooks of Collingwood, Footscray, St Kilda and Hawthorn (10 per cent systematic sample).

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Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

SURREY BLES _DETUR PULCIIRIORI. « Let it be given to the fairest one,” was the [rsoription apon “he Golden Avge . and DETUR PULCHRIORI has been the motto of those who have selected the MOUNT IDA ESTATE

And every portion of the Estate commands extensive views that can never be shut out. The prospect includes — the Dandenong Ranges, Mount Maeedon, the City and the Re and the most fastidious mind sould not desire 8

steel and healthier lave whereon live. Though LDA hasreach all theofHealthy and_ Picturesque Scenery of aRuraltoParadise, it isMOUNT still within easy Town,Atmosphere for ibis

QUITE CLOSE TO SURREY HiLbS STATION =

Being only about TEN MINUTES therefrom, or just such a walk as is absolutely necessary in the interests of digestion. For the lazy, who prefer the questionable delight of a sluggish liver, there will be even greater Railway

_.., , PROPGSED STATIONS AT EACH END OF MOUNT IDA ESTATE __ Comment or pruisy: of such a desirable spot would be indeed superfluous, and this announcenent is merely made

to inform the public who desire to seeure the Best Land in the Best Suburb. Purchases, may or may not double their monay within Two Years, but they will certainly be able to sell at 50 PER CENT. PROFIT

BEFORE CH RESTM AS, &#, i # =| ee

FREE RAILWAY PASSES... ‘Mount Ida’, boomed in the 1880s, then waited another fifty years before suburban settlers came

Though nature clearly had favoured the south-eastern suburbs above those in the north-west, contemporaries recoiled from the idea that this would necessarily produce a social divide between two Melbournes. The Building Societies’ Gazette, an energetic popularizer of the suburban dream, insisted that ‘in a community where all classes are virtually equal, we see no reason why the dwellings of the rich and poor should not be intermingled. Let each man select the site that is suited to his wants and taste, and let his house ... be such as becomes his station and means.’** Some observers were impressed by Melbourne’s ‘diversity —‘a poor house stands side by side with a good house, a cottage, one might almost say a hovel, in close proximity to a palace’.*? The pressures to segregate the classes geographically were probably

weaker than in some European cities. In London, it has been argued, the middle-class suburb was both ‘an invention for ... accentuating social distinctions and a means to putting off for a generation or two the full realization of

what was entailed in living in a slum’.*! Melbourne's relatively few slums

—~ 177 -

The Suburbs

seemed ‘easily rectifiable’ compared with the ‘gigantic evils of overcrowding and impecuniosity in London and other large English towns’, and the intrusion of the lower orders upon middle-class awareness, though sometimes irritating

or embarrassing, was rarely as traumatic or dangerous.” In such relatively frictionless conditions, social segregation seemed rooted in the universal acceptance of a pecuniary style rather than in middle-class fears for their safety or ‘face’.

All the world over, whether in the seven-flat tenements of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Paris, in London’s conservative West End, or New York's exclusive Fifth Avenue, the rich live with the rich, and the poor with the poor. The palace and the hovel, except in the imagination of the socialistic romancer, seldom adjut. Contiguity and its inseparable contrast have never yet served to increase the happiness of either class. In prosperous Victoria, this contrast, when apparent, is chiefly one of comfort versus luxury, extreme poverty being rarely a constituent. The cottage may sometimes be overshadowed by the mansion but it is usually a very respectable cottage which has no occasion to be ashamed of itself. It is doubtful, however, whether its inmates would not be happier if in less close proximity to their richer brethren whose wealthier lot is calculated to excite envy and discontent in the average bosom. The fact of an Englishman's house being his castle does not render him oblivious to its insignificance when compared with the palatial dimensions of his neighbour's stronghold. He is fully alive to the disproportionate, and utterly abhors being, in any sense, looked down upon. Hence it is, partly, that, in Melbourne, such class distinctions meet with the observance accorded them elsewhere, an obedience to the social law which takes its root from this perception of the fitness of things.” There was more than a little wishful thinking in such opinions, for by 1891 the city had developed a distinctive social topography, one that would survive most of the following century. The Yarra had become the effective boundary

between middle-class and working-class Melbourne. As the accompanying map indicates, the areas with the highest proportions of large houses were spread through a wide arc in the south-eastern suburbs, hugging the coast and hillsides and keeping well clear of valleys, flats and swamps. By contrast, the northern and western suburbs—apart from one or two small enclaves, such as Parkville—were given over to the cottages of the poorer classes.”

~ 178 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

Was it, one wonders, an accident of geography or a more deliberate exercise in status definition that placed the salubrious estates of the ‘upper ten’ within sight of the most abject refuges of the poor? Only a shallow stream and half a mile of steeply rising ground stood between the mansions of Toorak and Kew and the lowly riverside slums of Abbotsford and Burnley. This arc of prestigious suburbs sweeping around the Yarra from Kew to South Yarra must have seemed an impregnable barrier between the ambitious inner-suburban workingman and the well-to-do suburbs farther east. Certainly proximity did little to generate feelings of either compassion or envy. City gentlemen, driving home in the evening, scarcely glimpsed the squeeze and squalor of working-

class life behind the prosperous shop fronts of Johnston Street and Bridge Road. Surveyed from their hilltop retreats, the ‘busy haunts of men’ blurred into the haze of factory smoke and were lost in a wider vista of ‘silent forests, smiling valleys and rugged ranges’.** The working classes, meanwhile, were probably just as oblivious of their rich neighbours across the river. On summer Sundays they picnicked in Studley Park, and daring young larrikins sometimes ventured even further into alien territory to insult a passing swell or drive a band of invading Salvationists back across the river to their barracks. Against such a background, John Wren’s impertinent rise from a bootmaker’s cottage

on the Collingwood flat to a great white mansion in Studley Park was a social triumph.” The city’s first fashionable suburbs had emerged along the shores of Port Phillip Bay, a comfortable carriage journey from the central business district. Brighton had been a favourite town resort of the Western District squatters,*” and, following their example, Melbourne's infant business class settled a little nearer the city on a hill overlooking the sea at St Kilda. They were joined, in turn, by ‘other colonists of the better sort ... judges, army officers and gentle people’™*! who, like the merchants, were attracted by ‘the health-giving nature of its situation’.** By the 1880s St Kilda had an appearance of ageing gentility;

one-third of its householders were not in the workforce, many of them pensioners and annuitants.*? Meanwhile its title as the premier suburb was being vigorously contested by riverside suburbs closer to town." South Yarra had long been considered ‘one of the most aristocratic and favorite suburbs’,”” and

neighbouring Toorak was already acquiring the cachet it still retains as the proper place to live. Its ‘splendid chateaux’ housed ‘the creme de la creme of the upper classes, the magnates ... of Victoria’.‘° Further upstream, where the Yarra flows in a southerly direction, the more sparsely settled suburbs of Kew

— 179 -

The Suburbs

and Hawthorn were also beginning to attract their share of well-to-do residents. ‘At a very early date in the history of Melbourne, Kew became a favorite

place of residence for professional men, merchants and other magnates of society.’ Like St Kilda, its inhabitants included a number of wealthy pioneers, among them the Hentys, the Stawells and Henry (‘Money ) Miller. Its elevated position was reckoned a balm to invalids and the local wine ‘a great benefit to persons of delicate constitutions ’.4’ Hawthorn was a little less secluded, lowerlying and hence less prestigious; most of its residents were of ‘the superior middle class’, while ‘the lower class—speaking from the &.s.d. point of view had few representatives.” From the high eastern bank of the river, upper-class Melburnians looked down over the river flats upon an inner ring of dismal working-class suburbs. Collingwood, Richmond and South Melbourne conspicuously lacked the fresh atmosphere, softening foliage and wide vistas of the hillside suburbs. Their

low, flat terrain and soggy soil made drainage poor and enteric diseases a perennial hazard. Collingwood, the classic working-class suburb, was ‘a sort of municipal Cinderella ... low in more senses than one’.*” Its blighted environ-

ment and endemic poverty gave it the highest death rate in the metropolis. Other parts of the flat were hardly any better. The riverside areas of South Melbourne were so handicapped by swampy ground, seasonal floods and pervasive stench that visitors wondered, with more curiosity than concern, how people could bear to live there.” Here, as in most parts of the unsewered city, household wastes and seepage from cesspools were permitted simply to run away through open drains into the river. In the inner suburbs the flow of pol-

luted water was impeded by unfavourable topography, blocked drains and poorly designed streets. In winter the river itself regularly broke its banks, depositing a nolsome cargo over the lower regions of the flat. Furthermore, since the 1850s the riverbank had been used by noxious industries such as tanning and wool washing; the hides of newly slaughtered animals were left to dry in the sun and their entrails thrown in the river, a double pollutant of air and water. Newer industries, like bootmaking, added their share of stench and smoke so that, by 1880, the inner core of working-class suburbs had become a region synonymous in public estimation with dirt, disease and poverty. To offset these obvious habilities, residents of the inner suburbs enjoyed only two consolations: low rents and an accessible market for their unskilled labour. The docks, warehouses, shops and building sites of the central business district and the factories and workshops of the inner suburbs attracted a large unskilled labour force which, for obvious reasons, preferred to live as

-—~ 180 -

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TEESE SRR os SERS 3RSIS 0eeSeca SORA IOEE ROOT IRR Ege eee SeeenIeRIES oe Soe aeas Sn ich Ree SERRE SE OR RR Sn SRS

TRACE SREISISE ESE Uu nl Cl a 1 t Sena AES

Seo RS20Rn a ee eR ESane ee So 0 1 Sate 9 r SSRe SON a SaSORE LOR,

’. .tI°.° g }.}.} . . . . iad ° . . Houst M r h re th

ousing status of Melbourne Areas, 1891, showing percentage of OUSES of more than six rooms

recruited. In most casual occupations it was important to be on hand when

vacant, and even those i e lar e save ent vedIme ti Jjobs ) sebecame in more regular employment and OrkIng CLOS ough therere as aW rudimentary d mon ey by worki losetotohome. home. Alth mentarysyssy

em O orse omniopuses and Wagons In the inner suburbs, the fares—which

might h ted to 2 3 k ideration t t b)

Orkingmen, SO,the dS late as tL s, th worki d and late 1880 eyenerall Vyreferred to walk to

work. An early-morning b V stander at any clty intersection would have noticed

the quay or the riverbanks’ as COUNCHIO“r 1891, a Collingwood l . aoT9As , 1late 00a CialmMe

rrr The Suburbs

that ‘we have a very large population of artisans working in Melbourne. A great many walk to town in the morning and home at night.’ Collingwood manufacturers tended to recruit employees ‘in the neighbourhood and in the surrounding districts—Richmond and Prahran and Clifton Hill’* In the outwork sections of the boot and clothing industries, where materials and madeup articles had to be lugged backwards and forwards between factory and home, local residence was a necessity. In one way or another, therefore, a

house in the inner suburbs was essential for most menial, inner-city employees. In Collingwood for example 30 per cent of householders were artisans, many of them semi-skilled locally employed bootmakers. A further 18 per cent were unskilled labourers, while 15 per cent were employed in unskilled city service

occupations such as cabmen, draymen, barmen, cleaners and storemen.” Richmond also had a large number of factories, and ‘being so close to the centre of the metropolis, and so easily reached, many clerks etc employed in Melbourne reside[{d] there’.-! The riverside parts of South Melbourne were also ‘largely populated by persons whose avocations lie in the metropolis’.””

Ay atts us HB SRG | SOA BR at aeth iS8i a sp PRUE IS Ra aR Ett ag

ome Thad] oe (Re oepa| iei ages ere re eae?haggefonky es Se A SR eiaent bE , iTres qo oe ge \ ; | |aeiid iat a_ Sawer mnee” ume© fj ey

te bois a HWE CE mafCoie tion eeUe | AR le rome 4 Faoo SRE, evant spnsetacaostaglatiettal AapikMHOHREYE aeeaetisBoe pe; :eit : eysy) ey, fBi ee ~~ eeEhk eeeae. 7 Bele. His ois re “a

‘en feat oe a tes ee es _ Naga " Y [se Sep arte eae Fp aioe won ore ot Ee ERT Sian ate. nt o&, i o% . aide Tae i hacaie Beh” q vee SS BP aes Aa x. st aii aye | eat sae rei é aise: . se pg: __.) we Reg % sper Cd mee ae i. Se +L beer wis ary

a ae gd Tadd ae te ch F Hh FS ye hess joes eats re eer e dare ep aha ved “See «=D A pry. et

a le ne OS i eee a ed. Berea ae i

eeneee EER| Sieg « a mieM Wyeee cence) fhalo verdee eee es LS oR i reel \ PP ae eee er eae, Fe Eiri ie A br u(s 1 + Swe ) eee ee ee ee ee TRA TE PY A ion ee “cee Re Coe at S are eea lee a. ehalPOOR OCGee eee pie bs Se eee Se aee! k Se YeeBeet! aa

Le eee onCae) aeeaeGL lee OR RE Oe a. SRS. dee aeee ae aS ee i Sa edoe Ee:|r) nN ie By ee ee oe a a,gl geEte ME ine:Be BO 3ye Ee od a eel \\ Coe emeene eaawa gefeSec °Coe” OeaOL if alcoelach: ee” SR i eemee ek | ic eee Mes! «a Ps te DaeAe) ¢* LaF ge La eu ili? bea tS | al | ee eee cet wats aa ee ak oe va WA nn 4a ba yr! rik a | i aaa . Cah aaa ig ig ae: gees. i tes Filey cPe ey “GS: EO Heenan ee x‘ “ Sa COM , ro% rere OEE ee ee ee! lee lll MK OO (LS aCe ee ENE wi lte Git ice sane ae | ete ee te ee a ne ee aS 4 ee TS ime

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*brewe“He*gs*eea.he ‘i wt 7 a_feea7a : hsF nena y. . *ee xi hoaFe? ~Erayoi lin,“= o* aEy 2at nr ad : Ca te 3‘cnn * °oa-eeoe » *+: >

Rep OE Sop s ss po geBoP hatyae«: :ed ewmes eeBoe ansPosed ah :Ben” : Leea 7‘ a4# pth FRE a2Sy teats 3*. po A%e.Se Re refg oe ne ‘Wry i *sei‘:owe ireefia7wen ote ng TTF g. wn 4renae xa& mace Baerateed ge eens Bae »oon “rraOn eras By ding! A. a2Pagges cereot Hw bt satchel ae SieBE Ore rae|Bet eo. Shave ve‘ re ir)aa Be Ye aceve vie Sae Pty . gt oat. a oer § ne -ye+7t;Nts 2 weet oie

Pong “Yhoped Peto on oe fgBRR =e ek tLeee a scurseatereirrnneminemmuling FaFwy 4 vane oO % 4+. e. en Ue ee Belin PURER te |eoFaos Pi Pot he Priggi oe hes Gg cee Ra ee ® ae ios ve eR iafsOs ae ees eon :Ah agste 7ee UE .Fa+ef teeo ar re ,*hm * * bs £ . 6 eye “ES Ore aie ae aie ‘ ya ag |: BiSee. a cree hee % 4 : 8 bet * fs, 5 « i oO Py : hi te POAC kg Ba a hee acer: an on mS Bee tied os bet Ppp tes ~ e zt can ee Tee ar ae ; , tis | OE eee foe eB Lg te ‘ $s? » “7 ee mete. OF : Fr Ben 3 “ ‘ :: , g 4. ae oesMaes a shina re rs SinT tee, EAMG SENOS See(iB i cea bE ec icomnneie 2g Mes mernnwe ain queen te fy ngaoe . f ane ° a oe Beep RsaySok PpoeeraeBones rie eR te woth je] 3 i Siiiead Se sa et nme %| Bone Boot BO LTR R a ke nn rn: Ore tie Segpaaenren ee RORY Poe Page ER Gg oars | ae aeSie! DNs :cpeapae Soy var i7.4i. ilk eeSe a a te tinct, as Se arn: A TD x ae . Ee lt 4EESpan fa SRathe: hs ee |keBoe MEP eb Oe peBe~LST MS eye ; dte wane oe jit Me bas ; ree >aeFe*tnrnowwe ik Reaeies IR .ponmeee rs a. ia“See . Tigay Cog byCe *eet eeeos %© %. ae yt a 3 os & geo¥ SO e7 z tle Oe ag ry. son oneee PK. eos com SS geanSy Rie re LE Sako hot} ; PaBrygasedgett aeVER we woe SBesor ¢ ke : éag! aon re “

. oem oy hg Dewt.NES ne]of{tee Be pte 8 ae ee eee Sees get SRR Ee eee ag i Arowwne oF Beg : i * ‘ ars poi 43 ie bal, SMALE ENE Sere et wt, pond gangs SS EE RE a” egy ES Quai pe Bw eee waked GeO

Do _N6ohe edaRN ay iEe eeTr eee cSt te ER a ae Ogz.:erbas a cetent Se nr areae Cera i , tee A “y am : : eee ‘ were ade BOoF Tate ars Ken ares . Bey rts 6)28Fq : 2 {4 ¢ LS Paice og i Sa we esFore 4vod Steed 3 a Tas #“"yi Fe © pliner ng | fet Wen a.ibromine vee ae en %. rk. ie ee Poy st ee SR, ° ~ reine ong Sei te ab ge ay "Rae ad F: rr rs sees see ot : . : : iF pioF] sewage ON a < rhe ieee i i ft : ri ‘ i : : : : fo we ae eC ee Stas woo a “hs aes P : Poon BE ts Se.” 9 cel mL joes ag got ines 2 i * : SG “NS ‘pone 7. aa weed1 ef a Bier Senay : woe . ae : of hh, Sarr *eewere : se ® “4 4 OO open ONheogi Beare wtne . va anoyay fa eteePdLOIRE |™oom “oN hwhe tae iY! uf:B4%iarEg :fag meg) i ~ Bea eter peaen gy “os \ "ed ; }1 x CS ee. aLE ~& . cng ge tSpoo OF see TE:34iwidest : . %, » :RRB

See ee feet Meters mt pO : 88 : oe ee | apee ee .oe 1ag. Soy ae oemes, a~Mewersag :Inbwerecag fia Bug hiay Tet Ai.a4ow :Pa *erig‘mae aes fi: :PR" *abo ~. BE RY ii Sha.2a e Pan Se. *7 A P.wi . ®a meee one Pr fFafa Hyi Pee eae 4 aed if Ses : i iy it y ‘ id oe me Lee 7Fi ‘4 .ho : e1e ees weve eR te ha ted ok ‘_ ar, Aan |es ELSTHEAS WACK :BY i-aeSH an f j 4 ‘ GEN: . © i nome oe sf .:.‘ifg.‘ 5 oy ME A re at * : t Bs # Te Oe A# 5 . . lye Bs : “ tg a wot AP OF * er oe) * fg] ; rn ae Lt twee NY Romy “ ® 3 . * Ms : om ak eae “ : mM Be times & y ay if i 3 r % 4 Sy, . . 5 . be secee Be porn a 4 “4 “tS ~ . steht : * ‘3 artes ; a ak AN a GEO rsx £os ' ;-.pee e~: :eo 98 ¢: oe i: 4* :a4 Prarie A HR tat4¢:: U .;eg AYY Be i;ve eo. . 57 ,;fg ‘iliied cod ° ; : ff ane are : om, , 7 mt oo. te ‘ 3 si . ; : : erayesee oe .i:it1 a Sic + page 7 ee 4 saa R, S. Z 435 Roe : gh so ou“ poe ;ae RaSE .i:t' ate. S a ; | a ‘ po : : Mag , Ce PY n : ‘ : eS a a * : ; : : @ aS F + i Zz .fomee ee gt oe Se “ae q~ ee ae L& °aBP iiAi7’7?aQgt:i4isiS3 ,SE WELLL Eg apa OR ae Bret ow te.Z Gate beaa towne iSoa 3Loe _3 i.y a Wn he Paine Sese ; : _ O& nom, TAPS a Pe . ee : eer . PM : nage éaig Pei, | Fike %NPR a See as+: WS RSE RB ‘. nears ; 7 se served sctaatena, 4:“y .4 ae se eel rest PW oeti Agipe / BREE Recoe wo AES aaa :‘SEL a.waa Smeg ie ie areap COL \ 4 ae COWRA ;4Ho ee SL ECTORAL DTRICTS eee" ; ? E P : : P .fue oe 4 ; it p BS : be » : kenge Wa ifee |etEa isreiaa;‘= Pf ;: ia arate -: cetadiasas Beteween F H neater B i 3iifx*es gt °# “aR :x?ot

“mR | BBE | in op 4 e, 1886

By the peak o presented an 1 ‘ the old walki ) Dp.s of ity’s city’ sprawling p f the Melbourne landboom the v suburbs

un , ’

vastness’ rivalled only b LMDPTESSVTON itan O metr > ang .

London. In less than a decade new suburba I ban settlers and land speculators far beyond the b ds o g city, creating a new, spider-like ma °

a: ee CO SR ON alle SNA LOR RO Te re ac i Ee ee ae

RE ee eer ae eee , .iSage oe a: .. oi- . eee 2 hs me Pa TE ” 5 ; i so agpale eranes eege: SiS Bes, ; seat meeisde 1 te eae tian Oar Sig ee Sos RSS ae cdgRe eGo i otentan Sah thBD tna,ee weee ee My ng ee“Phen ee eae

oe ceese Lorekee ie eege ae go oie eee POS rtseCega ee kee gk ane gle 2sNt agenee PE gaon. Pe: Sarr ee ee“Gace aot Hae . Ra ottrunbiatinadinesasaae Le i os * oer eS Maeeee ae Po

ee oe se Be ene + pee oi gee Eh ted, FOE a A Oe Fe ee - i ae ae”, ie *y tp. ey a ams tags .RES aSR hed ahcialcblgt teas ate ca att pe RE Sie uienag Meee eeree yg ee&hier x. gg. a2, ibe: . OY 5a by ye7 +, eee gee | et patties ORS SL: es Be rr ee mn iEY. pe i Me, égf sh a:oy! 2ees amage ce Reacts rare ae eratee eoese oe HERES es: Pees2A TEMP cE oa RRbe A Ree, Bt wee By2oyaane Bes £3 ties Gite Foose | Wee ak ee see -5 * : ee ee .

FREE Pa ‘ nd 5 Reng SUES AREER iPietiaist tatuasitas il laaulname th iene :

By cones eos ay oe & | aa “ge ee Be ce Se oe a pe ee ae ae ae ee eee ee ee Pas Son 5 lage Phas ; Faas . 2 yg d®

ued +e sae ;Se re Oe are EA CS eieo agar za ,SSee sa : ; ee % Se ai etsy ae eS -] 5eeeee poem Ext ae : : a . i ey See o oo eee a am ae eee a ee a Hee = Eee os oe Te eo SS. | ee 3i a| |: Sean ee eemee ee oeSek ss RSS _ ere ote ee |Ree Be oS ‘ ss :EeeOr Bese ea iasec as | | | aLaces - — eee gagmial*SRR ee as = xeec=hes, PRR sueae- oe PHoeMG NA Rg ey ce Res! ee AAR eo"Oe eg UM = Ae : ZSee . i Tee ee i | tO er 2TURE URESZF Lee thyTERENCE UP gotee Eee Hoga ~ te siete ae : : Ae . REE SeLs 2 Se |» eae

tat wi ay es See age toe ee . > * . ran a jae : rence te) eee ee Pee 7 alod ae a: *Be aeee eke ;ee Oi ae ac ahaa elie aaa meat aa ai,,=Me aesaB . gue :¢ Soe Bia: 4. E & & ge z Spee Se .. Seas Sieeareres [Sih ‘ Ei F “8 eeeee ; : Fy . ail es re on ee eae t Bee! ge —— aE . : : ; a }| cee ee tameKoNen Bees i. Berea 8jae aoe see Pe v3 :ne. | ee tae ee & ee a _ ES aes ees a ee See ey .) =a q fee : “EE “GS ae Cae a : Pee eS Ph ae Bok ot, 2 ee * "1 F; 2 ae ais {ie aes oe oe, ih ok: a pee Bs zi : a re : ay ile | 2 ® fan q:ee ed dae ey 3 : Bg ve RE ase “y oy a ee ES 3 = Pe i ee : Beng gee & : Sonongg ie lla ae $ 2 =e guage Bio BR LE i: See Bet - nwo a soe i § :i ;* ae th ee eeSe . 4 aeee wg cack 2Sp Es ee:ge 32: eS.é 3 = —‘a oe ee bie age g: z oy 7 . = po a BESET ESE ; : Q ie : ae Pe en a. cae ad a CAS a :ai a Ane 5 aeaeae. 4ane = =aa Be 4 Boe£8 & heee be ae ff i oa me Pei gas oe Sees ¢ E. iw: 4Ee 3 . me =3

asragesayCo RDO Noite 0 SRNR A7Se _ ER i aTae=aSee ;ite Socnee os Pree DnE catBAO PEAS pif Oe. RE ORR COR RRLo re RTMR 1 TR RTE CURE ¢ ee Sas Bees : Fy Be a,ae ERRicde Eo. oo & cers 4 > : , asp as cotatpes a RSW RRR Aneuaien ae MaRniece a ee a oe a.:»1 SMO THOS SWEETHAM.ESTATE ACERT a : ee gn ee HE RS EO RRA alin eae RE ge eaeCAMBERWELL . we 3 gee Oo ee a| cassie Fe — aa.oe “ % oon Bareee A : sereeensanett tree tc4e ce ha wanancoe a 4 bs, : ee Se ge Be ge es aed a (ies ee

: Fa Pile Oe oe ae eg ee ;7a-a.'=: RR

coe. sedi ips SgQ appa abi hopesne, corpse 4 ; woe Pete : nA ‘ wetGEER eee SsIEE hilooFEE oeeesbopeeto: coee Ee

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£ ~ )axf:%:‘ ‘ ! 4 4 / &) le? ~ Ope 4

ater. . hetis:gop 7 wes ee aie‘ —_ diet ."og a _ip: ain * EOS Rao is i ee ee FES —_===____"E_—_*=__*____ET___ &

, Peter sn nnn tenn nine ETTNNE HR NTE ED i eM ATE Tee eR eee TTT AT EO sO ee eo ete Ey aU ta ey TREE CERI DENG, UG AORN OO Ca ty RET Cy Ce en ER Ge Oe tm Maree RN en PMR CON AOC EMEe Ce TO CEU Cee GEL att eee OTe MT ROT MORE TT

5 ay) 7) : Ev eer . tended Hf h h “SY zZ * Ty), . , " ot or :

f Y 1885 ao 1}? ’ the ih Sa eastern el ala ei ne AE i A 5 A he i railway ieee ee ES SeLoe ear aaa In suburban %| ° CASES TR ee oe oe ee Ee ee ee Ae Be ae a a ae Pe ee oe ee ee ee ae as

was extended from Hawthorn, where SA’4 = AD: wae re

it had terminated since 1862, through - : C. .b; SF ll. TB CD ds & ; LOVELY a PICK ME THY Some, e: Hills to Box Hill. All at once, a huge Absolutely THE OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. AMDBDETWELL, antey Ury an Urrey ? Bung tar Teskeat Spcte3 of th: Tamene CEIGEEN PARM and WINDSOR PARE. ‘ TORE TC UM RARWAT STATION. TSE oan? LAM TG ME PURGAASED Tat HAGHEST Pant 4

a

i ET Lands, , ‘ , casa . € | ds nd speculation ’ il-__ ae % . I . . a LOCAL AGENT: 6 per Cent. i ‘ woe. ‘4 nr q . Uu ' a a re oeie an eh Hed oy wo 12 3 > t cod “ ‘ spelen ab i Fe ERR ERE MESS BES BRIE ERE QI MABE ICTR ESTEE FO BS ORT AMSA .

§ } Macelon . Cha Vibe machine Meleraran ard Suturke seal Muaetsing tego aad tReet cl che TAC O i) eC Ww § U Ur QT AYN Ww QS ; tisagiee be the “oun Vago. Mount the Meaty Ranges, aid cme theBay. Dandenone Menniume acd ¢ 3

t |to| sate i . NO FINER ANYWHERE. Opened Up and Specu zon. VIEWS _ a FREE RAILWAY PASSES; 3 ffitts WR et the os det hoe Stow co mot ba Sheu? omd at any Te Re tattie whats Beatties suay mr 3

“

Real estate agents vied to outdo each > per sees Deposit. a a _ :10 Cent Deposit.Balanes Balances

4 HAWIMOBN CAMBERWELL, 4 & COLLINS ST. EAST at 3,.6,9.and 12 Months at ¢

other in lauding the picturesqueEi* SURREY ¢, H. HODGSON, . i2ee3; HILLS, ee . 3 | WAG Sinem Ietending Pareknenrs the ABotmeents 2 3aBF ; ) 33 Lememement ese We van : * 3 i Ss oy” Winpsor *. gyees Parka3j S C / Y ; ; 4 a ae Be ae!34 «8 ia oe hn re ee anes Proms ye - i:: soon Ttana dae eee enei5wegen C0 % ns is art ae3 tonearm, pine hte promotional maps to exaggerate the oe Be es :@* , *’ ~ ede 7eR # (2 .¥ eH athtae Ed .es! = Ee be: = is : fox ae: -s z a Ps Nantes Be ae Oe: » 5 CERTIFICATE. «=~ Ls: By 4 pus fe.ie 2%©ay Ap F f.; .f4. .seentimitnanenenrmenmane ¢. ep~OVUTLE.; : wd Rheem, teaegta gee. bo pet ee BO pf on yx: Ex.

ischievousl . RY ren on7”::| mischiev ly TER distorting theirrw3i OAD iG . 3 cAN BU

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te WORKMENS-@-RAM a Passengers jostle for a place on one of the Melbourne Tramway Company's few workmen's services

no neutral arbiter on this issue. His long apprenticeship with the Midlands Railway, a successful pioneer of cheap railway travel for the working classes, made him a natural ally of those who wanted to convert tramping artisans into suburban commuters. Whenever critics challenged the idea of railway exten-

sion in the northern suburbs, Speight reverted instinctively to irrefutable English experience: it was, he insisted, ‘the penny-a-milers, as we used to call them, that bring the grist to the mill’.”® The idea of railways for the working classes was already popular before Speight’s appointment. As early as 1881 Thomas Bent was reported to be con-

sidering a plan to standardize all fares at 3d per single journey (or 2s 6d a dozen) on all lines within 9; miles of the city.”’ Immediately there were cheers

from the outlying western suburbs, with their isolated colonies of workingmen, and groans from the residents of South Melbourne and Prahran, who foresaw a decline in property values closer to the city. For the time being, the idea was pigeon-holed. In January 1882, deputations from Footscray and Williamstown again petitioned the minister for special ‘workingmen’s trains’ at concessional fares. This time there was no opposition, and a fortnight later Bent had authorized two trains on each line, morning and evening, at the special rate of 2d for journeys under five miles and 3d for journeys over five miles. The new service was an immediate success. Ticket sales rose from 1600 — 199 -

The Suburbs

a week in late February to 2200 in March, and further morning trains were put on. The number of daily services continued to grow, from 32 services In 1883 to 59 in 1887.'°°

The introduction of workingmen’s fares was only one component in a wider pattern of pressure politics shaping urban railways management in the 1880s. Fares, schedules, the siting of stations and the duplication of lines were all matters freely negotiable in the market for political favours and, though the

most blatant examples occurred before the Railways Management Act of 1883, local pressures continued to influence policy through the rest of the decade.'°*' The residents of South Melbourne, Port Melbourne and Brighton all

sought and received substantial fare reductions and, though there had been all-round improvement in the frequency of suburban services in 1880, some suburbs—including Oakleigh, South Yarra and Mordialloc—received further concessions. From 1884 most outer suburbs in the south and east enjoyed peak-hour express services. Such fast, frequent services were possible only with duplicated line, and the extension of double track from Windsor to Elsternwick, Essendon to Broadmeadows, and South Yarra to Caulfield—all at the insistence of local boosters—may have improved the standard of services

and accelerated the pace of suburban growth in the districts they served.'°" All these concessions may have been economically sound as well as politically

expedient, but the paucity of public argument and detailed justification inspires doubts even while it prevents them being resolved. A clear case in point is the scheme for an ‘inner circle’ railway through North Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy—the logical culmination of the campaign for working-class railways. A feeling had developed that railways were a public service for which all citizens, rich and poor, were eligible as a

matter of right. But unlike fare concessions to Footscray or extensions to Brunswick, the ‘inner circle’ was not intended to help workingmen escape to the suburbs; it offered them train travel just where they were, even perhaps whether they needed it or not. As early as 1880 Patterson's bill had included proposals for a line from Richmond northwards through East Collingwood to Alphington. Fitzroy residents, who had hoped for a line of their own, were downcast, the lucky Collingwoodians jubilant. As it happened, the enormous costs of acquiring valuable urban land and local opposition to level crossings compelled the government to abandon the scheme.!”’ Under Gillies’s Octopus Act of 1883 the inner suburbs were fobbed off with two short ‘cockspur’ lines suitable only for goods traffic, and even these were opposed by some mem-

bers who argued that they did not ‘serve any purpose that would not be — 200 —

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

gained by a tramway’.'* Yet throughout the decade inner-suburban politicians kept up the pressure, and barracking for railways became a local sport to rank with football, town-hall building and street-fighting. Finally, in 1890, a parliamentary committee examined the rival proposals for an ‘inner circle’ railway. Fitzroy and Collingwood patriots, mainly local businessmen, came forward to urge their suburbs’ claims. On the vital question of whether either of the inner tramway suburbs really needed a railway, however, they were reduced to the simple, political argument that ‘the south

has railways and the north ought to have them’.' John Woods, a trenchant critic of urban railways, pointed to the technical advantages of tramways in the northern suburbs, but the railway advocates maintained that the speed and cheapness of trains would offset their less frequent schedules and more widely spaced stops. In trying to settle this confusing issue, the committee leant heavily on the expert testimony of Richard Speight, who showed his impartiality by backing both schemes. On the basis of revenue south of the Yarra and the government statistician’s projections of future population growth, he confidently predicted that ‘any lines within 9 miles of Melbourne would pay’. When finally pressed to plump for one line or the other, he told the committee he would simply ‘toss up a penny and whichever came down first I would select’.'°° The politicians were in no mood to gainsay such an agreeable expert and cheerfully endorsed both the Collingwood and Fitzroy lines. But already by 1891 pressures were mounting to curtail further railway expansion. It was not until 1903 that the Collingwood line was finally opened, and then, as its critics had foreseen, it was enormously expensive and captured only a fraction of the working-class population for whom it had been designed.!° The ‘inner circle’ lines were the most daring of several schemes promoted by the railways commissioners in the high boom years. Although depression intervened, and most of the lines were never constructed, the drawing-boards of 1890 reveal the broad outlines of a grand strategy for the conquest of urban distance. There were to be two new lines in the north—from Newmarket to Keilor Road, and Royal Park to Pascoe Vale—which neatly bisected the estates of prominent land boomers. It [Pascoe Vale line] ran past ‘eligible lots’ and ‘splendid situations’, And after well-known patriots they named the leading stations. You heard the porter ring his bell and cry with special unction— Next train for Bent Town, Munroville, La Rose and Melville Junction.!°

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There were also extensions to the south-eastern network from Kew to Doncaster and from Sandringham to Cheltenham.! Wending their way across virtually uninhabited and residentially marginal suburban land, the new routes were the logical culmination of the policy that railways should precede population and not population railways.

Why did the flourishing growth of suburban Melbourne come to such an abrupt and painful end? The tangled sequence of events began in October 1888 with the collapse of the land boom and the first signs of public unease. There had been such speculative fevers before and, like the others, this might easily have taken its course with only minor casualties. Residential expansion might even have continued, though at a more modest pace. Yet, by 1890, the whole stupendous enterprise was grinding to a standstill. After the event, of course, it all seemed inevitable. Anyone with forethought must see that, allowing for the buoyancy of the colonial spirit, the resources of the colonies and the natural increase of

the population, a time must arrive when the people must divert their attention, to some extent, from building houses. The influx of new colonists cannot always keep up, the arrival of new loan monies must come to a termination, and consequently the demand for houses cannot continue in so great a proportion as heretofore. '!" By the late 1880s the ‘natural increase’ of young colonial newlyweds, whose home-seeking first primed the housing boom, had begun to abate. Some historians suggest that weakening demographic pressures largely explain the

downturn in demand.''! The natural increase of ‘marriageable’ Victorians (aged 20-34) and the immigration of new settlers both reached a peak in 1888

and declined substantially thereafter. Yet the number of actual marriages was higher in 1889 and 1890 than in any previous year, and immigration—by

this time the most volatile component in housing demand—seems to have slackened only after the end of the land boom.''- The withdrawal of overseas funds seems to have been a consequence rather than a cause of the first decisions of lending institutions to reduce their advances and raise interest rates. In short, demographic pressures and external financial constraints, such as the Baring crisis, may have helped to precipitate the downturn, but they scarcely suffice to account for the almost total cessation of suburban growth — 202 —

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

that actually followed. All these pressures acted on a suburban economy whose wide frontiers and over-extended lines of communication rendered it particularly vulnerable to strain. The process of suburban development can be visualized as a series of moving frontiers extending from the city’s central core. Out on the farthest perimeter, amidst farms and orchards, were the advance parties of specula-

tors, auctioneers and land touts who subdivided, promoted and sold open paddocks into ‘desirable allotments’. By the late 1880s land hunger had driven them far beyond the outskirts of suburban settlement—north to Moreland and Fawkner, south into Sandringham and Mordialloc, east beyond Box Hill and Glen Iris, west as far as Maribyrnong and Altona. Following eagerly

in their tracks was the second wave of transport engineers and navvies who forged the vital connections between the city’s productive centre and its distant suburbs. As we have seen, railways and tramways operators happily embraced a pioneering role and extended their services far into the unsettled regions of outer suburbia. Then, at a distance, came the providers of such essential services as roads, gas, water and sanitation. At their most enterprising, as in the case of the gas companies, they kept well ahead of demand, extending their services wherever there were prospects of a payable return, but in other cases, such as the metropolitan water supply, they tended to lag and were constantly being jogged from behind by the onrush of eager settlers. Fourthly there were the landlords, speculators and builders who constructed the houses which were the most important component in the new suburb. And finally of course there were the suburban householders themselves. With all its obvious over-simplifications, this sketch suggests some important features of the growth mechanism. Clearly sound development depended

upon fair co-ordination between these successive phases of activity. Some leads and lags were inevitable, but if they lengthened too much—especially if the allocation of substantial resources ran too far ahead of final demand—the whole process risked being crippled by the dead weight of unused capacity. The most spectacular phase of the development process—certainly the

one which most captivated or disturbed contemporaries—was the riotous speculative trade in suburban land. The inflated rhetoric, champagne lunches and sharp dealing that accompanied land sales suggested a kind of reckless improvidence. But beyond a few fences, survey pegs and hoardings, subdivision and sale called for the investment of very few real resources. Its main effect

was simply to accelerate the circulation of money and land titles and, in the end perhaps, to redistribute wealth between the shrewd and the gullible. — 203 -

The Suburbs

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Burnley Station in the 1890s

The second stage of development—the extension of suburban transport networks—was potentially a more serious source of distortion. Professor N.G. Butlin for example has pointed to an ‘increase in locally consumed (largely urban) services’ and ‘declining yields on new railway investment’ as two symptoms of a more general tendency to long-run internal disequilibrium in the late-nineteenth-century Australian economy. Other historians have argued that the pattern of investment was not fundamentally unsound, at least until the high boom years, and cite the good profits on suburban train and tram operations and the high survival rate of railway lines constructed in Victoria in the years before 1888.!""

If a transport system is profitable, it suggests that its operations are soundly conducted. Yet it is important to understand that an entire system may remain in surplus while adding a substantial number of unremunerative

components. The tramways for example reaped bumper profits on their earliest years of operation but, by 1891, the company’s boom ventures into outer suburbia had brought earnings very close to the 1s a mile break-even — 204 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

point (see table 9). Similarly traffic and earnings on the suburban rail system had not kept pace with the extension of the system itself. Passengers on the Hobson’s Bay lines had increased from 22 054 411 in 1884-5 to 37 805 677 in 1888-9, but thereafter they began to decline even though further lines were

added. In their report for 1891 the commissioners noted that the eighteen miles of suburban line opened in the previous year had been ‘a serious drag upon the net results’.!!* The classic instance of course was the Outer Circle, which in its first nine months of operation attracted only 5153 passengers (mostly joy-riders?), but the Glen Iris and Sandringham lines barely made a more respectable showing.!!

TABLE 9 Tramways Traffic and Receipts, 1856-91 Receipts

Tram Passengers Passengers (shillings) Miles mileage carried Receipts per mile per mile

Year open (millions) (millions) &’000 run run

1886 2.3 0.5 16.4 189 32.9 7.6 1887 7.6 1.5 18.0 207 11.9 2.8 1888 19.9 4.0 31.1 363 70 1.8 1889 331.0 6.4 45.0 527 7.0 1.7 1890 = 387.2 7.5 45.3 O27 6.1 1.4 1891 45.3 9.2 48.0 963 5.2 1.2

Source: Victorian Yearbook, 1892, p. 161.

The fact that a line continued in operation into the twentieth century does not mean that the original decision to build it was sound, just as subsequent closure does not mean that the original decision was unwise. Railways commissioners were notoriously reluctant to mop up spilt milk; once a bad line had been constructed, politics and prudence often kept it open.!!® This was typically the case when a line cleared current running costs but contributed

negligibly to the interest burden on the original investment. Furthermore, there were several lines, such as those to Glen Iris and Sandringham, which made a good return only in the twentieth century when suburban development finally caught up with them. Their construction was possibly justified in the long term, but the original timing was badly awry. By 1890 few cities of — 205 -

The Suburbs

Melbourne's size boasted a system as advanced, extensive or convenient. In fact, it is likely that by the high boom years the system was becoming dangerously overgrown. Its two main operators were falling into the misbegotten strategy of attempting to annex each other’s natural catchments and, by the

turn of the century, railways and tramways intersected at no fewer than eighteen points.''' This was not necessarily a problem—they could have interlocked to offer mutual support—but in practice they seem to have constructed their routes so as to suck, rather than feed, each other's services. When the tramway to Brighton Road was opened in 1888, rail traffic from St Kilda began to decline, from 1 814 175 (1887-8) to 1 397 861 (1891). The Prahran tramway, opened in the same year, robbed the Prahran and South Yarra stations of almost a million passengers a year by 1890. And the Port Melbourne tram, opened in 1890, seems to have been the chief cause of a decline in local rail traffic from 579 000 (1888) to 298 000 (1891). In each case the fall in rail traffic preceded and exceeded the relatively small (6 per cent) decline in traffic through the whole system between 1888 and 1891. In the northern suburbs, competition between rail and tram was apparent in the poor returns of heavily populated tramway suburbs like Brunswick (140 769 in 1889) compared with their sparsely settled, but tramless, neighbours like Coburg (223 300).'!° The general pattern of railway, and implicitly of tramway, usage shown in a table of per capita annual rail journeys (see table 10) demonstrates the failure of the railways to make any substantial inroads on tramways territory. The Tramways Company unfortunately did not provide detailed traffic figures that would permit an examination of the impact of new railways upon tramway operations, but such little evidence as we have suggests that their attempts at territorial conquest were equally self-defeating. The third phase of development—the provision of essential utilities, like gas and water—revealed a similar pattern of brave expansionism. The Metropolitan Gas Company, formed in 1878 from a merger of the inner suburban gas companies, had an effective monopoly of gas supply in all but a few districts of the city. Nevertheless, it pursued a policy of vigorous growth, promoting the sale and hire of the new gas stoves and moving swiftly to forestall potential competitors. In 1885, when there were complaints of inadequate supply in the Prahran area, and anew company was pressing for permission to move In, the Metropolitan quickly improved the service and shut out its rival. Towards the end of the decade, the company adopted an increasingly aggressive policy

by extending its network well ahead of demand.'!’ In 1886 the chairman (John Benn) reported that ‘new and enlarged mains have been laid wherever ~ 206 —

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

TABLE 10 Per Capita Outward Suburban Train Journeys

Suburb 1881 1891

Fitzroy — .) North Melbourne 10 61 South Melbourne 46 98 Collingwood —- 11

Inner

Melbourne 72, 128 Richmond 75 127

Brunswick — 17 Flemington and Kensington 130 156 Essendon 93 147 Footscray 132 148

Northwest

Kew — 9

St Kilda 130 T7 Hawthorn 183 182 Prahran 127 154 Brighton 178 17]

southeast

Sources: Victorian Railways Report of the Board of Lands and Works, VPP., vol. 3, no. 48, 1882-3, appendix 16; Report of the Victorian Railways Commissioners, VPP., vol. 5, no. 124, 1891, appendix 17; Victorian Census, 1881, 1891. These estimates are necessarily fairly crude since station catchment areas and local government areas did not invariably coincide.

there was a prospect of a payable return, so that there is scarcely any settled

population within the company’s area that is not supplied’. And in 1887: ‘Keeping ahead of demand was the only safe means of conveying to their consumers a constant and ample supply’.'!*° The company had taken over 300

miles of mains in 1878; in 1890 there were 723 miles. In 1878 there were about 35 000 meter installations; in 1890 about 78 000. On the production side, the company installed a new mechanically operated coaling plant, new retort-stoking machinery and a large purifying and washing plant. During the early 1880s it erected new gas-holders of } million cubic feet capacity at Richmond and Fitzroy.'*! When a further holder of 3 million cubic feet (more — 207 -

The Suburbs

than double the required capacity) was undertaken in 1888, the chairman explained to shareholders:

the reasons are that the cost per 1,000 feet holding capacity is much cheaper proportionally than the cost of a small one, and that with ample storage gas can be made at a cheaper rate, and with less strain on the manufacturing plant; also that it occupies about two years to complete a large holder from the time the work is commenced, and we must not dis-

regard the fact that consumption has about doubled in the last five years. |" So confirmed was the company in its forward policy that two further holders, each of 3 million cubic feet capacity, were built in the succeeding two years. !”” By 1890 it was plain that gas suppliers, like other suburban developers, had extended their services beyond the limits of prudence.

The generous extension of transport and service networks rested on hopes that could only be justified by the sustained growth of new householders, the final consumers of suburbanism as a way of life. But by 1889 the construction of new houses was running beyond the capacity of the market to

absorb them. In some suburbs the numbers of vacancies were increasing more quickly than the numbers of new houses.!** By the end of the following year there was a general feeling that ‘outer Melbourne is admittedly overbuilt. East, west, north, south, the spirit of speculation is apparent and has left its mark in the shape of empty terraces, houses, shops etc, both brick and wood in unmade, unformed streets.’'*’ The census of 1891 revealed that many boom suburbs, such as Northcote (12.8 per cent), Oakleigh (12.5), Brighton (10.7), Brunswick (9.5), Hawthorn (9.5), and Essendon (9.5), were encumbered with high proportions of unoccupied houses.'”’ By the late 1880s the mechanism of suburban growth had become seriously uncoordinated. The disturbing spectacle of deserted railway stations, quarter-filled gasometers and unsold new houses highlighted a dangerous disparity between developers’ hopes and the demands of final consumers. In the end, the collapse of the colony’s financial institutions bore down on the overstrained mechanism of suburban development so as to halt, and ultimately reverse, the process of growth. People began to leave the condemned city for the country or other colonies. Between 1892 and 1895 Melbourne lost some 56 000 people. Vacancies had first appeared in the new boom suburbs, but by 1894 the largest population losses had been recorded in older workingclass districts such as South Melbourne (net loss of 9446 between 1891 and

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Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

1894), Richmond (6486), Collingwood (5085) Fitzroy (4330) and the City of Melbourne (8062).'*’ These were precisely the regions of greatest unemployment, eviction and social distress, and their poor, often casually employed tenants, had little choice but to move on when depression hit. Furthermore, land values and rents declined less steeply in the inner industrial suburbs than elsewhere. Values in Collingwood for example declined by only about 8 per cent (1889-93), compared with falls of 35-50 per cent in the newer suburbs.'“* (In Brunswick, where many breadwinners had been employed in the oncebooming brickmaking industry, rents fell to a mere 3—4s a week.) Unemployed inner-city workingmen had good reason to move out to where rents were cheaper and there was space to grow a few vegetables. Though Melbourne grew by only 5000 between 1891 and 1901, the outer suburbs gained some 13 000 people at the expense of the inner city.!*" Ironically, it was the collapse of suburban development that finally enabled some impoverished artisans to realize the dream of suburban seclusion. Hardship and depopulation began in turn to undermine the entire boom network of suburban services. Housewives cooked their meagre dinners on wood stoves, and families ate them by dimmed gaslight. From 1891 there was a steep decline in gas consumption—in the case of the Metropolitan Gas Company, from 18 980 million cubic feet in the period 1883-91 to only 9834 million cubic feet between 1891 and 1898. Suppliers had to face competition from other illuminants, especially electricity, which from 1894 was being used for street lighting in the City of Melbourne, Richmond, Essendon, Collingwood, Hawthorn and South Yarra. Gas consumption for cooking and heating declined catastrophically, and by 1894 the Metropolitan Gas Company had repossessed about half the 12 697 gas stoves it had sold on hire-purchase in 1890.!°°

Unemployment and wage reductions left men to sulk at home or compelled them to economize by walking to work, thus cutting severely into railway and tramway traffic. Operators began to repent their brave attempts at boom expansionism, feeling the pinch in precisely those regions where they had overextended in the late boom years. The railways had most difficulty in the inner, tramway suburbs.

Our suburban system, while it pays on the whole, has a great deal of mileage that is shockingly bad in the way of revenue ... while you get the

Brighton line and the Camberwell line, the Essendon line and the Williamstown line, and the line to Caulfield paying very well indeed, you — 209 -

The Suburbs

may say that all the rest [i.e. Port Melbourne, Collingwood, Brunswick, St Kilda, Outer Circle, Glen Iris] is very poor.'”! Most sections of the Outer Circle were closed down in the early 1890s. But the railways commissioners’ main remedy was to raise fares, grading the increases

heavily against first-class passengers, periodical ticket-holders and outersuburban residents. Some first-class passengers announced their Intention of henceforth travelling second class and formed a Second Class League to give their individual economies the force of a united protest. To many, who, like myself, have children attending schools, the proposed addition in fares is a consideration. We have been accustomed to travel first class, and as Iam not prepared to acquiesce in the justice of this increased special taxation, we shall certainly join the ‘second class league’ which it is proposed to form branches of in all the suburbs ...!" The incidence of the fare increases gave particular offence to periodical ticketholders and those living in ‘new towns ... such as Canterbury, Surrey Hills, and many other places—which, but for the railway and its facilities, would have had no existence’. Depression was threatening the lifeline between the suburban middle class and their jobs in the metropolis. The tramways meanwhile encountered greatest difficulty with the outersuburban lines that competed most directly with the railways. The company’s directors explained that trams needed to make about a shilling a mile to clear expenses.

On lines which pass through closely populated districts, like those of Richmond, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Brunswick, the traffic is sufficient to meet this outlay and yield a handsome surplus, but on lines where large stretches of parkland and other unremunerative areas have to be passed, the same results cannot be looked for. Another disturbing element is the

competition offered by the suburban railways, and in the case of the majority of lines this has had an enormous effect in reducing the traffic. The result of the past year has been that on some lines the return per tram mile has been under 9d when about 1s was required to pay expenses. The West Melbourne line has been run at a considerable loss, and neither the Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, nor Toorak lines have paid expenses. The Prahran line has yielded a shght profit, but the line to St. Kilda has not quite paid its way. The horse lines to Kew and Hawthorn are worked

at a loss. — 210 -

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities

The tramways had also to contend with cutting competition from cabmen. By 1894-5 the average return over all lines was less than 1s a mile. Employees’

salaries were drastically cut and trams were run at 12 m.p.h. instead of 9 m.p.h. so that fewer cars could make the same number of journeys. In 1893 it was suggested that the less profitable routes might be abandoned, but the company, perhaps under pressure from the Tramways Trust, maintained its services throughout the depression.!** It was not until the late 1890s that the process of suburban growth was cautiously resumed. The land boomers and their too sanguine supporters had endowed Melburnians with a network of suburban communications and services vast enough to serve the city for another generation. But the anger and disillusionment aroused by their activities did much to undermine the belief in suburbanism as a popular way of life. Henceforth politicians were reluctant to

embark on bold schemes of suburban improvement and, though their constituents continued to practise the domestic virtues, they were no longer propagated with the old evangelical zeal. The suburban dream had been painfully confronted with urban realities.

— 21] -

e9 a [3.25 Bl

EF LCG ee Shon ae

A City OF FREEHOLD HOMES A Home of One's Own ’—the Pattern of Ownership—

Compulsory Tenants and Reluctant Landlords It was an article of faith among boom-time Melburnians that the advantages of suburbanism as a way of life were most completely achieved in a home of one’s own. ‘To have a home which he himself reared or purchased—a home which he has improved or beautified—a home indeed, which, with honest pride or natural love, he calls his own, will make any man a better citizen ...’.' Here was an ideal with obvious attractions to the citizens of a vigorous and self-conscious metropolis: it simultaneously confirmed the city’s promise of economic and social mobility and offered sanctuary from its oppressive demands; it overlaid the basic desire for a place of one’s own with aspirations to petty landownership and rural peace. The mere fact of a home being our own is an incentive to make it as beautiful as our means, no matter how small, will allow. It is like a little world of our own creation which we endeavour to make more and more perfect, and for which we work all the harder. But without this incentive, born of ownership, it is impossible to take the interest in the property, which, by inducing us to beautify the house and grounds, would improve its value ...

After the toil of the day, with its attendant weariness and manifold

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A City of Freehold Homes’

vexations, there is nothing more soothing than to sit beneath our roof with the knowledge that it was reared through our own endeavours, and that we have not worked or saved altogether in vain.*

The popularity of home-ownership is a tribute to the importance of that hidden, pivotal institution, the suburban family, for only within a strong kinship network was the householder susceptible to the land boomers’ urgent appeals to conjugal affection and paternal pride, to the good opinion of friends and rela-

tives and to the pleasures of ‘long acquaintanceship and endeared association’.’ Only as a ‘family man’ could he appreciate the sufferings of neglected

children, the thraldom of prolonged rent-paying, the rootless insecurity of perpetual motion. During their heyday in the 1880s the Melbourne building societies worked these popular fears and hopes into a coherent suburban ideology.

In preaching the virtues of security and stability, suburban ideologues recognized that they were directly challenging nomadic habits that were a permanent fact of life for many city-dwellers and, in a romantic bush context, a main component of national mythology. They decried the ‘barbarism’ still apparent among the otherwise ‘civilised people ... resident in such cities as Queenly Melbourne and Queenly Sydney’, exhibited in the migratory habits ‘characteristic of the roving Arab ... the nomadic Tartar and ... the shepherd and stockman of the Australian interior’. They appealed to these unhappy wanderers to ‘admit, after all, that it is possible to settle down in the one locality

and house and be content and happy in the knowledge that, even though humble and in the midst of sordid surroundings, it is Home—which, the Poet tells us, is of Heaven “the kindred point” ’.* A home of one’s own could be regarded as either a fortress or a prison. It was an ambiguous guarantee of security. No goal for the footloose or freelance,

it called for the inclination and means to settle down. Home-owners, as a group, were measurably more settled than tenants: on average only one-third of Melbourne’s owner-occupiers in 1884 had moved house by 1889, while two-thirds of tenants had left their original homes. Even in half a decade, some would have followed a locust trail of ‘moonlight flits’.°

A notable feature of our Australian cities is the frequency with which certain of their inhabitants move from one place of abode to another. We refer to that class of people, forming a large portion of our suburban population, the family heads of which astonish their necessarily few friends if

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The Suburbs

they remain two or three years in the one suburb, or five or six months in the one street. Many of such may be said to yearly migrate to some other

locality; and, with their goods and chattels, keep moving around the General Post Office until they complete the circle.° The nomads consisted very largely of workingmen and especially of unskilled labourers whose casual employment and precarious livelihood were serious impediments to permanent residence and hence to ownership. The constant physical movement of urban populations from job to job and place to place

was probably among the most important forces limiting the economic and political advancement of workingmen in the nineteenth century. A man had to ‘settle down’ to become a citizen, in fact if not in theory.‘ Contemporaries, however, were reluctant to concede that some people simply could not afford to settle. The building societies upheld a radical individualism that contended that ‘a workman’s permanence of employment depends on himself. Given a

settled condition in the affairs of the country ... the skilled, industrious and sober artisan need have absolutely no fear of his future.”* Employment in Melbourne was probably fuller and more stable than in American cities. for example. But even in establishments employing mainly skilled artisans, the labour turnover could be fairly high. In the admittedly abnormal years of 1890-1 one large iron foundry and engineering works had an annual rate of replacement approaching 24 per cent.” Occupations with a high job turnover also generally had high residential mobility: 67 per cent of unskilled workers and 59 per cent of artisans would have moved house between 1884 and 1889, compared, for example, with only 40 per cent of professional and managerial

occupations and 39 per cent of shopkeepers and self-employed tradesmen. Within the ring of inner industrial suburbs, changing jobs did not necessarily mean moving house; nor of course was all residential mobility associated with changes in employment. When workingmen moved, it was usually to another house in the same locality close to much the same potential employment. At least half the Collingwood householders of 1884 who had moved house by 1889, and whose new homes can be identified, were still living in Colling-

wood, many in the same neighbourhood. Of those who had moved farther afield, about half had migrated only as far as the adjacent suburbs of Fitzroy, Carlton and Richmond. In sum, probably no more than a quarter of all those who moved house in the half-decade were beyond the reach of their old employment (and kin?).'"

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A City of Freehold Homes’

It was to combat this lively tradition of rent-dodging and moonlight-flitting that suburban ideologues promoted the ideal of settled industry. They invoked

the authority of the model American self-improver, Benjamin Franklin, and British armchair admirers of manly labour, like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle.'! Their followers were those honest journeymen content to measure

their course by milestones rather than the stars: ‘the first step towards making a man is right home-training, the next a trade, the next permanent employment, the next a home, and the next a wife’.'* The secular virtues of prudence, temperance, providence and industry were their ruling ideals. Home-ownership, the material goal, was also seen as a school of respectability:

The working man who continues for eight or ten years to pay his contributions [to a building society] becomes thereby an improved man; and who shall say that such improvement, confirmed by such means, is not of far more value to him and [his] family in many ways than even the house

in which he lives rent-free ... The social circumstances and personal habits of a man favour his moral and, we may be permitted to say, religious

character.” With these lofty moral aims, it is not surprising that active Protestant laymen were prominent among the promoters and managers of the building societies. Evangelical stalwarts like James Munro, James Mirams, the Davies brothers and J. W. Hunt were not unfeeling hypocrites who cultivated a reputation for probity simply to encourage susceptible investors but ardent believers in the moral foundation of social progress.'* The interlocking directorates of building societies, temperance associations, social purity leagues and Nonconformist

churches demonstrate an underlying congruence of ideals. The Victorian Alliance Record rightly claimed that ‘building societies are doing good work in the promotion of thrift, and are thus our allies in the war with intemperance’.

The building societies meanwhile supported scriptural instruction in state schools because it taught the ‘simple and elementary rules of uprightness’ by which they aspired to conduct their own affairs.'? The final, fantastic objective —a striking reversal of those national stereotypes, the jolly swagman and the wandering shearer—was an industrious, sober, pious and home-loving Australian petite bourgeoisie. The political implications of the building societies’ programme were stark. Poverty was a moral defect. The chains of inheritance and class were simply an illusion:

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The Suburbs

Although the mass of the population may appear the same through the same arrangement of strata visible, the atoms composing the mass are ceaselessly changing, and from the lowest poverty-stricken strata to the very highest there is constant upward and downward motion. As each individual grows up the individuals ascend or descend to their proper place, and this, so to call it, moral or social gravitation is as much a law of nature as is physical gravitation.!°

Collective solutions to working-class distress were not merely mistaken but self-defeating. The home-purchaser was in ‘upward motion: ‘he has a stake in the country, and it is in his interest to help to increase the prosperity of such country, and to avoid and fight shy of all revolutionary and disquieting or factious movements, such as strikes, violent political agitation, or anything calculated to hinder its advancement’.'' The societies tended to modify strict laissez-faire doctrines to take account of the aspirations of the colonial working class and the short-term prosperity of the societies themselves. They supported

high wages CIf workingmen are not fairly compensated, they cannot be expected to save’) and the prohibition of Chinese immigration CIf Chinamen are to over-run this fair land ... the working classes will not then find it the

easy matter it is now to keep up their building society repayments ). But although they endorsed profit-sharing co-operatives, the societies denied that their own operations were a demonstration of the co-operative principle. All they offered was a little “encouragement and assistance’ towards goals that remained within the grasp of an industrious and determined individual.'® The basis of the suburban ideology, then, was a faith in the individual’s

capacity to seek and secure their own well-being. The building societies claimed to be able to demonstrate with mathematical precision how an ordinary Melburnian could acquire a Home of His Own. All he had to do was

to convert his present rent into instalments. ‘Why pay rent’, he was asked, ‘when by paying the same amount to a building society you can become your own landlord?’ EXAMPLE

A. pays 11/- per week for 12 years, amounting to £343.4/0 and at the end of that time is no better off.

B. buys a house and borrows £200 from Society, and pays 11/0:d per week, or £2.7/- per month, for 12 years, amounting to £344.8/- and at the end of that time is owner of the property."”

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A City of Freehold Homes’

The arithmetic of this seductive argument was formally sound, but it rested on questionable assumptions. Throughout the 1880s the building societies had greatly extended the scope of their activities. In 1880 there were forty-seven registered Victorian societies, which advanced some £764 000 to borrowers; in 1885 seventy-four societies advanced a record &4 879 000. Meanwhile interest rates declined and the average period of repayment was lengthened from 8 to 12 years. It was apparently becoming easier for workingmen to finance purchase of their own homes. In 1885 a typical workingman could have spent his 11s a week in either of two ways: he could have paid the rent on a four-room weatherboard or three-room brick house or, if he had already accumulated a deposit or purchased a block of land, he could have devoted it to the repayments on a more modest three-room weatherboard house.”° In the face of these realities, a family man on a low income could have adopted one of three broad strategies: prodigality, economy or penury. He could simply give up the idea of ownership in order to maintain the size or style of housing that his position required of him. Perhaps he had a large

family and needed the room, or perhaps he aspired to a status which his means, as yet, did not completely support. The second possibility was to prune

his budget of every superfluous comfort and somehow save the margin between his old rent and the repayments on his preferred house. Finally, he could follow the advertiser’s advice and allocate his rent to house repayments while submitting to a lower standard of housing, a humbler home. Building societies needled obstinate tenants, encouraged scrupulous savers, and consoled modest proprietors. The persistent rent-payer, in their view, was simply vain or negligent.’ Were it not for this show of things, this vain desire to be unduly admired, the tenant would spend less on unnecessary acquisitions and make it his bounden duty to acquire that most necessary and beneficial of acquisitions, a castle of his own.”*! Great cities like Melbourne unfortunately beset the susceptible workingman with the temptations of vice and conspicuous consumption. Among the masses of our people in the larger cities there exists an ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the desire of spending and the duty of saving. On the one hand are ranged the many enticements (held out to everyone

having a surplus over the absolute requirements of life) to indulge in extravagance of dress, mode of living, or amusement; or to gratify some

more pernicious passion. These enticements continually tempt the

-— 217 -

The Suburbs

susceptible side of man’s nature to needless expenditure. On the other hand, the hope of becoming a householder and property owner, or a businessman, urges the provident side to lay up part of the earnings, so that in time such hopes may be realized.-The societies could cite inspiring examples of borrowers who had followed duty rather than desire. They compared ‘Mary Ann’, a servant girl who kept a bank-book and only one boyfriend, with her more prodigal friend ‘Kate’. They related the story of ‘Mr Robinson’, who had once accompanied his wife to the theatre on Saturday nights, but managed to halve his weekly outgoings by going alone and abolishing his good lady’s beer allowance. They juxtaposed the budgets of ‘Spendthrift’ and a more prudent fellow clerk to point a Micawberish moral.-’ They readily conceded that the good man who exchanged a rented villa for a mortgaged cottage had to sacrifice some pride. A tenant might ‘occupy a dwelling of a slightly more imposing appearance than would be the case if the same amount of money were directed to the paying off of a house purchased from a building society. But the would-be suburban homeowner was encouraged to shun the ‘shadow and show of things’ and grasp ‘some potent substantiality in the background .-' From the grim, grey world of daily wants he was beckoned towards a brighter, more real, estate.

So persuasive were the building societies’ propagandists, and so accommodating were the lending institutions themselves, that it would be easy to conclude that home-ownership was extending on every hand. Casual visitors and local observers acclaimed it as a general blessing. William Senior for example,

who visited Melbourne in 1880, reported that the working classes of Melbourne were ‘the absolute owners of the suburbs ... the thickly-populated suburbs of East Collingwood, Prahran, Hotham, Emerald Hill and Carlton are to a considerable extent owned by the working man’. And in 1888 the Daily

Telegraph, a proud ally of the building societies, boasted that Melbourne, beyond any other capital in the world, was ‘a city of freehold homes’. Enthusiastic contemporaries made such claims without fear of contradiction, for until the Commonwealth census of 1911, there were no official Statistics of home-ownership. Only recently have historians begun to exploit the records of individual home-ownership and tenancy in municipal ratebooks to derive estimates of the general level of occupation. A. E. Dingle and D. T. Merrett have estimated from a survey of six Melbourne municipalities that in -~ 218 -

A City of Freehold Homes’

1891, on the eve of the depression, only a minority of Melbourne householders (41 per cent) owned or were buying their own homes. They surmise that the proportion was not much higher in the preceding decade.*° A wider sampling of suburbs and years broadly confirms their view. Table 11 presents the sound-

ings of suburban ownership levels so far available for the late nineteenth century. An estimate of the general metropolitan level of owner-occupation derived from these suburban estimates for 1881 and 1884, and weighted in accordance with the distribution of dwellings in various zones of the metropolis, suggests that about 45.5 per cent of Melbourne householders owned or were buying their own homes in the early 1880s. Between the early 1880s and the early 1890s, levels of owner-occupation appear to have actually declined by some 4—5 per cent over the decade, a conclusion which at first seems oddly at variance with the picture conjured up by the activity of the Melbourne building societies. Did all the vigorous propaganda, the tidal inflow of capital, achieve so little? Were the extravagant

promises of lending institutions possibly even an ideological reaction to declining chances among the would-be home-owners? The evidence is not altogether as pessimistic as it might seem. In the first place, global estimates based on a variety of partial samples should be treated as provisional and compared only with caution. Furthermore, economic and demographic conditions were not wholly favourable to a rise in ownership levels in the 1880s: the rapid appreciation of land values tended to outstrip the capacity of young newlyweds and recent immigrants to accumulate a deposit. In such unpropitious circumstances the addition of some 18 000 homes for owner-occupation in a single decade—there were only about 23 000 in 1881—was a remarkable achievement.*’ However, even if the level of owner-occupation belies the more extravagant boosters’ guesses and seems low compared with mid-twentieth-century levels (Melbourne’s rate was 68 per cent in 1971), it was unquestionably very high by world standards. In the United States, perhaps the most nearly comparable country, only three cities of more than 100 000 population (Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit) had ownership rates of more than 40 per cent in 1890.** Certainly Melbourne had a higher proportion of owner-occupiers than Sydney (30 per cent in 1891) and a slightly higher proportion than Adelaide.*’ Data are still meagre, but a contemporary city of comparable size with a higher rate of home-ownership has yet to be brought to light. Why were Melburnians so well favoured? One important ingredient in their

good fortune was certainly the abundance of picturesque, easily serviced and relatively cheap freehold land. There were few geographical barriers to —~ 219 -

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A City of Freehold Homes’

metropolitan growth such as the harbour, sandhills and shallow soil presented

in Sydney and no caste of hereditary urban landlords like that in some European cities. On the other hand, there was a readiness on the part of the colonial government to provide the transport and other services necessary for metropolitan expansion. The outlying, newly developed estates on the suburban frontier became a happy hunting-ground for would-be home-owners. As table 11 shows, the highest rates of owner-occupation during the 1880s were

achieved in new suburbs like Hawthorn, Malvern, Footscray and Kew, the lowest in old-established inner suburbs like Collingwood and Port Melbourne. R. V. Jackson, writing of home-ownership in Sydney, has suggested that ‘the closer a suburb was to the city, the more densely it had been built up, the higher were its land values and the higher was the proportion of brick to wooden houses—in short, the more thoroughly wrban was an area's character —the smaller the role of the owner-occupier was likely to be’. He notes the close correlation of suburban tenancy rates with population density and the proportion of brick dwellings.” A similar relationship between urbanization and tenancy also prevailed in Melbourne; suburbs with high population densities and high land values generally had low rates of owner-occupation. Created initially by the tug of market forces, these relationships were reinforced by institutional inertia and generational change. The agencies offering houses for tenants and loans for purchasers tended to confirm the dominant pattern of occupation. The areas where tenancy predominated were the historical creation of a local landlord class. Inner-suburban landlords were typically residents of the suburbs in which they held property, and sometimes even let and occupied houses in the same street. Even those who were not actually residents frequently lived in a neighbouring suburb or had lived nearby in the recent past. They were usually men of middling rank—shopkeepers, small manufacturers, builders or even artisans—and rarely great absentee landlords in the European style. It is plausible to see them as successful gold-rush immigrants now approaching the end of their working lives, ploughing their gains into familiar suburban fields, tending them jealously and taking a modest return. Landlordism and speculative ownership were the natural focus of petit bourgeois investment, calling for an intimate knowledge of local developments, and favouring the old identity who could foresee and even influence their course.”! By contrast, the new fringe suburbs took shape largely without a comparable class of local landlords. Their developers and financiers were large, city-based

mortgage companies, building societies and banks, and their pioneers— — 221] -

The Suburbs

perchance the landlords and local busybodies of a later generation—still young, vulnerable mortgagees. Lending institutions, especially building societies, have also traditionally promoted the Australian style of extensive metropolitan growth by favouring working-class borrowers on new, detached houses in developing suburbs.” Contemporaries assumed that

these environs of Melbourne which have a radius from six to eight miles would have been confined within a much smaller compass had it not been for the Victorian Building Societies. But for their intervention, the suburbs of Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Hotham etc. and the great metropolis itself would have been far more thickly populated ... Building societies, also, by enabling a host of individuals to migrate from the crowded city and such of its suburbs as are almost equally crowded, have materially contri-

buted to the health and comfort of the remaining residents ... north, south, east and west, the smaller suburbs ... are receiving the benefit of this influx of population from the larger areas.” In a general sense, by simply broadening the availability of housing finance, the building societies certainly promoted extensive metropolitan settlement. But in the narrower sense that they actually gave preferential treatment to

TABLE 12 Percentage Distribution of Modern Permanent Building Society Loans, 1554 and 1589

1884 1889 Annual MPBS Annual MPBS

metropolitan loans to metropolitan loans to

population owner- population owner-

Areas increase occupiers increase occupiers

City 4 8 (29) 0 5 (22) Inner suburbs 4) 61 (222) 25 21 (103)

South and east 26 13 (48) 13 30 (146) North and west 30 18 (69) 63 45 (223)

Total 101 100 (368) 10] 100 (544) Source: Loan applications of the Modern Permanent Building Society, Victorian Yearbook.

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A City of Freehold Homes’

working-class settlers in outer suburbs, the claim is harder to evaluate. Only

one society, the Modern Permanent, has left records complete enough to establish its effective policy.** Table 12 suggests that its lending performance. compared with the overall pattern of residential growth, was skewed towards borrowers, at first in the inner, ‘traditional’ working-class suburbs, later in the developing suburbs to the north and west of the city.’? But the Modern Per-

manent thought of itself as an artisans’ and labourers’ society, and its loans policy may not have been typical of all. The wider pattern of building finance in the boom period was finally—and then only partially—revealed after the flood-tide of speculation receded. Then, in the late 1890s, the proportion of repossessed houses whose purchase or erection had apparently been financed by building societies was highest in working-class suburbs, especially on the suburban fringe (Footscray 85 per cent, Collingwood 62), while, by contrast, middle-class suburbs, especially in the inner city, had relatively low proportions of building society foreclosures (Hawthorn 51 per cent, St Kilda 35), but numerous foreclosures at the hands of banks and insurance companies (St Kilda 58 per cent, Hawthorn 44, Collingwood 30, Footscray 15). Houses repos-

sessed by building societies had a lower valuation, on average, than those falling into the hands of banks and insurance companies.” Not all these loans were necessarily made to working-class borrowers; some were probably speculative investments in working-class areas by middle-class borrowers. Nevertheless, there is persuasive, if not finally conclusive, evidence for the building societies’ claims as friends of the workingman. Despite all their vigorous activity, the level of owner-occupation remained low in working-class suburbs, especially of the older sort. Hence the question naturally arises: were workingmen greatly disadvantaged in pursuing the suburban dream of ownership? A. E. Dingle and D. T. Merrett, in their analysis of 1891 Melbourne ownership patterns, confirm the importance of intensifying land-use but also emphasize personal incomes as a related factor accounting for variation in rates of owner-occupation between suburbs. Ownership levels

were low where householders were poor and land dear (inner suburbs like Collingwood) and high where land was cheap and residents well-to-do (outer, middle-class suburbs like Hawthorn and Brighton). They find an impressive

correlation (0.959) between levels of tenancy and proxies for land values (dwellings per acre) and low income (size of dwellings and persons per room).”" In global terms, there can be little doubt that high income promoted owner-

occupation. The average Melburnian enjoyed higher wages and more secure employment than the Londoner or Mancunian or even, probably, the New

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The Suburbs

Yorker or San Franciscan.’* He mortgaged a future that seemed more assuredly

prosperous. The suburban ideology had a special appeal among that large middling class who were strangers, equally, to luxury and poverty, and building society officials identified their clientele as consisting mainly of ‘the lower

middle class ... of thriving artisans and prosperous tradesmen with neither too much nor too little of worldly goods’.*’ Their impression is borne out by the records of one of the largest societies, the Modern Permanent, which directed almost 60 per cent of its loans during the 1880s to shopkeepers, artisans and self-employed tradesmen. (While 60-70 per cent of loans to manual workers were for owner-occupation, loans to shopkeepers and self-employed tradesmen were directed, in about the same proportion, to landlordism and speculation. )

TABLE 13 Home-ownership Rates by Householder’s Occupation, 1553-4

and 1585-9

Occupation 1883-4? 1888-9» Professional and managerial D8 (38) 53 (113) Shopkeepers and indep. trades DD (106) 54 (215)

Clerks and shop assistants 48 (31) 46 (114)

Artisans 46 (123) 48 (263) Service and unskilled 50 (121) 44 (207)

Not in the workforce 43 (93) 54 (166) Miscellaneous and unknown 45 (11) 50 (50)

“ Collingwood, Footscray, St Kilda only " Collingwood, Footscray, St Kilda, Hawthorn Source: Municipal ratebooks.

As important as high general incomes may have been in supporting the practice of home-ownership in Melbourne, it 1s doubtful whether income differentials were the major factor explaining varzatzons in ownership rates, for owner-occupation was apparently an achievement open to most sections of Melbourne society, not a special advantage of the rich. Table 13 sets out sample estimates of owner-occupation for the main occupational groups in the 1880s. Although the higher-income occupations did fare better than the lowest, their advantage was only marginal: there are less than 10 percentage points between the leading professional and managerial occupations and the mere unskilled labourers, although of course the houses they occupied

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‘A City of Freehold Homes’

were spectacularly different. Moreover, even if Hawthorn had consisted wholly

of professional and managerial occupations, and Collingwood entirely of labourers, the variation in ownership rates between the two occupational groups would account for only a fraction of the variation in levels of owneroccupation between suburbs. It is as likely that occupational variation reflects variations in suburban ownership rates as the reverse. The social significance of this wide diffusion of property rights would bear close scrutiny. Does it help for example to explain the comparative moderation of working-class politics in Melbourne? Or do both point back to the foundational significance of ideals of self-help and upward mobility in the evolution of the gold colony? An explanation of the social variation in home-ownership emphasizing market forces to the exclusion of social ideals would be wide of the mark. People did not decide to become home-purchasers or chose a particular home on economic criteria alone. Buying a home was a symbolic act, and, like other symbolic acts, it was surrounded with sentiment and sanctioned by tradition. When a family rented a house they may have regarded it instrumentally—as no more than box for living in. But when they staked their future in buying a house, they reached for individual and ideal qualities that, in the 1880s, were best achieved in a brand-new home on the suburban frontier. In the late nineteenth century many purchasers may still have shared the aspirations of landless gold-rush immigrants. (Was the yeoman dream of five acres and a cow realized in a quarter-acre block and a pen of chooks?) Australia itself, after all, could be regarded as a distant suburb of Britain, and dreams of independence and security crushed by the harsh environment of London or Leeds may have lived again on the frontiers of Footscray, Brunswick and Albert Park.*!

By 1890 thousands of Melburnians had pinned their hopes of future security and independence on the idea of home-ownership. The building societies, their chief supporters, stood high in public esteem. Many had operated successfully for twenty or thirty years, and their managers were men of recognized, and

even ostentatious, morality. Few borrowers would have realized that the prodigious expansion of the high boom years had undermined the independence of the societies and the security of their faithful clients. By the late 1880s many lending institutions were backing their extraordinary advances of long-

term home loans with short-term deposits raised in the United Kingdom. Many were also investing a proportion of their borrowed funds in booming

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The Suburbs

Melbourne real estate. They were becoming more and more vulnerable to any sudden withdrawal of deposits or unforeseen decline in land values.*” The collapse of the land boom in late 1888 had at first brought only a little trepidation. For the time being land prices remained fairly sound and home-

building proceeded vigorously. It was not until March 1890, when James Mirams’s Premier Building Society collapsed, that disquiet began to spread. Although most insiders recognized the Premier's exceptional position as the

heaviest speculator in real estate, the general public seems to have been a little shaken: the financial press printed soothing editorials, and the societies themselves now advanced only on conservative valuations.*’? The maritime

strike, which began in August, added further to the disquiet. Empty paypackets raised the spectre of large-scale default in repayments, and anxious officials began to exhort borrowers to keep well clear of the strikers: “it behove each and every citizen to lay hold of his common sense, if he would come out of the struggle with a roof over his head’."' Immediately at least there was only a Slight increase in applications for the suspension of repayments, and for the

year as a whole the number of borrowers from Victorian building societies actually increased by 4319. But by 1891, when the land banks and investment companies began to tumble, the position took a clear turn for the worse: in June the building societies raised their deposit rate by half of 1 per cent and in December the trading banks withdrew their support. Immediately several societies suspended and the rest fell under mounting pressure. Meanwhile, under the combined impact of hardship, financial uncertainty and declining real estate values, borrowers began to default with their repayments. At first the building societies waived their right to recover fines for non-payment and simply added them to the principal." But as time went on, indulgence became impossible and default more widespread. By the end of 1893 J. W. Hunt, manager of the Modern Permanent Building Society, had to report to his British agents,

we have now rather more than half of our borrowers unable to keep up their fortnightly repayments. Out of this number, that is, those unable to keep up their repayments, about 60 or 65% are unable to pay even interest.

In many of these cases we have reduced their interest to 6%. In many others we have taken possession altogether. In these latter cases, the nett

receipts from rents do not average more than 23% to 3% and I do not know when it is to improve. The great trouble is the scarcity of employment. We used to look upon artisan and labourers’ cottages as the best

—~ 226 -

A City of Freehold Homes’

possible security, and our business was largely confined to that class of security. Now it is different. When the workman is out of work, he has no other resources and either stays in the house without paying, or clears out altogether and throws the house on our hands.*‘ Gradually the spectacular decline in land and house values undermined the financial basis of the building society movement. Many properties depreciated so much that their value fell far short of the purchaser’s debt, while rents, which had declined to ‘almost nominal amounts’, were far less than weekly building society instalments. By mid-1894 the Modern Permanent had taken possession of nearly half its loans, and repayments had been suspended and interest alone was being paid on half the rest. Hunt confessed: What I feared has actually come to pass and large numbers have thrown up their houses simply because of the terrible depreciation in values ... The working men are asking themselves why they should continue to pay a society 12/6 or 15/- a week when their houses are not now worth as much as they owe, and they can rent others next door at 2/- or 3/- a week.*® At the end of 1894 the accounts of the society showed that almost 65 per cent of its assets were held as house property in possession and only about 26 per cent as advances on full or part repayment terms. Other societies were more guarded in publishing information on the composition of their assets, but it is clear that the situation of the Modern Permanent was far from exceptional. Returns furnished to the government in 1895 demonstrated that the diminished number of societies still operating had, on average, only about half as many borrowers as in 1889, and financial commentators believed that a large proportion of their assets was in repossessed houses.*” The building societies had become great reluctant landlords.

These developments were bound to have serious effects upon homeownership levels, and, in turn, upon the credibility of the entire suburban ideology. Between 1891 and 1901 the proportion of Melbourne householders

who owned or were buying their own homes is estimated to have declined from 41 to 35 per cent. This is certainly a smaller decline than contemporary observers and some later historians postulated.”° Yet, in social terms, its effects

were catastrophic. Even such an apparently marginal fluctuation may have dispossessed some 6000 families or more than 20 000 individuals. Further-

more the net measurement disguises radical shifts in the social pattern of ownership and tells us nothing of the sometimes calamitous process of

—~ 227 -

The Suburbs

re-adjustment. Scores of small landlords who hung on to their own homes were compelled to relinquish the nest-egg properties on which they had depended for a living in old age. For every owner-occupier who lost his home outright, there were several others who remained proprietors only at the cost of enforced moves, scraping economy and prolonged anxiety.

Three classes of suburban home-owner were especially vulnerable to depression: those who were recent borrowers, those whose properties depreciated steeply in value, and those who were employed in occupations subject

to unemployment or insolvency. Because they had paid high prices and incurred large debts, recent borrowers were among the most acute sufferers after the crash. Their special position is clearly shown in the pattern of repossessions at the end of the decade. In the four suburbs sampled, houses in the hands of lending institutions (1898-9) comprised 10 per cent of those built before 1884, 20 per cent of those built in the mounting boom period up to 1888-9, and a staggering 79 per cent of those built in the period after the collapse of the land boom and before the crash of 1893. The most recent borrowers and most catastrophic declines in property values were concentrated in new, outlying residential suburbs. Young married couples with heavy mortgages and growing families were stranded in their brand-new, unsaleable dream-homes. In some of the most devastated suburbs, such as Hawthorn, Brunswick and Footscray, the rate of owner-occupation fell by as much as 20 per cent (see table 11). The shifts and shocks that reverberated through suburban society were traced out in sharply accelerating mobility rates (see table 14). No less than 60 per cent of Hawthorn householders (86 per cent of tenants and 44 per cent of owners) changed houses between 1889 and 1894. By contrast, old-established areas like Collingwood, which only five years earlier had very high rates of tenant mobility, weathered the crisis with

TABLE 14 Quinquennial Turnover of Owners and Tenants by Suburb, 1559-94 (per cent)

Suburb Tenants mobile Owners mobile

Collingwood 59 19 St Kilda 71 30

Footscray 83 32 Hawthorn 86 44 Source: Municipal ratebooks.

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A City of Freehold Homes’

relatively little physical disruption; their paid-up home-owners were almost twice as stable as the vulnerable borrowers of the wasting outer suburbs. Practically no category of home-purchaser remained untouched by the threat of foreclosure. Table 15, which delineates the levels of owner-occupation

among the main occupational groups, needs to be interpreted with caution. Fluctuations in the ownership rates for some occupations cannot be satisfactorily disentangled from related, and perhaps fundamental, changes in ownership throughout the suburbs in which such occupations were concentrated. For example the apparent stability of home ownership among artisans may be associated, in some measure, with the comparative stability of ownership in Collingwood where many artisans lived. Furthermore, it appears that many owners may have transferred the title of their homes to near relatives, especially wives, in order to frustrate creditors: there was a sharp rise in the number of householders ‘not in workforce’ and, in the short term at least, their ownership rate was well sustained. Nevertheless two groups—'shopkeepers and self-employed tradesmen’ and ‘service and unskilled workers’—stand out among the victims of the crash. Builders, outer-suburban shopkeepers and

other small businessmen had borrowed heavily in their pursuit of boom fortunes and, when the crash came, they were left without trade, assets or support. Their creditors swiftly brought them to book and, throughout the early 1890s, they were the largest class of insolvents.°! Even in good times low-paid labourers and service workers had to struggle to keep up their repayments. In depression, when the unskilled were the largest group among the unemployed, their situation became impossible. In 18938, a tramway conductor

TABLE 15 Home-ownership Rates by Householder’s Occupation, 1889-1599

Occupation 1889 1894 1899 Professional and managerial o2 (113) 57 (112) 35) (116) Shopkeepers and indep. trades 53 (215) 39 (221) 31 = £4(248)

Clerks and shop assistants 46 (114) 45 (119) 388 = (128)

Artisans A8 (263) 47 (274) 36 (297)

Service and unskilled 44 (207) 39 (231) 27 (806)

Not in workforce 54 (166) 56 (284) 42 = (279)

Miscellaneous and unknown 50 (50) 33 (49) 27 (33)

Source: Municipal ratebooks.

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facing drastic wage reduction reminded his employers that many ‘men in the company s employ had built their little houses at the tramway termini, and ... had to pay their instalments to the building societies’.’* In succeeding months many such embattled borrowers surrendered their little suburban castles and joined the grumbling ruck of dispossessed workingmen. The trials of these il-starred home-seekers stirred misgivings about the

entire system of values and institutions on which the boom campaign for home-ownership had been erected. Melburnians began to wonder ‘whether, after all, the modern development of the [building society] system is not a huge mistake, whether societies really and truly do render an economic service,

whether it is not imprudent for the earners of wages and salaries to invest their savings in immovable property .”’ To many well-intentioned suburbanites, homes were not just ‘immovable property’ but secular temples. They sought homes of their own as sanctuaries from the noise, artificiality and turmoil of the metropolis, symbols of their hard-won independence and self-respect. Yet they had lived to see the sanctuary defiled and the symbol debased. Gone now was the heyday of the artisan in his five-room wooden cottage in the suburbs

with a lawn in front, a lace veranda and a ‘small iron-framed, time payment

piano, on which his daughter ... discoursed popular airs with a powerful manual execution’.?! The petty suburban proprietors surrendered their gardens, pianos and self-respect and retired to cheaper rented quarters. And with their sad retreat, the ideal of home itself, with its promise of privacy and peace, was Shattered: Home—good Lord! a three-roomed hovel ‘twixt a puddle and a drain, In harmonious connection on the left with Liver Lane, Where a crippled man is dying, and a horde of children fight, And a woman in the horrors howls remorsefully at night.

It has stables close behind it, and an ash-heap for a lawn, And is furnished with the tickets of the things we have in pawn; And all day the place is haunted by a melancholy crowd Who beg everything or borrow, and to steal are not too proud. Through the day come weary women, too, with famine-haunted eyes Hawking things that are not wanted—things that no one ever buys. And I hate the prying neighbours, in their animal content And the devilish persistence of the man who wants the rent.” — 230 -

EEN NE MAKING ENDS MEET Foundations of a Plutocratic Society: the Structure of Means—Anticipatory Spending: the Marriage Question— Patterns of Expenditure—the Depression: a Multiple Crisis of Means—Drastic Remedies—a New Fashion of Austerity ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was an unashamed plutocracy. R. E. N. Twopeny, an astute young gentleman just out from England, swiftly concluded that ‘wealth

is ... the predominating factor here, as rank in London’. Another shrewd observer, the society novelist Ada Cambridge, agreed that ‘money is the gauge of social consequence in Melbourne’. They were not just drawing attention to the lack of an English-style aristocracy, but recognizing that wealth, brazenly

displayed, and income, conspicuously consumed, together defined the local hierarchy of prestige and the boundaries of social intercourse. ‘Social advertising’, as Edmund Finn called it, was a main preoccupation of Melbourne society. With money in their pockets, lowly-born shopmen could scale the social heights while virtuous, down-at-heel gentlefolk languished on the sidelines. The colonial upper class demanded ‘a class of goods in the way of dress,

ornament and decoration not demanded by Adelaide, by Sydney or even by India itself’. The lower middle classes were eager to acquire stylish furnishings and to practise ‘genteel accomplishments’. Even the working classes seemed

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to prefer the status of comfortable consumers rather than the humble dignity of toil. James Service, speaking on Eight Hours Day 1885, repudiated the phrase ‘working people’. ‘It would be better’, he suggested, ‘to speak of those who do not dine in the evening (Laughter and Cheers). I think that is the best distinction that could be drawn.’!

After the bitter constitutional conflicts of the late 1870s, when some colonists had feared an outbreak of class warfare, contemporaries were eager to embrace ideals of social consensus. But by the mid-1880s their preoccupation with status-seeking is as revealing of their social aspirations as it is of their fears. The pioneer American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, a keen observer of social life in another upstart metropolis, Chicago, identified a ‘pecuniary style of life’ as the means by which its ‘leisure class’ gained recognition. In Melbourne too, the expenditure of money, as revealed in people's incomes, wealth, consumption and styles of life, promises to throw light upon fundamental social distinctions, and guide us to some of the more significant social consequences of the economic boom and depression. Incomes in Melbourne, compared with London for example, were fairly evenly distributed: there were not as many either at or below subsistence or in the highest luxury, but many more on reasonably comfortable middling incomes.”

The largest incomes and expenditures were those of the city’s business class of merchants, bankers and managers. A substantial merchant, like James Balfour, might have spent 4000-5000 per annum in the late 1880s, but some notable boomers unquestionably went through much more. H. G. Turner, the salaried general manager of a bank, earned £3500, while J. W. Hunt, the manager of a building society, drew £1000 in 1885 and £1560 in the late eighties. Manufacturing salaries were probably rather less: Michaelis Hallenstein paid $750-1000 to the managers of his tannery.’ The income levels of professional men overlapped to some extent with those of the business class and, for some purposes, they constitute a single group joined by association and sometimes by blood as well as status. Business-

men often guided their studious or unenterprising sons towards the security and respectability of the law or medicine, while professional men, on their side, coveted access to a wealthy business clientele. Some well-connected doctors might have earned as much as £3000 a year though the average suburban practice, even with attached appointments to a medical club or institution, yielded only 600-1000. Similarly, even though an eminent barrister might have earned

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as much as a county court (£1500) or even a supreme court judge (£3000), few working solicitors would have drawn more than &500-800. The ‘newer’ professions, such as dentistry and architecture, are unlikely to have gathered much more.*

Next in general order of wealth comes the miscellaneous class of shopkeepers, tradesmen and other self-employed small entrepreneurs. Twopeny put small shopkeepers in the S3800—400 range, and the little additional evidence is consistent with his estimate. Advertisements for small businesses? occasionally quoted the supposed annual or weekly profits or, more usually, the weekly takings. A yield of 20 per cent profit on takings was regarded as a good average; most advertised takings, reckoned on this basis, would have yielded returns of 300-600, with a few large grocers and drapers rising to £1000 and some small fancy goods and confectionery shops, presumably run by women, down to £150-200. Advertisements almost certainly erred on the optimistic side and, since shopkeepers often borrowed heavily to set up business, figures based on them may be inflated. On the other hand, by the 1880s many well-established shopkeepers and tradesmen had accumulated comfortable little holdings of real estate. Socially the ‘shopocracy’ inhabited a different sphere from the business and professional class. Though they sometimes earned as much as professional men, they spent more modestly, confining their social pleasures to the little suburban pond of mayoral receptions and mutual improvement societies. The artisans over whom they held court also enjoyed good prospects during the boom years: employment was full, overtime plentiful, wages relatively high. Skilled adult tradesmen in the building or engineering industries were paid on a scale £130—-180 in 1885, though overtime may have boosted their earnings to £200 or more. Many factory workers were on piece-rates; the incomes of male operatives in the boot and clothing industries for example varied from 30s to &3 10s. It was common for wives and children to work, so in a ‘mature’ family the income may have exceeded the husband’s wage by $50, £100 or even more. But unless the artisan became a foreman or independent tradesman, he could not look forward to promotion in his own right.° By contrast, many were drawn into more ‘genteel employments’ precisely by the promise of advancement. The still-new state schools were encouraging thousands of youngsters to pursue the goal of white-collar respectability, and contemporaries noticed that ‘in all businesses that require a certain amount of elegance of dress, and manner, and gentility, the supply is always greater than

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the demand’.’ Yet the prospects and rewards of most clerks were little better

than artisans’. Twopeny’s estimate of £300-400 was certainly optimistic; firmer evidence suggests that four-fifths of clerks earned salaries lower than $300, about half less than £200.

TABLE 16 Clerical Salaries, c. 1855 Approx. percentage clerical

S p.a. employments

Manager 5OQ0-—1000 8 secretary

Accountant 300-400 12 Head clerk 200-300 30 Junior clerk 75-150 50 [ Cashier]

Source. Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Company, Minutes of Directors, 1885; Swallow and Ariell, Notebook of Staff Salaries, 1887 (Melbourne University Archives); Modern Permanent Building Society, Minutes of Directors, 1885; Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank, pp. 260-2; ‘Salaries of Permanent, Professional and Clerical Officers in Banks of Issue, Insurance Offices and Wool Warehouses, 1894-5, Victorian Statistical Register, 1894, ‘Interchange , p. 245.

Shop assistants, too, rarely achieved better wages than artisans. Like clerks, they were expected to dress respectably and maintain decent appearances. Those in ‘genteel’ trades, such as drapers’ assistants, earned £125-

$200, butchers and bakers rarely more than &100-150. Even with the exertions of the early-closing movement, shop employees continued to work longer hours under more trying conditions than any other class of respectable employees.®

There was, finally, at the very foot of the occupational ladder, the large class of semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers. Boom conditions probably save wider opportunities and greater security of employment both to service workers, such as employees of the railways and tramways, and to manual labourers on the many building and engineering works about the city. Bus and train drivers may have needed more skill and shouldered more responsibility than the lowest manual labourer; the £90-120 a year they earned was a cut above a labourer’s wage but well short of an artisan’s. Unskilled builder's labourers or lumpers were usually employed on a casual basis and, although they enjoyed greater continuity of employment and more overtime during the — 234 -

Making Ends Meet

boom years, not all would have averaged even the &95-—105 per annum that a full fifty-two weeks’ employment would have yielded.”

This broad framework of incomes set the co-ordinates by which contemporaries navigated Melbourne’s social world and defined the terms of debate for those urgent domestic controversies of the 1880s, ‘the servant difficulty’, ‘the dress bill’ and the ‘marriage question’. Even in anticipation—before a couple was engaged or the banns read—the problem of making ends meet rested heavily on the suitor’s mind. When would-be mothers-in-law anxiously wondered ‘why the young men don't marry’, they usually answered themselves by pointing to the disheartening imbalance between the young men’s incomes and their daughter’s lifestyles. Sometimes, it is true, they touched on moral factors: the young ladies were alleged to be frivolous, overeducated and overdressed, and the young men wanting in domestic feeling and a sense of social duty. Some believed that the spinsters were suffering the competition of attractive moneyed widows, while impecunious bachelors were obliged to make their way against women clerks and postmistresses. But most observers agreed that the bachelors’ diffidence was mainly a matter of money: they could not afford to maintain a respectable household.?® All these explanations were more or less superfluous, since they rested on a false definition of the ‘marriage problem’. Despite the contemporary fuss, there is no firm evidence at all of a decline in the tendency of men to marry. The proportion of marriages per 1000 marriageable men was higher in 1881 (57.42) than it had been ten years earlier (52.43), and it showed little sign of a decline in the succeeding decade (55.24 in 1891). The real problem was not ‘why don't the young men marry?’ but ‘why can’t the young ladies find hus-

bands?’ Melbourne’s growth during the 1880s was largely sustained by the accession to marriage and home-building of a cohort of gold-rush children. But

the girls, on average, arrived at marriageable age sooner than the boys: in 1881 the average difference in the ages of marrying couples was 4.8 years. Thus a girl born in 1860 might become ‘eligible’ in 1878-80; a young man not perhaps until 1883. Because of the acute bunching of age cohorts, unmarried women in the younger eligible ages (15-25) quite outnumbered their prospective partners (see table 17). Because it was quite unprecedented in Victorian history, the crisis seemed more acute. The mothers of the hapless spinsters of the 1880s had themselves enjoyed exceptionally high marriage chances; but since the 1850s the female

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TABLE 17 Unmarried Males and Females by Age, 1881 (Victoria)

15-20 21-25 26-30 31-35 36-40

Males 30 712 15 955 8 340 6 854 Females 49 703 — 29 412 a 8 909 3 444 2 063 Source. ‘Conjugal Condition’, Victorian Census, 1881.

marriage rate had fallen at every censal year, from 245 per 1000 marriageable

women in 1854 to only 48 per 1000 in 1881.'! ‘Why don’t the young men marry?’ was a surplus spinster’s lament. Of course the ladies might have been put at ease if only the bachelors had been induced to marry younger. But in a society captivated by the promise of

material success, matrimonial delights were heavily discounted to worldly ambition. For would-be gentlemen unable to support both a wife and a career, marriage was an economic question, not a moral one.

Matrimony, after all, is merely a matter of money; it implies the question

satisfactorily answered: ‘Can I keep a wife and keep up a respectable appearance on my present income?’ How seldom can a professional man, or a bank clerk, or a civil servant answer that question in the affirmative

before he approaches middle life. A young man in a profession, whose income is no larger than if he had gone in for a trade, finds it all he can manage to keep up appearances proper to his station in life. The thought of marriage does not enter his mind, or if it does, he is appalled by the hopelessness of his position. His own pride, as well as the little attention that is often bestowed on household affairs by young ladies, would render the keeping of a domestic absolutely necessary. If he could live before on $150 a year, how could he expect to do so then with the same degree of comfort on an income of less than £350 or £400?"

Marriages were as frequent as ever among ‘those who subsist by manual labour, or among the storekeeping or smaller trading public’, but among that class whose ‘social position’ was better than its ‘pecuniary one’ the pressure was acute. Some bank officials were actually forbidden to marry until they attained to a suitable salary (about £250). Meanwhile they faced a set of daunting alternatives: contracting into a life of genteel poverty, marrying for money, continually deferring marriage in the hope of promotion, or simply resigning — 236 -

Making Ends Meet

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— 243 -

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gallons per annum in Britain, 16 gallons in Victoria). Even if its impact upon

working-class expenditure was less than in Britain, where it absorbed as much as a quarter of incomes, drink may still have jeopardized such vulnerable items as life insurance and building society payments. Beer, the workingman’s favourite, was consumed at all levels of society; the £500 budgets also

included wine, while the S850 list provided for spirits. Nevertheless it was beer rather than wine or spirits that showed the most striking per capita increase during the 1880s. Hotels were thick upon the ground in workingclass suburbs, where they became the focus of strong, and sometimes fierce, local sentiment. In 1885 Collingwood had 87, Richmond 64 and Footscray 33. By contrast, middle-class suburbs, with their populations of teetotallers, clubmen and fireside imbibers, had only a sprinkling of public houses—Hawthorn had 9 and Kew only 7. It was no wonder that proposals to amend the Licensing

Act in 1885 so as to allot licences in a fixed proportion to population were opposed by working-class representatives as ‘class legislation’.°”

Among the more common items of expenditure, dress was the acknowledged badge of status. How a person dressed signalled their occupation, social status and taste and instantly cued the conduct of those they met. Beyond the fundamental demarcation between white and blue collar, men’s clothing may have been relatively uniform, but a lady’s apparel fixed her own and her husband’s status unambiguously. ‘A wife’, the experts agreed, ‘must dress according to her position in society—indeed, very often the status of the husband 1s gauged by the gowns of the wife’.’’ Melbourne ladies formalized the game of fashion and status as a distinct social ritual. ‘Doing the Block’—promenading the most fashionable section of Collins Street—became a favourite weekday afternoon and Saturday morning pastime among the middle classes. Artisans’ and labourers wives may have escaped the compulsory vanity of ‘respectable’ dressing and resorted more frequently to mending or second-hand garments,

but the women of Melbourne, working class as well as middle-class, were reckoned the best dressed in Australia. The home sewing machine and the introduction of standardized ‘ready-to-wear’ clothing for women, as well as men, were beginning to bring about a democratic revolution in dress.’' Melbourne softgoods houses were sensitive both to the vagaries of London fashion and to local moods. The annus mirabilis 1888 for example brought a revol-

ution in taste, as the established ‘aesthetic and medieval styles’ were supplanted by the ‘rumpled, picturesque coquetry of the eighteenth century. ‘Straight, limp, light fabrics’ gave way to ‘rich heavy stuffs’ (silk and satin imports trebled between 1880 and 1890), ‘elaborate hairdressing’ and ‘spark—~ 244 -

Making Ends Meet

ling, fanciful, omnipresent’ jewellery.** The dripping ornament of boom architecture had its counterpart in the world of fashion. Thorstein Veblen had famously argued that the consumption habits of the middle class were mainly directed towards the maintenance of ‘the lady of the house’ in a state of conspicuous abstention from work. Her dress (long gowns, high-heeled shoes, flowery bonnets, immobilizing under-garments) was physi-

cally incompatible with manual labour; however, to ensure that the work of the household was actually done, she commanded a retinue of servants proportionate to her social position and the size of her household.*? Mrs Beeton laid down a formula relating servants to income, beginning with the lowest clerk on £150 a year with a maid-of-all-work, and rising to a magnate with a retinue of butlers, grooms, cooks, maids and nurses. Significantly, the income levels for domestic service in Melbourne were pitched rather higher than in London.” A family on £200 was fortunate to employ a girl, that on £3800—400 could barely afford a maid-of-all-work. A large family on £500 might have a nurse as well, while a £600 establishment included a boy, a nurse and a general servant. At a princely S800-1000, a lady commanded two women and a man-

servant. Wages were markedly above English levels and, even at the going rates, domestics were in poor supply. The servant shortage was a vexing and apparently interminable problem to middle-class matrons. Until the 1880s, most servants were immigrant Irish girls. Most were trained for no other occupation, and their entry into service at the age of 14 or 15 relieved their poor, and often prolific, parents. With the gradual abandonment of assisted immigration, however, the supply of Irish girls began to dry up, and colonial girls, with more spirit and fewer siblings, were loath to take up the slack. There were now many other more attractive and better-paid forms of employment. Factory work, for example, offered more independence, more free time, and the opportunity of living with parents or friends.

What sort of life is domestic service where only one young woman is employed, and treated as servants are treated in some households ...? She is wanted at 6 a.m., or before, and keeps busy all day till bed time at 10 or

11 p.m. ‘No followers allowed’, not even a brother or sister, lest they should eat or drink something, or take something home. The poor girl cannot sit with the ‘family’—she is ‘only a servant’, and therefore has only the kitchen to sit in if she has any leisure. If there are any grown-up sons, she

is liable to instant dismissal if one of them is seen speaking to her, and the daughters order her about as though she were a convict.” — 245 —-

The Suburbs

In addition, domestic service was stigmatized, as were most other occupations dominated by the Irish. Like women of other subject races, the Irish servant was the butt of crude insults and the focus of vague sexual fears.” The pros-

perity of the boom years did more to emancipate the servants than it did to provide better service for the masters. The increase in the number of servants simply did not keep pace with the growth of the population at large.*'

Middle-class matrons viewed the servant shortage as a moral crisis as well as an economic difficulty. Some blamed it on a state education system that dis-

enchanted young colonials with manual labour and led them into morally dangerous commercial pursuits. (In fact, as the Society in Aid of Maternity Hospital Patients discovered, a maiden’s honour was in greater peril as a domestic than in any other occupation.) Others deplored the effects of the servant shortage on the family being served, especially the loss of that formality, regu-

larity and discipline that they considered essential to the sound nurture of middle-class children.” In 1883 Bishop Moorhouse opened a Servants Training Institution with a speech on the value of domestic service as a schoo! of wifely duty. Two years later a Victorian Domestic Servants Immigration Society was established under a committee of society matrons to try to increase the supply

of servants. At the height of the boom, even the methods of joint stock enterprise were applied to the ‘servant difficulty’; a company was formed to arrange the importation of servant girls but, like similar ventures, it met with scant success.” As attempts to enlarge the supply of domestic labour failed one by one, the mistress of the house had to offer new incentives even to retain her maidof-all-work. The colonial miss demanded higher wages and payment in advance and objected to wearing a cap, now despised as a badge of servitude. Mistresses were advised to placate her, to indulge ‘friendly gossips over the neighbouring fence, or little hLngerings with the butcher or baker if they are not carried to excess’. They offered ‘a little relaxation of old-fashioned rules, more spare evenings and attention to the inclinations of servants in little things’. Some experts proposed to offer the servant ‘definite and regular hours of work and leisure, just as her sisters have in the factories’. Others, taking a different tack, wondered if it was ‘absolutely impossible to retrace our course somewhat towards the primitive state of things in which the servant was regarded, and regarded herself, as a member of the family’.*? Yet neither old-fashioned familiarity nor the modern American system of casual daily help could really — 246 -

Making Ends Meet

resolve the issue. Above all practical considerations, servants were symbols of middle-class status and authority. If, on the one hand, they became detached from the household or, on the other, were treated as equal members of it, that symbolism was fatally compromised. A housewife’s budget reflected not only her social status and income, but the composition of her family. The selection of budgets in table 18 superimposes a life cycle upon the income scale. The lower budgets take account of children only in anticipation: there is a ‘babies’ fund’ in the £156 budget, and provision is made in the £300 budget for ‘the inevitable increase of expendliture which comes with the increase of [the] family’.*! Budgets in the middle range provided for children in infancy, devoting sizeable amounts to nurses and milk, while the £850 and £1000 budgets included expenses for older children >)

—music and school fees. The assumption that lower incomes went with

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~ 247 —

The Suburbs

young, relatively inexpensive families, larger incomes with hungrier, costly adolescent families was a convenient one for domestic economists; in life, resources were not always distributed as fairly. The basic costs of children— food, clothing and the like—did not vary markedly from class to class, and the recommended fare for young children—milk, bread, jam and oatmeal—was cheap enough for almost all to provide.** But the older the children, the more their parents’ means determined their comparative well-being. Education was the critical item. Both ‘Thrifty Mary’ and ‘Contriving Lucy’ (£560) mentioned school expenses, and ‘Housemother’ (£850), with two adolescent children, allotted 7s 6d per week specifically to ‘school and music’, an amount consistent with the fees at a good private school.” Private education was the gateway to the learned professions, commerce

and finance, or indeed any calling that required more than elementary education. Of schoolchildren aged 13-14 in 1891, only 18.2 per cent attended private schools, but at 16-17 the proportion was 59.1 per cent.*' State schools did provide a chancey route for the clever sons of the poorer majority. Private schools, judging by the enrolments at the prestigious Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College, catered mainly for the sons of professional men, merchants, bankers, pastoralists and a sprinkling of self-denying shopkeepers and clerks.*? Apart from these larger schools, there were some dozens of smaller private academies dotted through the suburbs. Growing families and rising incomes made the 1880s a prosperous time for schoolmasters. In 1886 the Argus reported the speechdays of 40 schools (27 boys’ and 13 girls’) but by 1890 the number had risen to 67 (85 boys’ and 32 girls’). Many of the new schools were in burgeoning middle-class suburbs like Hawthorn, Armadale, Toorak and Kew.

The curricula and ‘tone’ of the private schools accurately reflected middle-class urban values. Their prime function was to fit young Melburnians for their assigned places in the life of the emergent metropolis. For boys this meant a heavy stress upon the values and skills of the market-place: ‘commercial education’ was a fetish of the boom years, and would-be professional men were assiduously schooled for entrance to a university that had lately acquired the revealing nickname, ‘The Shop’.*’ Young ladies, meanwhile, were schooled

in ‘genteel accomplishments’ such as music, painting, literature and fancy needlework. A perceptive old girl of the Presbyterian Ladies College, the future novelist Ethel Richardson, recognized that these pursuits were cachets rather than serious callings. Like their mothers, private schoolgirls were already preoccupied with the ‘regulation questions’:

~ 248 —

Making Ends Meet

‘Where do you come from?’ ‘What’s your father?’ ‘How many servants do you keep?’ ‘How much have you got a year?’*

The heavy costs of education and other expenses of child-rearing alerted middle-class parents to the benefits of ‘family limitation’, a practice gaining

increasing minority support. In a rare discussion of the issue in 1880, the Australasian reported that ‘the modern gospel of Malthusianism’ was ‘little known among the masses’; only the ‘thoughtful and provident’ came under its

influence.*® Families were indeed larger on average in the working-class suburbs on the northern and western fringes of the metropolis than in the middle-class suburbs to the south and east.*”? The middle classes generally married late and had shorter reproductive lives but, even in the 1880s, some couples had probably begun to practise the artificial methods of contraception that were becoming known among English contemporaries.

Rising incomes and smaller families opened the delights of society to many ambitious matrons. In these ‘settled and civilized times’, attention was increasingly focused upon the etiquette and ‘ceremonial uses’ of a metropolis. Ladies ‘in society’ were expected to keep a visiting book and to maintain the onerous ritual of afternoon and morning ‘calls’. According to the etiquette of good society, when one lady was introduced to another, she was obligated to call at her new acquaintance’s house and leave her card. If the gesture was

reciprocated, it opened the way to closer acquaintance. Stiff though the custom seems, the ‘etiquette of cards’ served important functions.” It was a means of communicating names, addresses and titles. In a fluid society, it also prescribed an entry route into its more refined circles while enabling insiders to exclude unwelcome social climbers without embarrassing face-to-face confrontations. Card etiquette was originally designed for the compact, intimate world of Kensington or Bath, but in sprawling Melbourne ‘the tax upon ladies of visitpaying, which modern society demands. [was] made much heavier because of the distances that [had] to be traversed between friend and friend’.?! A carriage was a prized social asset, the lack of one an almost fatal social handicap: For example, we will imagine a lady living at Studley Park and having no

carriage. In her visiting list there will doubtless be residents of remote Brighton, Balaclava, St. Kilda, Toorak, South Yarra etc., besides her closer

— 249 —

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Sitting ina deck chair Geranium cuttings — 250 é

Making Ends Meet

neighbours at Kew and Hawthorn. She has a household to attend to, and many pressing duties of at least equal importance with that of keeping up her visiting connection.”

The £600 and £850 budgets allocated amounts for horse-feed, stable maintenance and the wages of a ‘boy’ or ‘man’ whose.duties presumably included the care of a horse and buggy. But for those on lower incomes, the costs of a carriage were almost prohibitive.

Mrs. D. 1 think, my love, we might get a pony and carriage now. The Wagthorpes have one and so have the Killjoys, and I am sure Killjoy’s income is not as large as yours, nor Wagthorpe’s either ...

Mr. D. Let me see, pony and carriage will cost at least eighty pounds; stables another hundred, boy twelve and six a week, feed six shillings; wear and tear, shoeing etc., say five shillings. Now the interest on a hundred and eighty pounds, at ten per cent, is about seven shillings a week; this added to the boy’s wages, feed, shoeing etc., will increase our expenses by thirty shillings. That’s seventy five pounds a year, nearly house rent.” Yet, in this time of expanding railway and tramway services, the carriage was ‘a mark of respectability’, not just a means of conveyance. It was ‘the favourite of the doctor, the retired tradesman, the man of independent means, and of every aspiring individual who seeks to gain influence’.* Carriage-builders encouraged the trend, knowing that the man who looks upon his buggy as part of his stock in trade ... is not so likely to pay handsomely for building, repairing or renovating his vehicle as the man of leisure, who feels that fashion demands that his carriage, buggy or dog cart shall not only be stylishly built, but have every attention paid to those details which will keep his turnout the cynosure of admiring eyes, and the topic of complimentary conversation.”

During the boom years the numbers of carriages increased rapidly and their splendour advanced prodigiously. ‘The style of equipages’, the Argus noted in 1885, ‘marks the refined improvement of the times’. A ‘Rotten Row’ was established in Albert Park and, for atime, the serpentine drive around the lake became a fashionable afternoon pastime, an equestrian equivalent of ‘The Block’. Herr Plock’s band was engaged and the vanity of the metropolis trundled to and fro in a complex exchange of glances and esteem.” — 25] -

The Suburbs

As Melbourne’s ladies sifted their social acquaintances through the mechanism of ‘calling’, so their husbands sought the company of kindred souls through the clubs and pubs to which they turned in refuge from the ‘dust and din and turmoil of the work-a-day world’.’’ Here, too, Melburnians fell into their assigned places on a hierarchy descending from the universally acknowledged apex—the Melbourne Club—down to a jungle of low bars and billiard rooms. The Melbourne Club, defended by a 40-guinea entrance fee and a phalanx of old colonists, consisted of ‘the proudest merchants and bankers and the most patrician squatters’. At the other end of town, the Australian Club gathered in the newer rich—stock and station agents, merchants, bankers, lawyers and squatters. The Athenaeum, which sprang from the old Mechanics Institute, was larger and even less exclusive. Clubland prospered during the eighties: the Australian Club for example grew from 249 in 1880 to 453 in 1890, and in 1886 its premises were greatly enlarged at a cost of £10 000.” Beneath this solid upper crust there was a hotch-potch of middling clubs and associations. ‘Housemother’s’ husband (£850 per annum) for example was a member of the Melbourne Cricket Club. There were also suburban bowling clubs, mutual improvement associations, musical societies—like the Melbourne and Metropolitan Liedertafels—and clubs with a professional clientele —like the Travellers, the Pipeclay (Army) and the Accountants and Clerks.

Even hotels, traditionally more relaxed, often gathered their patrons selectively. Sometimes they appealed nostalgically to old-world allegiances: Scots resorted to the Highland Club, Germans to the Alexandra, Cockneys to Rigby’s John Bull Tavern. There were also houses catering for special recreational interests: Clements’s for cricketers, the Bridge (Young and Jackson's) for rowers. Each city interest or calling had its favourite eating and drinking places. Merchants and stockbrokers lunched at Mrs Burton's Hall of Commerce

Hotel, while their clerks and warehousemen consumed humbler pie and smaller beer at the John Bull. Lawyers frequented the Waterloo, but their con-

veyancers and clerks preferred Larkin’s Temple Court. The acknowledged house of call for builders and contractors was the Clarence on the corner of Elizabeth and Collins Streets, while butchers gathered at Meader’s Meat Market Hotel on the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets. The time-honoured fellowship of vice among bookmakers, touts and publicans flourished at the ‘horsey’ west end of Bourke Street.” Status distinctions influenced the practice of religion as much as secular life. In a sermon on church-going, Rev. Charles Strong, a sharp-eyed critic of colonial churchmanship, gave an acute analysis of the factors that promoted — 252 -

Making Ends Meet and inhibited religious practice in Melbourne.”’ The chief factor deterring the

poor from church attendance (and attracting the rich?) was the fact that people had to pay for churches. Respectable church-going required the payment of pew rents (see ‘Housemother’s’ budget), respectable clothes and, in this ‘widespread city of suburbs’, a buggy for the journey. Accordingly, the most

popular churches tended to be very much a preserve of the well-to-do. Most Melburnians acknowledged one of the main Christian denominations but, by the sterner test of attendance, the churches, especially the transplanted

TABLE 19 /ntensity of Adherence of Anglicans and Presbyterians by Suburb, 1591, expressed as percentage of professing adherents (census) who attend (denominational statistics)

Suburb Church of England Presbyterian

St Kilda 22.9 59.9 Kew 27.0 27.8 Camberwell 18.0 47.2 Brighton16.2 17.6 29.8 31.9 Prahran Hawthorn 15.2 25.5 Caulfield 12.1 00.7 Essendon and Flemington 12.0 29.3 Preston 10.4 28.2 South Melbourne 9.9 24.2, Footscray 9.7 17.2 North Melbourne 9.7 25.8 Collingwood 9.4

Fitzroy 7.7 Richmond 8.5 19.8 17.4

Brunswick 8.8 20.3 Melbourne 8.3 33.7 Port Melbourne 5.4 18.1

Williamstown 5.6 36.0

Source: Yearbook of the Diocese of Melbourne, 1891; Proceedings of the Commission of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, 1891; ‘Religions of the People’, Victorian Census, 1891.

— 253 —-

The Suburbs

establishments of Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, were solidly middle class. As table 19 indicates, the highest ratios of Sunday attenders were in the pros-

perous, established suburbs to the south and east, the city’s emerging ‘Bible belt’. According to Strong, even the inner concerns of the churches accorded with their outward demeanour. ‘Their hearts are more in the price of shares, or so-and-so’s new bonnet, than in the Kingdom of love and righteousness. Flaunted in the dress and entertainments of society matrons, or more subtly expressed in the solid ritual of church-going, the prosperity of the boom years was nevertheless widely diffused throughout the community. ‘It was an era of extravagance in Balls, Garden Fetes, Dinner Parties and private theatricals’, recalled Henry Gyles Turner of the year 1888, ‘and I see from my diary that I took my full share’. Ada Cambridge agreed: It was never that I heard so much good music, saw so much good acting, met So many interesting travellers, enjoyed the greatest race meetings in the history of splendid Flemington, the hospitality of Government House

in its best days, the most memorable entertainments of a time when nothing but the first-rate was tolerated."! Yet plebeian Fitzroy had its ‘Assemblies’ as well as bourgeois Hawthorn. The artisan in the ‘gods’ attended much the same plays and operas as the merchant in his box and the shopkeeper in the stalls. Victorian football, then enjoying a boom of its own, was watched and played by both Collingwood bootmakers and St Kilda stockbrokers. Local affiliation sometimes overrode class loyalties. The fundamental uniformity of taste that Twopeny noticed in relation to food and furniture prevailed in other commodities as well. Distinctions of quantity or degree were more apparent than distinctions of kind. In Ada Cambridge's apt words, ‘all in their degree were rich and lived lavishly’. The urban commonwealth was fittingly symbolized in the organization of its most popular civic ritual, the Melbourne Cup. English visitors were surprised to find that racing was a pastime enjoyed by all classes in Melbourne.

The ‘upper ten drove in their carriages, the professional and trades people journeyed by special train, the workingmen came in vans, buses or on foot. At the course itself the classes assumed their own defined places: Toorak in the Stands and on the Lawns; the lower middle classes on the Hull; the working

classes, the Chinese and the ‘criminal classes’ on the Flat. Yet all classes dressed for the occasion and ‘bad taste was not particular to any suburb’. The centennial year of 1888 saw Flemington and Melbourne at their giddy pinnacle. In the enclosure, there was a noticeable increase in the numbers of new drags, broughams and barouches. The ladies of Toorak were splendidly attired — 254 —

eC ee Making Ends Meet

in silks and lustrous satins whose predominant colour, the social scribblers noted, was an affirmative red. Over 100 000 people were estimated to have attended on that memorable day. The newly extended Hill was not large enough to accommodate the droves of aspiring middle-class families who spread their wine and cake, their ham sandwiches, bottled beer and oranges beneath the gums. Down on the Flat, even the lower orders evidenced no poverty, ‘no hungry or wolfish looks at the near but unattainable splendours. The people on the flat [were] just as content with themselves as the people on

¢.*

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the Lawn.

..°

Within three years the sport was over and the feast consumed. The inspiring chorus of class harmony had degenerated into a bewildering cacophony. The maritime strike of 1890 produced a dramatic confrontation of Capital and Labour in which some historians have seen signs of deeper fissures in Australian society, an augury, even, of revolution.’* Yet, while Melbourne saw sculfles and threats of violence in 1890, the wider eruptions that followed had

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. } ° « °...)‘) THE SKYLINE AND THE STREET:

IMAGES OF MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE

As the boom reached its climax Melbourne’s graphic artists responded to the euphoria with images that evoked the city’s ‘marvellous’ sense of progress and civic pride. They loved to wrmagine themselves looking down

on the city, as though from an imaginary balloon, and to compare its

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The ‘candid friend from England’ saw the young metropolis from a pinnacle, measuring it against the standard of colossal London. But to provincial Victorians, Melbourne itself seemed gigantic, a voracious octopus throttling their defenceless farms and townships. (Urban manufacturers, who welcomed the drift to the city, naturally chose happier metaphors: people ‘swarmed to the city like bees to the twig’.)*’ Long before Melbourne reached its zenith, spokesmen for country interests were warning that ‘centralization is one of the chief evils we have to combat. Its disastrous effects are apparent in the abnormal growth of both Melbourne and Sydney which bid fair to become “the great wens” of Australia.’*° By 1885 depopulated provinces were combining to resist the rampant metropolis. A Decentralization League, formed in Bendigo among merchants whose Riverina trade was falling into Melbourne hands, lashed out against a pattern of government spending upon railways, schools and administration that seemed to encourage undue concentration in the metropolis.*‘ By the late 1880s there were protests, too, against a redistribution of electorates towards the bloated metropolis. Countrymen pleaded that the drift to the city was not irreversible but a mere ‘fortuitous concourse of atoms’, that Melburnians already had closer access to political influence, and that weight should be given to the ‘great producing interests’.** If the drift was not halted, economic and moral calamity would swiftly ensue.

It surely indicates something wrong that the metropolis contains more than one-third of the population of the country ... It is impossible to

reconcile such a condition in a new country with what has always obtained elsewhere in truly prosperous communities, and therefore the patriot is forced to look on the prospects as ominous of coming disaster and collapse ... If I spoke as a moralist, it would be allowed me to repeat the warning given for centuries of the dangers to the moral and physical well-being of men when they are crowded into cities, but it will not be out of place even here to note that whereas in the United Kingdom crime has very sensibly diminished, it remains the same in Victoria, if it has not actually increased ...*"

The Argus cited William Cobbett and Alexis de Tocqueville in support of its contention that decentralization was a fundamental safeguard of democracy. It was more sceptical, on the other hand, of the common assertion that the metropolis had been favoured by the direct action of the state. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was propelled by universal and probably irresistible forces:

— 287 —-

The Suburbs

The times do not favour one-horse affairs either in carriages, in commerce, or in cities. The enormous joint-stock companies consolidating some pri-

vate enterprises and crushing others and the absorbing metropolis are alike the products of the age, and in no small degree the one assists to strengthen the other. In the solar system the dominance of the centripetal force would mean the inrush of the planets to be devoured by the sun. The asteroids would go first. Scores of Victorian hamlets could be mentioned which have disappeared from the scene having slipped down the railway to Melbourne.” In more settled times country Victorians came up to Melbourne as sojourners, to ogle at the courts at the International Exhibition or to take in a show at the Opera Comique. They returned home poorer, but a perhaps a little wiser, than when they arrived. But by the 1880s country folk stumbling off the train at

spencer Street station were more likely to settle permanently in the metropolis. The bushman was often seen as a potential victim of the wiles of the metropolis:

Backward looks he once and lingers As his swarthy sun-burnt fingers Ope the station gate, Then oer dusty roads and gritty southward rides he to the city— Southward to his fate.”

He was at best a source of refreshment to a polluted environment; at worst another victim to ‘the rush and flurry, the hard materialism, the blinding glare, the dust and turmoil, the manifold temptations of city life’. Even those who

stayed on the land did not escape the deadly contagion of the city. Bishop Moorhouse regretted that ‘this great city is the centre not only of the wealth and culture, but also of the vice and pleasure of the colony. There is not a family which may not know the shame and agony of having a poor daughter lost in the mazes of this deadly labyrinth of sin.’ Christians often imagined urban ills in the dark, sensual shapes of Sodom and Gomorrah. Henry Varley, the itinerant evangelist, claimed that ‘no other city the size of Melbourne that has so many prostitutes in it ... no city the size of this on God's earth with five or six such debasing places of amusement in it as Melbourne has’. Melbourne was a battlefield in the great ‘War between Heaven and Hell’.”*!

— 288 -

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

Varley and the bishop presumably knew the evils of city life by reputation rather than personal experience. Other observers, inspired more by curiosity or profit than indignation, were meanwhile making a speciality of discovering how the city’s ‘other half’ lived. Throughout the 1880s investigative journalists patrolled Melbourne’s back slums to capture lurid details of the city’s low

life for the edification or titillation of their readers. From the late 1870s Stanley James (pseudonyms Julian Thomas’ and ‘The Vagabond’) was writing

slashing exposes of Melbourne’s network of charitable institutions. After serving a journalistic apprenticeship on the crime beat of Mayhew’s London, James had followed a picaresque progress from Europe, through the United States, to Melbourne, where he arrived ‘sick in body and mind, and broken in fortune’ late in 1875. He wrote as a ‘participant observer’, posing as a hospital outpatient, an asylum warder, a tramp and a destitute immigrant, minutely recording the way in which routine benevolence revealed itself to the down-

and-out of the metropolis. Neither a philanthropist nor a radical critic, he claimed no interest but personal profit, no objective but impartial truth. Yet his sympathies emerge clearly from his stories. Worldly, sceptical, tolerant and humane, he cared little for ‘fashionable religion’, though he was capable himself of almost homiletic fervour. But his usual attack was subtler, compacting significant detail into a broader theme: ‘how the forces of society work against the weak’. His helpless poor are buffeted from benevolent home to doss-house

to hospital until at last, unpaid and unprayed for, they are shovelled into paupers’ graves. ‘In death as in life,’ he reflected, ‘the poor have not a square show for salvation’.*? James’s Vagabond Papers immediately opened up Melbourne’s slums to the curious and benevolent. His article ‘Outcasts of Melbourne’ (1877) had an impact comparable in some ways to Andrew Mearns’s

The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883). In 1882 the Rev. Samuel Chapman of Collins Street Baptist Church launched a stinging attack upon the slum

dwellings of Little Bourke Street, which inspired the usual committee of public-spirited gentlemen ‘to investigate the back slums with a view to their abolition’.”*’ The Argus and Australasian took up the cry and commissioned a

reporter and the usual police guide to furnish detailed, street-by-street descriptions of ‘The Back Slums of Melbourne’.** Superficially objective, their writing was shaped by the crude moral assumptions that permeated nearly all the slummer journalism of the decade.

Almost all these writers assumed that the slum-dwellers inhabited a separate moral universe. Sexual vice, theft, gambling, opium addiction, and especially the miscegenous association of Chinese men and abandoned white

— 289 —

The Suburbs

women, were flagrant violations of middle-class morality with its emphasis upon Family, Property, Sobriety and the dominance of the European. Apparently devoid of moral feeling, the people of Little Bourke Street had fallen to the level of ‘brutes in the mire of their filthy den’. In his Light and Shadows of Melbourne Life (1888), John Freeman saw Little Bourke Street as a literal jungle: his slum-dwellers are ‘rattish’ and ‘predatory ; they cry like monkeys, they ‘come forth from their holes like unclean animals’; they blink in the light like owls.’ The poor were a distinct sub-human species, not simply the last link ina social chain. Little Bourke Street, where poverty, filth and moral decay appeared together, was the text that demonstrated their necessary connection.

But ‘Outcast Melbourne’ was not only alien, it was threateningly near at. hand:

By a right of way flanked on the one side by the sky-reaching Bourke Street Coffee Palace, and on the other by the Theatre Royal pile, we leave the hurry and bustle of Bourke-street and plunge at once into that quarter

of Little Bourke-street where almond-eyed Celestials people the footpaths and chatter in doorways, where the air is redolent with the fumes of opium, and where playful half-caste children can now be counted by the hundred." The contrast between the brightness and health of ‘Marvellous Melbourne's’ most fashionable streets and the hidden darkness and disease of the ‘back

slums’ became a journalistic cliche. The Vagabond Papers were subtitled ‘Sketches of Melbourne Life, in Light and Shade’; John Freeman's Lights and

Shadows of Melbourne Life modified the title to reinforce the contrast between Melbourne's civilization and its vice.

As the visitor passes through [Melbourne's] broad streets, he will marvel at its stately buildings and manifold signs of prosperity. He wil notice the

well-to-do look of the people he meets; he will admire the grace and demeanour of the women, and the manly independent bearing of the men.

Let him now turn down one of the arteries leading from the broad streets to the little ones at the back, and he will see that although we have much to rejoice in. we have also something to deplore. He will find that Melbourne has its shadows as well as its bright spots, its hovels as well as its

palaces, low life as well as high, and abject poverty side by side with boundless wealth. |

— 290 -

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

—__————————ee nnn senescence eee eee ee By the late 1880s the evils of Little Bourke Street had become ‘an oft-stated, but still urgent case’. The slum investigators now turned their searchlight on other dark corners of the city. They contrasted Smith Street, Collingwood, ‘where everything was almost a blaze of light, and where plenty and providence abounded’ with the desperate poverty in the adjoining narrow streets;

and the ‘health, life and energy’ of Bourke Street during the day with its sordid night traffic of beggars, drunks and prostitutes.* In his famous detective novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1887), Fergus Hume deployed the journalist’s full repertoire of lurid slum imagery. Calton the detective and his guide Kilsip turn from the balmy night air of a Bourke Street flooded with electric light and band music into a Little Bourke Street ‘where the narrowness of the street, with the high buildings on either side, the dim light of the gas lamps, and the few ragged looking figures slouching along, formed a strong contrast to the brilliant and crowded scene they had just left’. They negotiate a dark, air-trapped lane as hot as a furnace, pass Chinamen shrilling ‘like parrots’. Calton presses closer to his guide ‘like Dante to Virgil in the Infernal Regions’. They thread narrower and darker lanes. ‘It is like walking in the valley of the shadow of death’, Calton mutters. At the end of the ‘tunnel’, they are plunged in total darkness.”

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‘Marvellous Melbourne’

O solitude! O voiceless crowd of trees; O hopeless wilderness without one fruit, Or herb, or graceful flower!—O pathless maze Of maddening monotony, all glare, Or else unspeakable sadness of blank shade; O solitude!

Thou had’st an empire then without a soul Beneath the solemn and unworshipped heavens, As though nor earth, nor heaven, possessed a God.

With European conquest, however, the entire creation was mysteriously restored: Such was the scene, till civilized man Came with his flocks and pastoral hand To claim—redeem—and use the land ...

Oxen, flocks and herds, dogs, horses and the ‘warbling magpie now appear. The godless Australian landscape begins to assume a divine English aspect. No sooner does this occur, however, than the pastoral arcadia (andante pas-

torale) is rudely disturbed by the discovery of gold. Plutus rises (allegro molto agitato) and Melbourne is revolutionized by an influx of Yankee enterprise. Yet the gold rush, in Horne’s view, was no more than a passing phase in a history of steady progress. Melbourne, the ‘mad city’, remained an island in a saner pastoral hinterland. The Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 offered a new stage for local poets as well as a new shop window for local manufacturers ."! In J. W. Meaden’s winning Cantata for the Opening of the Melbourne International

Exhibition (1880), the yet -to-be-discovered Victoria is portrayed in less sombre hues than in Horne’s prototype cantata; it awaits not redemption but the joys of human companionship: In slumbers deep—where branching treeferns wave, And Austral seas the long, low beaches lave, Where, fringed with reeds, the silent lone lagoon, Reflects the starry cross and crescent moon, With garnered sweetness in her peaceful breast The fair Victoria lies too long at rest. — 297 —

The Suburbs

At last her solitude is broken as a ‘vast and busy army arrives: Fair South land, no longer, Thy coasts shall silent be. The merry voice of laughter Shall echo songs of glee Then busy sounds of labour, Shall rise on the summer air And sweetly chimes the Sabbath bell, That calls to the house of prayer.

The new colony emerges as a union of several equal interests—sheep walks, farms, mines and towns—together following the divine command to subdue and fructify the earth. Its glories are not those of a rich, imperial capital Cnot ours the boast of marble palaces and steel-clad host’) but the simple joys of ‘Happy Homes where Peace and Plenty reign’. With the rise of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, however, domestic modesty is cast aside for extravagant metropolitan claims. The sense of measured pride in the city Ss progress is now supplanted by amazement and even disbelief. Yet the faster the city grew, the more urgent became its inhabitants’ nostalgic yearnings for the unspoiled bush: The waters of the noble bay were fed By a pure stream which no pollution knew; Mans commerce had not stirred its rocky bed, But on its banks sweet-scented wattles grew ...

Thus J. FE Daniell in ‘The Jubilee of Melbourne’ (1885?)."" The Rev. William

Allen’s Traugural Prize Poem for the Opening of the Centennial International Exhibition (1888), in sharp contrast to Horne’s original, portrayed the ‘solitude’ of the untouched bushland as a demonstration of the divine presence: Over all perpetual solitude doth brood, Save where the savage stalks in search of food; A land by civilization’s step untrod— Alone with Nature, and with Nature's God.

— 298 —

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

Reverence for nature, and nature’s God, had seemingly strengthened as the moral implications of the land boom and city’s headlong expansion began to sink in.. In these poems of the late 1880s the themes of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ —

its unbelievable progress, its vigorous business and social life, its growing reputation—become the dominant theme: Here, fifty winters since, by Yarra’s stream, A scattered hamlet found its modest place: What mind would venture then in wildest dream Its wondrous growth and eminence to trace? What seer predict a stripling in the race Would, swift as Atlanta, win the prize Of progress, ‘neath the world’s astonished eyes?

It is no dream, upon those grass-grown streets, Has risen up a city vast and fair, In whose thronged thoroughfare the stranger meets With signs of all the world can send most rare And costly to her marts. And everywhere Ascends the hum of nervous, bustling strife— The splendid evidence of healthy life. In Wiliam Allen’s vision of ‘The Present and Future’, the ulusory character of the city’s rise is more strongly suggested, and even more energetically rejected:

Where the spotted snake crawled by the stream, See the spires of the great city gleam. Is it all but the dream of a dream’? Not a dream! For the night is away And we walk in the light of the day That shall not be extinguished for aye.

By the late 1880s the ceremonial verses suggest that the city was struggling to resolve the contradictory sentiments evoked by the experience of headlong metropolitan growth. Their crude antitheses—nature and artifice, innocence and experience, reality and illusion—refracted the moral dilemmas

— 299 —

The Suburbs

disturbing thoughtful Melburnians. As ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ approached its

zenith, the poets, like the historians and men of affairs, hesitated between aspiration and nostalgia, waiting, as it were, for some conclusive turn of events. As Melburnians reconstructed the past to support their changing sense of

identity, so they created alternative visions of the future to reflect present moods of optimism or disquiet. The most buoyant spirits looked to their immediate booming past as a passport to a golden future: *“We know what we are, but know not what we may be”. We may only speculate and judge by the past what is to be the future."’! All sorts of decisions, personal and collective,

hung upon their ‘future prospects’. Great public works, like railways and sewerage schemes, called for long-term forecasts of population growth and its effects. H. H. Hayter, the government statistician, appearing before the Sani-

tary Commission of 1889, confidently projected contemporary population growth half a century into the future. The population of the city in 1933, he estimated, would be about 1 566 280—as large as that of Canton or New York, and larger than Berlin or Vienna.” Here indeed was a statistic to conjure with:

What will Collins-street be, when a human tide of three times the present volume ebbs and flows along its broad pavements? What will be the roar of the suburban railway traffic when the trains have to run three times as often, or have to be three times as big as at present? ... What will be the tumult and fever of Melbourne when its business is multiplied threefold?”

Australia in 1890 was at the same stage of growth as the infant American republic. Its young capitals were at the same stage as New York in 1790.

Presuming that our Australian population will increase in the same ratio [as the US] i.e. double itself every twenty-five years, in 1915 we shall number eight million souls; in 1940, sixteen millions; in 1965 thirty-two

millions, and in 1990, a century hence, sicty-four millions ... Should Melbourne retain her present proportion to the whole of the population, in 1990, with a total Australian population of 64 000 OOO, one-eighth or 8 000 000 will be resident in what would then be the ‘Queenly City’ in very truth.” But even the most sanguine ‘boosters’ shrank from such an absurd conclusion:

‘This’, they modestly conceded, ‘is beyond the dreams of even Melbourne which will probably rest content with being no smaller than say London or New York or Paris’. Even if it were not to be the largest, in a few years it would

be at least ‘the finest city in the world. — 300 —

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

It was hard to believe that booming expansion could continue indefinitely. Few contemporaries dared to predict that the great card-house of speculation would actually fall but, in fitful imaginings, Melburnians saw their city crumpled

by earthquakes, ravaged by disease, bombarded by foreign foes. Hubris summoned up Nemesis; prosperity and its sins called out for judgement. Pride produced its own anxieties. Melbourne’s growing self-esteem made its citizens more sensitive to the imagined greed and envy of foreign powers. so helping, perhaps, to feed the hysteria and mild paranoia associated with the ‘Russian scare’ of 1883:

Victoria, you see, had enjoyed a continued run of prosperity for many years; its people had prospered and made money hand over fist and ... never hesitated to spend it as freely in pleasure. Melbourne grew to be a large and wealthy city, its colossal warehouses and shops gradually extended to the suburbs, and colonists thought of nothing but commerce, money-making and pleasure. We [recalls the prophet-historian] entirely overlooked the fact that the colony with its tremendous trade and magnificent wealth offered a tempting prize, at once rich and rare, to any filibustering fleet.” In The Battle of the Yarra (1883), ‘An Old Colonist’ imagined a scenario in which Russia was set at odds with Britain, and the Australian colonies fell prey to Tsarist tyranny. In Melbourne there are flustered attempts to organize a volunteer force to resist the expected invasion. But panic breaks out, the

banks and building societies collapse, and thousands are thrown out of employment. Finally, on a scorching summer day, amid dust storms and under lowering skies, the Russians set upon the city. A tiny band of volunteers offers

heroic resistance, but they are swiftly overwhelmed by superior arms, discipline and experience. By evening, scores are dead and the gutters of Flinders

Street are stained with colonial blood. In The Battle of Mordialloc (1888) Melbourne again appears puffed up and ripe for judgement: ‘Our prosperity advanced by leaps and bounds. There seemed no earthly reason why we should not go on forever.””’ But Victoria ineptly passes anti-Chinese legislation,

which is vetoed by the imperial parliament; the colony declares itself inde-

pendent; and the Chinese and the Russians make a pact to invade the defenceless metropolis. After a bloody battle at Mordialloc, a seaside resort close to Melbourne, the city is captured and sacked. In Marvellous Melbourne Twenty Years Hence (1889), the unsanitary city is attacked by plague and 100 000 of its citizens perish. Then, following London’s example even —~ 301 -

The Suburbs

in disaster, a great fire follows in its wake, destroying and purifying as it goes. Melbourne's end is a bitter one: its banks and theatres are all razed, the population shrinks to a mere 40 000 Asiatics who conduct opium dens and lottery establishments in the deserted ‘skyscrapers’ of Collins Street, and— final humiliation—Geelong, now a city of 350 000, supplants Melbourne as the capital of Victoria and the emerging federation. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ with

its amazing progress, its energy and vigour, its continental dominance, is utterly humiliated. At first sight these ‘prophetic histories’ are no more than political pamphlets in fancy dress. Their reforming objectives were as mundane as a voluntary militia and sanitary pans. But, at a deeper level, they express and exploit an underlving unease with the vapid prophecies of the boomers, a discomfort based as much upon a sense of cosmic balance as hard fact. The progress of

Melbourne, the prophets suspected, was surely foo marvellous to continue without leading to an equally marvellous fall.

Judgement did finally come upon Melbourne. It did not come suddenly like a thief in the night, but by the steady onset of pain and knowledge. For those who could read them, there were signs: in 1889 there was a general collapse in land values; in 1890 trade was brought to a standstill by a maritime strike: in 1891 the Yarra flooded and the countryside was plagued with locusts; in 1892 there were epidemics of measles and influenza; in 1893 the banks collapsed and wool and wheat prices fell. ‘Misfortunes’, a philosophic editor reflected, ‘never come singly .‘" The Almighty had visited terrible punishment on ‘Marvellous Melbourne . Contemporaries had agreed that Melbourne's commercial life was not only vigorous, bold and enterprising, but mercurial and erratic. ‘We are’, said one, ‘a wonderful people. Great in hope, fierce and irresistible in panic. ‘We know of no middle way in anything’, sighed another. Some saw this ‘instability of our national temper as a recurrence of gold fever, but whatever its origins, evidence of it was everywhere in 1892. When the boom bubble was pricked, all confidence, resolution and presence of mind were lost. As they had been previously puffed up, Melburnians were now deflated. From an orgy of speculation they now turned to ‘equally extravagant bewailing of [their] fate’. Melbourne, once ‘marvellous’, was now dubbed ‘miserable’.'“ Poets discarded the old themes of progress and plenty for new sad songs of suffering and decay:

— 302 —-

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

We may read of wealthy cities on the books we chance to scan; We may read of fall’n empires and the fall’n state of man: We may picture in our fancies golden treasures in our path; But they change as does the weather, or like love, will turn to wrath. Melbourne once was in its glory; revelled in its golden lore; But that glory fast is fading, perhaps to see it never more. Those who hoarded up the treasure, in those days when times were best, Feel that they have been the wisest, and in comfort take their rest. While the hundreds who are starving never thought hard times would come, And they spent their daily earnings; now they have no food or home. This is Melbourne, Marvellous Melbourne; what an empty boast of pride, While its poverty is swelling like a mighty ocean tide.”

Sensitive men in public life recoiled, not just from the poverty and financial scandal, but from the city itself. Alfred Deakin abhorred ‘its stews, its smells, its coarseness, vulgarity, harshness, artificiality, baseness, selfishness, corruption, ferociousness and vice’ and wished himself in the country—'the source and goal of human development’. His friend Charles H. Pearson must have

contemplated the city decaying around him when he wrote, in National Life and Character (1894), of the relentless encroachment of great cities and of the social calamities left in their path. He deplored the cramping, deadening round of the ordinary city-dweller (‘The dweller in a great city is tending more and more to become avery small part of a very vast machine’) and the debilitating effects of unbridled expansion (‘The decline of the Roman Empire was undoubtedly hastened by the heavy indebtedness of the cities—an indebtedness which was often occasioned by their engaging in great public works’).” The drive, ‘push’ and enterprise praised by visitors in the 1880s seemed less admirable in the strained and depressed conditions of the 1890s. In his poem ‘In Collins Street’, George Essex Evans detected sinister undertones in the bustle of commerce: I stood in the heart of the city street, I felt the throb of her pulses beat, The thunder of life on the sunny air, The waves of the people everywhere, Like the stirring lilt of a mighty song — 303 -

The Suburods

Ran the fever of life in the moving throng, With the hope and joy and the want and woe Of a million souls tn its ebb and flow. Like a floating straw in an eddy caught My soul was whirled in the city’s thought— The purse-born pride and the scheming brain, The grinding need and the grasping gain; The silent strength that is born to rule, And the shallow laugh of the feckless fool, The fresh young face where no shadow lies, And the quenchless pain in the harlot’s eyes ...'” In the countryside, the old churlish cry against ‘rotten Melbourne’ swelled into chorus:

The fact was that Melbourne had killed the whole colony, and all the country districts were to be offered up as a sacrifice in order that something might be done to deliver Melbourne from its wretched condition. Where was all the wealth of the colony gone? A second Melbourne had been built over the original Melbourne of ten years ago, but they could not see the population in it. Ichabod was written over it. That was where the capital had gone, where the banking money had gone; and that was the

means by which the colony had been dragged down to Its present condition ... Melbourne had wasted its substance with riotous living, and had plundered the country districts in building up this modern Babylon.‘‘ In London too there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. ‘Melbourne’, John Mcllwraith reported, ‘positively stinks in the nostrils of English people ... I have always been proud of Melbourne and held it up on all sides but now I feel ashamed to mention it ...."° The ‘seamy side’ of its financial life was exposed

in the English reviews.'” Sydney at last had its revenge as the Bulletin’s cartoonists took savage delight in the scandals of ‘Marvellous Smellboom’.”" Editors wrote of the ‘fierce chastisement’ which had fallen upon the city,

and of Melbourne being ‘purged by adversity. There were even signs of repentance: the colonial treasurer received several small sums of money through the various government departments from anonymous donors ‘who evidently felt uncomfortable on account of some smart practice by which they had defrauded the Government’.*! Others with much heavier obligations saw

— 304 —

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

their difficulties not as punishment for personal recklessness or imprudence but as the irruption of an overwhelming, impersonal force. The depression was ‘a plague’, a ‘great wave’, an infection from abroad. Unable to resist it, they regarded themselves as innocent victims.** To the devout, even natural disasters were signs of divine displeasure: ‘As Christians we believe that nothing happens without God, and that it is our duty and privilege to recognize His almighty hand in all events, whether they affect ourselves or the community at large’.®’ So it behove all people to examine themselves, repent their past sins and amend their lives. In 1892 the Free Presbyterians had undertaken a solemn fast ‘in order that they might humble themselves before God on account of His heavy hand on the community, felt by all classes in the general commercial depression and widespread distress in the colony and also to confess the sins which were the procuring causes of God’s wrath’.“' Among these sins they numbered immorality, irreligion and ‘the insidious advances of Romanism’. In the same year, the Wesleyans set aside a Week of Self-denial. They viewed the distress of the community as the result of ‘some hasting to get rich, and entering into unjustifiable speculations little less than gambling’, and called upon the people to heed the warning ‘Beware of covetousness’.®’ In short, each denomination construed disaster as the fruit of its favourite sin. In May 1893, after the bank crash, the Anglican bishop, Dr Field Flowers Goe, acceded to requests for a Special Day of Humiliation and Prayer. Services were held by each of the principal Protestant denominations and there was a

special combined service in the Melbourne Town Hall. In his address the bishop acknowledged that many people had already told their troubles to God in private prayer and in family and congregational worship. But now

as the cloud of misfortune grew blacker and threatened to burst in ruin more or less terrible upon our heads, we became more importunate and thought it well to gather together in a great public meeting ... and cast ourselves before the throne of God in deepest humiliation and prayer, in the hope that the Lord would remember us in our lowest state ...°° He recounted how King Hezekiah, his city besieged by the Assyrians, had spread out the threatening letter of Sennacherib before the Almighty; how Daniel, though innocent himself, had identified with the sins of the people: how Jonah called upon the king and all the people of Nineveh to cast themselves upon the mercy of God and how the Lord had held His hand from the destruction of that wicked city. Other speakers recalled God’s grace in — 305 -

The Suburbs

more recent times, and His mercy towards the English people in the face of the Spanish Armada and alter the Great Fire. Melbourne's penitents, however, were not confronted by an adversary of flesh and blood, or even by a natural disaster. As the bishop confessed, it was more difficult to detect causes or pray for remedies. ‘In times like the cholera or the cattle plague they knew what to pray for, but their troubles now arose out of the complex forms of modern civilization, and made the petition more difficult. We knew the cause of our troubles to be covetousness, extravagance. selfishness and forgetfulness of God.*' The clergy of the respectable denominations shrank from a more exact reckoning of the people's sins; their congregations, after all, were still thickly packed with land boomers. The remarks of the Rev. Alex Marshall of Scots Church at the Town Hall service illustrate their difficulty. He was careful to limit. his condemnation to general sin, and actually denied the existence of some notorious individual cases. He was at pains to affirm that ‘the men who had the direction of [our great financial] institutions were upright honourable men. We could sympathize with them in their misfortunes, whatever blame we might be disposed to attach to the general policy.” The sins to be repented were not ‘villainy and deception’ but ‘reckless living, extravagance, gambling, mammon worship and God-forgetfulness’ (good Presbyterian sins). The evangelical Southern Cross, advising its readers ‘how to bear the loss of money , assured them that financial failure implied no spiritual fall.“ So Sir Matthew Davies for example could claim that his legal responsibility for the Freehold Investment and Banking Company implied no moral responsibility,” and his friend and fellow director, James Balfour, was encouraged to see himself, not as an object of wrath, but as a sacrificial victim. ‘I have been thinking’, wrote his son from Dunedin, of the time Melbourne is going through Just now in connection with the Captivity of the Jews in Babylon. They went through this weary time of trial and they came out purified but the ¢rrocent had to suffer with the guilty. “The Servant of the Lord’ was among the people ... No doubt many are wondering why you should be suffering. Perhaps they will come to see that your sulferings are really brought through their sins ..."!

Not everyone could find comfort in sackcloth and ashes. George Gray, the builder and architect, had firmly believed that God had endowed man with ‘commonsense and reason and that he would become ‘fortunate or unfortunate, successful or unsuccessful, happy or miserable’ as he himself determined.

—~ 506 —-

‘Marvellous Melbourne’

But with the depression and the failure of his business, he was left disconsolate: ‘My whole life’, he confessed, ‘has been one huge mistake from which there is no escape, but by that common road called death’.”” Other sufferers bemoaned their failure to condemn the excesses of the land boom while there had still been time. There was, after all, comparatively little merit in humiliating ourselves when we have been

weighed in the balance and found wanting. The fact is, that in this ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ when the delirium of the boom fever was raging, individual responsibility was forgotten, and with the swelling vanity of the fabled frog, the prayer of men and women was, ‘Give us more gold and land, O Mammon! for this shall last forever’. Why was the voice of the preacher not heard then crving in the wilderness, ‘All is vanity ...°?”” While the rich put their souls in order, the poor struggled to sustain their fainting bodies. Once again reporters ventured out, like explorers of the ‘dark continent’, to investigate their condition. Articles on ‘How the Poor Live’, ‘Poorer Than the Poor’, “The Cry of the Workless’, and tracts on The Bitter Cry of Outcast Melbourne began to appear.”' By using titles already familiar to English readers, they suggested that poverty had attained levels comparable only to the appalling conditions of ‘Outcast London’. No longer did reporters pinpoint

dark blots upon the face of the fair city; Melbourne was now the ‘City of Dreadful Night’. They moved beyond the ghetto lanes of Little Bourke Street

and into the outlying, unmade streets of Brunswick and South Melbourne. Poverty had permeated the whole fabric of society: ‘side by side, almost rubbing shoulders with the children of the rich, can be found the emaciated and wasted faces of the women and their little ones’. Every suburb, even South Yarra and Toorak, had its casualties. The poor were still seen as subhuman but no longer as predators or scavengers; they were inoffensive sheep, ‘herded’ and ‘hunted’.”” No longer did reporters underline their moral degeneracy, but

their laudable independence of charity, their self-respect, their frustrated industry. They tried, so far as they could, to commend them to the sympathy and charity of their fellow Melburnians. The evils of urban life—poverty was only one—no longer seemed isolated and remediable but endemic and well-nigh insoluble. And so it was natural perhaps that as the city came to symbolize the concentrated sin and suffering of the colony, the countryside, as the original source of goodness and wealth, came to seem purer, simpler and more harmonious. Melburnians began to

yearn for the bucolic innocence of rural life, the secure but independent — 307 -

The Suburbs

station of a ‘petty yeoman’, the communal pleasures of the ‘medieval village’. The rural dream was the reflex of the urban nightmare. The emergence of the

metropolis had prompted, even in the 1880s, a subtle questioning of urban values and a nostalgic evocation of the unpeopled wilderness. The mood of the nineties was different. Men reached, not for primeval solitude, but for a rich and active community life. Their mood was utopian rather than romantic. It looked beyond idle reflection to the energetic creation of a ‘new arcadia. The most vivid manifestation of the anti-urban mood was the rise of the

village settlement movement of the early 1890s. Rural communitarianism caught the imagination of a surprisingly wide range of contemporaries, from leaders of commerce across the political spectrum to the anarchist left. A settlement at Bayswater, sponsored by Paterson, Laing and Bruce, a large soft-

goods firm, supported twenty-three married employees—at least until the pangs of enforced celibacy drove them citywards again.”’ David Andrade, the anarchist bookseller and militant vegetarian, promoted a Social Pioneers Land Settlement Scheme based on the ideas of Owen, Fourier and Cabet.”* Between these poles there were dozens of other ventures under the aegis of such representative bodies as the Co-operative Village Settlements Association, the Affleck—Robertson Association, the Salvation Army, the Rechabites, the Essendon Village Settlement Association and Lady O’Loghlen.”' All over the country-

side reconstructed suburbanites built settlements bearing the names of Caulfield, Essendon, Fairfield, Brighton and West Brunswick.!"" The most influential and widely debated of these projects was the Tucker Village Settlement Scheme, conceived and organized by the Rev. Horace Finn Tucker,!"! the eccentrically ‘high’ priest of fashionable Christ Church, South Yarra. In February 1892 Tucker returned to Melbourne after a country holiday and was appalled to discover the mounting poverty and distress in the metropolis. He wrote to the Argus calling for the introduction of co-operative rural

settlements and suggested, as an Initial experiment, a settlement of 100 families on 500 acres of government land. The public plantation of village settlements was the way to ‘turn back the human tide from the crowded city to the free, open plains’.''= His plan was widely acclaimed and, within a fortnight, a curiously assorted committee of clergy, charity organizers, politicians and socialist theoreticians was busily at work translating Tucker's intuitions

into conerete plans.' Tucker himself elaborated his vision in a series of speeches and pamphlets and, most vividly, in his fascinating novel The New Arcadia (1894). Its sources were a hotchpotch of Charles Kingsley and the

~ 308 —

é , ay ? Tn eee ences cence cence nr A Marvellous Melbourne

Christian Socialists’, the John Ruskin of Unto This Last, Henry Maine and the host of other nineteenth-century sages who viewed the village society of the Middle Ages as a haven of the faith and virtue lost through industrialism. The drift of his ideas became apparent in April 1892, when the governor launched the scheme with a ‘Villagers’ Fete’, complete with maypole dances, 104 Th l behind country games and a Punch and Judy show. e motives behindthe the vill village settlements were a direct inversion of the themes of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.

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For progress, individual enterprise and city dominance they substituted regression, co-operation and ruralism.

The romantic nature of Tucker's experiment was most apparent in his fictional creation of the ‘New Arcadia’ with its ‘bowers’ and ‘grottoes’, its village green’ and ‘jolly smiths’, and its kindly village priest celebrating the ancient rites in ‘the figured eastern light’ of a Gothic Revival chapel.'”? The village settlement was a moral reaction against the dehumanizing effects of economic competition: ‘Competition ... appealed to the basest passions of

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Sehe Eee &§ SlaeoR eeeSSo Se WANA RRSANS FERRO ee. ous ae s. WR BENT NANG Se ey ¥ — \SSiy UULSUR CUCU}; em. CCN BS Bi. See eS : é — . “S32 ee eee... & OR SS Q_ SN ee ee ae a 3K | aes See RONEN S rae BOE LES SC & . . eee ee PRETEEN SANS i we PS ie ~ John Benn (president), Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes, 29 Apr. 1879. -" FS. Grimwade, ibid., 18 Apr. 1883. -" Tbid., 12 Dec. 1881, 29 May, 12 June, 12 July 1882, 21 Jan. 1884, 19 Apr. 1886. For a useful digest of the chamber’s activities see Cowderoy, Melbourne's Commercial Jubilee: Notes from the Records of Fifty Years’ Work of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce. ““ Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes, 28 Oct.. 23 Nov. 1885, 21 Feb., 19 Apr., 6 Nov. 1886, 17 Jan. 1887, 23 Apr. 1888, 11 May 1893; Argus, 19 Jan. 1887. “" Argus, 12 Aug. 1891; ATR, 25 Sept. 1882. *’ Cowderoy, op. cit., pp. 79-80. *! Thid., pp. 85-90; Codification of Laws; VPP Legislative Council, D1, 1887, and General Code Bill, VPP, D2, 1888.

* John Foley, John Railton and Daniel Roessler, ‘Nineteenth Century Melbourne Warehouses’ (B.Arch. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1959); B. C. Fam, P. C. Kain and Yt Sng, ‘Warehouses

in Flinders Lane and Robb Street’ (B.Arch. thesis, University of Melbourne, n.d.). The photographs in these theses provide a valuable record of Melbourne's early commercial architecture, most of which has since disappeared.

— 329 —-

Notes

ef David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker (London 1958). “T 'Prade with the United Kingdom’, VPP, vol. 2. no. 27, 1896. p. 8. * 3 May 1887. p. 2.

IC. 12 July 1889, 24 Jan. 1890. 11 Oct. 1892. “ IC, 28 June 1889. 2 Nov. 1888, 5 Dec. 1893. ” Australasian Shorthand Journal, Sept. 1890. ” Stott's Business College, The Way to Success (Melbourne n.d.), p. 4; /C, 21 Sept. 1888; Melbourne International Exhibition, Officzal Record (1881), p. 674: Argus Cexhibition Supplement), 16 Oct. 1888: As. 1} Mar. 1892. p. 95.

"ICL 5 Oct. 1888: Argus. 27 Oct. 1888: Australasian Shorthand Journal, May 1890, p. 3: Vieforvan Census, 1891. Occupations , showed 86 female ‘typewriters’ in the city. "Australian Stenographer, Nov. 1893: Australasian Shorthand Journal, June 1890: Argus, 18 Dec. 1889.

AT. July 1894: 4 Australasian Shorthand Journal, June 1890; see also Davis. “Seventy-five Years of Commercial Education in Victoria, 1850-1925° (M.Ed. thesis), pp. 157-66. eg “Duties of Clerical Staff of Hoffman Brick Company’, Minutes of Directors, 30 Apr. 1885: ‘Swallow and Ariell-—Office Rules’ in ‘Little Green Book’ (c. 1888).

' Elhott to Ruegg, 12 Nov. 1889 (copy), Ruegg to Balfour. 25 Nov. 1889, Balfour Papers. IC. VO Jan. 1890: Argus. 27 Aug. 1886, 27 Aug. 1887. " Argus, 21 Mav L885. Argus, 27 Aug. 1885, 27 Aug. 1886, 27 Aug. 1887.

IC. 6 Sept. 1886: Argus, 27 Aug. 1886. " Building Societies” Gazette, 3 Julv 1890. 13 Feb., 11 Sept. 1889. "ALG. Turner to Chamber of Commerce, /C. 17 May 1889. | Tbid.. LO Jan. 1890. ICT May 1895: Smith (ed.), The Cyclopedia of Victoria, vol. 1, p. 497. ™ From notices in ATR. -/C. Sutherland (ed.). Vietorza and [ts Metropolis, etc. *! Derham to Swallow, 2 Aug. 1886. Swallow and Ariell, Derham Letterbooks. HEC. Grondona in Australasian Commercial Congress, Report of Proceedings (Melbourne 1889), p. Ix. Among the gold-rush merchants who died in the late 1880s or early 1890s were Richard Goldsborough (1886), Robert Caldwell (1887), Alexander Fraser (1888), John Lorimer (1888), FC. Lange (1888), Samuel Renwick (1888), John Currie (1889), Sir James Lorimer (1889). Phipps Turnbull (1890). George Anthoness (1892), John McCallum (1892), W.'T. Moffat (1892), Isaac Younghusband (1892). Robert Ramsay (1894), John Benn (1895).

26 June 1884, p. 254, ~~ Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes, 1888, p. 150.

“ATR, 28 July 1884. p. 439. Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes. 1888, p. 150. Australasian Commercial Congress, Report of Proceedings, Pp. Xi. " Tbid.. pp. liv, 13.47. 112. Both Reid and Sargood had sons entering their firms at this time (ef. Smith Ced.). op. cit.. vol. 1, pp. 498, 501). = Argus, 15. 19, 21 Dec. 1888. ™ Branklyn, A Glance af Australia in 1SSO, p. 214. ME YIC. V9 Apr 1886. po.

™ HOG. Turner in Melbourne Chamber of Comunerce. Minutes, 7 May 1889.

MIE 3 Nov. 1887. p23. IC 19 Apr. 1886. p. 4. Local practice closely followed English usage (see H. A. Shannon, “The Limited Companies of 1866-18833" in E. M. Carus-Wilson, Essays ir Lconomic History, vol. 1 (London 1954), p. 392). Later critics of the Companies Act. readily perceived that “sometimes when a firm has a doubtful future before it. it has taken advantage of its good standing and credit to transform itself into a company, the company taking over all the labilities, and the firm being relieved of all its care and anxieties (VPD, vol. 74, 1894. p. 777). Compare

— 330 -

Notes

‘Companies Registered, 1887-8’, VPP, vol. 1, C7, 1888, and ‘Companies Defunct or in Liquidation, 1886-96’, VPP, vol. 1, C6, 1896. 6S Australasian Commercial Congress, Report of Proceedings, p. 43. Charges for embezzlement

increased from about 50 a year in the mid-1880s to a peak of 107 in 1892 (Victorian Statistical Register, ‘Law, Crime, etc.’); on motives of defendants see JC, 6 Sept. 1887, 3 May 1889, Building Societies’ Gazette, 13 Feb. 1889. ™ 31 May 1887, p. 3.

™ JC, 2 Feb. 1894, p. 8; Melbourne directories; Argus, 9 July 1892. ‘| Argus, 20 Nov. 1894. ‘= Argus, 6 Nov. 1894.

® Board Appointed ... Enquire into Effect of the Fiscal System, VPP, vol. 2, no. 37, 1894, q. 15683 CW. H. Calder).

" VPD, vol. 72, 1898, pp. 1218, 1255. ™ Age, 17 May 1894.

® JC, 18 Aug. 1891, p. 8.

™ Age, 4 May 1894; Board Appointed ... to Enquire into Effect of the Fiscal System, loc. cit.. qs 9375, 15734. "S Age, 24 Apr. 1894. Cf. merchants listed in Melbourne and Sydney directories, 1890, 1895. ™ See A. W. Martin, ‘Economic Influences in the “New Federation Movement” ’, in J. J. Eastwood

and FB. Smith (eds), Historical Studies, Selected Articles (Melbourne 1964), pp. 215-25. “” Gibson to Dougall, 9 June 1891, Foy and Gibson, Gibson Letterbook, p. 250. ‘! Robert Reid, London Memo Book, 10 Nov. 1896, p. 36. * Tbid., 1 Mar. 1897, p. 84: Gibson to Dougall, 10 Feb. 1891, p. 198. There was a sudden decline in shipping rates from 1890 (Argus, 3 Jan. 1891).

Closed Naked Weight 1 Jan. 1890 15 Apr. 1890 = 20 Dec. 1890

Sailing Ship Steamer 30S30s 27s25s 6d17s 20s6d

“JC, 17 Mar. 1891, 15 Mar. 1892, 26 Sept., 7 Nov. 1898, 22 May 1894. “tT 29 Aug. 1893.

‘> Robert Reid, London Memo Book, 12 Jan. 1897. “6 Tbid., 24 Apr. 1897.

* JC,17 Mar. 1891; A/, 1 Aug. 1892. 153 ‘agents and commission agents’ were listed as insolvents

between 1889 and 1893. ‘8 H.R. Carter in Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes, 26 Apr. 1894; JC, 25 Apr., 4 July, 9 Dec. 1893. “AT, 4 Feb., 1 Mar. 1892. “© Thid., 1 Dec. 1893; JC, 7 May 1895; AG, 30 Nov. 1895.

“1 2 July 1892; on wage reductions among clerical employees see pp. 213-14. = Argus, 9, 18, 21 July, 20 Sept., 6 Oct. 1892. AFG, 23 Feb., 26 Mar, 4 June, 1,24 Sept., 5 Nov. 1891, 29 Jan., 24 Mar., 29 Apr., 29 Sept. 1894; Argus, 25 June, 21 Oct. 1892.

IC, 5 Dec. 1898. ” IC, 9 June 1891. "© Argus, 10, 13 Feb., 13 Sept., 9 Nov. 1892; JC, 1 Mar. 1892. Cf. Trevor Matthews, ‘The All for Australia League’ in R. Cooksey (ed_), The Great Depression in Australia (special number of

Labour History, 1970), pp. 136-47. “~ Commonweal, 10 Sept. 1892, The Argus (13 Feb. 1892) described the YVPL as consisting of

‘“Black coated” young workers mainly between 20 and 40°. Among the members were R. J. Aleock, J. F Deegan, W. J. Curry (merchants), Charles Forester, E. Jowett, W. R. Church,

W.F. Stillman (agents), WL Baillieu, G.D. Meudell, Theodore Fink Gand boomers), and FE. Thonemann, FG. Sargood, H. F. A. Gourlay (sons of merchants).

~ 3381 -

Notes

"’ J. Hubbart to Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Argus, 20 Dec. 1892. "IC, 3 Jan., 27 Mar. 1894; Robert Reid in Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Minutes, 14 Feb. L889.

Two ‘The Old Spirit ... Has Gone Out’ There is an extensive and still expanding literature on the development of class relations in latenineteenth-century Australia and its urban context. R. W. Connell and T. H Irving's Class Struclure in Australian History. Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1980, represented the high point of structuralist Marxist influence; John Rickard’s cultural approach in his Class and Politics New South Wales, Victoria and the Barly Commonwealth, 1590-1910, ANU Press, Canberra 1976, has probably been of more enduring influence. Shirley Fitzgerald’s Ristng Damp: Sydney, 1870-90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1987, was a methodologically innovative study of Sydney covering a Similar period, which brings out the ways in which class relations were shaped by that city’s very different industrial base. Some of the most informative new material on the social history of Melbourne's manufacturing industries is found in local histories. John Lack’s A History of Footscray. Hargreen Publishing Co.. North Melbourne 1991, and Susan Priestley, South Melbourne: A History. Melbourne University Press, 1995, expand the history of the riverfront industries, such as boilermaking, ship building and the ‘noxious trades’; Helen Penrose (ed.), Brunsiwick: One History Many Voices. Victoria Press. South Melbourne 1994, deals with the brick industry; while Janet McCalman, Straggletown,: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900-1965, Melbourne University Press 1984, is an admired study of class relations in the context of an early-twenticth-centurv industrial suburb. Raelene Francis, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour tu Victoria, [SSO-1989, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 1995, is an outstanding study of the changing place of women in manufacturing industry over this period. ' Australasian, 20 Mar. 1880, p. 373. - W_K. Hancock, Australia (London 1930), p. 77. * See the author's “Class. Associations and Opinion in Richmond, 1860-1892" (B.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1962). ATR. 14 Feb. 1883. p. 77. 11 Apr. 1883. p. 18, 19 Dec. 1883. p. 843, 29 June 1885, p. 433. * ATR. AT Jan. 1883. p. 19.

PD Oct. 1882. Also see A. G. Thompson. John Buncle’ in ADA, vol. 3, pp. 295-6. “RCT. gs 29236-7. * Manufacturer, May 1890, p. 110.

“ Official Record of the Melbourne International Bavhibition, 1550-1, p. xiv.

Argus, | Oct. 1884. p. ISA. Manufacturer, Mav 1890. p. 110. ~~ 2T Mav 1885.

Norton, A fistory of Capital and Labour. pp. 153-4. Barrett, Tre Trver Suburbs, ch. 6. ” Geoffrey Blainev’s suggestion (The Rush That Never Ended, p. 61) that the goldfields declined because urban industry grew, rather than the reverse, deserves more detailed investigation.

See, notably, Butlin. Jieeestinent ia Australian Bconomic Development, 1S61-1900, p. 182. Historians of nineteenth-century Victorian manufacturing are presented with three independently collected sets of industrial statistics: the returns of factories and factory employment in the Statistical Register, the statistics collected by the chief inspector of factories, workshops and shops and the statistics of manufacturing occupations in the Victor?an Census. Butlin, following Coghlan and other writers, has generally relied on the annual series in the Statistical Register, arguing that they present reasonably accurate and comprehensive information on emplovment. Despite their formal definitions of a factory ‘the statisticians of the day did not treat minimum numbers as a serious statistical limit’ and included homeworkers as well (Australian Domestic Product, Ineestment and Foreign Borrowing, p. 156: freestinent tn Australian Beonomic Development, LS61-1900, pp. 201-10).

— 332 -

Notes

More recently, Thompson, in his thesis ‘Statistical Measurement of Manufacturing Activity in Victoria’ (M.Comm thesis) and his article ‘The Enigma of Australian Manufacturing, 18511901’, Australian Economic Papers, June 1970, pp. 76-92, has argued that these figures are seriously defective, especially in the earlier period, and that the returns of ‘Occupations of the People’ in the Victorian Census furnish more accurate estimates of employment. They were

collected with more care and are more consistent with a fair interpretation of the factory inspectors’ reports and even with Butlin’s own estimates of domestic product. Parsons (‘Some Aspects of the Development of Manufacturing in Melbourne, 1870-1890’, Ph.D. thesis) follows Butlin, arguing against Thompson that the census returns compound manufacturing and non-

manufacturing employees and that the collection procedure was less reliable than for the Statistical Register. Judgements in this area depend largely on one’s purpose in using the statistics as well as the assumptions one makes about their validity. I share Parsons’s doubts about the possibility of disentangling ‘manufacturing’ from ‘non-manufacturing’ occupations but agree with Thompson’s view of the census as probably the more comprehensive survey of employment. Unfortunately only a one-sided view of the matter yields clear numerical conclusions.

The argument has an important bearing on views of the relative size, productivity and growth rate of Victorian manufacturing. The Thompson estimates contrast with Butlin’s in suggesting that manufacturing activity was a larger sector of the colonial economy and that its growth was accelerating more rapidly in the 1880s and stagnating more completely in the 1890s. But whether they substantially alter our understanding of the general structure of factory employment—the subject of the present chapter—seems more doubtful. While they would enlarge our estimates of women outworkers in the clothing industry, they generally bear out the contrast, developed here, between the growth of investment goods and the comparative stagnation of consumer manufacturing (see Thompson thesis, p. 99 and table 6). And, so far as I can see, they are consistent with the general view of manufacturing growth put forward by Parsons (op. cit., ch. 2) and followed here. '* Patterson, The Tariffin the Australian Colonies, 1856-1900, ch. 10. 18 Apr. 1885. See also Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2, pp. 592, 616: RCT, qs 2118 (Parry), 2744 (Barthold), 2964 (Beath Schiess), 3094 (Mclvor and Lincoln). “” Cf. P.G. Hall, The Industries of London (London 1962), chs 4, 5; Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, First Series, Poverty (London 1895), vol. 4, pp. 157-218. For the location of Chinese furniture shops in the Little Bourke Street area see the Mahlstedt maps of the central business district (Map Collection, La Trobe Library); Melbourne Directory, 1885; appendixes to factory inspectors’ reports. -! Cf. P. J. Rimmer, ‘The Boot and Shoe Industry in Melbourne’, Australian Geographer, no. 5, March 1968, pp. 370-81. -- Inspector Ellis, VPP, vol. 3, no. 30, 1889, p. 8. See also Michaelis Hallenstein to George Hallenstein, 25 Sept. 1889, Michaelis Hallenstein, Moritz Michaelis Letterbook, p. 46; AJ, 1 Dec. 1888, p. 472; Sutherland (ed.), op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 623, 626. *° 10 July 1891, p. 45.

“1 Australasian Coachbuilder, 10 June 1891, p. 39, 10 Oct. 1891, p. 95; 10 Apr, pp. 9-10, 10 May, pp. 19, 10 Aug. 1890, pp. 63-4; Manufacturer, Aug. 1887, p. 11; Sutherland (ed.), op. cit., vol. 2, p. 615. -” AT, 1 Aug. 1888, p. 201.

“° Factory Inspectors’ Report, VPP, vol. 3, no. 30, 1889, p. 7; A/, 1 Aug. 1888, p. 201. “" Argus, 18 Oct. 1884; [Footscray City Council], Footscray’s First 100 Years. -* Footscray town clerk’s evidence to Royal Commission on the Sanitary Condition of the Metropolis, First Progress Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 27, 1887, 6286; H. B. Allen, Second General Report on Mr. Mansergh’s Scheme of Drainage, VPP, vol. 4, no. 76, 1891, p. 8. -" AT, 1 Sept. 1886, p. 120, 1 Apr. 1888, p. 111, 1 Mar., p. 121, 1 Apr. 1889, p. 175, 1 Jan. 1891, pp. 138-14.

30 See pp. 153-5.

— 333 -

Notes

*! See returms of brickvards in Victorian Statistical Register, ‘Production . *~ The following account 1s based on the Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Company, Minutes of Directors, 1885-9. ~ Froeland. Architecture in Australia, pp. 187-8: Argus, 9 Oct. 1888 (Exhibition Supplement),

pol: ‘Bricks in Muecyclopaedia Britannica: Bowley, frrocations in Building Materials, p. 63,

“ Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics (Melbourne 1960), p. 100. Norton. 4 ffistory of Capital and Labour, p. 166: Sutherland (ed.). op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 6235, 606. "Arthur Rowlston to Horace Bedggood, 14 May 1957, Bedggood Papers (ANU Archives). “ROR, Park, Brook, Catherall. and David Watson from Langland’s; Bertram, Dangerfield, Scott and Glover from Fultoms: Gideon James. George Young atid Robert Bruce from Enoch Chambers. See Sutherland (ed.), op. cit.. vol. 2. p. 590 Th: AVR, 17 Jan... 1885, p. 26. The predominance of Scottish names may be significant. * Capital costs are difficult to estimate accurately. In the mud-1880s the costs for a boot factory were estimated at about S8OO, but it would certainly have been higher for a modern engineering works (Arges. | Aug. 1885). “Factory Inspectors) Report. 1889, VPP. vol. 2, no. 22. 1890, p. 8; John Bedggood to Royal Commission on the Factory Act. VPP. vol. 2. no. 31. 1902-5, q. 6709. Age. 12 Dec. 1936. TROT. q. 1185. = See loan applications to Modern Permanent Building Society, nos. 3396, 3508A, 4348, 5661, 605 1.

Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Co.. Minutes of Directors, 15 Dec. 1886, 28 Nov. 1887, 16 Jan. ISS88: Papers of Defunct Companies, nos. 1609, 886, 969, 2374, 1504. 1481.

RCT q. 15451. Manafactirer, Aug. 887. p. 5, Thich. Sept. T8858. p. PIS. Apr 1889, p. 5. ' Thid.. Mar. 1890. pp. 76. 80-1. ™ Mav T891. p. 46 Cedit.).

Vietorian Chamber of Manufactures, Annual Reports (lists of members). "OAT 1 Aug. 1891. p. 227.

| From a comparison of trade and residential addresses inWelbourne Directory, 1890. = Seep. 1&2.

Argus. 25 July 1885. ROT. q. 27155. Contpare earlier views in Report of Select Committee on the Tariff, VPP, vol. 2, D260. P859-60. gs SI-6. 156-8. ~ RCFA, gs 4691-2 (P. Edersham). For further evidence on the cigar trade see ATR, 22 Nov. 1882,

p. 639: Argus. 5 June. 12 Sept. 1885: 15 Feb... 19 Oct. 1892. “ATR 3 Mav 1886. p. 278: ef AY, | Jan. 1891. pp. 15-14. “AL | Apr. P8890 p. 175. For example several foundries began to experiment with steel manufacture. In 1887 Langland’s installed a modified Bessemer converter and brought skilled work-

men from England to operate it. Later in the same vear Phillips. McWalter and Chambers began using steel castings as a substitute for iron and brass in small wheels and cogs. In 1889 Phillips's son and two of his other emplovees established the Sheffield steelworks in Brunswick. and John Heskett and Sons imported a Siemens-Martin open hearth steel plant. Mephan Ferguson and G. and C. Hoskins opened wrought iron plants while Langland’s established a factory to make cast Iron pipes (AJ, 1 Mar.. pp. 56-7, 10 Oct. 1887. p. 254: 1 Oct. 1889, p. 424, | Apr. 1890. p. 98: Menefactaurer, Oct. 1889, p. 18).

OAT | Apr L&89. po 1. “ T Sept. 1890. p. 266.

Fora brillant analvsis of the problem of casual labour in London see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford 1971). pt. 1. " VOBU. Minutes. td July 1884. p. 174.

— 334 —-

Notes

‘* For an account of the system see E. C. Fry, ‘Outwork in the Eighties’, University Studies in History and Economics, vol. 2, no. 4, July 1956, pp. 77-93. °? RCFA, qs 4306-9 (Mrs A.). For further evidence on the character of ‘apprenticeship’ in the inner-city trades see reports of Mrs Graham and Mrs Creswell to Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Report, pp. 100-1; RCT, gs 19615-17, 19949-56, 20111-15, 24818-20, 25122-5, 25638-4383, 27068-71, 27096, 27512, 28228-3835, 28762, 29162-7. *t RCT, q. 2121 (John Parry) and RCFA, q. 4605 (Miss H. of Cohen and Lyons). ® RCT, q. 11952 (Andrew Barry), qg. 11886 (William Trenwith). *© “Eimployees in Factories’, VPP, vol. 1, C2, 1889.

*” RCFA, gs 4281 (James Munro), 3963 (Wilson). 6 RCT, qs 26307-8 (William Evans); see also qs 11978, 25701, 25744, 26300-8. “’ Factory Inspectors’ Report, VPP, vol. 3, no. 30, 1889, p. 5.

Tbid., vol. 2, no. 22, 1890, p. 5. "| Dyson worked for a time in a Melbourne paper-bag factory in the early 1880s (see obituary in

Argus, 26 Aug. 1931) and the ‘machinery’ of his stories was, he claimed, ‘the outcome of experience in [that] one establishment’ (Fact’ry ‘Ands, p. vii). ” Factory Inspectors’ Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 22, 1890, p. 12. 8 On rents see pp. 152-4. ‘4 See for example Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, pp. 100-11, and Fry, ‘The Condition of the Urban Wage-earning Class in Eastern Australia in the 1880s’ (Ph.D. thesis), ch. 4. ® V. Stooke to RCFA, VPP, vol. 2, no. 31, 1902-3, g. 222; see similar testimony by John Bedggood in ibid., q. 6705. ® Philipp, ‘Trade Union Organization in New South Wales and Victoria 1870-1890’ (M.A. thesis), pp. 44-6; Parsons, op. cit., p. 575A. “™ VOBU, Minutes, ‘Objects of the Society’. Cf. statement of United Furnishing Trade Society in UFTS, Minutes, 21 Aug., 4 Sept., 16, 30 Oct. 1884. 8 Judith L. Watson, ‘The Political Career of William Arthur Trenwith’ (B.A. thesis, Monash University, 1965); VOBU, Minutes, 10 Sept., 17 Dec. 1883, 28 Jan. 1884.

™ Norton, A History of Capital and Labour, p. 161. 8° Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, p. 101. 5} VOBU, Minutes, 22 Jan. 1883.

* Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, p. 106; VOBU, Minutes, Sept.—Oct. 1884; for full statement of settlement see J. T. Sutcliffe, A History of Trade Unionism in Australia (Melbourne 1921, reprint 1967), p. 58. “3 UFTS, Minutes, March—June 1886, July-Sept. 1888, Nov—Dec. 1889; Serle, op. cit., pp. 296-302. “t JC, 28 Aug., 6 Sept. 1886; Factory Inspector’s Report, VPP, vol. 3, no. 30, 1889, p. 8; Buckley, The Amalgamated Engineers of Australia, 1852-1920, pp. 106-7. Also compare similar movement among printers, Fitzgerald, The Printers of Melbourne, p. 61. ® Sinclair, Economic Recovery in Victoria, 1894-1899, p. 92. *® Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Company, Minutes of Directors, 29 Apr. 1889, and weekly records of sales; Northcote Brick Company, Minutes of Directors, 23 Jan., 1 Feb. 1889, Builder, 26 Jan.

1889, pp. 122-3; Argus, 17, 21, 26 Apr. 1890. *" Argus, 17 June 1892; Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Co., Minutes of Directors, 20 May 1892: ibid., 13 May 1891, 28 Sept. 1892, 15 Mar. 1893; ibid., 24 Aug., 14 Sept., 16 Nov. 1892, 25 Jan. 1893.

88 AT, 21 Dec. 1889, p. 11, 1 Jan., pp. 1-2, 1 Feb. 1890, p. 40. * AT, 1 Apr, p. 85, 1 May 1894, p. 12; Victorian Chamber of Manufactures, Annual Report, 1894 (evid. of John Danks to Committee on the Tariff); AZ, 1 Oct. 1891, p. 314, 1 May, p. 168, 1 June, p. 197, 1 July, p. 244, 1 Sept. 1892, p. 319. ”” Buckley, op. cit., ch. 10.

"! The highest votes for Progressive Political League candidates were recorded in Melbourne West (69.5 per cent of the vote), Richmond (62.4), Port Melbourne (58.9), Emerald Hill (57.2)

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Notes

and Williamstown (55.7). The effect of the maritime strike on these largely waterside electorates must also be taken into account. Footscray’s relatively poor showing (29.3 per cent) 1s partly accounted for by its loyalty to a strong Liberal candidate, G. D. Clark, and the residual influence of notions of working-class ‘respectability’, as attested by Footscray’s high homeownership rate (see p. 181) (figures from Argus, 21 Apr. 1892). ™ Australasian Coachbuilder, 10 Apr., p. 2, 10 Dec. 1891, p. 110. * Tbid., 10 July 1892, p. 42 (Stickland). “4 Ibid., 10 June 1892, pp. 27-8. This was a common but not universal reaction. Most of the witnesses who gave evidence to a Chamber of Manufactures inquiry on causes of the depression in 1892 called for increased duties (Argus, 5, 26 Apr., 28 May, 14, 15, 21 June, 14 July 1892),

but two years later, when manufacturers testified to a board appointed to inquire into the effect of the fiscal system, they were less united. The strongest support for the tariff then came from unionists, while manufacturers were at odds with each other about its unequal effects on different industries. ” Australasian Coachbuilder, 10 Mar. 1891, p. 152. “’ Factory Act Enquiry Board, First Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 47, 1893, pp. 12-18. “ Victorian Yearbook, 1906-7, p. 653. 'S P Head, ‘Boots and Shoes’ in D. Alderoft, The Development of British Industry and Foreign Competition, 1875-1914 (London 1968), pp. 162-5. Inspector Ellis in Factory Inspectors’ Report, VPP, vol. 3, no. 49, 1895-6, p. 3; Victorian Yearbook, 1906-7, p. 653; AZ, 1 May 1892, p. 132: Welcome to Bedggoods (n.d.) in Bedggood Papers (ANU Archives); Argus, 9 Jan. 1893: Australian Leather Journal, 15 June 1898, pp. 26, 30, 15 Sept. 1898, pp. 129-30; Leader, 21 July 1894; see also Norm Georgiou, ‘Some Features of the Collingwood Boot and Shoe Industry’ (Econ. Hist. thesis, University of Melbourne, n.d.). 0 Pactory Inspectors’ Report VPP, vol. 3, no. 49, 1895-6, p. 3; ibid., vol. 2, no. 63, 1894, p. 5. 1 Evidence of J. W. Billson (Sec. of VOBU) to Board Appointed to Enquire into the Effect of the Fiscal System, VPP, vol. 2, no. 37*, 1894, qs 8824-6; Edgar M. Hoover, Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries (Cambridge 1937), p. 799; Argus, 9 Jan. 1893. I VOBU, Minutes, 27 Nov. 1893, p. 285. The bootmakers had attempted, unsuccessfully, to start a Co-operative Factory in 1883. For English conditions see A. Fox, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, 1874-1957 (Oxford 1957), esp. ch. 10. 3 VOBU, Minutes, 29 Jan., 12 Feb., 22 Feb. 1894. M Thid., 11 Jan. 1895 (cf. Fitzgerald, The Printers of Melbourne, pp. 75-7); Fraser, Machinery: A Device of the Devil (Melbourne n.d. [e. 1901? ]). mM Others certainly could be added. The Agricultural Implement Workers Union for example went through similar stages (minutes in office of Tinsmiths and Sheet Metal Workers Union, Trades Hall, Melbourne). There was a noticeable falling off of activity by late 1890 (ibid., 27 Nov., 11 Dec. 1890); some discussion of co-operation and other nostrums, including a National Bank (22 Jan. 1891); increasing difficulty in maintaining subscriptions (19 Feb. 1891), and abortive attempts to start an unemployment benefit fund (27 July, 17 Sept., 17 Dec. 1891); ragged resistance to piecework (1 Sept. 1892) and finally the virtual extinction of the society. Also see Pressers Union, Minutes, 1891-4. i UPTS. Minutes, 28 Nov., 7 Dec. 1889, 27 Feb., 22 May, 19 June, 10 July, 21, 28 Aug. 1890. lO" Thid., 5 Feb., 30 July, 8 Oct. 1891. OS UFTS, Rough Minutes, 4. 10. 17, 25 May, 22 June 1893, 4 Apr. 1895, and Annual Report, 1895;

T. Coghlan, Labour and Industry tn Australa (Oxford 1918), vol. 4, p. 2093; Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, p. 118. VOBU, Minutes, 1891-4: Sinclair, Economic Recovery in Victoria, 1894-1599, pp. 94-5.

Three ‘This Modern Babel’ Because the sources are few and meagre, the history of the nineteenth-century Melbourne building industry may never be fully recorded. Several commissioned histories of wider scope have

— 336 -

Notes

appeared since the appearance of this chapter: Oscar Gimesy, Built from Nothing: A History of the Building Industry in Australia, Building Careers Resource Centre, Carlton 1992, and W.R. H. Keast, A History of the Master Builders Association of Victoria: Building Victoria, Master Builders Association, East Melbourne 1994. The technological history of building is better

covered: see Henry J. Cowan, From Wattle and Daub to Concrete and Steel: the Engineering Heritage of Australia’s Buildings, Melbourne University Press, 1998. An indispensable source for the history of individual buildings and architects, which also throws light on the industry, is Miles Lewis, ‘Australian Architecture Index’, 2nd edn, microform, La Trobe Library. ' Westgarth, Half a Century of Australasian Progress, pp. 46-7. - Building Societies’ Gazette, 1 Aug. 1887, p. 142. > John Brine et al., ‘Victoria’s Ferrous Metals Industry, 1840-1910’ (B.Arch. thesis, University of Melbourne, n.d.), pp. 69-72; Blainey, One Hundred Years, Johns and Waygood Limited, 1856-1956, pp. 19-23; Freeland, Architecture in Australia, pp. 161-6, 178. 4 JC, 28 Nov. 1888, p. 5, and see Freeland, op. cit., pp. 176-8. ” For details see Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2, pp. 653, 656, 661; James Moore's is shown in print in Troedel Collection (La Trobe Library); Manufacturer, Feb. 1890, pp. 66-7 (Moreland Steam Saw, Planing and Moulding Mills). * See Shaw, Builders of Melbourne, pp. 27-33. " Bowley, The British Building Industry, p. 350. ° Cf. for example, H. J. Dyos, ‘The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London’,

Victorian Studies, vol. 11, Supplement Summer 1968, pp. 641-90; Ernest Aves, “The Building Trades’ in Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Second Series, Industry (2nd edn, London 1897), vol. 5, pp. 31-161. " For conditions in the 1850s see Campbell, “The Settlement of Melbourne, 1851-1893’ (M.A. thesis), pp. 47-63. 10 AT, 1 June 1886, p. 61.

'l Builder, 10 Sept. 1892, p. 134. ” Tbid., 17 Sept. 1887, p. 297, 2 Nov., p. 422, 23 Nov. 1889, p. 499. 3 Thid., 6 June 1891, p. 451. '! Gray, Letters to England, 1885-1923; Wilkinson, ‘The Life and Architecture of George Gray, 1842-1920’ (B.Arch. thesis).

'’ Letters to England, 11 Jan. 1885. '8 Tpid., 28 Jan. 1885, 24 Apr. 1887; Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 16.

’ See Cannon, The Landboomers, pp. 76-9. 18 The organized resistance of the qualified architects is treated in the next chapter. ' Builder, 27 June 1891, p. 510 (R. C. Brown). ~° Most of the builders borrowing from the Australian Mutual Provident Society, for example, were large city contractors (see Mortgage Loans Ledgers of Australian Mutual Provident society). “! Even in 1888 the majority of ‘builders’ (so described) applying for loans from the Modern Permanent Building Society wanted sums of less than £1000, though occasional loans of up to £3000 were sought for rows of shops or dwellings (see MPBS, Applications for Loans). ““ Building Societies’ Gazette, 13 Mar. 1890, p. 573; Daily Telegraph, 24 Feb. 1890. “5 Building Societies’ Gazette, 30 Jan. 1890, p. 505. “* Gray, loc. cit., 25 Dec. 1885. M. Dowling (see Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2, p. 635) was Irish-born, lived in England for six years, then emigrated to New York where

he worked for nine years and presumably married his ‘corn-fed Yankee’ wife, and finally arrived in Victoria in 1877. He set up his own plastering business in 1882. “> Based on comparison of MPBS loans for 1888 with Melbourne Directory. ““ Builder, 26 Oct. 1889, p. 398. “" Age, 17 July 1890 (Charles Junor Heap). -* According to figures in the 1891 census, 16 per cent of plasterers, 24 per cent of plumbers and 17 per cent of slaters were employers or self-employed.

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Notes

~’ Builder, 17 Sept. 1887, 2 June, 21 July, 4 Aug. 1888, 28 Dec. 1889. °° See John Hetherington, Melba (Melbourne 1967), pp. 15-17. *! Mitchell, Ireland, Pigdon, Amess, Peacock, Gunn, John Wright, T. W. Freeman, Gamlin, Nation, Cockram and Charles Butler were all major shareholders (see Memorandum of Association of Melbourne Builders’ Lime and Cement Co. 1874). A large but declining share of the company’s business was with its own shareholders. ™ Building Societies’ Gazette, 19 June 1890, p. 87. ** Stonemasons Minutes, 1885-8. * Bowley, Irrovations in Building Materials, pp. 50-1; H.W. Robinson, The Economics of Building (London 19389), p. 94 and appendix A; William S. Hilton, Foes to Tyranny: A History of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers (London 1963), chs 15, 16. ” Builder, 23 June 1888, p. 417. * Thid., 13 July 1889. * Thid., 16 Nov., 14 Dec. 1889, 15 Feb., 8 Mar. 1890. ** A bill along these lines was passed by the Legislative Assembly in 1889 and 1890 but discharged by the Legislative Council at the end of each session. The attitude of the Council as a Whole is not clear but many probably felt, as F T. Sargood did, that ‘the contractors were powerful and wealthy and well able to look after themselves’ (VPD, vol. 68, 1891, p. 3412). ” Builder, 10 May 1890, p. 1012. " Tbid., 26 Apr, 10 May 1890. Tbid., 21 June 1890. © Tbid.

™ Gray, Letters to England, 20 Feb. 1886. " Tbid., 8 Mar. 1885.

Argus, 22 Feb. 1888; Builder, 17 Oct. 1891. ' The number of carpenters and joiners emigrating to the Australian colonies jumped from 309 in 1881 to 2137 in 1883, and 1049 in 1884 and remained at over 700 in 1885 and 1886 before subsiding to about. 400 in 1887 and 1888 (Statistzcal Register). " Builder, 7 Sept. 1889 (Inskip).

Argus, 22 Feb. 1888. " Builder, 23 Nov. 1889, 17 Oct. 1891; Building Societies’ Gazette, 1 Aug. 1887. " Builder, 30 Aug. 1890; 13 Oct. 1888. *' Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2. p. 588; ‘Occupations of the People’, Victorian Census, 1891. = For their role in the struggle for the Eight Hour Day see Helen Hughes, ‘The Eight Hour Day and the Development of the Labour Movement in Victoria in the Eighteen-Fifties’, Hzstorzcal Studies, vol. 9, no. 36, May 1961, pp. 396-412; Clive Turnbull, Australian Lives (Melbourne 1965), pp. 23-41: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Victorian Operative Masons’ Society to Inquire into the Origin of the Bight Hours Movement in Victoria (1584) (ANU Archives). > Stonemasons Minutes, 2 Feb., 6 July 1887, 21 Mar., 4 July 1888, 16 July 1890. ’' Minute Book of Comity for Revising the Laws of the Victorian Operative Bricklayers Society, discussion of rule 49, 1873 CANU Archives). » George Hills to secretary of Contractors and Architects Association, 25 June 1883; A. W. Davies

to [George Hills], | Sept. 1884, Bricklayers Letterbook. “Circular re Improver Question’ (inserted in Bricklayers Letterbook). ™ ‘Bricklayer’, Age, 12 July, and article, 16 July 1890.

From figures in Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2, p. 588; Argus, 31 Dec. 1888; ‘Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners’, “History of the Union’ (typescript, n.d., in office of Building Workers Industrial Union): ‘Occupations’, Victorian Census, 1891. ” Builder, 29 Sept. 1888, p. 265. "" Argus, 10, 23 Sept. 1885.

— 338 —

Notes

5! Tbid., 28 Dec. 1888. ® Ibid., 3, 20, 29, 30 Dec. 1888. °° Tbid., 10 Jan. 1889. *t Tbid., 16 Jan. 1889.

“ Tbid., 18 Jan. 1889. %© Age, 17, 18, 19 July 1890.

87 See p. 100.

8 Argus, 16 July 1892. *) See pp. 215-16. ® Builder, 14 Nov. 1891. " Tbid., 19 July 1890; Argus, 15 Feb. 1892. ™ Tbid., 23 Apr. 1892. ™ Tbid., 21 May 1892.

| Thid., 18 Oct., 22 Nov., 20 Dec. 1890, 28 Mar., 25 Apr., 2 May 1891; Proceedings of the Feder-

ated Master Builders’ Associations of Australia, 1890, p. 16. ® Tbid., 29 Nov. 1890. ® Tbid., 7 Mar. 1891, 23 Apr. 1892.

™ See ‘Chiseler’ in Commonweal, 18 Feb. 1893. ® Bricklayers Minutes, 15 June, 20 July, 3 Aug., 14, 21 Dec. 1891. ™ Tbid., 11 Apr., 18 June 1892, 13, 20, 27 Apr., 20 July, 1 Aug. 1891. “9 Tbid., 15 Aug. 1892.

5! Builder, 24 Sept. 1892. “° Bricklayers Minutes, 7 Nov. 1892, 23 Jan., 6, 27 Feb. 1893.

* Brownlie to Seward, 15 Jan. 1892, Brownlie to Clingan, 16 Jan. 1892, Stonemasons Letterbooks. °4 Brownlie to Mellor, 21 Jan. 1892, ibid.

® Operative Stonemasons’ Society Rulebook 1892, rule no. 87; Brownlie to Johnson, 14 June 1892, Stonemasons Letterbooks. “© Brownlie to president of Builders and Contractors Association, 9 May 1892, Stonemasons Letterbooks. *” Stonemasons Minutes, 8 July, 3 Aug. 1892; Brownlie to Clingan, 27 Aug. 1892, Stonemasons Letterbooks. ‘* Brownlie to Adams, 21 July 1893, Stonemasons Letterbooks; on wage rates see Brownlie to Gibbs, 18 Jan. 1898, ibid.

Four Professions and the Public The history and impact of the professions in Australia has yet to receive the kind of comprehensive and analytical treatment that Harold Perkin has given their British counterparts in his superb

book, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, Routledge, London 1989. Much writing on the history of professions is a by-product of the celebratory marking of anniversaries of professional associations, founding acts of parliament, courts, hospitals and other professional institutions. There are important exceptions, however. T. S. Pensabene, The Rise of the Medical Practitioner in Victoria, Australian National University 1980, charts the attempts of medicine to establish its professional status in the face of competition from unauthorized healers and friendly

societies. Evan Willis, Medical Dominance: Division of Labour in Australian Health Care, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1983, places that story in a sociological frame. Some of the best and most critical writing on the history of the medical profession in Melbourne has been stimulated by the

long tradition of commissioned hospital histories, by professional historians, inaugurated with Ken Inglis’s history of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Hospital and Community, Melbourne University Press, 1959. Among the most notable recent additions to this tradition are Bryan Egan, Ways of a Hospital: St Vincent’s, Melbourne, 1890s-1990s, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW 1993. Emma Russell, Bricks or Spirit: The Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, Australian

— 339 -

Notes

Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne 1997, and Janet McCalman’s outstanding Sex and Suffering: Women's Heath and a Women’s Hospital: The Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne, 15561998, Melbourne University Press 1998. Two doctoral theses explore aspects of the organisation and culture of the medical profession in this period: Bryan Egan, ‘Nobler than Missionaries’: Australian Medical Culture, c.1880—c.1930, Monash University 1988, and Monika Wells, ‘Belly Rippers’

to ‘Saviours’: Surgeons, Physicians and the Treatment of the Acute Abdomen, Australia, 18601910, Monash University 1997. Harold Love’s biography of the medico and literary man, James Nield, Victorian Virtuoso, Melbourne University Press 1989, throws light on the medical culture. Writing on the other professions is less extensive. J. R.S. Forbes, The Divided Legal Profession in Australia: History, Rationalisation and Rationale, Law Book Company, Sydney 1979, traces the history of a long debate. J. A. M. L. Robertson, The Australian College of Dentistry: A Century of Dental Education in Victoria, University of Melbourne 1998, and The Dental Board of Victoria: A History of its First Hundred Years, Dental Board of Victoria, Melbourne 1998, deal with aspects of a profession first registered in this period. Since the appearance of J. M. Freeland’s The Making of a Profession: A History of the Growth and Work of the Architectural Institutes in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971, there has not been a great deal of writing about the history of the architectural profession, although studies of individual architects, such as Ursula de Jong, William Wilkinson Wardell, 1823-1599: His Life and Work, Monash University, Clayton 1983, continue to appear. The history of pharmacy is told in Gregory Haines, Pharmacy in Australia: The National Experience, Australian Pharmaceutical Publishing Company, North Sydney 1988, and of accountancy in Rob Linn, Power Progress and Profit: A History of the Australian Accounting Profession, Australian Society of Certified Practising Accountants 1996.

| See for example addresses of Australian students in Britain given in the British Australasian (London) in the late 1880s. - For general developments see Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne 1958), ch. 10. More detailed programmes of utilitarian reformers are contained in C. H. Pearson's Report on Education, VPP, vol. 3, no. 105, 1877-8, the royal commissions on technical education in VPP, vol. 2, no. 29, 1901, and the University of Melbourne in VPP, vol. 2, no. 138, 1904. The numbers of graduates in the main professional faculties were (calendars of the University of Melbourne):

Law Medicine Engineering

1880-4 1885-9038 2752, 96 14 26 1891-4 4] 90) 16

* Based on advertisements in AMG, 1881-2, and the ‘Partnerships’ column of the Argus. ' Builder, 16 May 1891, p. 378. ” Argus, 16 Sept. 1885, p. 10. ° Dec. 1884, p. 71. ' VPD, vol. 77, 1895-6, pp. 225-6 Cisaacs on Companies Bill). “ Based on an analysis of entries in Briick’s Medical Directory (1883 and 1886 editions), membership lists of the Medical Society of Victoria in the AM/J and of the British Medical Associ-

ation in the AMG, and particularly of 103 biographies of medical men in Smith (ed.), The Cyclopedia of Victoria, and Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis. “ Calculated from applications for Registration as Attorneys filed in Public Record Office of Victoria. The sponsors were usually, though not invariably, fathers of the candidate. For more precise figures see Davison thesis, p. 243. '” Leavitt and Lilburn (eds), The Jubilee History of Victoria and Melbourne, vol. 1, p. 43. '! A.S. Gray in presidential address to Victorian Medical Society, AMJ, 1881, p. 18; Australian Law Times, 30 Aug. 1890, p. XXXV. '- Gray, Letters to England, 25 Dec. 1885.

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Notes

Australian Law Times, 28 Feb. 1885, p. CXXVII; A. S. Gray, loc. cit. ‘4 For an interesting theoretical discussion of the thresholds of urban services see W. F Ogburn and O. D. Duncan, ‘City Size as a Sociological Variable’ in Ernest W. Burgess and Donald J. Bogue, Urban Sociology (Chicago 1964), pp. 58-76. Vactorian Census, 1891; Melbourne Directory, 1890. '® For an explanation of the centralization of medical practice see L. Brick, ‘Present State of the Medical Profession in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand’, AMG, Mar. 1893. '" Leavitt and Lilburn (eds), op. cit., p. 43. ‘5 For a useful typology of professional associations, see Geoffrey Millerson, The Qualifying Associations (London 1964), p. 33. !! AMG, Oct. 1883, p. 15. “0 AMJ, 1881, p. 17. This impression is largely borne out by membership lists. “1 Tbid., 15 May 1890, p. 223.

““ AMJ, 15 Feb. 1892, p. 90. The 1892 election was the most vigorously fought in years. For a description see K. S. Inglis, Hospital and Community (Melbourne 1959), pp. 1385-7. “3 See biographies in ADB.

“4 Smith (ed.), The Cyclopedia of Victoria (biographies); for an unsympathetic view of specialization AM./, 15 Jan. 1886, pp. 16-17. *? Melbourne Directory, Victorian Census, 1891. “© For an ‘official’ account of the BMA’s foundations see AMG, Nov. 1881, p. 24, and for a more candid one, see J. W. Springthorpe, ‘The Beginnings of the Victorian Branch, BMA, 1879-1907’ (typescript in AMA Library, cat. no. 743). “" AMG, Nov. 1881, p. 24 (Dr Cutts in first presidential address). “8 AMG, Aug. 1884, p. 252. “" Annual Report of BMA; AMG, Aug. 1882, p. 153; AMJ, 15 Jan. 1885, p. 23.

3° AM, 1889, p. 75. 31 Rules of the Law Institute of Victoria (1892) in Law Institute of Victoria, Papers. Cf. J. B.

Bennett’s evidence to the Select Committee on the Attorneys, Solicitors and Proctors Bill, VPP, vol. 1, D19, 1878.

Australian Law Times, 31 Jan. 1880, p. 76, 24 May 1890, p. CLXXII. 33 See Serle, The Golden Age, p. 49n: Dean, A Multitude of Counsellors, p. 120. 4 From Victorian Law List (1880), List of Counsel at the Bar (a full set is deposited in the Supreme Court Library). This is a crude measure of effective membership of the bar, since it clearly includes a number of individuals who had ceased to practice. Cf. Dean, op. cit., p. 120. * Geoffrey Sawer, ‘Division of a Fused Legal Profession: the Australasian Experience’, University of Toronto Law Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1966, pp. 245-66. *® Australian Law Times, 14 Oct. 1882, p. LXVI, 23 Dec. 1882, p. CXIX, 21 July 1883, p. X, 19 July 1884, pp. XI-XI, 27 Sept. 1884, p. LV, 28 Feb. 1885, p. CXXVII, 18 July 1885, p. XI, 16 Oct. 1886, p. LIX.

7 VPD, vol. 45, 1884, pp. 214-15. *8 Select Committee on Attorneys, Solicitors and Proctors Bill, VPP, vol. 1, D19, 1878, gs 689, 651, 146, 310, 130, 479. * See e.g. W. J. Reader, Professional Men (London 1966). 1 Builder, 9 May 1891, p. 367. 4! VPD, vol. 24, 1876, pp. 300-8, vol. 56, 1887, p. 2188. * Odontological Society of Victoria, Minutes, 1884-7; VPD, vol. 50, 1885, p. 1587, vol. 51, 1886, p. 386, vol. 58, 1886, p. 2016, vol. 56, 1887, pp. 2133-5. 3 Builder, 28 Apr. 1888, p. 265. 4 J. M. Freeland, The Making of a Profession (Sydney 1971), pp. 36—43. * AMJ, 15 May 1890, p. 199. Cf. Inglis, Hospital and Community, ch. 7. 1° AMG, Feb. 1887, p. 127, 1893, p. 97. The estimate of subscriptions is based on figures in the Commissioner’s Report on Friendly Societies, VPP, vol. 2, no. 8, 1890.

— 34] -

Notes

“ AMS, 10 Jan. 1891, p. 20. * Annual Reports of MSV and AMA in AM/ and AMG. " AMJ, 15 Apr. 1891, p. 252. AMS, 15 Mar. 1891, 15 Dec. 1891, pp. 582-5, 15 Jan. 1892, p. 32, 15 Feb. 1893, p. 64. “' VPD, vol. 69, 1892-3, p. 389. = VPD, p. 888. ~ VPD, pp. 746-9, 894-5. “AMT, 15 Aug. 1892, pp. 363-4. ” VPD, vol. 96, 1892-3, p. 1378 (petition). " “Occupations , Victorian Census. ” Builder, 9, 23, 30 May. 8 Aug., 12 Sept., 7 Nov. 1891, 5, 26 Nov. 1892.

* Builder, 22 Aug., 5 Sept. 1891 (qualified architects), 9, 23 May, 6, 13 June, 17 Sept, 1891 (students), 20 Aug, 1892 (builders). ™ Objects of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects quoted Smith (ed.) The Cyclopedia of Victoria, vol. 1, p. 380. " Builder, 6 June 1891, p. 451. '! Tbid.

' VPD, vol. 70, 1892-3, pp. 1522-4. ' See Young's introductory speech VPD, vol. 66, 1892-3, p. 915; Petitions listed in Minutes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Session 1891, pp. 311, 321. '" VPD, vol. 66, 1892-3, p. 931 (Fitzgerald).

' Tid.

“© “Committee on the Bar Association’, Law Institute Special Committees (MU Archives).

28 June 1889. ' See ‘profiles’ in JC, 12 July 1889, 31 July 1894, 26 Feb. 1895; biographies in Smith (ed.), op. cit., vol. 1, p. 391. " IC, 28 June 1889. ™ Statistics of membership in Smith (ed.), op. cit., p. 392; JC, 24 June 1890, 23 June 1891, 2 July 1895, 27 Aug. 1891.

‘T Companies Act. 1896 (59 Vict. 1482), section 31 2b. The institutes accredited were the Incorporated Institute of Accountants of Victoria, the Federal Institute of Accountants (see Smith (ed.), op. cit., p. 392), the Australian Institute of Incorporated Accountants (see VPD, vol. 81,

1896. pp. 220-1), the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (see Smith (ed.), op. cit.. p. 391) and the Society of Accountants and Auditors. = T Fink, VPD, vol. 81, 1896, p. 221. “JIC, 12 Feb. 1895, p. 5: see also 3, 17 July 1894.

Australian, 4 Aug. 1888, p. 265.

Five ‘A Great Quasi-mercantile Establishment’ It is surprising that the revolution in administration that has swept through the Australian public sector in the past two decades has not stimulated new interest in the history of the Australian public service; but perhaps historical amnesia better suits the reformers’ purpose. Studies have appeared of individual departments and agencies such as the Department of Lands (Raymond Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain: Space and the Public Interest in Victoria, 1536-84, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1989), the Victoria Police (Robert Haldane, The People’s Force: A History of the Victoria Police, Melbourne University Press 1986), and the Auditor-General’s Department (Peter Yule, /i7 the Public Interest: 150 Years of the Victorian Auditor-General 's Office, Melbourne 2002). ' Royal Commission on the Civil Service, VPP, vol. 2, no. 10, 1875, p. xxviii.

- ‘Oecupations , Victorian Census. * Cf. James R. Scobie, ‘Buenos Aires as a Commercial Bureaucratic City, 1880-1910', American Historical Review, vol. 77, no. 4, Oct. 1972, p. 1072; A. F Davies, Australian Democracy (Melbourne 1958), p.3.

~ 342 —-

Notes

4 Adelaide and the Country, 1870-1917 (Melbourne 1973), p. 151. » Civil Service Commission 1858-9, VPP, vol. 2, no. 19, 1859-60, p. 10. ® On the extent of ‘supernumerary’ employment see VPD, vol. 48, 1883, pp. 661-9; (James Service), Royal Commission 1878, loc. cit., pp. xvi-xvil. The accuracy of these general statements may be confirmed by an inspection of the civil service lists in the Government Gazette. “ W. Ravenscroft Stephen, ‘Civil Service Reform’ in Chief Secretary’s Department, Inward Correspondence, A2075, p. 3. Unhappily the archival records of the public service are very incomplete. The papers of the Public Service Board, which superintended the service from 1883, have been destroyed. Some of its communications are to be found in the records of other departments, especially the Chief Secretary's and the Premier’s. But since much of the information sought by the board was gathered by returnable questionnaires, the departmental records often record only the receipt of a letter and not the letter itself or its reply. The records of the Public Service Association also seem to have been destroyed. ® Act 160 (1862), section 21; Stephen, ibid., p. 2. ” Royal Commission, Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 10, 1873, p. 12; 25 Vict. 160 Schedule; Royal Commission, Evidence qs 1402-5, 1416-18 (C. H. Symonds), 1667-8 (E. S. Symonds). '? Royal Commission, Report, loc. cit., pp. 19-20; Royal Commission, Evidence, gs 1608 (C. H. Symonds), 2517 (Jones), 3492 (Steavenson). '! YPD, vol. 73, 1893, pp. 1762, 1784. 2 See P. Loveday, ‘Patronage and Politics in New South Wales, 1856-70’, Public Administration. vol. 18, 1959, pp. 341-85. 3 e.g. D. Newell to Chief Secretary, 16 May 1873, Chief Secretary's Department, Inward Correspondence. 420 Nov. 1871 (my emphasis). Chief Secretary's Department, Outward Correspondence. ' Parnaby, ‘The Economic and Political Development of Victoria, 1877-1881’ (Ph.D. thesis): John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy (Melbourne 1968), esp. chs 6-9; H. G. Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria (London 1964), vol. 2, ch. 8. '© Shillinglaw to Labilliere, 29 Nov. 1879, Shillinglaw to Knight, 6 Aug. 1880, Shillinglaw Letterbook. " See e.g. VPD, vol. 44, 1883, p. 902 (Walker). 'S For evidence of Service’s early concern with public service reform, see W. H. Archer to James Service, 7 June 1880, Archer Papers. '" Moore, Reform of the Civil Service (Melbourne 1880); John Wisker, ‘Civil Service Reform’, Victorian Review, 1 Dec. 1882, pp. 156-65. “0 21 Aug. 1880. Archer’s authorship is established by a note in the Archer Papers (9/2/7). Other articles in the series on the ‘Past and Present of the Victorian Service’ and civil service reform in the United States appeared on 28 Aug., 11, 24 Sept., 16 Oct., 10 Dec., 1890. According to Archer's application for the position of public librarian (Public Record Office), he had been employed by the government to investigate the civil service and draft a bill for its reorganization. But I have not seen a copy of such a draft bill. “! Chief Secretary’s Department, Inward Correspondence, A2075. “- ‘Trade and Customs Recommendations’, ibid. “8 AT Vict. 773, preamble; VPD, vol. 43, 1883, p. 661.

-! The more general questions of interpretation were settled in Browne v. the Queen (Victorian Law Reports, vol. 12, 1886). ~” See for example Lucy Brown, The Board of Trade and the Free Trade Movement, 1830-42 (Oxford 1958), esp. ch. 2. “° VPD, vol. 72, 1893, p. 1378. -" Government Gazette, 25 Jan. 1884; Argus, 11, 17 Jan. 1884, Smith (ed.), The Cyclopedia of Victoria, vol. 1, pp. 259-60; Fred Johns, An Australian Biographical Dictionary (1934), p. 181; P. Mennell, The Dictionary of Australian Biography (1892), p. 106. “’ Argus, 12 Dec. 1888 (evidence of Templeton to S. A. Royal Commission on Civil Service). “” PSB Report, VPP, vol. 4, no. 65, 1884, pp. 3~4.

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Notes

*° Tbid., vol. 2, no. 3, 1885, p. 3.

*! Ibid., p. 6; see also Templeton’s remarks during hearings, Argus, 22 May 1885. * Government Gazette, 1885, pp. 368-495, gives a full listing of officers with their classifications under the two acts. Most reclassifications had the effect of ‘demotions’ and the ‘administrative’ departments (Treasury, Chief Secretary's and the Registrar-General’s) seem to have been more drastically affected than most. * Argus, 25 Sept. 1885 (E. Joske). Joske attempted to calculate promotion chances by estimating the average age of officers in each class, the probable rates of ‘displacement’ by death or retirement, and the number of officers in each class competing for places in the classes above them. But he underestimated the rate of displacement by taking retirements only from the first class and overestimated the number of competitors by including all officers of the class instead of those promotable by virtue of seniority. * Argus, 24 Sept. 1885. * Argus, 15 Aug. 1885 (William Thwaites), PSB Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 3, 1885, pp. 8-9. “ Argus, 15 June 1885. * Argus, 25 July 1885. * Argus, 8 Sept. 1885. Argus, 22 Sept., 7 Nov. 1885; Premier's Office, Inward Correspondence P3045A, 12 Oct. 1885. *” ‘Occupations’, Victorian Census, 1881, 1891 (from analysis of occupations described Introduction notes 21 and 29.) ‘! PSB Report, VPP, vol. 2, no. 10, 1893, pp. 3-5. * PSB Report, 1888, VPP, vol. 4, no. 121, 1889, p. 10; PSB Report, 1890, VPP, vol. 6, no. 176, 1891, p. 11. *} H. Moors, memorandum on ‘Shorthand and the Typewriter in the Public Service’, 10 Feb. 1888, Chief Secretary's Department, Inward Correspondence, L3040; T. R. Wilson to Public Service Board, 13 Mar. 1891, Chief Secretary’s Department, Correspondence, R2335; PSB Report, 1884, p. 4, 1890, p. 12, 1892, VPP, vol. 4, no. 1384, 1892-3, p. 10. 4 VPD, vol. 56, 1887, p. 2288; Argus, 12 Dec. 1888 (evidence to SA Royal Commission on Civil Service). PSB Report; 1887, VPP, vol. 3, no. 114, 1888, pp. 4-5; 1889, VPP, vol. 4, no. 121, pp. 7-8; 1889, VPP, vol. 4, no. 159, 1890, p. 7. ’ Argus, 12 Dec. 1888. " VPD, vol. 56, 1887, pp. 2281-92, vol. 59, 1888, p. 1912; Daily Telegraph, 4 July 1888; Return of Officers who resigned from Public Service, VPP, vol. 1, C17, 1888. 4% VPD, vol. 56, 1887, pp. 2265-72.

VPD, pp. 2400-10, 2495. ” VPD, vol. 59, 1888, pp. 1912, 2347-8, vol. 60, 1889, pp. 260-71. »! PSB Report, 1891, pp. 14-15, 1892, VPP, vol. 4, no. 184, 1892-3, p. 18. * Argus, 14,21, 23 Mar., 2,27 Apr., 20, 30 May 1892, 56 Vict. 1276 (1892) Schedule. ™ See e.g. VPD, vol. 44, 1883, pp. 889-92 (C. H. Pearson at a time when he was leader-writer and parliamentary spokesman for Syme). For an account of Syme’s ‘anti-competitive’ views see La Nauze, Political Economy in Australia, pp. 113-15. “' See C. E. Sayers, David Syme: a Life (Melbourne 1965), ch. 19; Cannon, The Landboomers, ch. 6.

»” VPD vol. 57, 1888, pp. 243-63, vol. 58, 1888, pp. 1491-5; VPP, vol. 1, C1, 1888.

Age, 19, 26 Nov., 14 Dec. 1892. Argus, 25 Nov. 1892; Age, 2, 9 Dec. 1892. ’ 8 Nov. 1892. *’ Public Service Board and Chief Secretary's Department, VPP, vol. 1, nos C3, C8, 1892-3. 6 57 Viet. 1813 (1893), VPD, vol. 72, 1893, pp. 1089-123. "1 57 Vict. 1324 (1893), VPD, vol. 72, 1898, pp. 1369-72. ' VPD, vol. 72, p. 1380.

—~ 344 —

Notes

&§ VPD, vol. 73, p. 1453.

64 VPD, vol. 73, pp. 1454, 1503-4, 1948, 2094. © PSB Report, 1894, VPP, vol. 2, no. 14, 1894-5, pp. 5-6.

Six The Social Dynamics of a Metropolis The development of communications and their influence on the process of urbanization, a main theme of this short chapter, has been developed in other studies, such as Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications, Nelson, Melbourne 1984, K. T. Livingstone, The Wired Continent: The Communications Revolution and Federating Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1991, and my own, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Tome, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1993. ' An Introduction to Economic History (New York 1922), pp. 186-7. * An Economic History of Australia (Cambridge 1930), p. 298. > The Rush to Be Rich, pp. 267, 271. 1 Migration and Urban Development (London 1972), chs 2, 4. » Many of these inventions were of American origin but were often introduced to Australia via Britain.

* As recent Marxist critics of ‘urban sociology’ have argued. See notably, essays by Manuel Castells, ‘Is There an Urban Sociology?’ and “Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology’ in C. G. Pickvance (ed.), Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (London 1976). * See the seminal essay by Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (1938) in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss (eds), Czttes and Society (New York 1957). Wirth’s formulation has been subjected to trenchant criticism by several recent writers. See for example Castells, op. cit.; R. N. Morris, Urban Sociology (London 1968); Brian J. L. Berry, The Human Consequences of Urbanisation (London 1973), pp. 14-17, 30-5; R. E. Pahl, Whose City? (London 1970, Pelican 1976), chs 10, 12. It is generally agreed by his critics that Wirth’s idea of ‘urbanism’, like many of the other contributions of the ‘Chicago School’ of urban sociologists, was culturebound to the late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century American city. It does not apply for example to the traditional, pre-industrial city or, strictly, to cities in contemporary planned societies (Berry, op. cit., chs 3, 4). Though compare Castells’s view that many ‘capitalist’ features persist in Soviet cities (op. cit., pp. 66-7, n. 21). Like other Progressive intellectuals, Wirth exaggerated the ‘pathological’ aspects of city life (Berry, op. cit., p. 34), yet showed little understanding of their economic or class components (Pahl, op. cit., pp. 238-9). All these criticisms have weight but, in my view, leave Wirth’s analysis of the internal dynmics of the late nineteenth-century city—such as Melbourne—relatively unimpaired. One can agree that ‘urbanism’ is an unsatisfactory basis for a general theory, without denying its value as a component in a micro-theory of capitalist urbanization. * For an attempted analysis of the role of communications in urban growth, see Richard L. Meier, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge Mass. 1962). On the effects of communications ‘overload’ see esp. ch. 4. ” On communications developments generally see annual reports of the postmaster-general in VPP.

'" See for example Alan R. Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban Industrial Growth, 1500-1914 (Cambridge Mass. 1966), ch. 3. '! See statistics of ‘Patents Applied for and Granted’ in Statistical Register.

Seven Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities I have placed the development of the Australian suburb in international context in ‘Australia— The First Suburban Nation?’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 22, no. 1, November 1995, pp. 40—

74, and in the longer course of Australian history in ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb’ in Louise Johnson (ed.), Suburban Dreaming. An Interdisciplinary Approach to

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Notes

Australian Cities, Deakin University Press, Waurn Ponds, Vic. 1994, pp. 99-113. The suburban character of Australian cities in relation to their North American counterparts is also discussed in Lionel Frost, The New Urban Frontier, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney 1991, chs 2,5. In delineating the suburban character of late-nineteenth-century Melbourne I may have overemphasized the predominance of the single-family detached dwelling—a bias challenged by Seamus O’Hanlon in Together Apart: Boarding House, Hostel and Flat Life in Pre-war Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne 2002. There has been a great deal of writing on the history of the Australian house since the appearance of this chapter. Robert Irving (ed.), The History and Design of the Australian House, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1985, is a valuable account of stylistic and technical aspects; the social history of the house is better dealt with in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 2000; I have expanded on the relationship between immigration and domestic ideals in ‘Colonial Origins of the Australian Home’ in ibid., pp. 6-25. Similarly, the brief references to suburban gardening styles may be supplemented by entries in Richard Aitkin (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian Garden History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 2002. The most thorough statistical study of Melbourne’s social topography is Lesley Fricker, Some Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Melbourne’s Urbanisation Process, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne 1978. For further detail on the development of three of the suburbs—Hawthorn, St Kilda, Footscray—used as examples in this and the next chapter see: Victoria Peel, Deborah Zion and Jane Yule, A History of Hawthorn, Melbourne University Press in association with the City of Hawthorn 1993; Gillian Upton, The George: St Kilda Life and Times, Venus Bay Books, Richmond 2001; John Lack, A History of Footscray, Hargreen Publishing Co., North Melbourne 1991. Ethnic segregation, a topic lightly touched on here, is the subject of a more thorough study by Chris McConville, ‘Catholics and Social Mobility in Melbourne and Sydney’, Australia 1588, no. 2, August 1979, pp. 55-65: McConville, Croppies, Celts and Catholics: The Trish tn Australia, Edward Arnold, Caulfield, Vic. 1986. The outlook and motivation of the landboomers has been a subject of intermittent interest to historians. Geoffrey Curr, “Liberalism, Localism and Suburban Development in Melbourne 1870-1900", Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 74, April 1980, pp. 4158, is a persuasive revisionist account stressing their gold rush antecedents. Two notable landboomers, Thomas Bent and Matthias Larkin, are the subject of more detailed study in Margaret Glass, Tommy Bent: Bent by Name, Bert by Nature, Melbourne University Press, 1993, and Susan Priestley, South Melbourne. A History, Melbourne University Press 1995, pp. 167-73. The history of Melbourne's public transport system has been a popular subject for local historians and railways and tramways enthusiasts. Some of these works contain valuable social as well as technical information. David Beardsell, The Outer Circle: A History of the Oakleigh to Fairfield Park Railicay, Australian Railway Historical Society (Victorian Division), Melbourne 1979: D. F Jowett and I. G. Weickhardt, Retarn to Rosstown: Railways, Land Sales and Sugar Beet Ventures in Caulfield, Rosstown Historical Research Group, Mordialloc, Vic. 1978; and R.L. Hudson, Steam Suburban, Windsor Publications, Melbourne 1969, are good examples. Robert Lee’s forthcoming history of the Victorian railways will offer a new synthesis. There are simlar popular books on the history of the trarmways system, but John D. Keating, Mind the Curve! A History of the Cable Trams, Melbourne University Press, 1970, remains the best overview. The history of other utilities, gas, water and sewerage, is covered in John D. Keating, The Lambent Flame, Melbourne University Press, 1974, and Tony Dingle and Carolyn Rasmussen, Vital Connections. Melbourne and its Bourd of Works, 1891-1991, Melbourne University Press 1991. A related subject, neglected in this book, is the development of Melbourne's road system: see Max Lay, Melbourne Miles: The Story of Melbourne's Roads, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne 2003. ' Franklyn, A Glance at Australia in 1880, pp. 172-3. - Thirty Short Poems, pp. 144-5. * See for example J. R. Seeley, R. A. Sim and E. W. Loosley, Crestwood Heights (New York 1956),

pp. 4-5, William M. Dobriner, Class 7n Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs 1963), ch. 3.

— 346 -

Notes

+ Thomas’s Guide to Melbourne, p. 66. > Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday (Melbourne 1961), p. 317. ® Vale Collection of Real Estate Maps, vol. 5, no. 20 (La Trobe Library). "e.g. Australasian, 7 Aug. 1885, p. 489; Building Societies’ Gazette, 1 Feb., p. 503, 3 Apr. 1888, pp. 657-8. °C. Boyne Luffman, The Principles of Gardening for Australia (Melbourne 1903), p. 44. The names cited in the text are selected from the 1898-9 St Kilda ratebook. " Vale Collection, vol. 6, no. 22. '0 Luffman, op. cit., p. 45.

'! Harris, Woman—the Angel of the Home and the Saviour of the World, p. 1. 2 An Old Housekeeper, The Australian Housewives’ Manual, p. 94. 3 Anon., Australian Etiquette, p. 222. 4 Buildings Societies’ Gazette, 22 May 1889, p. 44. Tbid.; Australian Etiquette, p. 224; The Australian Housewives’ Manual, p. 105. 'S Australian Etiquette, p. 224. '" Tbid., pp. 226-7. 18 An Old Housekeeper, Men and How to Manage Them, pp. 35-6, 39, 106. ') See esp. W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven 1957), pp. 341-8; Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell. “0 Argus, 25 Oct. 1884. “1 Australasian, 29 Mar. 1879, p. 6. “2 Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, p. 37. “> Australasian, 25 July 1885, p. 186; Argus, 28 Aug. 1885. See also Alec Bagot, Coppin the Great (Melbourne 1965), and C. R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church (Melbourne 1971), pp. 195-6 and passim. “4 Universal Building Society, Pamphlet of Useful Information for Persons Wishing Either to Build, Borrow or Invest (bound with some editions of Melbourne Directory for 1885). *> Based on tabulation of entries in 1898-9 Hawthorn ratebook. “© Australasian Building Societies’ and Mortgage Companies’ Gazette, Home Truths for Home Seekers, p. 48. “" See pp. 00-00. “* Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management (1859-61, 1968 facsimile), p. 20. “" Compare the similar broad patterns in Boston described in Sam B. Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge 1962), ch. 1. 3° See for example Barrett, The Inner Suburbs, ch. 4. 31 See Boyd, Australia’s Home, p. 48. ** 13 June 1888. 3° Morris (ed.), Picturesque Australasia, vol. 1, p. 58. 31H. J. Dyos, ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, Sept. 1967, p. 27.

» Age, 2 Feb. 1884; Australasian, 26 Feb., 12 Aug. 1881. © Building Societies’ Gazette, Sept. 1886, p. 53. >” This pattern still largely survives. See FL. Jones, Dimensions of Urban Social Structure: The Social Areas of Melbourne (Canberra 1969). 38 Argus, 6 Dec. 1884, p. 4. 3 See Niall Brennan, John Wren: Gambler (Melbourne 1971); Frank Hardy, Power without Glory (Melbourne 1959). 419 Kiddle, op. cit., ch. 15.

4! Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown (London 1952), p. 53, and see his other novels, The Montforts (1928), A Difficult Young Man (1955) and Outbreak of Love (1957), for a portrait of the St Kilda gentry.

“ Thomas’s Guide to Melbourne, p. 77; R. P. Whitworth, The Official Handbook & Guide to Melbourne (Melbourne 1880), p. 215.

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Notes

© From survey of 1883-4 St Kilda ratebook. ™ R. J. Johnston, ‘The Location of High Status Residential Areas’, Geografiska Annaler 48, ser. B (1966), pp. 23-35.

Thomas, op. cit., p. 76. Argus, 6 Sept. 1884. ™ Argus, 6 Dec. 1884; Thomas, op. cit., p. 71.

Argus, 29 Nov. 1884, p. 4. " Argus, 9 Aug. 1884, p. 13. See also Barrett, op. cit., passim. Argus, 16 Aug. 1884, p. 13. *l Argus, 19 June 1885, p. 7.

™ Parliamentary Standing Commmittee on Railways, Enquiry into the Northern Lines, VPP, vol. 2, no. 3, 1891, g. 1317; Report of Select Committee ... on the Suburban Tramways Company Bill, VPP, vol. 1, 1891, q. 88. ” From survey of 1883-4 Collingwood ratebook. ™! Argus, 30 Aug. 1884. » Whitworth, op. cit., p. 213.

J. W. McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Sept. 1970, pp. 125-8. ~ Argus, 30 Aug. 1884. °”* Hall, “Some Long-period Effects of the Kinked Age Distribution of the Population of Australia,

1861-1961, Economic Record, vol. 39, Mar. 1963, pp. 46-7, Kelley, ‘Demographic Change and Economic Growth in Australia, 1861-1911°, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, ser. 2, vol. 5, no. 3, Spring/Summer 1968, pp. 245-6. ™ Cf R.J. Johnston, “Some Tests of Intra-urban Population Mobility: Melbourne, Australia’, Urban Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, Feb. 1969, pp. 51-2. "0 12 Mar. 1886, as quoted in Barrett, op. cit., p. 144; Ron White, ‘Presbyterian People in Victoria, 1880-1900° (B.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1964), p. 30, fn. 52. I have also attempted to trace the origins of new settlers in some streets of Footscray and Hawthorn. '! See table and map in Davison thesis, p. 331. ' Enquiry into the Northern Lines, VPP, vol. 2, no. 3, 1891, q. 663. ™ Building Societies Gazette, Aug. 1886, p. 41; Argus, 25 Oct. 1884; Vale Collection, vol. 5, no. 10. *T From an analysis of lists of councillors, Victorian Municipal Directory, list of building society directors, Building Societies’ Gazette, July 1886, p. 34. ™ Weston Bate, “Thomas Bent’, ADB, vol. 3: Cannon, The Landboomers, Beever and Freeman, ‘Directors of Disaster? , Hconomic Record, vol. 43, Mar. 1967, pp. 119-26.

" Hawthorn and Boroondara Standard, The History of Hawthorn to 1895, p. 98; D. M. Gibb, ‘The Emergence of a Bavside Suburb: Sandringham, 1850-1900' (M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971): Ross Peacock, ‘Green and Gold Boomers’ (B.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973). “e.g, Victoria Sugar Refinery, Yarraville; Northcote Brick Company.

"Argus, | Jan. 1889. ™ McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century , loc. cit., p. 114.

" Harrigan, Victorian Raliways to “62. “' Argus, 8 July 1882. ™ RLL. Wettenhall, Railway Management and Politics in Victoria, 1856-1906 (Canberra 1961), ch. 3. “e.g. Coburg line, Argus, 15 Aug. 1883; Glen Iris, 5 July, 8 Aug. 1882, 17 Oct. 1884. " VPD, vol. 47, 1884, p. 2037. ™ For a fuller account see M. A. Venn, ‘The Octopus Act and Empire Building by the Victorian Railways during the Land Boom’ (M.A. prelim thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973). ™ Argus, 22 Oct. 1884. In fact, after a spate of later additions, the total cost was nearer &5 million and the length 1200 miles.

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Notes

“ From Victorian Railways Commissioners’ Reports.

® W.C. Kernot in Alexander Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and Its Metropolis, vol. 2, pp. 17-28, and his The Extension of Rail and Tramways. See also Enquiry into the Northern Lines, loc. cit., qs 1, 1383, 151, 189 and Board Appointed to Enquire into the Working and Management of the Railways, VPP, vol. 3, no. 71, 1895-6, qs 1862-5. ™ The History of Hawthorn to 1895, pp. 98-106; Argus, 29 Nov. 1884; Melbourne Directory, 1880-90; Vale Collection, vol. 3, no. 28, vol. 5, nos. 20, 76, 108, 122, 126, 130, 149, 153, 182, 188, vol. 6, nos. 32, 48, 58, 60, 78, 1380, 186; Survey of 1883-4 Hawthorn ratebook. 5° 6 Sept. 1884. 8! David Gaunson, Argus, 15 Oct. 1884. 8“ Enquiry into the Northern Lines, loc. cit., q. 2. 83 Argus, 8 Oct. 1884.

“t See Harrigan, Victorian Railways to 62, pp. 101-8; Blainey, A History of Camberwell, pp. 50-4. 5> See meetings reported in Argus, 2, 28 June, 2 Aug. 1883, 22 Oct. 1884. 86 See e.g. ‘Engineer’ in Argus, 21 Oct. 1884. Ss’ Venn, op. cit., 36-8.

58 See Blainey op. cit., p. 65. 5° Select Committee on the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company’s Bill, VPP, vol. 2, 1882. "0 See Keating, Mind the Curve!, chs 2-4.

*! Compare bus routes as given in Wimpole’s Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne ..., p. 86, and tram routes as in Sutherland (ed.), op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 22-3. "= Select Committee on the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company’s Additional Branches Bill, VPP, vol. 1, 1884.

Argus, 9 Nov. 1935; JC, 15 Dec. 1886, p. 3. “4 Enquiry into the Northern Lines, loc. cit., q. 1177; Argus, 7 Dec. 1888. » Argus, 7 May 1885. — ” Select Committee on Tramways Act 1890 Amendment Bill, VPP, vol. 1, 1891; Builder, 16 Nov.

1889, p. 466. Select Committee on Suburban Tramways Company Bill, VPP, 1890, vol. 1, pp. 5, 48. For other schemes in Essendon and Brunswick see Buzlder, 12 Apr. 1890, p. 946: Argus 20 Nov. 1888. “ Argus, 30 Apr. 1884. "8 Enquiry into the Northern Lines, loc. cit., gq. 107, H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport (Leicester 1969), p. 200. ™ Argus, 12, 14, 27, 29 Sept., 13 Oct. 1881. 100 Argus, 14, 25 Jan., 28 Feb., 6 Mar., 13 Apr., 1882; Age, 9 Mar. 1882: Victorian Railways Book Timetables, 1883, 1884-5, 1887. 101 See Wettenhall, op. cit., pp. 34-6. 102 Argus, 2 Dec. 1880, 13 July 1881, 28 June, 4 Sept. 1884. ' Argus, 3 Apr., 15 Sept., 1, 5, 18, 28 Oct., 18 Nov. 1881; 8, 29 Mar., 25 Aug. 1882. f Argus, 30 Oct. 1884, p. 9. 1 Enquiry into the Northern Lines, loc. cit., qs 465, 1295-6. 1% Tbid., q. 73.

1" The two-mile line cost £211 000—the highest cost per mile of any line except the Flinders Street viaduct. It was estimated, in 1903, that if it had been constructed to the 1890 specifications, it would have cost £359 000. In its first year of operation the line attracted only 663 000 more Collingwood passengers than it had in 1891, and the suburb continued to have a very low per capita passenger ratio (26). It may be argued that the line justified itself by shortening journeys to the city from the Heidelberg and Northcote districts, but there was little increase in traffic over 1891 levels in the Heidelberg line, and though passengers increased in Northcote, the effect of the improved service cannot be isolated from the simultaneous decline of the Northcote Tramway (see Keating, op. cit., pp. 117-19). Victorian Railways Commissioners’ Report, 1908, VPP, vol. 2, no. 19, 1903, p. 6, appendix.

— 349 —-

Notes

Argus, 23 July 1892. Statement ... by the Victorian Railways Commissioners (on) Proposed New Lines of Railway, VPP, vol. 1, Al, 1890. '" Building Societies’ Gazette, 24 May 1890, p. 648. ''T Kelley, loc. cit.; Hall, loc. cit., p. 47. = Victorian Yearbook, 1890, p. 268; JC, 7 Feb. 1890, p. 6.

' Butlin, Investment tn Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900, pp. 414-15; Hall, Lhe Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Econom,y 1852-1900, p. 129: Beever, ‘Victoria's Railway Spree: a Reappraisal’, Melbourne Historical Journal, vol. 10, 1971,

pp. 39-44. )

'' Victorian Railways Commissioners’ Report, 1891, VPP, vol. 2, 1891, p. XI. ''” Traffic figures in Victorian Railways Commissioners’ Annual Reports.

This was characteristically the case with country lines. Keating, op. cit., p. 56. 'S Victorian Railways Commissioners’ Annual Reports, appendix.

41 Vict. 586; Metropolitan Gas Company, Jubilee 1878-1928. Report of Select Committee of Legislative Assembly upon the Metropolitan Gas Company’s Bill, VPP, vol. 1, D24, 1877-8: Metropolitan Gas Company, Compendium of Lectures ... pp. 47-8; Argus, 28 May 1885: AIBR, 16 Aug. 1887, p. 482. '" AIBR, 15 Feb. 1886. pp. 76-7, 16 Aug. 1887, p. 482. =| ATBR, 16 Aug. 1890, p. 576, 16 Feb. 1888, p. 87. '~ AIBR, 16 Feb. 1888, p. 87; Metropolitan Gas Company, Compendium of Lectuyes ..., pp. 17-18. ‘5 AIBR, 17 Feb. 1890, p. 109. ‘| David Merrett, ‘A Note on Excess Housing and the End of Melbourne’s Building Boom’. I am indebted to Mr. Merrett for his permission to draw on this unpublished paper. I” Building Societies’ Gazette, 18 Dec. 1890, p. 410. ~" From Victorian Census, Habitations’. =" From Victorian Yearbook, ‘Municipal Statistics’. '* From municipal ratebooks—median net annual values (see chapter 9). "From McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’, loc. cit. " ATIBR, 18 Feb. 1892, p. 121; Al, 1 Feb. p. 55, 1 May, pp. 129, 144, 1 June, p. 174, 1 Oct. 1891, p. 399; Metropolitan Gas Company, Compendium of Lectures ..., p. 48.

! Board Appointed to Enquire into the Working and Management of the Railways, loc. cit., q. 2052. 2 Argus, 6 May 1892.

Argus, 4 July 1891. ' AIBR, 17 Aug 1893, p. 788, 18 Aug. 1894, p. 551; JC, 9 Apr., p. 6,21 May 1895, p. 6; AZ, 1 Aug. 1893, p. 229.

Eight A City of Freehold Homes’ The Australian tradition of home-ownership has continued to attract historical attention. Blair Badcock, ‘Home Ownership and the Illusion of Egalitarianism’ in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of Furopean Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne 2000, is up-to-date survey. R. V. Jackson, ‘Building Societies and the Workers in Melbourne in the 1880s’, Australian Economic History Review, no. 47, November 1984, pp. 28-38, challenged the prominent role I gave to building societies in explaining high levels of working-class home-ownership, arguing from a fresh analysis of Modern Permanent Building Society records that most loans went to middleclass speculators. If we accept this conclusion, we are left to puzzle, as David Merrett (Paying for It All in Troy (ed.), pp. 237-53) does, about how working people secured the funds for homebuilding or purchase, as they indubitably did. It seems likely, on the basis of American and Canadian studies, that families played an important role, though documentation of these relation-

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Notes

ships is scant. The obverse of home-ownership, tenancy, has been the subject of an excellent LaTrobe University PhD thesis by Terry Grigg: Landlord and Tenant Relations, Melbourne, 1860-1980. Further analyses of ratebooks in particular localities have supplemented and refined the estimates of home-ownership levels given here. See especially data in Jane Beer, Charles Fahey, Patricia Grimshaw and Melanie Raymond, Colonial Frontiers and Family Fortunes: Two Studies of Rural and Urban Victoria, History Department, University of Melbourne,1989, pp. 118-21; Rosemary Kiss, Neither Power nor Glory: A Study of the Origin and Development of the Suburb of Fitzroy, Melbourne, in the Nineteenth Century, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, and John Lack, A History of Footscray. pp. 117-21. When the results of these studies are factored

into my metropolitan estimate of home-ownership in the boom period (45.5 per cent), they suggest a slight reduction, to perhaps 41 or 42 per cent. Philippa Mein Smith and Lionel Frost, ‘Home Ownership in Adelaide, 1881-1911, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 35, March

1995, pp. 40-55, demonstrate that home-ownership rates in that city were around 35 per cent, higher than Sydney’s but lower than Melbourne’s. ' Building Socteties’ Gazette, 13 June 1888, p. 96. * Ibid., 14 Aug. 1890, p. 172. On the primitive sense of territory, see Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (London 1969), esp. ch. 9. On similar ideological themes in an English con-

text, see Albert Mansbridge, Brick upon Brick (London 1934), p. 34; Seymour J. Price, Building Societies: Their Origin and History (London 1958), ch. 1, and the same writer's From Queen to Queen: The Centenary Story of the Temperance Building Society (London 1954), ch. 4. * Australasian Building Societies’ and Mortgage Companies’ Gazette, Home Truths for Home Seekers, pp. 16, 57. 4 Tbid., p. 55, and cf. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne 1958) pp. 168-9. » Based on a sampling of turnover rates in Collingwood, St Kilda and Footscray. ® Home Truths for Home Seekers, p. 55. " Stephan Thernstrom, ‘Working Class Social Mobility in Industrial America’ in Melvin Richter (ed.), Essays in Theory and History (Cambridge Mass. 1970), pp. 221-88. 5 Building Societies’ Gazette, 2 Jan. 1889, p. 622. ” Calculated from John Danks and Co., Wages Book. Residential mobility rates calculated from ratebooks. '!° These patterns of mobility possiblv reflect the kind of close kinship network that observers

have detected in English cities both in the late nineteenth century and more recently (see Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London 1957), part 1). 'l Building Societies’ Gazette, 19 Dec. 1888, p. 576. Home Truths for Home Seekers, p. 9. Building Societies’ Gazette, 3 July 1887, p. 105. + Cf. Cannon, The Landboomers, p. 3; Meudell, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift, p. 29. Building Societies’ Gazette, 15 July 1887, p. 113, 13 Mar. 1889, p. 764. '® Tbid., 1 June 1887, p. 55.

’ Tbid., Sept. 1886, p. 49. 'S Tbid., 11 Sept. 1889, p. 236, 2 May 1888, p. 4, 13 Mar. 1889, p. 764. '? Universal Building Societies, Pamphlet of Useful Information for Persons Wishing Either to Build, Borrow, or Invest, p. 10. “° See Butlin, /nvestment in Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900, pp. 262-6; calculations are based on a study of advertised rents in the Age, the table of building society repayments in Universal Building Societies, op. cit., pp. 12-13, and Butlin, Australzan Domestic Product, Investment and Foreign Borrowing, 1861—1938/9, pp. 328, 245. “1 Home Truths for Home Seekers, p. 44. “2 Building Societies’ Gazette, 28 Aug. 1889, p. 223. Cf. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York 1899, Mentor edn, 1953), p. 72.

— 35] -

Notes

** Ipid., 15 July, p. 127, 15 Sept., p. 218, Jan. 1887, p. 129. “4 Tbid., 9 Oct. 1889, p. 307; AFG, 5 Nov. 1892, p. 314. > Travel and Trout in the Antipodes (Melbourne 1880), pp. 28-9; Daily Telegraph as quoted in Building Societies’ Gazette, 5 Dec. 1888, p. 550.

-" “Home Owners and Tenants in Melbourne, 1891-1911', Australian Economic History Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Mar. 1972, pp. 21-35.

“" An estimate based on an extrapolation of ratebook estimates into census returns of ‘Habitations’.

“* US Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Eleventh Census: 1590 (Washington 1896), pp. 288-9. “" See R. V. Jackson, ‘(Owner Occupation of Houses in Sydney, 1871 to 1891’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Sept. 1970 (special issue on urbanization in Australia), p. 142. *° Tbid., p. 149.

‘1 This paragraph is based on an examination of landlords in St Kilda and Collingwood in the early 1880s. Names were traced through the Melbourne Directory for 1884 and 1885. * See e.g.M. R. Hill, Housing Finance in Australia, 1945-1956 (Melbourne 1959), pp. 15, 36, 39,141. * Building Societies’ Gazette, 1886, p. 69, as quoted Butlin, Jrvestment in Australian Economic Development, 1561-1900, pp. 265-6. *T Modern Permanent Building Society, Applications for Loans. ** T have used the classification of suburbs proposed by J. W. McCarty, ‘Australian Capital Cities in the Nineteenth Century’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Sept. 1970 (special issue on urbanization in Australia), p. 125. *’ Based on an analysis of sampled houses in the hands of lending institutions in 1898-9. * Loc. cit., p. 36. *S See N. G. Butlin, ‘Long-run Trends in Australian Per Capita Consumption’ in Keith Hancock (ed.), The Nasional Income and Social Welfare (Melbourne 1965), p. 8. ” Home Truths for Home Seekers, p. 17. ” See for example I. A. H. Turner, ‘The Growth of Melbourne: an Historical Outline’ in P. N. Troy (ed.), Urban Redevelopment in Australia (Canberra 1967), p. 34. "| On the failure of attempts to cure the London housing problem in the 1880s, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford 1971), Part 2.

2 Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, pp. 424-32; Hall, The Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy, 1552-1900, ch. 4; Beever and Freeman, ‘Directors of Disaster?’, Hconomic Record, vol. 43, Mar. 1967, pp. 123-6. " AIBR, 7 Nov. 1890, p. 781; Standard Mutual Building Society, Minutes, 19 Aug. 1890, p. 279. WY Building Societies’ Gazette, 28 Aug., pp. 196-7, 25 Sept. 1890, p. 254, and for a less committed view, JC, 19 Aug. 1890, p. 6. Modern Permanent Building Society, Minutes; Victorian Yearbook, 1889, 1890, 1891. ' Standard Mutual Building Society, Minutes, 20 Nov. 1891, p. 324.

™ Hunt to Finlayson and Auld, 11 Dec. 1893, Modern Permanent Building Society, London Letterbook. * Hunt to Finlayson and Auld, 17 July 1894, ibid. ' AIBR, 19 Nov. 1894, p. 748: Statistical Register, ‘Accumulation . Dingle and Merrett, ‘Home Owners and Tenants in Melbourne, 1891-1911’, loc. cit., pp. 28-9. These figures are broadly in line with the author's own sample estimates. *l See pp. 215-16. ~ Age, 7 Feb. 1893, p. 6.

AIBR, 19 Nov. 1894, p. 748. t Brancis Adams, ‘The Labour Movement in Australia’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 56, 1891, p. 184.

” Dyson, In Town’, Rhymes from the Mines.

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Notes

Nine Making Ends Meet The outline of salary and wage levels presented here needs to be interpreted in the light of more recent research on the seasonal variability of earnings, notably the important article by Jenny Lee and Charles Fahey, ‘A Boom for Whom? Some Developments in the Australian Labour Market, 1870-1891’, Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 1-27. The brief account of bourgeois family ideology in this chapter became a point of departure for a series of important studies by Patricia Grimshaw and others of nineteenth-century families: see for example Patricia Grimshaw and Graham Willett, ‘Family Structure in Colonial Australia’, Australia 1888, no. 4, 1980, pp. 5-27; Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1985; Jane Beer, Charles Fahey, Patricia

Grimshaw and Melanie Raymond (eds), Colonial Frontiers and Family Fortunes, History Department, University of Melbourne 1989. Peter McDonald, Marriage in Australia: Age at First

Marriage and Proportions Marrying, 1860-1971, Australian National University, Canberra 1975, reviews the statistical data on marriage rates and questions my suggestion, based on an analysis of differences in marriages rates between suburbs, that the middle class was more likely to defer marriage. Patricia Quiggan, No Rising Generation: Women and Fertility in Late Nineteenth Century Australia, Australian National University, Canberra 1988, offers a more extended discussion of the contemporary debate. But the most sophisticated analysis, based on raw data from local marriage records, is Ann Larson, Growing Up in Melbourne: Family Life in the Late Nineteenth Century, Australian National University, Canberra 1994. This reveals a more complicated picture in which the effects of occupational status are modified by birthplace and social mobility.

The origins of the genteel world of middle-class respectability in Melbourne during the 1860s and 7Qs is the subject of an excellent study by Penny Russell, ‘A Wish of Distinction’: Colonial

Gentility and Femininity, Melbourne University Press, 1994. She deals with several of the topics discussed here, such as servants and child-rearing, as reflected mainly through the correspondence of elite families. For further studies of ‘the servant problem’ see Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Thomas Nelson, West Melbourne 1975, and B. W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2002. The contribution of Melbourne’s private schools to its distinctive class structure, a subject

lightly touched on here, has been the subject of several books, most notably, for a period later than this, Janet McCalman, Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle Class Generation, 19201990, Melbourne University Press, 1993. The decline of the birthrate, and its complex relationship with the economic depression of the 1890s, has been the subject of much more sophisticated demographic work since I discussed it here. Ann Larson, Growing Up in Melbourne, chapter 2, is the best recent discussion. The role of the gentlemen's clubs has also attracted some distinguished historical work as well as a great deal of mythology. Paul de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria, 1550-1880, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1991, deals mainly with the period before the land boom, but his The Australian Club, Melbourne, 1878-1998, Australian Club, Melbourne 1998, and Joseph Johnson's history of the Savage Club, Laughter and the Love of Friends, Melbourne Savage Club, Melbourne 1994, are valuable points of entry to the subject. Walter Phillips has assembled the data on church attendance for Victoria and the nation as a whole in Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Sydney 1987, pp. 418-35, and H.R. Jackson, Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand, 18601980, Allen & Unwin, Wellington 1987, contains a pertinent discussion of Sunday observance. The account of unemployment and the political responses to it given here has been challenged in some respects by Bruce Scates in ‘The Struggle for Survival: Unemployment and the Unemployed Agitation in Late Nineteenth Century Melbourne’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 94, April 1990, pp. 41-63. Scates sees the radicals as exerting a stronger influence over the general temper of the movement than I do. He makes intensive use of police files, the source I also largely rely on, and provides illuminating detail on the role of women in ‘Knocking Out a Living:

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Notes

Survival Strategies and Popular Protest in the 1890s Depression’ in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1990. Similar issues arise in the historiography of charitable activity during the depression. Shurlee Swain, ‘The Poor People of Melbourne’ in Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1985, pp. 91-112, and in her PhD thesis, The Victorian Charity Network in the 1890s, University of Melbourne 1977, analyses case records for 20,000 recipients of charitable assistance during the depression. Her conclusions and mine are disputed, largely on ideological grounds, by Richard Kennedy, Charity Warfare: The Charity Organisation Society in Colonial Melbourne, Hyland House, Melbourne 1985. I have enlarged on the special difficulties of older people in the depression in *“Our Youth is Spent and Our Backs are Bent”: The Origins of Australian Ageisi’, Australian Cultural History. no. 14, 1995, pp. 40-62. Suicide has been the subject of a much fuller study by Simon Cook, Secret Sorrows: A Social History of Suicide in Victoria, 1841-1921, PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne 1998.

' Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, p. 105; Australasian, 4 Nov. 1882, supplement, p. 1: Edmund Finn, ‘The Phases of Social Advertising’, Victorian Review, 1 July 1882, p. 357; ‘Wealth and Waste’, Australasian, 10 May 1879, p. 584: Argus, 2 Apr. 1885, p. 6. See my ‘R. EL N. Twopeny and Town Life in Australia’, Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 63, Oct. 1974, pp. 292-305. ~ Cf. N.G. Butlin, “Long-run Trends in Australian Per Capita Consumption’ in Keith Hancock (ed.), The National Income and Social Welfare (Melbourne 1965), p. 8, and Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, pp. 90-3. * Balfour, Statement of Income in Ledger 1890 (loose notes) in Balfour Papers; Turner, Personal Memorabilia, p. 111: Modern Permanent Building Society, Minutes; Robert Michaelis to Edward Michaelis. 8 Sept. 1891, Michaelis Hallenstein, Private Letterbook of Moritz Michaelis, p. 95.

' Advertisements for medical practices in the “Business Partnerships’ column of Argus and salaries of government medical officers as listed in the Victorian Statistical Register, Blue Book, 1885, VPP, vol. 2, no. 21, 1886: for lawyers see also Blue Book and Twopeny, op. cit., p. 45. Cf. Butlin, Australian Domestic Product, Investment and Foreign Borrowing, 1561— 1938/9, p. 244. ' Chiefly in Argus and Age for 1885.

" Victorian Yearbook, 1885-6; Victorian Statistical Register, 1885; RCT, qs 2515, 2596, 3463, 7762, 8136, 8493, 11576. © John Hindle to Royal Commission on Shop Employees, VPP, 1883, vol. 2, no. 16*, q. 172. * Victorian Statistical Register; Royal Commission on Shop Employees, loc. cit., qs 112, 431; Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, pp. 105-6. “ Royal Conunission on Shop employees, loc. cit., q. 2960; Victorian Statistical Register. " Australasian, 19 June 1880, p. 785: Argus letters of 15, 19, 20, 25, 29, 31 May, 12, 14, June 1880; Melbourne Punch, 9 June 1881, p. 231; Australasian, 14 Feb., p. 313, 7 Mar., p. 439, 1] Apr, p. 727, 25 Apr. p. 775, 6 June, p. 1063, 20 June, p. 1159, 4 July, p. 7, 18 July, p. 108, 3 Oct., p. 653, 31 Oct. 1885, supplement, p. 5; Gray, Letters to England, 8 Oct. 1885.

' Victorian Yearbook, 1902, p. 157. ™ ‘Young Bachelor’, Arges, 15 June 1880.

' “Coelebs of Twenty-five’, Argus, 22 May 1880: Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank, pp. 260-1. ‘TH. D. D’Esterre Taylor, “Something to Do for Our Boys’, Victorian Review, 1 Feb. 1884, p. 394; J. W. Springthorpe, ‘On the Psychological Aspect of the Sexual Appetite’, AMG, Oct. 1884, p. 11, an account broadly in line with contemporary English views; see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London 1966), ch. 1. The young man who resorted to prostitutes was, in fact, faced with a system of charges and institutions that reproduced the gradations in most other forms of consumption. There were so-called ‘respectable’, “high class’ or ‘flash’ brothels like those of Madame Brussels, which were said to be magnificently furnished—sometimes on

— 354 —-

Notes

liberal credit from large furniture merchants—and discreetly conducted. The clientele comprised ‘a superior class of man’, according to the superintendent of the city police who was himself discovered in one of these houses under suspicious circumstances (Royal Commission on the Police, VPP, vol. 2, no. 21, 1883 qq. 6803-927). There were, secondly, the street-walkers of Collins Street who were said to consist, very largely, of ‘sly women’—women who lived outwardly respectable lives as domestics or music teachers in the suburbs and came into the city at about 10 o'clock in the evening to ply their trade. These, apparently, often operated from ‘respectable receiving houses’ or hotels, which they used as places of assignation; sometimes their proprietors also supplied rooms and operated as ‘short-time houses’. There were, thirdly, the ‘low accommodation houses’ and the very lowest types of brothels like those in ‘Romeolane’, ‘Bilking Square’ and other haunts off Little Bourke Street. These last were often controlled by Chinese or European ‘bullies’, and prostitution here was largely a ‘front for theft’ (see evidence of Standish, question 53-5, 71-2, Dalton 386-422, Winch 1032, 1037, 1059,

O'Mara 352-3, in Report of the Select Committee upon the Bill for the Prevention of Contagious Diseases, VPP, D14, 1878). > The Australian Housewives’ Manual (Melbourne 1885), p. 29. See also evidence of Dr J. Singleton to Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Bill, VPP, vol. 2, D14, 1878. 1S An Old Housekeeper, The Australian Housewives’ Manual, p. 18; Twopeny, op. cit., pp. 47-8.

The number of sewing machines imported to Victoria increased dramatically from 14 615 in 1880 to 21 300 in 1885; piano imports grew from 1248 in 1881 to 5170 in 1889, and there were at least ten local manufacturers. If piano ownership indicated a muting of classconsciousness (Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia (Melbourne 1970), p. 119) ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ produced counter-revolution on a colossal scale. " Twopeny, op. cit., pp. 38-48; Argus, 30 Aug. 1884.

'S For an account of contemporary hire-purchase arrangements, see Wertheim v. Virtue, Victorian Law Reports, vol. 16, pp. 869-72. ' Gray, Letters to England, 4 May, 10 Aug. 1885, 20 Feb. 1886, 20 Jan. 1887. “° Calculated from Victorian Census, 1881, 1891, ‘Conjugal Condition’. For full tables see Davison thesis, p. 462. *! Herald, 25 May 1885; Wicken, The Australian Home, p. 3. ““ Wicken, op. cit., p. 7; ‘Household Finance’, Daily Telegraph, 22 Feb. 1890; Australasian, 30 Nov. 1882, p. 211; Men and How to Manage Them, p. [16]; The Australian Housewives’ Manual, p. {vu}. “* Wicken, op. cit., p. 38; Smith (ed.), The Cyclopedia of Victoria, vol. 1, pp. 524-5.

“! For good discussions of English examples, see J. Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living (London 1970), ch. 8, and J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood (London 1954), ch. 4.

“> An Old Housekeeper, Men and How to Manage Them, p. 19. “" Meat: UK 119 lb per annum, Victoria 276 lb per annum; Sugar: UK 68.99 lb per annum, Victoria 90.75 lb per annum; Tea: UK 4.70 lb per annum, Victoria 10.01 lb per annum (Victorian Yearbook, 1893, pp. 356, 363).

“7 Mutton 1885: London 43-73d lb, Melbourne 13d-5d lb; Beef 1885: London 34-634 lb, Melbourne 4—5d lb. (Victorian Yearbook, 1898, p. 360, 1886, p. 1095). Twopeny, op. cit., pp.

62-3; Charles Iredell, Ten Years’ Practice in Australia (Melbourne 1896), pp. 40-1; Argus 15 Aug. 1885.

““ Twopeny, op. cit., p. 71; The Australian Housewives’ Manual, pp. 104-5; Men and How to Manage Them, p. 40; Australasian, 7 Apr. 1885, p. 439.

*’ Victorian Yearbook, 1885-6, p. 539; John Burnett, Plenty and Want (London 1966), pp. 154-5; Argus, 22, 29 July, 2, 10 Sept., 1885; Ann M. Mitchell, “Temperance and the Liquor Question in Later Nineteenth Century Victoria’ (M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1966), table 2, opp. p. 9.

® Australasian, 24 Jan. 1885, p. 151. | Twopeny, op. cit., p. 73.

— 395 —

Notes

= Tabletalk, 9 Mar. 1888, p. 8. On sensitivity to London styles, see Bright and Hitchcock, London

Letterbook, 4 Jan., p. 308, 18 Apr. 1884, p. 381; Robert Reid, London Memo Book, 26 Mar. 1897, p. 99. * Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. 7. “| Cf. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood, ch. 5, and Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living, pp. 240-2. ” Garden and Field, Jan. 1888, p. 101; Argus, 17 Oct. 1888; Australasian, 4 Mar. 1882, p. 263; John Parry to Royal Commission on Shop Employees, VPP, vol. 2, no. 16*, 1883, q. 1603. °° Twopeny, op. cit., p. 51; Melbourne Punch, 29 Jan. 1880, p. 48, 22 Mar, p. 113, 29 Mar. p. 121, 12 Apr., p. 144, 31 May, p. 214, 5 July 1888, p. 1. Compare, for example, attitudes to Negro women in the deep south as portrayed in John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New York 1937), ch. 8. * There were 11 681 ‘domestic servants’ in the County of Bourke in 1881, 16 581 ‘domestic or lodging house servants in the Melbourne Metropolitan Area in 1891. More exact comparisons are not possible (see Victorvan Census ‘Occupations’, 1881, 1891). * Argus, 19 Oct., | Dec. 1888, 29 Apr. 1885; Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Bill, VPP, vol. 2, D14, 1878, qs 40, 41, 193, 204, 370, 439; Return of Offences against Young Girls, VPP, vol. 1, C5, 1893.

” Australasian, 2 June 1883, supplement, p. 6; Argus, 13 Apr., 14 Apr. (edit.), 12 Oct. 1885, 20 Oct., 16 Nov., 4 Dec. 1888.

" Australasian, 4 Mar. 1882, p. 263, 4 Apr, p. 631, 2 May 1885, p. 823: Melbourne Punch, 29 Mar. 1883, p. 121: Australasian, 14 Mar., p. 506, 9 May 1885, p. 908. 'T An Old Housekeeper, Men and How to Manage Them, p. 118. " Dr Willis, Argus, 15 Sept. 1885, An Old Housekeeper, The Australian Housewives’ Manual, pp. 107-9. " Seotch College, Prospectus, 1885, p. 13 (copy at the school); Carlton Grammar Schoo! adver-

tisement, Australasian, 1890. Statistician’s Report, Victorian Census, 1891, p. 349. ® Based on an analvsis of enrolments for 1880, 1885, 1890 and 1895 at Scotch College (card index at the school) and Melbourne Grammar (Liber Melburniensis). Neither source has sufficiently complete entries on fathers occupations to permit a rigorous statistical analysis; but it is clear that while Melbourne Grammar catered especially for pastoral and professional families, Scotch drew mainly the scions of business. Compare I. V. Hansen, Nor Free nor Secular (Melbourne 1971), esp. chs 1, 4. “Graduate, Argus. 5 Nov. 1892. ™ Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom (Windmill edn 1960), p. 42. 'S “Pros and Cons of Family Limitation’, Australasian, 31 Jan. 1880, p. 134. ™ Based on suburban child-woman ratios, 1891, calculated from Victorian Census, ‘Ages’ and ‘Conjugal Condition’. For table see Davison thesis, opp. p. 480. The upper half of the table includes the suburbs of Preston, Flemington, Coburg, Footscray, Northcote, Brunswick, Oakleigh, Williamstown, Fitzroy, Port Melbourne, Essendon, North Melbourne. The lowest child-woman ratios were found in Brighton, Richmond, Caulfield, Prahran, Camberwell, St Kilda, Malvern, Collingwood, Kew, Hawthorn, South Melbourne and Melbourne.

Australasian, 18 July 1885, p. 103, 20 Mar. 1886, p. 535. ! Morris (Ced.), Picteresque Australasia, vol. 1, p. 58. = Australasian, 9 Aug. 1884, pp. 282-3. Melbourne Punch, 3 May 1886, p. 278. ATR, 3 May 1886, p. 278. ™ Australasian Coachbuilder and Saddler, 10 Sept. 1890, p. 75. Argus, 4 Apr. 1885, p. 13: Australasian, 13 Dec. 1884, p. 1132. ~ JF Deegan, Chronicles of the Melbourne Beefsteak Club, (Melbourne 1890), p. 81. Argus, | Aug. 1885; Thomas's Guide to Melbourne, p. 100; Sir Ernest Scott, An Historical Memoir of the Melbourne Club (Melbourne 1936), p. 82: Rules and Regulations of the

— 356 -

Notes

Australian Club, 1881 (in Association and Institution Pamphlets, vol. 10, State Library of Victoria); Australian Club, Minutes of the Committee, 27 Jan. 1886, 6 Nov. 1889; R. WE. Wilmot, The Melbourne Athenaeum, 1839-1939; History and Records of the Institution (Melbourne 1939), p. 36. ” Massina’s Guide to Melbourne (Melbourne 1878), pp. 4-7; H. Thomas, Official Handbook and Guide to Victoria (Melbourne 1880), p. 24. 6 Strong, Church-going: A Sermon (Melbourne 1891). 6! Turner, Personal Memorabilia, p. 111 (1887), p. 117 (1888); Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia, p. 185. 6 Freeman, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, pp. 72-7; Argus, 16 Sept. 1892, p. 6; Cambridge, op. cit., p. 185. 63 Argus, 4 Nov. 1885, 3, 7 Nov. 1888, Age, 6 Nov. 1889.

4 e.g. Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (Melbourne 1940) ch. 6, and Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics (Melbourne 1960), chs 7, 8 but compare Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia (Melbourne 1970), pp. 179-80, 211. On the new ‘economic’ basis for political divisions in Victoria, see Finlayson, ‘Groups in Victorian Politics, 1889-94’ M.A. thesis, pp. 217-21. ® See tables in Davison thesis, pp. 492-3. % Argus, 23 June 1892. 8 Argus, 19 Feb., 14 June 1892. 65 Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 7 Feb. (Stokes), 138 Feb. (Stokes), 19 Feb. (Wardley), 20 Feb. (Wardley), 21 Feb. 1892 (Cantry). ® Tbid., 7 June 1892 (Wardley), and Chomley letter of same date. ” Age, 10 June 1892, p. 5; Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 10 June 1892 (Gleeson), Passmore Edwards to Commissioner Chomley in ibid. 1 Aygus, 11, 15, 24 June, 5 July 1892; Age, 10 Mar. 1893.

’ Report of the Select Committee ... Appointed to Consider and Report upon the Present Distress and Want of Employment, Legislative Council Votes and Proceedings, D3, 1893. This report presents only the sketchiest summary of the evidence heard by the committee, but press reports of the hearings help to fill it out. See Argus, 26, 30 Aug., 6, 7 Sept. 18938. ® Argus, 29 June, 5, 16 July 1892. ™ PG. McCarthy, ‘Labour and the Living Wage’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 13, Apr. 1967, p. 83. ™ See typology elaborated in E. Wight Bakke, ‘The Cycle of Adjustment to Unemployment’ in Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel, A Modern Introduction to the Family (New York 1960), pp. 112-25, and Argus, 14 Aug. 1893. ’® Swallow and Ariell, Notebook of Staff Salaries, 1890, 1894 (MU Archives); Modern Permanent Building Society, Minutes of Directors, 1890, 1894. ™ See ch. 2, 3. Cf. Butlin, Australian Domestic Product ..., p. 158. ® 15 Feb. 1892. ™ From Victorian Yearbook. *° On trading banks, see R. Gollan, Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Origins and Early History (Canberra 1968), ch. 3, and Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank, p. 302; on insurance companies see JC, Mar. 1893, p. 7; on savings banks see Victorian Statistical Register, ‘Accumulation’.

1 Meredith to Balfour, 8 July 1895, Balfour Papers. “2 25 Dec. 1894 (edit.). 83 G, Turner, VPD, vol. 91, p. 749. 54 Victorian Yearbook, 1894.

8 JC, 22 Dec. 1891, p. 5, 27 Aug. 1895, p. 5. 86 Age, 20 Feb. 1894; Commonweal, 14 Nov. 1891. 8” Age, 15 Mar. 1893. 88 Age, 11 Apr. 1894.

— 357 -

Notes

“ Norma McArthur, ‘Net Migration to Australian Colonies and States, 1881-1911’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, vol. 38, no. 1, Apr. 1967, pp. 64-6. “’ Tam indebted for this observation to Mr J. Gibbney. "! Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 21 July (Wardley), 16 July 1892 (Wardley). ™ Robert Jones, High Rents and Low Wages {Melbourne 1890], p. 6, pamphlet filed in Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, Jan.—Mar. 1890.

" Commonweal, 5 Sept. 1891; Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 16 July (Wardley), 18 July 1892 (Wardley).

“! Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 5, 22 Feb., 30 Mar., 6,21, 26 June, 22 Aug., 4 Sept. 1892. The main speakers were J. W. Fleming,? Mellor, W. D. Flynn and John White. ” Argus, 13 Oct. 1892. " Argus, 19 Aug., 9 Nov. 1892, “ Victorian Police Gazette, 2, 12,26 Oct., 16, 23 Nov. 1892. "S Argus, 18, 19 Nov. 1892.

Tbid. ™ Victorian Statistical Register, ‘Law, Crime, etc.’ MN Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 18 Sept. (Geelan), 19 Sept. 1892 (Cauly), note of A. W. Colville (secretary to commissioner) for information of commissioner, 14 July 1892. = Tbid., 8 Aug. (Stokes), 25 Sept. 1892 (Geelan and Wardley). MS Age, 5 Jan. 1892: Argus, 21 Jan. 1892. IM Argus, 5 Jan., 21 May, 11, 16 June, 14 Nov. 1892. From Victorian Yearbook. Cf Emile Durkheim, Suicide (trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, London 1952), p. 243. % Report of the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums, 1892, VPP, vol. 2, no. 33, 1893, p. 3.

I" Age, 7 Feb. 1893. |

MS For a systematic presentation of Melbourne wholesale prices 1861-1911, see the Commonwealth statistician’s Labour Report, no. | (1912), esp. pp. 48-9, and appendix, pp. xvi—xix; for retail prices see Victorian Statistical Register. "Argus, 20 Jan., 20 July 1892.

Age, 15 Mar. 1893. Mt 72 July 1893, p. 6. Ie AGS, 22 June, p. 137, 22 Sept., pp. 197, 202, 22 Oct. 1892, p. 222. ls Letter of Rev. J. Dawborn, Argus, 5 July 1892. Mt Building Societies’ Gazette, 18 Dec. 1890, 23 Apr. 1891.

5 VPD, vol. 74, 1894, pp. 1188-92, vol. 75, 1894-5, p. 327; Landlord and Tenant Act 1890 (54 Vict. 1108), pt 4; Argus, 30 May 1892. i Amendment to Landlord and Tenant Act 1895 (59 Vict. 1388); Buzlding Societies’ Gazette, 17 Aug. 1889.

‘I’ Report of Thomas Wardley on ‘Sunday Socialist Meeting’, 27 Mar. 1892; Victoria Police Melbourne, Reports, Jan.—Mar. 1892.

US Richmond Guardian, 4 June 1892; Victoria Police, Melbourne, Reports, 16, 28 June, 5 July 1892: Argus, 6 July 1892. ' H. Armytage, Argus, 11 July 1892. 20 J B, Patterson’s statement on relief measures, Argus, 6 July 1893; statement on camps, Argus, 23 Aug. 1893.

“I Argus, 21 Jan. 1892; Age, 12 June 1892.

I Argus, 14 Sept. 1892. 3 Aygus, 24 June 1892. For a full account, see Shurlee Swain, “The Melbourne Charity Network in the 1890s’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1976). Il Argus, 21 Feb. 1892, 13 Sept. 1893. I Argus, 2 Aug., 10 Sept., 7 Nov. 1892. “8 Victorian Statistical Register, ‘Vital Statistics’. Full table in Davison thesis.

— 358 —-

Notes

lev Age, 22 Apr. 1893.

28 JC, 27 Aug. 1895, p. 6. 9 Wictorian Statistical Register, 1895, ‘Vital Statistics’. 139 Victorian Census, 1891; Victorian Yearbook, 1902. 131 Victorian Yearbook, 1902, pp. 168-9, 173-5, and see Neville Hicks, ‘Evidence and Contemporary Opinion about the Peopling of Australia, 1890-1911' (Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1971).

132 Smythe, Limitation of Offspring ..., p. 5. 133 See esp. Report of the Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-rate and on the Mortality of Infants, NSW Parliamentaty Papers, 1904, vol. 4, and for discussion of this and other evidence on the problem, Hicks, op. cit., ch. 4. 34 See evidence of Dr Jones, Argus, 23 Aug. 1892. 35 An Act for the Better Protection of Infant Life, 54 Vict. 1198, esp. sections 4, 12. 138 Evidence of Youl (qs 3893-4) and Neild (q. 2825) to Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions, VPP, vol. 4, no. 60, 1892-8. 13” Argus, 5 Sept., 28, 29 Nov., 1, 2 Dec. 1898. 138 Evans, ‘The Average Man’ in Loraine and Other Verses, p. 161. ‘89 “Our Mr. Soker’ in AG-/, 30 Jan. 1894, p. 31. 49 JC, 30 Aug. 1892, p. 5. 41 Reid, London Memo Book, 13 Oct. 1896, p. 25, 16 Feb., p. 73, 24 Apr., p. 123, 11 May 1897, p. 144; Gibson to Dougall, 8 Dec. 1891, Foy and Gibson, Gibson Letterbook, p. 324. ‘42 Gibson to Dougall, 12 Apr. 1892, p. 417, 4 Aug. 1891, p. 301.

43 Australasian Coachbuilder and Saddler, 10 Oct., p. 73, 10 Apr. 1892, p. 3. 4 “Occupations’, Victorian Census, 1891, 1901. > Victorian Yearbook, 1893, p. 411, 1895-8, p. 1093. 46 G. Blainey, James Morrissey and S. E. K. Hulme, Wesley College: The First Hundred Years (Melbourne 1967), pp. 87-92. 4" Quoted Nancy Adams, Family Fresco (Melbourne 1966), p. 34. 48 ‘Scotch College: Old Boys, 1851-1939’ (typescript at the school) and Liber Melburniensis. M9 RW. E. Wilmot, The Melbourne Athenaeum, 18389-1939, p. 38. 0 Australian Club, Minutes of the Committee, 19 Apr., 5, 7 Aug. 18938, 7 Mar., 11 Apr. 1894. 2 2.2 Nov. 1892. 8 Argus, 13 Aug. 1892.

I Thirty Years in Australia, p. 188.

Ten ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ For parallel studies of urban imagery see my ‘ “Sydney and the Bush”: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 191-209; Graeme Davison and David Dunstan, * “This Moral Pandemonium”: Images of Low Life’ in Davison, Dunstan

and McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne, pp. 29-57; ‘The Picture of Melbourne, 18351935’ in A. G. L. Shaw (ed.), Victoria’s Heritage, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1986, pp. 12-36. Leigh

Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1985, has offered a perceptive account of the urban sources of the rural myth in Australian painting and a fuller analysis of visual urban imagery in his Sunlight and Shadow. Australians Impressionist Painters 1880-1900, Bay Books, Kensington, NSW 1989. The significance of Melbourne’s boom architecture, an important subject barely broached here, is the subject of several studies, including Granville Williams and Peter Sands, Buzlding a City: 100 Years of Melbourne Architecture, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1981; a more recent study is Philip Goad, Short History of Melbourne Architecture, Pesaro Publications, Balmain, NSW 2002; compare his useful guide, A Guzde to Melbourne Architecture, Watermark Press, Balmain, NSW 1998. Most of these studies emphasize architectural rather than social

— 359 —-

Notes

values; for an approach to a social interpretation of boom architecture see my ‘Reading a Building’ in Graeme Davison and Chris McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook, Allen & Unwin, Sydney

1991, pp. 179-96. There is now an extensive literature on slum imagery in Melbourne and elsewhere: Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 18701914, Leicester University Press, 1993, focuses mainly on Sydney, Birmingham and San Francisco but makes incidental reference to Melbourne. In a later study of the ‘Little Lon’ district, Mayne and his collaborators have sought to use archaeological evidence to move beyond the formulaic contemporary accounts of slum life: see for example Alan Mayne, Tim Murray and Susan Lawrence, ‘Melbourne's “Little Lon”’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 31. no. 114, April 2000, pp. 131-51. The sanitary defects of ‘Marvellous Smellbourne’ are the subject of fuller studies by David Dunstan, ‘Dirt and Disease’ in Davison, Dunstan and McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne, pp. 140-71, his Governing the Metropolis: Melbourne, 1850-1591, Melbourne University Press, 1986, and Tony Dingle and Carolyn Rasmussen, Vital Connections: Melbourne and its Board of Works, 1891-1991, Melbourne University Press, 1991. The uses of the city’s foundation story, including the Batman Treaty, are the subject of current work by Bain Attwood and Helen Doyle. J have written more extensively about the uses of urban ‘foundation myths’ in ‘The Great Voyage; National Celebrations in Three New Lands’ in my The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2000, pp. 56-79. ' Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge 1963), p. 61; also ‘Friendship’s Garland’ in R. J. Super (ed.), The Collected Works of Matthew Arnold (New York 1960), vol. 5, pp. 349-50; Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, vol. 2, pp. 423-4; Australasian, 21 Mar., pp. 555, 572; 28 Mar. 1885, p. 620; Argus, 14 Apr. 1885, | Jan. 1886. - Sala, op. cit., p. 423; Argus, 8, 15 Aug. 1885. * William Westgarth, Victoria, Late Australia Felix, or Port Phillip District of New South Wales (Edinburgh 1853), pp. 151, 345, and compare his Half a Century of Australasian Progress, p. 47; William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria wn 1853 and Victoria tn 1858 (London 1859), p. 36: R. H. Horne, Australian Facts and Prospects (London 1859), p. 205; Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (London 1873), vol. 1, pp. 383-8; Twopeny, Town Life tn Australia, pp. 2-3. 1 Perkins, Melbourne Illustrated and Victoria Described, p. 3; Builder, 15 June 1889, p. 570. » Twopeny, op. cit., pp. 2-3. ' Builder, 9 Nov. 1889, p. 443, 11 Feb., p. 82, 18 Feb. 1888, p. 99. " Perkins, op. cit., p. 3; Victorian Railways Tourist Guide (Melbourne 1885), p. 6, statistics reprinted in Building Societies’ Gazette, 5 Dec. 1888, p. 550; Knox, The Boy Travellers in Australasia, p. 456. * Twopeny, op. cit., pp. 30-1. * Australasian, 4 Aug. 1888, p. 265. 0 T). M. Davies in Builder, 31 Aug. 1889, p. 211. ' Builder, 25 Apr. 1891, p. 305, 9 Aug. 1890, p. 82, but also compare views in Builder, 15 June 1889, p. 555, 7 Feb. 1891. Building Societies’ Gazette, 6 Nov. 1890, p. 327.

3 Freeland, Architecture in Australia, esp. pp. 171-6, 191; Maie Casey et al. (eds), Harly Melbourne Architecture, 1840-1888: A Photographic Record (Melbourne 1953); on town halls, see designs in Building and Engineering Journal, 8 Aug. 1880, p. 25, 17 Nov. 1888, p. 433, 15 Nov. 1890, p. 370, and comment in Argus, 17 July 1885, p. 7, and Builder, 27 Aug. 1887, p. 251, 8 Dec., p. 513, 22 Dec. 1888, p. 561. 't Australasian, 12 May 1883, p. 594, 27 Dec. 1884, pp. 225-6.

Builder, 23 Feb. 1889, p. 189. '© Tbid., 30 July 1887, p. 195.

" Tbid., 26 Sept. 1891, p. 257. IS O27 Apr. 1889, p. 12.

'’ Argus, 18 Jan. 1890, p. 13.

— 360 —

Notes

“9 Argus, 23 Jan. 1890, p. 11. “1 See letters in Argus, 21 Jan., pp. 7, 8, 23 Jan., p. 11, 27 Jan., p. 8, 30 Jan. 1890, p. 4.

2 Gray, Letters to England, 11 Jan. 1885; Clarke, The New Chum in Australia, p. 26.

*3 See reviews in Argus, 21 Jan. 1889, p.6, and Australasian, 26 Jan. 1886, p. 186; Jane Conroy, ‘Melbourne Theatre, 1880, 1890, 1900’ (BA. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1970), pp. 16-17. “4 See pp. 106-7. 2° Manufacturer, Dec. 1891, p. 122. “° Australasian, 9 Aug. 1879, p. 178. 2 Argus, 6, 28 Oct. 1885. “8 VPD, vol. 58, 1888, p. 1383 (Andrews), p. 1323 (Harper). *? Argus, 27 Oct. 1885 (letter of John Crozier, Castlemaine). 39 Argus, 31 Oct. 1885 (edit.). °! C_ A. Sherard, ‘Satan’s Ganymede’ in Sladen (ed.), A Century of Australian Song, p. 418, and see Melbourne Punch, 17 Feb. 1881, p. 63. 32 C.J. Ham, Argus, 29 May 1885; YMCA speaker in Herald, 3 Jan. 1885. 33 Argus, 22 Sept. 1885. °4 Varley, The Social Evil, p. 16; Varley, The War between Heaven and Hell in Melbourne ... See also Dunstan, Wowsers, pp. 65-6, 169, and Henry Varley [jun.], Henry Varley’s Life Story (London n.d.). > The Vagabond Papers. Sketches of Melbourne Life, in Light and Shade (Melbourne, 1877), ser. 1, p. v., ser. 4, p. xiii, ser. 2, pp. v, 191, 67. Stanley James, The Vagabond Papers, edited and with an introduction by Michael Cannon (Melbourne 1969) contains an excellent biographical account. Cannon’s abridgement, however, by excising ‘The Vagabond’s’ ‘philosophical homilies’, makes him seem a more radical critic than he was. © The Vagabond Papers, ser. 3, p. 52; cf. Anthony S. Wohl, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’,

International Review of Social History, vol. 13, pt 2, 1968, pp. 189-245; K.S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London 1963), pp. 67-9. ” Australasian, 27 Jan. 1883, supplement no. 878, p. 10, 3 Mar. 1883, supplement no. 883, p. 9. 8 Tbid., 20 Jan., p. 79, 3 Mar. 1883, p. 273. 39 See pp. 15-19.

Australasian, 20 Jan. 1883, p. 79. 4! Freeman, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, pp. vii—viii. * Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1888 (‘The Night Side of Melbourne by a Visitor’); Argus, 22 Jan. 1889 (‘Our Mid-City Slums’); Australasian, 21 Apr. 1888, pp. 852-3 (‘The Chinese Quarter’); Daily Telegraph, 15 Apr. 1887 (Social Wreckage’). 8 Hume, Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Arrow edn London 1959), pp. 89-102. 4 Australasian, 7 July 1888, p. 11 (review); Freeman, op. cit., p. 206. ® The Vagabond Papers, ser. 3, pp. 52-3. ‘© By the conclusion of this period, colonial historians themselves recognized that the Batman— Fawkner story had attained the status of a myth (see James Bonwick, The Writing of Australian History (Sydney 1896)). For a study of urban myth-making similar to that undertaken here, see R. Richard Wohl and A. Theodore Brown, ‘The Usable Past: A Study of Historical Traditions in Kansas City’, Huntington Library Quarterly, May 1960, pp. 237-59. ” T. McCombie, The History of the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne 1858), p. 18; Bonwick, John Batman: The Founder of Victoria, p. 2; G. W. Rusden, The Discovery, Survey and Settlement of Port Phillip (Melbourne 1871), p. 46.

18 Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip; John Batman: the Founder of Victoria; Port Phillip Settlement; see also E. E. Pescott, James Bonwick: A Writer of School Books and Histories with a Bibliography of His Writings (Melbourne 1939). Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip ..., pp. 36-7; Port Phillip Settlement, p. 195. °° Batman’s Journal, 30 May 1835, quoted Bonwick, Port Phillip Settlement, p. 180.

— 361 -

Notes

*! Fawkner in Diggers’ Advocate, 1853, quoted Bonwick, Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip ...,p.57 (emphasis mine). Of course there is more than values and interests between Batman's and Fawkner’s accounts: Batman landed in early winter, Fawkner in early spring; Batman wrote contemporaneously, Fawkner almost twenty years later. ~~ Labilliere, The Early History of the Colony of Victoria, vol. 2, p. 92. ” Westgarth, Halfa Century of Australasian Progress, p. 15 (emphasis mine). »* Quoted Perkins, Melbourne Illustrated and Victoria Described, p. 7. ~ Building and Engineering Journal, 21 July 1888, p. 40; Buelding Socveties’ Gazette, 24 Oct., p. 463, 7 Nov.. p. 493, 21 Nov., p. 517, 5 Dec. 1888, p. 562; Australasian, 26 May 1888,

pp. 1132-3, ” Perkins, op. cit.. pp. 20-1. " Bautlder, 28 May 1892, p. 369, 2 Aug. 1884, p. 13. °’* Perkins, op. Cit.. p. 3.

" See Official Record of the Melbourne International Exhibition 1880-1, pp. li-lviil. " See also Cyril Pearl, Alioays Morning (Melbourne 1960), p. 213; Anne Blainey, The Farthing Poet: A biography of Richard Hengist Horne, 1802-84, a Lesser Literary Lion (London 1968).

"l Andrews, Ode: Anticipatory of the Opening of the Great Exhibition in Melbourne, 1580; see also ‘On the Opening of the First International Exhibition of Melbourne, | October 1980’, Melbourne Review, Oct. 1880, p. 420, and untitled poem by Edward Smithurst, Herald, 15 Jan. 1885. ™ Tn Sladen (ed.), A Century of Australian Song, p. 121. ™ Thid., p. 122.

" Argus quoted Building Societies’ Gazette, 19 Sept. 1888, p. 348. ™ Building Societies’ Gazette, 5 Dec. 1889, p. 417. See also Victorian Yearbook, 1885-6, p. 95. " Building Societies’ Gazette, 5 Dec. 1889, p. 417. ™ Thid., 20 Nov. 1890, p. 351; Builder, 31 Aug. 1889, p. 211.

' An Old Colonist. The Battle of the Yarra, pp. 7-8. This and other pamphlets of the kind were inspired by The Battle of Dorking Cfirst published in 1868 by Blackwell's Magazine and later in 1871 by George Robertson in Melbourne). See I. FE Clarke, Voices Prophesying War (Oxford 1966). " Battle of Mordialloc, p. 9. "AFG, 30 July 1891, p. 147. "AFG, 28 Feb. 1894, p. 15: Builder, 31 Oct. 1891, p. 346 CR. C. Brown); Argus, 17 Sept. 1892: JC, 27 Mar. 1894, p. 8. R. Helger Wallace, Argus, 28 Dec. 1892, p. 3. ™ Willoughby, Marvellous Melbourne and Other Poems, pp. 1-12. “| From the notebook ‘Clues’ dated 3 Oct. 1892, no. 578, p. 45, Deakin Papers (ANL, MS. 1540/27/341). ™ National Life and Character (London), pp. 13, 168, 187. See also John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 18380-1894, Oxford Don and Australian Radical (Melbourne 1969), pp. 235-9.

™ In his Loraine ard Other Verses, pp. 172-4; see also ‘A Commonplace Song’ in ibid., pp. 163-5. “H.R. Williams, VPD, vol. 72, p. 1113. ™ John Mecllwraith to Branston, 28 Oct. 1892, John MclIlwraith’s Private Letterbook. ™ See esp. J. W. Fortescue, ‘The Seamy Side of Australia’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 29, 1891, pp. 523-7; Howard Willoughby, ‘The Seamy Side of Australia: A Reply from the Colonies’, ibid., vol. 30, 1891, pp. 292-302; R. M. Johnston, ‘The Attack on the Credit of Australasia’, ibid., vol. 31, 1892, pp. 606-22; Sir Robert G. C. Hamilton, ‘Lending Money to Australia’, ibid., vol. 32, 1892, pp. 194-202: Sir George Baden-Powell, ‘The Credit of Australasia’, Fortnightly Review, ns., vol. 50, 1891, pp. 3-12.

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Notes

8° Bulletin, 20 Aug. 1892, p. 14. 3! AFG, 22 Dec. 1892, p. 185; Argus, 22 Feb., 8 Oct. 1892. *“ John Mcilwraith to Andrew Mcllwraith, 10 July 1892, John Mcllwraith’s Private Letterbook:; J. W. Hunt to Finlayson and Auld, 5 Nov. 1894, Modern Permanent Building Society, London Letterbook. ‘3 Bishop Goe, Argus, 17 May 1893. In turning on ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as they did in 1893

Melbourne churchmen could command a solid repertoire of biblical imagery (see Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids 1973)). “1 Argus, 13 May 1892, p. 3.

® Argus, 9 Mar. 1892, p. 10; Pastoral Address in Minutes of the Wesleyan Conference, 1892, p. 73. (Methodist Church of Victoria Offices); also compare views of Baptists, Argus, 16 Nov. 1892.

8° Argus, 17 May 1898. *" Argus, 18 May 1898.

88 Ibid., ef. Argus, 15 Oct. 1892; Meudell, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift, pp. 29-30. “19 Aug. 1892, p. 663. "” Argus, 14 Aug. 1892. "| Rev. G. H. Balfour to James Balfour, 9 Feb. 1893, Balfour Papers; cf. Graeme Davison, James Balfour’ in ADB, vol. 3.

™ Gray, Letters to England, 20 June 1886; Gray to his daughter Ellen, 11 July 1892, quoted Wilkinson, ‘The Life and Architecture of George Gray, 1842-1920’ (B.Arch. thesis). Letter of J.B.’ [a clergyman?], Argus, 18 May 1893. “Age, 10, 11, 12 July 1898, 2 Apr. 1894: Commonweal, 30 Apr. 1892, pp. 2-3. ” Age, 22 June 1892. ” Tbid.; Age, 10 July 1893. “ Argus, 23 July 1892. "’ Commonweal, 16 Apr. 1892, supplement. See also Andrade, The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast Emancipated the Workers (Melbourne 1892). " Age, 26 May, 7 Oct. 1893; Argus, 5 Mar., 5 Aug., 9 Sept. 1893. 100 J.D. Adams, ‘Village Settlements in Victoria in the 1890s’ (M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1971), pp. 353-9. Ol Born England, 1849, son of Rev. Joseph Tucker; educated Moore Theological College; priest in Bendigo and Campaspe districts; from 1880, vicar of Christ Church, South Yarra, to his retire-

ment in 1908; died 1911. Son Gerard Kennedy Tucker founded the Brotherhood of St Laurence. Adams, op. cit., pp. 77-8; Crockford’s Clerical Directory (London 1908); I. R. Carter, God and Three Shillings (Melbourne 1967), ch. 2. 1% Argus, 9 Feb. 1892.

18 Argus, 22, 23 Feb. 1892. 04 Argus, 5 Apr. 1892; see lecture on ‘Christian Socialism’, Age, 21 Apr. 1894; The New Arcadia, p. 179.

% Lecture to Co-operative Society, Argus, 20 Aug. 1893, p. 8; The New Arcadia, pp. 71-2, 131-2, 160. 06 The New Arcadia, p. 148. 10" Cf, Argus, 23 Feb., 20 Aug. 1892. 108 The New Arcadia, pp. 23, 128.

'" For contemporary criticism, see Argus, 9 Mar., 7 Sept. 1892. 110 YPD, vol. 69, p. 597 (J. B. Patterson).

‘ll VPD, p. 613 (McLellan) but also see pp. 605-6 (Vale) and p. 617 (levers). 2 Adams, op. cit. (M.A. thesis), chs 12, 13; Tucker Village Settlements Association, The Tucker Village Settlements of Victoria: Handbook for the Information of Contributors and Intending Settlers; Argus, 31 Aug., 23 Sept., 10 Dec. 1892. 3 R.H. Croll (ed.), Smike to Bulldog (Sydney 1946), p. 40.

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Notes

‘4 Quoted R. H. Croll, Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting (Melbourne 1935), p. 385; Ursula Hoff, ‘Reflections on the Heidelberg School’, Meanjin, vol. 10, 1951, pp. 125-33; Alan McCulloch, The Golden Age of Australian Painting: Impressionism and the Heidelberg School (Melbourne 1969), p. 150. ' Croll, Tom Roberts, p. 54; McCulloch, op. cit., p. 142. “The Great Lindt’, Australasian Photo Review, vol. 59, July 1952, pp. 396-413, 490-7; various photographs and albums in the Historical Collection, La Trobe Library. ’ Victor Kennedy and Nettie Palmer, Bernard O’Dowd (Melbourne 1954), esp. chs 4, 5. "8 Walter Murdoch (ed.), The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd (Melbourne 1944), pp. 53-6. The poem was originally published in the Bulletin, 1 June 1901 (see Hugh Anderson, Bernard O'Dowd (1866-1958): an Annotated Bibliography (Sydney 1968).

Afterword ' Mark Twain, More Tramps Abroad, London 1897, p. 107. ° H.C. J. Lingham, Juvenal in Melbourne: A Satire Social and Political, Melbourne 1892. Lingham’'s largely unavailing struggle to make a living as a practitioner of ‘lofty literature’ was revealed in his June 1918 application to the Commonwealth Literary Fund, National Archives of Australia, 59/6391, Series A463/62. * Sun, 27 February 1932. ' Sun, 1 July, 22 December 1932. ° Vikki Plant, ‘The Garden City of a Garden State: Melbourne in the 1934 Centenary Celebrations’

in Graeme Davison and Andrew May (eds.), Melbourne Centre Stage: The Corporation of Melbourne, 1542-1992, Victorian Historical Journal, vol.63, nos 2 and 3, October 1992, pp. 86-100; Sun, 29-30 May 1935. * Souvenir Commemorating the first Centennial of Marvellous Melbourne, the Garden City of the South, Melbourne 1935 " Sun, 12 April 1947. * Sun, 10 August 1958. ” Craig McGregor, Profile of Australia, London, 1966, pp. 118-19, and compare Jim Davidson (ed.), The Sydney—Melbourne Book, Sydney 1986. !° The Landboomers, Carlton 1966, p. 5.

'! Theatre Australia, vol. 2, nos 4 and 5, August and Sept.—Oct. 1977, pp. 36-44; also see program, notes and drafts in Jack Hibberd Papers, LaTrobe Ms 12269/2909/2. - Marvellous Melbourne by the Age [1981]. '’ Age, 20 November 1990. I Meanjin, no.1, 1981.

Francis Tibbalds, Marvellous Melbourne 2000: An Overview of Planning Opportunities and International Comparisons, London, August 1990, pp. 2, 9,10, 12.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY For a fuller listing of sources including relevant books and articles published since 1978 the reader is referred to the notes.

Archival and Manuscript Sources Colonial Government Records (Victorian Public Record Office) Premier's Department. Inward and Outward Correspondence, 1885-95 (in relation to the public service). Chief Secretary's Department. Inward and Outward Correspondence, 1880-95 (in relation to the public service). Victoria Police. Reports of the Melbourne District, 1888, 1890, 1892-3. Papers of Defunct Companies, 1880-95. Records of Insolvencies, 1890-5. Prosecutors’ Briefs, 1890-5 (cases of embezzlement and larceny). Registrations of Attorneys, 1880-91.

Local Government Records Collingwood City Council. Ratebooks, 1878-9 to 1898-9 (Victorian Public Record Office). Footscray City Council. Ratebooks, 1883-4 to 1898-9 (Town Hall, Napier Street, Footscray).

Hawthorn City Council. Ratebooks, 1883-4 to 1898-9 (Town Hall, Burwood Road, Hawthorn). St Kilda City Council. Ratebooks, 1883-4 to 1898-9 (Town Hall, Brighton Road, St Kilda).

Business Records Australian Mutual Provident Society (Victorian branch). Mortgage Loans Ledgers, 1885-95 (MU Archives). Bright and Hitchcock. London Letterbooks, 1882-8 (MU Archives). Danks (John) and Co. Wages Book, 3 Apr. 1896 to 9 Sept. 1897 (ANU Archives). Foy and Gibson. Private Letterbook of William Gibson, 1890-6 (MU Archives). Hallenstein (Michaelis) and Co. Private Letterbook of Moritz Michaelis, 2 Apr. to 13 Dec. 1889; Letterbook of F D. Michaelis, 12 Apr. to 4 Dec. 1887 (ANU Archives). Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Company. Minutes of Directors, 1884—95 (MU Archives). Kauri Timber Company. Minutes of Directors, 1888-95 (MU Archives). Mcllwraith (John) and Co. John Mcllwraith’s Private Letterbook, 19 Mar. 1893 to 23 Apr. 1895 (ANU Archives). Melbourne Builders Lime and Cement Co. Minutes of Directors, 1874-91 (MU Archives). Modern Permanent Building Society. Applications for Loans, 1880-95; London Letterbook, 1891-5; Minutes of Directors, 1880-95 CANU Archives). Northcote Brick Company. Minutes of Directors, 1886-9 (MU Archives). Reid (Robert). London Memo Book, 25 Aug. 1896 to 28 June 1898 (ANU Archives). Standard Mutual Building Society. Minutes of Directors, 1886-91 (MU Archives). Swallow and Ariell Pty Ltd. Letterbooks of F T. Derham, 1885—96; ‘Little Green Book’; Reports of Proceedings of Shareholders Meetings, 1891-4 (MU Archives).

Trade Union Records Agricultural Implement and Machine Makers Society. Minutes of Special, General and Quarterly Meetings, Feb. 1890 to Mar. 1894 (at office of Tinsmiths and Sheet Metal Workers Union, Trades Hall).

— 3865 —

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Operative Stonemasons Society of Victoria. Minutes of General, Special, Half-yearly, Annual and Committee Meetings of the Central Lodge, 1880-95: Letterbooks of the General Secretary, 1880-95 (ANU Archives). Pressers Union. Minutes of Special, General and Quarterly Meetings, 14 Mar. 1888 to 11 Aug. 1897 CANU Archives). Trades Hall Council. Minutes, 1880-95 Gnicrofilm, ANU Archives). United Furnishing Trade Society. Minutes of General, Special and Committee Meetings, 27 July 1882 to 10 Oct. 1894: Rough Minutes, 20 Dec. 1885 to 11 Jan. 1894 (ANU Archives).

Victorian Operative Bootmakers Union. Minutes of General Meetings, 1882-95 (ANU Archives).

Victorian Operative Bricklayers Society. Minutes of Lodge Night, Quarterly and Special Meetings of the Melbourne Lodge, 1880-95; Letterbook of the Melbourne Lodge of the VOBS, 1880-4 (ANU Archives).

Others Archer, W. H. Papers (MU Archives).

Australian Club. Minutes of the Committee, 1880-95 (at the Club, William Street, Melbourne). Balfour, James. Papers (in the hands of Mrs J. W. Read, Camberwell, Victoria). Gray, George. Letters to England, 1885-1923 (Manuscript Collection, La Trobe Library). Law Institute of Victoria. Minutes and Annual Reports (at. offices, 465 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne); Papers (MU Archives). Melbourne Chamber of Commerce. Minutes, 1879-95 (Manuscript Collection, La Trobe Library). Odontological Society of Victoria. Minutes, 1884-8 (Library of the Dental Hospital, Grattan Street, Melbourne). Scotch College. Card Index of Old Boys (at the school, Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn). Shillinglaw, J. J. Letterbook. 1877-99 (Manuscript Collection, La Trobe Library). Turner, H. G. Personal Memorabilia, n.d. (Manuscript Collection, La Trobe Library).

Parliamentary and Other Official Sources Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria and Papers Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command. (In citing from this series I have employed the convention adopted by J. M. Worthington, /rde.r to the Parliamentary Papers, Reports of Select Committees and Returns to Orders, Bills, etc. Melbourne 1909.) Victorian Census, 1881, 1891, 1901. Victorian Government Gazetie, 1880-95. Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 1880-95. Victorian Police Gazette, 1890-3. Victorian Railways Book Timetables, 1880-90. Victorian Statistical Register, 1880-95. Victorian Yearbook, 1880-1 to 1895-8.

Newspapers and Periodicals Age, 1880-95. Argus, 1880-95.

Australasian, 1880-95. Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News, 1887-95. Australasian Building Societies’ and Mortgage Companies’ Gazette, 1886-90 (becomes Australian Financial Gazette).

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Australasian Coachbuilder and Saddler, 1886-94. Australasian Grocers’ Journal and Storekeepers’ Gazette, 1889-90, 1891-5. Australasian Insurance and Banking Record, 1880-95. Australasian Ironmongery, 1886-95. Australasian Manufacturer, 1889-91. Australasian Shorthand Journal, 1884-8, 1890-1. Australasian Trade Review and Manufacturers’ Journal, 1882-90. Australian Financial Gazette, 1891-5. Australian Law Times, 1880-95. Australian Leather Journal, 1899-1906. Australian Medical Gazette, 1881-95. Australian Medical Journal, 1880-95. Australian Stenographer, 1893-4. Building and Engineering Journal of Australia and New Zealand, 1888-90. Bulletin (Sydney), 1880-95. Commonweal and Workers’ Advocate, 1891-3. Daily Telegraph, 1880-92. Garden and Field, 1880-90. Herald, 1880-95. Journal of Commerce and Melbourne Prices Current, 1880-95. Manufacturer, 1887-9 (becomes Australasian Manufacturer). Melbourne Punch, 1878—95. Melbourne Review, 1876-85. Table Talk, 1888-9.

Victorian Engineer, 1886-9. Victorian Review, 1879-86.

Contemporary Books, Pamphlets, etc. Adams, Francis. Australian Essays. Melbourne, 1886. — The Australians. London, 1892. — The Melbournians. London, 1892. Andrews, R. Ode: Anticipatory of the Opening of the Great Exhibition in Melbourne 1880. Privately printed, 1880. Anonymous. Australian Etiquetie. Sydney, 1885. — The Battle of Mordialloc. Melbourne, 1888. — Marvellous Melbourne Twenty Years Hence. Kew, 1889. {Australasian Building Societies’ and Mortgage Companies’ Gazette]. Home Truths for Home Seekers. Melbourne, 1890. Ballantyne, Rev. James. Our Colony in 1880. Melbourne, 1880. Bannow, Waldemar. The Colony of Victoria: Socially and Materially. Melbourne, 1896. Barry, John. Victorzan Police Guide. Melbourne, 1888. Bonwick, James. Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip, Melbourne, 1856. — John Batman: the Founder of Victoria. Melbourne, 1868. — Port Phillip Settlement. London, 1883. Brick, Ludwig. Australasian Medical Directory and Handbook. Sydney, 1883, 1886. — The Sweating of the Medical Profession by the Friendly Societies of Australia. Sydney, 1896.

Cambridge, Ada. Thirty Years in Australia. London, 1903. Clarke, Percy. The New Chum in Australia or the Scenery, Life, and Manners of Australians in Town and Country. London, 1886. Cowderoy, Benjamin. Melbourne’s Commercial Jubilee: Notes from the Records of Fifty Years’ Work of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce. Melbourne, 1901.

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De Gruchy & Leigh's Stranger’s Guide to Melbourne: Descriptive, Topographical, and Social. Melbourne, 1866. Dyson, Edward. Fact'ry ‘Ands. Melbourne, 1906. — Rhymes from the Mines. Sydney, 1896. — Spat’s Fact'ry. Melbourne, 1914. Evans, George Essex. Loraine and Other Verses. Melbourne, 1898. Franklyn, H. Mortimer. A Glance at Australia in 1880. Melbourne, 1881. Fraser, W. W. Machinery: A Device of the Devil. Melbourne, n.d. (c. 19017). Freeman, John. Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life. London, 1888. General Mercantile Agency and Private Inquiry Office. Melbourne, n.d. (c. 1885°). Halloran, Henry. Jn Memoriam on Closing the Victorian International Exhibition 1880, 30 April 1551. Melbourne, 1881. Harris, Mrs T. Woman—the Angel of the Home and the Saviour of the World. Melbourne, 1890.

Horne, R. H. The South-Sea Sisters: a Lyric Masque for the Opening of the International Evchibition of Australasia. Melbourne, 1866. Hume, Fergus. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. London, 1887; Arrow ed., 1959. Hutchinson, M. L. /838—15885, Melbourne Then & Now. Melbourne, 1888. Intercolonial Freetrade Conference. Reports. Melbourne, 1887, 1888. Intercolonial Trades Union Congress. Report. Melbourne. 1884. International Temperance Convention (1888). Report. Melbourne, 1889.

[James, Stanley] Julian Thomas’, ‘The Vagabond’. The Vagabond Papers: Sketches of Melbourne Life, in Light and Shade (Melbourne, 1877; edited with introduction by Michael Cannon, Melbourne, 1969). Kernot, W. C. The Extension of Rail and Tramways. Melbourne, 1887. Knox, T. A. The Boy Travellers in Australasia. New York, 1889. Labilliere, F P. The Karly History of the Colony of Victoria, 2 vols. London, 1878. Leavitt; T. W. H. Australian Representative Men. Melbourne, 1887. Leavitt, T. W. H., and Lilburn, W. D. (eds). The Jubilee History of Victoria and Melbourne. Melbourne, 1888.

Martin, Arthur Patchett. Fernshawe: Sketches in Prose and Verse. Melbourne, 1881; London, 1885.

Massina’s Popular Guide to the Melbourne International Exhibition. Melbourne, 1880. Mayes, Charles. The Australian Builders’ Price Book. Melbourne, 1886, 1891. Melbourne Chamber of Commerce. Annual Reports, 1880-95. Morris, E. E. (ed.), Picturesque Australasia, 4 vols. London, 1889-90. Murphy, William E. History of the Eight Hours Movement, 2 vols. Melbourne, 1896, 1900. Norton, John. A History of Capital and Labour. Melbourne, 1888. O'Dowd, Bernard. Daiwnward? Sydney, 1903. Official Record of the Melbourne International Exhibition 1880-1. Melbourne, 1882. Old Colonist, An. The Battle of the Yarra. Melbourne, 1883. Old Housekeeper, An. The Australian Housewives’ Manual. Melbourne, 1885. — Men and How to Manage Them: a Book for Australian Wives and Mothers. Melbourne, 1885.

Perkins, H. Melbourne Illustrated and Victoria Described. Melbourne, 1880. Richardson, Henry Handel. The Getting of Wisdom. London, 1910; Windmill ed., 1960. Sala, George Augustus. The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, 2 vols. London, 1894.

Schleman, Joseph. Life in Melbourne, Australia. London, 1882. Sladen, Douglas (ed.). A Century of Australian Song. London, 1888. Smith, James Walter. A Handy-book on the Law concerning Owner, Builder & Architect. Melbourne, 1894. Smith, James (ed.). The Cyclopedia of Victoria, 3 vols. Melbourne, 1903-5.

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Smyth, Mrs B. Limitation of Offspring, Being the Substance of a Lecture Delivered in the North Melbourne Town Hall, and Elsewhere, to Large Audiences of Women Only. Melbourne, 1893. Sutherland, Alexander. Thirty Short Poems. Melbourne, 1890. —(ed.). Victoria and Its Metropolis, 2 vols. Melbourne, 1888. ‘Tasma’ [Jessie Catherine Couvreur]. Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill. London, 1889; Colonial ed., Melbourne, 1891. Thomas’s Guide to Melbourne. Melbourne, 1879. ‘Thomas, Julian’ [Stanley James]. The Vagabond Papers: Sketches of Melbourne Life, wn Light and Shade, series 1-4. Melbourne, 1877. Tucker, Horace. The New Arcadia: an Australian Story. Melbourne, 1894. Tucker Village Settlements Association, The Tucker Village Settlements of Victoria: Handbook for the Information of Contributors and Intending Settlers. Melbourne, 1892. Twopeny, Richard Ernest Nowell. Town Life in Australia. London, 1883. Universal Building Society. Pamphlet of Useful Information for Persons Wishing Either to Build, Borrow, or Invest. Melbourne, 1884. Varley, Henry. The Social Evil. Melbourne, 1878.

— The War between Heaven & Hell in Melbourne, Being a Graphic and Interesting Sketch of the Recent Crusade against Sin and Social Wickedness in the City. Melbourne, 1891. Victorian Chamber of Manufactures. Annual Reports, 1880-95.

— Report of the Tariff Enquiry Committee together with Appendices and Minutes of Evidence. Melbourne, 1894. Westgarth, William. Half a Century of Australasian Progress: a Personal Retrospect. London, 1889. Wicken, H. L. The Australian Home: a Handbook of Domestic Economy. Sydney, 1891. Willoughby, G. H. Marvellous Melbourne and Other Poems. Melbourne, 1898. Wimpole’s Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, [ts Suburbs, and Interesting Places of Resort. Melbourne, 1881.

Later Books, Articles and Pamphlets Barnard, EF. G. A. Jubilee History of Kew. Kew, 1910.

Barrett, Bernard. The Inner Suburbs. Melbourne, 1971. Bate, Weston. A History of Brighton. Melbourne, 1962. Beever, E. A. ‘Victoria’s Railway Spree: a Reappraisal’, Melbourne Historical Journal, vol. 10, 1971, pp. 39-44. Beever, E. A., and Freeman, R. D. ‘Directors of Disaster?’, Economic Record, vol. 48, Mar. 1967, pp. 119-26. Blainey, Geoffrey. A History of Camberwell. Melbourne, 1964. — Gold and Paper: a History of the National Bank of Australasia Limited. Melbourne, 1958.

— One Hundred Years Johns & Waygood Limited 1856-1956. Melbourne, 1956. Bowley, Marian. The British Building Industry. London, 1966. — Innovations in Building Materials: an Economic Study. London, 1960. Boyd, Robin. Australia’s Home. Melbourne, 1952. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Citzes. London, 1963. Buckley, K. D. The Amalgamated Engineers of Australia 1852-1920. Canberra, 1970. Butlin, N. G. Australian Domestic Product, Investment and Foreign Borrowing 18611938/9. Cambridge, 1962. — Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900. Cambridge, 1964. Butlin, S. J. Australia and New Zealand Bank. London, 1961. Cannon, Michael. The Landboomers. Melbourne, 1966. Colonial Gas Association. Fifty Years of Good Public Service 1888-1938. Melbourne, 1938.

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Daley, Charles. A History of South Melbourne. Melbourne, 1940. Davison, Graeme, ‘Public Utilities and the Growth of Melbourne’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Sept. 1970, pp. 169-89. —‘R.E.N. Twopeny and Town Life in Australia’, Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 68, Oct. 1974, pp. 292-305. Dean, Sir Arthur. A Maltitade of Counsellors: the Bar in Victoria. Melbourne, 1969. Dingle, A. E., and Merrett, D. T. ‘Home Owners and Tenants in Melbourne 1891-1911’, Australian Bconomic History Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Mar. 1972, pp. 21-35. Dunstan, Keith. Wowsers. Melbourne, 1968. Dyos, H. J. Victorian Suburb: a Study of the Growth of Camberwell. Leicester, 1961. Fitzgerald, R. T. The Printers of Melbourne. the History of a Union. Melbourne, 1967. [Footscray City Council]. Footscray ’s First 100 Years. Melbourne, 1959. Freeland, J. M. Architecture tn Australia: a History. Melbourne, 1968.

Gibbs, George A. (comp.). Water Supply and Sewerage Systems of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. Melbourne, 1925. Hall, A. R. ‘Some Long-period Effects of the Kinked Age Distribution of the Population of Australia 1861-1961", Economic Record, vol. 39, Mar. 1963, pp. 48-52. — The Stock Eevchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy 1852-1900. Canberra, 1968.

Harrigan, Leo. Victorian Railways to ‘62. Melbourne, 1962. Hawthorn and Boroondara Standard. The History of Hawthorn to 1895. Melbourne, 1896. Keating, John D. Mind the Curve! Melbourne, 1970.

Kelley, A.C. ‘Demographic Change and Economic Growth in Australia 1861-1911’, E.vplorations in Entrepreneurial History, ser. 2, vol. 5, no. 3, Spring-Summer 1968. La Nauze, J. A. Political Hconomy tr Australia: Historical Studies. Melbourne, 1949. [Melbourne Church of England Grammar School]. L7ber Melburniensis. Melbourne, 1965. Metropolitan Gas Company. Compendium of Lectures Delivered by Officers of the Metropolitan Gas Company. Melbourne, 1941. — Jubilee 1IS75-1928. an Historical Sketch. Melbourne, 1928. Meudell, George. The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift. London, 1929. Nicholson, G. Harvey (ed.). First Hundred Years: Scotch College Melbourne 1851-1951]. Melbourne, 1952. Patterson, G. D. The Tariff in the Australian Colonies 1856-1900. Melbourne, 1968. Selby, Isaac. Old Pioneers’ Memorial History of Melbourne from the Discovery of Port Phillip down to the World War. Melbourne, 1924. Serle, Geoffrey. The Golden Age: a History of the Colony of Victoria 1851-1561. Melbourne, 1963. — The Rush to Be Rich: a History of the Colony of Victoria 1883-1589. Melbourne, 1971. Shaw, Mary T. Builders of Melbourne: the Cockrams and Their Contemporaries 15531972. Melbourne, 1972. Sinclair, WA. Bconomic Recovery tr Victoria 1594-1599. Canberra, 1956. Weber, Adna F. The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1899; reprint, 1963.

Theses Bartlett, G. R. ‘Political Organization and Society in Victoria 1864-1883°. Ph.D., Australian National University, 1964.

Campbell, Joan. ‘The Settlement of Melbourne 1851-1893: Selected Aspects of Urban Growth’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1970. Davis, D. J. ‘Seventy-five Years of Commercial Education in Victoria 1850-1925°. M.Ed., University of Melbourne, 1966. Davison, G. J. ‘The Rise and Fall of “Marvellous Melbourne” 1880-95’. Ph.D., Australian National University, 1969.

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Finlayson, M. G. ‘Groups in Victorian Politics 1889-94’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1964.

Fry, E. C. ‘Condition of the Urban Wage-earning Class in Eastern Australia in the 1880s’. Ph.D., Australian National University, 1956. Hone, Anne. ‘Men, Mansions and Melbourne in the 1880's’. B.A., University of Melbourne, 1960. Ingham, S. M. ‘Some Aspects of Victorian Liberalism 1880-—1890'°. M.A., University of Mel-

bourne, 1949. McLachlan, N. D. ‘Larrikinism: an Interpretation’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1950. Moore, R. J. ‘ “Marvellous Melbourne”: a Social History of Melbourne in the ‘Eighties’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1958. Parnaby, J. E. “The Economic and Political Development of Victoria 1877-1881. Ph.D., University of Melbourne, 1951. Parris, J. R. ‘The Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880-1’. B.A., University of Melbourne, 1955. Parsons, T. G. ‘Some Aspects of the Development of Manufacturing in Melbourne 18701890’. Ph.D., Monash University, 1970. Philipp, June. “Trade Union Organization in New South Wales and Victoria 1870-1890’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1953. Roe, Jillian. ‘A Decade of Assessment: Being a Study in the Intellectual Life of the City of Melbourne between 1877 and 1886’. M.A., Australian National University, 1965. Saunders, David. “Terrace Housing’. M.Arch., University of Melbourne, 1959. Smith, F B. ‘Religion and Freethought in Melbourne 1870-1890’. M.A., University of Melbourne, 1960. Thompson, A. G. ‘Statistical Measurement of Manufacturing Activity in Victoria’. M.Comm.., University of Melbourne, 1964. Wilkinson, R. A. ‘The Life and Architecture of George Gray 1842-1920’. B.Arch., University of Melbourne, 1967.

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SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS Black and white illustrations

Introductton 3: Entrance to the Melbourne International Exhibition, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria (hereafter LTPC, SLV). 9: Map based on Melbourne Harbour Trust General Plan, 1893, LTPC, SLV. 11: Great Hall of the New Melbourne Stock Exchange, /llustrated Australian News, 1891.12:View from the Exhibition Building, 1883, LTPC,SLV.18-19:

A Busy Crossing, Elizabeth Street and Collins Street, engraving, Australasian Sketcher, 5 September, 1889, LEPC, SLYV.

‘From Men to Moneygrubbers’ 21: Coastal steamers at Queen’s Wharf, 1883, LTPC, SLV. 27: Melbourne tea auction, Australasian Sketcher, 1885. 30: Interior of Melbourne Commercial Exchange, Victoria of Today, 1901. 32: Craig Williamson’s buildings in 18838, Australasian Sketcher, 1883. 33:

Typewriter exhibit, /llustrated Sydney News, 1890. 36: The Workingman, Melbourne Punch, 1882.

‘The Old Spirit ... has gone out’ 51: Richmond in the 1870s, Australasian Sketcher, 1873. 56: Pickles’ Carriage Building Factory, Victoria and Its Metropolis, 1888. 59: Wright and Edwards’ Engineering Works, Victoria and Its Metropolis, 1888. 61: Craven's Patent Brickmaking Machine, Building and

Engineering Journal, 1888. 63: Hoffman Company Steam Brickworks, Melbourne University Archives. 70: A sweater’s workroom, Jllustrated Australian News, 1890. 80:

Bedggood’s Boot Factory, Australian Leather Journal, 1901. 83: North Melbourne, c. 1900, Department of Geology, University of Melbourne.

‘This Modern Babel’ 87: Building the Exhibition Building, LTPC, SLV. 89: Hydraulic lift in city building, Australasian Builder, 1889. 92, 95, 99, 109: The Way We Build Now 1, 2, 3 and 4, Melbourne Punch, 1883.

Professions and the Public 124: The New Judicature Act, Melbourne Punch, 1883. 130: Casualty ward of Melbourne Hospital, Jllustrated Australian News, 1887.

The Social Dynamics of a Metropolis 160: Melbourne telephone exchange in 1880, Australasian Sketcher, 1881. 162: Melbourne telephone exchange in 1890, Illustrated Australian News, 1890. 164-5: A villa near Camberwell Station, Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News, 21 June 1890.

Suburban Dreams and Urban Realities 172: Suburban villas, Malvern, c. 1890, LTPC, SLV. 177:‘Mount Ida’ advertisement, Vale Real Estate Maps, La Trobe Collection, SLV. 182: Housing status of Melbourne, 1891, map by Guy Holt Illustration and Design. 183: The contrasting styles of development on the high (Hawthorn) and low (Richmond) banks of the Yarra, M.M.B.W. Sewerage Map, 1897. 189:

— 372 —-

Sources of Illustrations

Melbourne’s railway system, map by Guy Holt Illustration and Design. 192: Chief commissioner’s railway inspection tour, Victorian Railways. 195: From Camberwell station, LTPC, SLV. 197: Melbourne’s tramway system, map by Guy Holt Illustration and Design. 199: Workmen’s tram, /llustrated Australian News, 1889. 204: Burnley Station in the 1890s, LTPC, SLY.

Making Ends Meet 237: A contemporary comment on the ‘Marriage Question’, Melbourne Punch, 1885. 239: Time-payment furniture store, Victorian View Album, 1889. 247: The ‘Servant Problem’, Melbourne Punch, 1883. 250: J. W. Lindt, studies of Ethelred, LTPC, SLV. 255: At the Cup,

Illustrated Australian News, 1882. 272: Distributing food to the unemployed, Leader, 1894.

‘Marvellous Melbourne’ 281: George Augustus Sala, Illustrated Australian News, 1885. 284: Vestibule of the Federal Coffee Palace, Australasian Builder, 1887. 291: ‘Outcast Melbourne’, /llustrated Australian News, 1893. 296: Batman’s landfall as pictured in 1888, Victoria and Its Metropolis, 1888. 309: Tucker Village Settlers, Wimmera, 1893, Illustrated Australian News, 1893. 312: J. W. Lindt, Study of a bullocky, c. 1894, LTPC, SLY.

Colour illustrations

Melbourne’s Palace of Industry 1: Joseph Nash, International Exhibition, Hyde Park, London, 1862, 1863, LTPC, SLY: The Garden Palace, Sydney, 1879, LTPC, SLV; Melbourne Exhibition Building, 1880, coloured lithograph, Supplement to the Illustrated Australian News, 9 October 1880, LTPC, SLV. 2: Samuel Calvert after A. C. Cooke, from design by Reed & Barnes, engraving, Illustrated Australian News, 10 June 1878, LTPC, SLV; Charles Nettleton, The Exhibition Building under construction, 1880, LTPC, SLV; Melbourne Centennial Exhibition, 1888, engraving. Australasian Sketcher, 9 August 1888, LTPC, SLV. 3: The inaugural ceremony

at the opening of the Melbourne International Exhibition, 1 October 1880, engraving, Australian Sketcher, October 9, 1880. Under the dome, ‘Federation’ lunette and ‘Morning’, photographed by James Lauritz, 1996. 4: Inside the Nave, 1880, LTPC, SLV; A View from the Balcony, engraving, Jllustrated Australian News, 6 November 1880.

Building the Boom Metropolis 1: Gibbs Bright warehouse, The Harold Paynting Collection, LTPC, SLV; Oakden, Addison and Kemp, Perspective of Australian Property and Investment Company Building, LTPC, SLV. 2: William Pitt, Rialto Building, facade, 1889, LTPC, SLV and Olderfleet Building, fleche roof, 1889, LTPC, SLV. 3: William Pitt, Commercial Bank of Australia, Collins Street facade and section, LTPC, SLV. 4: Brokers outside the Melbourne Exchange, 1887, LTPC, SLYV; William Pitt, facade of the new Melbourne Stock Exchange, 1889, University of Melbourne Archives.

The Railway Suburbs |

1: Whitehead’s Map of Melbourne and Suburbs, 1886, Map Collection, SLV. 2: Tibbits, Shrublands, 1882, Courtesy City of Boroondara Library Service; Batten and Percy Auction Plan, 1887 LTPC, SLV; Flinders Street Station, c. 1890, LTPC, SLV. 3: Batten and Percy Auction Plan, 1888, LTPC, SLV. 4: Universal Building Society pamphlet, in Sands and McDougall, Melbourne Directory, 1885 (author's copy).

— 373 -

Sources of fllustratzons

The Skyline and the Street: Images of Marvellous Melbourne 1: Clarence Woodhouse, Melbourne in 1838 from the Yarra Yarra, c. 1888, colour lithograph, from 1538 — Melbourne Then and Now — 1888, M. L. Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1888, LTPC, SLV; Edmund Thomas, Melbourne in 1888 from the Fitzroy Gardens, 1888, colour lithograph, from 1838 ~ Melbourne Then and Now — 1858, M. L. Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1888, LTPC, SLV. 2: Tom Roberts, Bourke Street, Melbourne, c. 1886, purchased 1918, National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia; Lindt, Bourke Street, Looking East, LTPC,

SLV. 3: Frederick McCubbin, Australian 1855-1917, Melbourne in 1555, 1888, Gift of Mr Hugh McCubbin, National Gallery of Victoria; J. W. Lindt’s carte de visite, date unknown (author's collection); Lindt, Collins Street, Looking East, LTPC, SLV. 4: Gill, Doing the Block, 1880, LTPC, SLV: The Block, engraved by P. Naumann, from a sketch by Melton Prior, 1886, The Illustrated London News, 22 February 1890.

— 374 -

Abbotsford, 179 Balfour, James, business activities, 24, 26, accountants, 115, 1384-5 31, 34, 261; income and expenditure,

34-5 Balwyn. 194

Accountants and Clerks Association, 10, 232, 275; as victim of crash, 306

Adams, Francis, 11-12, 286 Banks and Co., 52

Adams, George H., 23 Bar Association, 134 Age, 6, 82, 106, 183, 154-5, 191, 266, 320 Bar Committee, 123 agency system, 23-4, 26, 31, 38-9, 42-3 barristers, see legal profession

Aitken, James, 265 Barrows, J. H., 285-6

Albert Park, 68, 91, 251 Barry, Sir Redmond, 122 Alphington, 189, 193 Batman, John, 292-93, 295, 296

Allen, Professor Harry, 119 Beaney, Dr James, portrait, 11 Allen, Rev. William, 298-9 Bedggood, John and Co., 52, 61, 66, 79-80

Alston, David, 64 Beeton, Mrs Isabella, 174, 241, 243 Amess, Samuel, 96 Benjamin, Benjamin, 46 anarchists, 265, 269-70 Benn, John, 206-7 Andrade, David, 265, 308 Bennie, J., 41

apprenticeship, 66-72, 88, 102-4 Bent, Thomas, vi, 152-3, 187, 189, 198,

Archer, W. H., 142, 274, 343 n.20 199, 319

architects, 88-91, 107, 110; metropolitan Bernhardt, Sarah, 277

concentration, 118; professional Berry, Graham, 1

protection, 127; reactions to Bevan, P., 58

depression, 181-2; recruitment, 115 Bird, Dr Edwin, 120

architecture, 2, 14-16; commercial, birthrate, 249, 273-4 27-8; domestic, 171-4; boom styles, Bishop, Joseph, 78 282-5 Bligh and Harbottle, 24 Argus, 3 52, 92, 248, 251, 280, 287, 289, ‘Block,’ The, 244 308; on public service, 147, 155; on Bolte, Henry, 318

history of Melbourne, 6, 10; on Bonwick, James, 293 industrial relations, 49, 75; on boot and shoe industry, 7, 51-5, 61-3,

unemployed, 45, 258, 260 68-9, 71-5, 79-83

Armadale, 168, 248 Bosisto, Joseph, 3, 127 Arnold, Matthew, 279 Box Hill, 168, 187, 189, 191, 194 artists, 311-13 bricklayers, 85-6, 90, 94, 104-5, 110-11 Ascot Vale, 168, 185 brick manufacturing industry, 58-60, 64,

Athenaeum, 252, 277 76, 77, 258

Austral Otis Elevator Company, 58 Briggs, Asa, vill, 318

Australasian, 172 249, 289 Brighton, 180, 200, 208, 220, 239, 249,

Australasian Ironmonger, 67 253, 272, 274 Australian Club, 252, 277 Branch), 10, 120-1, 129-31

Australasian Trade Review, 24, 28 48 British Medical Association (Victorian

Australian Law Times, 116 Broadmeadows, 200

Australian Medical Journal, 118 Brown-May, Andrew, xvi Australian National University, ix—x Brownlie, Brother, 111-12 Brunswick, 14, 97, 253, 258, 274:

Baillieu, W. L, 46 industries, 54, 58-9, 76, 197; suburban

Balaclava, 249 development, 65, 188, 206, 208, 220,

Balfour, Elliott and Co., 82-8, 39 225, 240

— 375 ~

Index

Buenos Aires, 14, 137 task of mother, 168-70; see also Builders and Contractors Association of education, generation gap, women Victoria (BCV), 95-6, 98-101 Chinese, employment in furniture industry,

Builders Exchange, 100 53, 82; fear of, 52, 216, 301; quarter in building industry, ch. 3 passim; depression Little Bourke Street, 187, 355 n.14,

in, 106-10, 258; finance in, 92-3; 285, 290-1

growth, 14-15, 85-8; jerry-building, Civil Service, see public service

94-5, 98-101, 106-7; origins of Clarke, Marcus, 4, 114 bullders, 95-8; structure, 88-90, 106, class relations, 14, 49-50, 60, 65-6, 71-2,

107, 112—3; trade unions, 102-6, 74-5, 83-4, 270; see also social status, 110-12; see also architects, bricklayers, manufacturing

stonemasons etc. Clauscen, G. C., 187

building societies, as financiers, 63, 92-3; Clendinnen, Inga, vu clientele, 223-4; collapse, 226, 229-30: clerks, associations, 10, 34-5, 147-50;

growth, 14-15, 216-17; ideology, numbers, 10, 28, 150; recruitment and 215-18, 230; see also Modern promotion, 36-7, 137-40; salaries, 34, Permanent Building Society 1538-4, 232-4, 259; and housing, 175-6, Building Societies’ Gazette, 177-8 217-8, 224-5, 229; and insolvency, Bulletin (Sydney), vi, 283, 304, 3138 261-2: and marriage, 235-7 Buncle, John, 60, portrait, 48-9 Clifton Hill, 65, 187, 193, 197

Burnley, 179 clothing industry, 52, 68-9, 72 clubs, 252,

Burwood, 168 277; see also names of clubs, e.g. Butlin, N. G., ix, x, 204, 327-8, 332-3 Australian Club Butters, J. S., 64 coachbuilders, see carriages Coburg, 189, 206

Calder, W., 39 Collingwood, 12, 96, 120, 210, 240, 253,

Camberwell, 168, 189, 191, 253, 193 254, 291: growth of, 6, 14; hotels, 244;

Cambridge, Ada 231, 254, 278 housing, 171, 182, 187, 209, 214,

Campbell, Sloss and McCann, 57, 63 218-25, 220; industries, 51, 54, 176,

Cannon, Michael, xv, 319 180; transport in, 190, 197, 200-1, 207:

Canterbury, 194 workforce, 65-6, 71, 72, 182

Carlton, 53, 194, 197, 214, 218, 222, 313 Collingwood Observer, 185

Caron, Monsieur Jules, 4 Commercial Exchange, 28-9 carpenters, 105, 110 communications, social aspects, 10, carriages, construction industry, 52-3, 55, 159-62: in mercantile activity, 22, 28,

63, 78-9; demand for, 249-51, 276 31: influence on manufacturing labour,

Caulfield, 193, 200, 253, 308 71; on growth of public service, 138

Centennial International Exhibition, 298 companies, public, 39, 62-3, 330-1 n.67

central business district, 10-12, 161; Comte, Auguste, 282 construction in, 86-7, 102; commercial Coppin, George, 171 functions, 20-1, 25, 28, 31; government Cornwall's Brick Company, 60

functions, 187; manufacturing Couchman, T. C., 145, 155 functions, 52-3, 55-7, 76; professional Cutts, Dr William, jnr, 120 functions, 118; vice zone, 2, 354-5 n.14,

288-92, 307-8 Daily Telegraph, 218, 282

Chamber of Commerce, 28-30, 45 Daily Telegraph (London), 280 Chamber of Manufactures, 30, 65 Dampier, Alfred, 286

Chapman, Rev. Samuel, 289 Danks, John, 57, 61

Charity Organization Society, 45 Davies, M. H., 215, 265, 306

Cheltenham, 202 Davison, William, 96

children, as manufacturing employees, Deakin, Alfred, vi, 121, 1383, 144, 303

71-2: costs, 247-9, distribution in Decentralization League, 287 metropolis, 185-6, 249-51; rearing as Dening, Greg, vil, x1

— 376 -

Index

dentists, 115, 117, 126-7 manufacturing employment, 71-2; and depression, causes, 14-5, 40, 202-3, 327-8 professional connections, 115-6; and

n.33; effects, 15-17, 134, 317, on public service patronage, 140-1; and building industry, 106-113; on home- suburban settlement, 186-7; see also

ownership, 225-30; on lifestyle, domestic economy, generation gap, 255-78; on manufacturing, 76-84; on marriage M’s self-image, 302-15; on mercantile family limitation, 249, 273-4 life, 40-46; on suburban development, Fawkner, J. P., 11, 293-5

204-11 Ferguson, Mephan, 58, 334 n.57

Dennemont, Emile, 266 Fink, Theodore, 46, 319 Derham, F. T., 26, 37 Fitzgerald, Dr Thomas, 119 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 5, 287 Fitzgibbon, E. G., 283 Dickens, Charles, 296 Fitzroy, 12, 14, 96, 176, 253, 254;

Dickinson, Dr William, 120 industries, 52-4, 65, 71-2; suburban

Dilke, Charles, 11 development, 185~7, 190, 207, 222; Dingle, A. E., 218, 223 transport, 189-90 197, 200-1 doctors, see medical profession Flemington, 185, 253, 254, 272 domestic economy, 173-4, 238-54, 262, food, 241-38, 267-8

266-9, 274-7 football, 201, 254, 285

Doncaster, 202 Footscray, 14, 120, 176, 244, 253;

Dowling, M., 98, 337 n.24 industries, 55, 57-8, 77; and influence

dress, 244-5, 275-6 on F’s social character, 58, 68, 188;

Duffy, Frank Gavan, 141 residential development, 221, 223, 225:

Dunstan, David, xiv transport, 199, 207

Durkheim, Emile, 266—7 Franklyn, H. M., 39

Dyson, Edward, 230 Fraser and Co., 39 Freeman, John, 290-2

East Melbourne, 167 Fryer, Evangeline, 313

education, commercial, 37-9; private, 248, Fulton’s Ironworks, 62

277; professional, 114-15, 98-9, furniture, 238-9, 276 118-19, 124-5; and centralization, furniture industry, 52, 53-4, 68, 75, 82 137-8; and Exhibition, 4; and gold

generation, 2-3; and mother, 169-70; Gamble and Son, 60 and public service, 139-41; see also gardening, 168, 175-6

apprenticeship, children gas companies, 14, 187, 203, 206-9 Edwards, Passmore, 257 generation gap, social effects, 3-4, 158-61;

Ellery, R. L. J., 147, 151 on building industry, 96-7, 101-2; on

Elliot, Dr Nicholas, 120 housing demand, 218-9; on

Elsternwick, 200 manufacturing, 50, 66, 66-71; on

emigrants, 108, 264; see also immigrants ‘marriage problem’, 235-7; on medical

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 294 practice, 119-20; on merchants, 21-2, engineers, see metal industry 32-3, 37-9, 45-6; on professions,

272, 308 202-3

Essendon, 176, 200, 207, 208-9, 253, 114-5; on suburbanization, 14, 184-6,

Essendon Brick Company, 64 geographical mobility, of builders, 88,

Evans, George Essex, 266 96-8, 264; of householders, 185-6, Exhibition Building, xi, 2 187-8, 208-9, 212-4, 227-9 Gillies, Duncan, 152, 190, 163, 196

Fairfield, 308 Girdlestone, Dr T. M., 119

family, and apprenticeship, 101-2; and cult Glen Iris, 168, 205

of Home, 168-71; and depression, Glenroy, 313 268-74; and domestic service, 247-8; Goe, Bishop, F. F,, 305 and home ownership, 212-5, 230; and Gordon, General Charles, 172

~ 377 -

Index

Gordon House, 172 Hunt, J. W., 34-5, 215, 226, 232 Gras, N.S. B., 10, 158

Gray, George, 90-1, 93, 101, 108, immigrants, character, 11-12; number,

238-9, 306 186; social impact, 159; and building

Greig and Murray, 26, 39 industry, 96-9, 101-2; and civil service

Grondona and Co., 39 patronage, 139-42; and hotels, 252; and legal profession, 122-3; and

Haddon, FW, 50 manufacturing, 6, 53; and medical

Hallenstein, Michaelis, 232 profession, 118-19; and servant supply, Harkness, Thomas, 62, 66 245-6: and social segregation, 186-7;

Hawksburn, 168, 193 see also emigration

Hawthorn, 120, 168, 187, 209, 239, 272, incomes, 232-5, 258-60, 267-9; and 312; as middle class suburb, 180, 185: housing, 173-4; and home-ownership,

housing and home-ownership in, 208, 223-4 221, 223, 225, 228: social institutions industry, see manufacturing

in, 244, 248, 251, 253, 254. infanticide, 274

Hayter, H. H., 300 insolvency, pattern of, 262; and builders,

Hearn, Dr W. E., 29, 122, 138 107-8; and metal manufacturers, 77-8:

Heinecke and Fox, 39 and merchants, 46; and homeHeskett, John and Sons, 334 n.54 ownership, 229-30

Hesselmann, Carl, 22-3 intercolonial free trade, 26-7, 29-30

Higinbotham, George, 122 investment, 7, 9, 14, 202-3, 327-8 n.33;

Higinbotham, Thomas, 193 industrial, 24-5, 52-3, 55-65, 78-82,

Hirst, John, xiii, 138 267; mercantile, 24-8, 39; professional, Hoffman Brick Company, 59-60, 64, 76-7 114-5: public, 1387-9, 150-1; in

Holden, James, 96 residential construction, 14-16, 82-3;

home, ideal, 14; defined, 166-8; denied, in transport, 189-202; in urban

230: physical setting, 175-6; and services, 203-4, 206-8 domestic economy 239-40, 240-3; and Irish, 50, 97, 186, 245

sex-roles, 168-70, 172-3: see also Ironmasters Assistants Union, 75 family, home-ownership, housing Irwin, Dr John, 120 home-ownership, 13, ch. 8 passin; forces Isaacs, Isaac, 156 promoting,219-21; ideal, 212: level of in Melbourne,218—21, 227-8; in Sydney, James, Stanley (The Vagabond’), 289-92

221; political implications, 215-6, Jolimont, 185 224—5: suburban estimates, 220-1; and Jones, S. P., 43-4 building societies, 212-19, 222-30; and Jordan, Tillmans and Co., 23 incomes, 223-4: and mobility, 212-15: Joske, E., 148, 344 n.33

and occupations, 224, 229: and Journal of Commerce, 28, 31, 35, 39, 40,

‘urbanization , 221 43, 134

Horne, R. H., 4, 296-7

hotels, 182, 244, 252 Kennett, Jeffrey, 322

housing, demand for, 14-18, 184-7; jerry- Kensington, 168 built, 94, 127: preference for single- Kew, 168, 179, 180, 186, 190, 194, 198,

family dwelling, 13, 171; rents and 202, 220, 239, 248, 251, 253 incomes, 171-2; and social industry, King, John, 266 90-1, 94, 105-7; and social segregation, Knorr, Mrs, 274 176-7; of manufacturers, 65—6; of

merchants, 20-1; of working classes, Labilliére, F P., 294 72, 182-3, 186-7: see also home, home- Labour Bureau, 272

ownership, building industry Ladies Benevolent Societies, 272

Hume, Fergus, 291 land boom, causes, 14-17, 183-8; and Hunt, Horbury, 109-10 effects, 2389-40, 246, 306-7; on — 378 —

Index

commerce, 25, 31, 36-7, 39-40, 45-6; ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ myth, vi, XH—XV,

manufacturing, 55-7, 59-60, 63-4, 11-12, 17, 86-7, 162, 166, 231, 76-7; building industry, 88-101, 107-8, 316-17; defined, 12, 279-82; 112-18; professions, 116-18, 129-381, celebrated in verse, 297-9; twentieth 133-6; public service, 150-1; suburban century usage, 320-2; and growth, 161-3, 201-4, 209-11, 209-11, ‘countermyths , 283-6, 287-93, 302;

225-7 and history, 294-6; and prophecy,

186-7, 211 308-11

land boomers, character of, 91, 107-8, 299-302; and village settlements,

landlords, 221, 228, 286-72 Marvellous Melbourne (musical), Xi,

Lang, Matthew, 25, 45 319, 3820

Langlands Foundry, 48, 57, 62, 334, n.37, Marxism, Xi, xill, 322

334 n.57 Mayhew, Henry, 68, 292

Langridge, George, 187 Meaden, J. W., 297-8 Larkin, Mathias, 91, 187 medical profession, costs of qualification, larrikinism, 69-71, 285 115; growth, 117; honorary system,

Law Institute, 121, 124-5, 1384 118; metropolitan concentration, 118;

Law, McWalters and Co., 77 ratio of doctors to patients, 117,

Lawson, Henry, vi, vii 119-20; recruitment, 116; as

Le Fevre, Dr George, 119 professional paradigm, 126-7; and legal profession, amalgamation, 122-3, ‘club’ system, 120, 128-31 133-4; metropolitan concentration, Medical Society of Victoria, 118, 120 118; qualifications, 124-5; origins and Melbourne and Hobson's Bay Railway

recruitment, 114-6, 122-38; and Company, 189-91, 193 depression, 133; and reformers, 121 Melbourne, beginnings, 5-13, 292-31;

Lennon, Hugh, 60-1 density, 18, 171-5, 249; population, 6, Lindt, J. W., 250, 312-3 7, 183-7, 208-9, 264-5, 273; self-image, Lingham, Henry, 316-17 1-5, 11, 17, ch. 10 passim; as London, compared with Melbourne, 13-14, ‘metropolis’, 6-12, 26-8, 41-2, 1386,

53, 99, 102, 166-8, 231, 286; and 150, 157, 156-63, 279-80, 281-2, 283, building industry, 98; and professional 287, 291, 294-5; compared with other

training, 114-5, 118 cities, 13-14, 50, 53, 187, 170, 300; links with other colonies, 7, 26, 51, McCarthy, Charles, 120 97-8, 264, 281-2; relations with McCubbin, Frederick, 312-3 Victorian countryside, 7-8, 22, 25, 138, McEwan, James, 42 287-8; see also ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ Malvern, 193, 220, 221, 272 myth, spatial patterns etc. Manufacturer, 65 Melbourne Builders Lime and Cement manufacturers, ‘associated manufacturers , Company, 96 64-5; merchants as, 25, 108; origins Melbourne, City of, 53, 96, 186, 209, 272 and status, 60-6; residential patterns, Melbourne Club, 252, 265

65-6; self-image, 47-8; and Melbourne Cup, 254-5, 277

intercolonial free trade, 29-30 Melbourne Directory, 23, 62, 107 Manufacturers and Exhibitors Association, Melbourne Grammar School, 39, 248, 277

47 Melbourne International Exhibition, 1-6,

manufacturing, ethos, 47-50; growth, 6-7, 12, 20, 22-3, 47-9, 297-8, 317 51-2; investment, 23, 53, 55-65, 78-82: Melbourne Punch, 38 locational patterns, 6, 50-60, 188-9; Melbourne Telephone Company, 29 products, 2-3, 47; workforce, 6, 70-1; Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus and class relations, 49-50, 60-2, 83-4; Company, 15, 196-8, 206, 209-10

and depression, 76-84 Melbourne Typographical Society, 81

Marks, Josiah, 265 Mentone, 311

marriage, 14, 235-8, 272-3 Menzies, Robert, 318 — 379 -

Index

merchants, ch. | passim; growth, 22-8, pharmacists, 118, 126 28; intercolonial trade, 26, 41-2; Phoenix Clothing Co., 53 origins, 20-22; office organization, pianos, 355, n.16 30-1; partnerships, 37-9; and agency Pickle’s Carriage Works, 55-6, 63 system, 22—5, 31, 42—4: and clerical Pigdon, John, 96, 265 employees, 32-7, 44-5; and commercial Pinschof, Carl, 23

education, 37-8; and commercial pollution, see public health morality, 39-40, 45-6; and depression, Port Melbourne (Sandridge), 54, 176, 186,

40-6; and manufacturers, 25; and 198, 200, 207, 221, 240, 253 pastoral investment, 25; and politics, Prahran, 54, 253, 272; suburban

28-30; and sugar industry, 26 development, 186, 187, 192-3, 218,

Merrett, David, 218, 223 220; transport, 198-9, 206; see also metals and engineering industry, 52-8, South Yarra, Toorak

55-8, 62-3, 67-8, 76-8, 185 Prell, F W, 25, 31

Meudell, W. G., 134 Preston, 253

Mirams, James, 215, 226 Prince's Hill, 189 mobility, see geographical mobility, social professions, ch. 4 passim; associations, 11,

mobulity 118, 158; British influences on, 125-7,

Modern Permanent Building Society, 34; 136; growth, 114-5, 117; malpractice,

clients, 224; loans 222-3; and 117; attitudes to qualifications, 120-6;

depression, 226 professional relationship defined,

Moonee Ponds, 272 115-6, 125-7; and defended, 127-36; Moorhouse, Bishop James, 246, 288 protective legislation, 125-8, 131-5;

Mordialloc, 189, 200, 301 recruitment to, 114-6, 119-20; and Morrison, Dr Alexander, 277 depression, 128, 131-5; see also

Munro, D., 78 architects, dentists, legal profession, Munro, James, 153, 215, 265, 319 medical profession, pharmacists

Murphy, W. E., 49 Progressive Political League, 335-6 n.91 prostitution, 2, 288, 291, 354-5 n.14

Newmarket, 201 protection, see tariff Newport, 55, 58 Proudhon, J.- P., 265

Nield, Dr James, 119, 274 public health, fear of miasmas, 175; river Normanby, Marquis of, 2, 5, 12 pollution, 51, 57-8; hazards of inner Northcote, 14, 59, 76, 176, 187, 159, suburbs, 180-1; and housing, 95, 182;

208, 220 and M's image, 283-5

Northcote Brick Co., 60, 77 public service, Victorian, ch. 5 passim; North Melbourne (Hotham), 48, 53, 65, Age's campaign against, 154-5; Argus’s

185, 193, 198, 222, 240, 253 defence of, 155; ‘business’ functions, 10, 137-8; classification, 145-7;

Oakleigh, 200, 208 concentration in metropolis, 137-8;

O'Dowd, Bernard, 313-15 growth, 150-1, 156; organization, 140, ‘Old Colonist, An’, 301 151-2, 161; patronage system, 139-42,

‘Old Housekeeper; An’, 174, 240-2 154; promotion, 1389-40, 146-7, 156-7:

omnibuses, 189, 196 recruitment, 138-9, 151-3; reform,

103-4, 111-13 155-6

Operative Stonemasons Society of Victoria, 141-2, 143-9; retrenchment, 153-4, Public Service Act (1883), 143-9

Park, Robert E., 17 Public Service Board, 148-6, 161, 163; Parkes, Sir Henry, 2-35 personnel, 144-5; carries out Parkville, 167, 178 classification, 145-7: conflicts with P.S. Paterson, Laing and Bruce, 308 Association, 148-9, nurtures Patterson, J. B., 140, 155, 189 bureaucratic efficiency, 150-1; political

Pearson, Charles H., 114, 127, 191, 308 opposition, 152-7; replaced, 155-6

—~ 380 —-

Index

railways, administration, 144, 150, 127, 115-16; and home-ownership, 212-13,

154, 187, 189-91, 192-38, 200-1; 224-5

country lines, 7, 150; suburban lines, social status, 13-14, 82-4, 158-60, 174-5,

14, 15, 17, 138, 168, 188-96, 198-202, 224-5, 231-3 204-8, 209-10; and industrial Society in Aid of Maternity Hospital

development, 55, 58, 58-9 Patients, 249

Reid, Robert, 38, 43-4, 275-6 South Brunswick Brick Co., 64 religion, influence on building societies, South Melbourne (Emerald Hill), industry

215-6; suburban church attendance, in, 51, 55, 78; suburban development, 252-4; and reaction to depression, 90-1, 176, 180-4, 186, 208, 253;

304-6 transport, 199, 208; and depression, Renard, Jules, 42 258, 268, 307 Richmond, viii, ix, 6, 14, 51, 176, 180, 184, South Preston Brick Co., 64 185, 186, 187, 207, 214, 253; industrial South Yarra, 53, 180, 200, 209, 249, 307

development, 71, 96, 182; transport, spatial patterns, 10, 14-15; building

197, 200, 210; and depression, activity, 98, 107-8; commerce, 20-1,

209-10, 272 31; density, 13; family, 239-40, 206;

Roe, Jill, xiii, 318 home-ownership, 219-23; industry,

Roberts, Tom, 311-13 50-60, 76-8; medical care,119; poverty, Robison Bros, 57, 63 257-60; professions, 118-19; religion, Ruegg, Richard, 32-3 252-3; residential development, 185-7, 208-9, 219-23; social status, 175-82;

St Kilda, 119-20, 186, 239, 249-50, 253, vice zone, 354-5 n.14; see also central

254, 265, 267, 272; described, 180; business district, suburbs etc. home-ownership in, 220, 228; industry Speight, Richard, 1338, 154, 189, 198,

in, 53, 54, 55; transport, 198, 206 198-9, 201

Sala, G. A., 12, 279-81, 285, 317, 320 Springthorpe, Dr J. W,, 129

Salvation Army, 179, 256, 308 Stephen, W. Ravenscroft, 142

Sandringham, 202, 205 Stickland, F. J., 55, 78

sargood, F. T., 21, 37, 140 stonemasons, 86, 103-5, 111-12 Scotch College, 39, 248, 277 Streeton, Arthur, 311 Serle, Geoffrey, 75, 159, 161, 318 Strong, Rev. Charles, 171, 252-4

servants, 186, 245-7, 276-7 Studley Park, 12, 249

Servants Training Institution, 246 suburbanism, ideal, 13-14, 18, 166-71, Service, James, commercial activities, 21, 240; physical setting, 175-8; reaction 26, 37; critic of professional protection, against, 264-5 127, 130-1, 133; defines ‘working suburbs, building industry in, 97, 107-8, people’, 232; observes M’s progress, 113; doctors in, 119-20; economic 283; reforms public service, 139, 142, distress in, 257-8, 271-3; causes of

143, 148-50; victim of robbery, 265 growth, 14-15, 184-8; causes of sewing machine, 54, 69, 79-81, 244, decline, 202-9, 209-11; home-

355 n.16 ownership in, 212-25; inner, working

shopkeepers, earnings, 233; home- class, 194-202; middle class commuter, ownership, 224, 229; mobility, 214; 191-6; social divide between, 177-83: as landlords, 221; in depression, transport systems in, 188-202, 204-6;

262-3, 268 and crime, 265—6; and demand for

shorthand, 31-2, 151 carriages, 249-51, 254; and hotels, 244; ‘slummer’ reporters, 289-92, 307 and marriage patterns, 239-40; and

Smalley and Harkness, 79 private schools, 248; and religious

Smythe, Bertha, 273 observance, 252-3; and village

social mobility, among builders, 88-94, settlements, 308, 311; see also suburbs

95-7; clerks, 31, 82-4, 36-7, 233-5; by name

factory operatives, 60—3; professions, sugar trade, 26, 329 n.17

— 381 —-

Index

suicide, 266-7 Veblen, Thorstein, 245

Surrey Hills, 168 Victoria Steel Foundry, 63 Sutherland, Alexander, 7, 96-7, 166-8, 292 Victorian Alliance Record, 215

Swallow and Ariell, 26, 39, 259 Victorian Builders and Contractors

Swinbourn, James, 87 Association (V.B.C.), 98-101

Sydney, compared with M, 219-21, 281-2, Victorian Domestic Servants Immigration

231,318; supplants M as re-export Society, 246

centre, 41-2 Victorian Institute of Architects (later

syme, David, 133, 154-6 Royal Victorian Institute of Architects), 127, 131-2

tailoresses, 74—5 Victorian Operative Bootmakers Union, ‘Tasma’ (Jessie Couvreur), 4, 286 73-5, 82-35 tea trade, 26, 31, 40 Victorian Operative Bricklayers Society, technical innovation, 161-2; agricultural 104-8, 110-11

implements, 48-9; boot manufacturing Victorian Public Service Association, 10,

equipment, 54-5, 69, 79-84; brick 147-50

press, 60; cable tram, 196-7; carriage village settlements, 308-11

building equipment, 55-6, 76; Virgoe, W. R., 25 engineering, 58, 67; lawnmower, 176;

ready-to-wear clothing, 244; sewing wages, see incomes machine, 355 n.57; steel-making, 334 Walch, Garnet, 280

n.57; street-paving, 283 Walkenden Brick Co., 64

telephone, 29, 31, 40, 160, 161 Ward, Russel, vil

Templeton, J. M., 144-5, 149, 154 water supply, 14, 51, 203 tenants, 84, 171-2, 182-3, 217-30, Wesley College, 39, 277

239-40, 268-70 Westgarth, William, 85, 280, 294

theatre, 254, 277-8, 286 West Melbourne, 185, 198 Thomson, Hugh, 66 White, Daniel, 55, 63, 64, 78-9

time-payment, 238-9 White, Richard, 61

Toorak, 46, 179, 180, 193, 248, 265, 307 Whybrow and Co., 79 Trades Hall, 1, 46, 49, 73, 102, 258, 266 Williamstown, 54, 57-8, 77, 198, 199, 220,

trade unions, 1-2, 34-5, 49-50, 68-70, 240, 253, 272 73-6, 81-3, 101-6, 108-12, 121, 160, Wilsmore Brick Co., 64 256, 265 Windsor, 168, 200 tramways, 14, 15, 196-9, 206, 209-11 Wirth, Louis, 161, 345 n.7

transport, see omnibuses, railways, women, as domestic servants, 245-8;

tramways housewives, 168-70, 172-3, 240-4;

Trenwith, W. A., 69, 73-4 manufacturing operatives, 53, 69, 71-2,

Trollope, Anthony, 280 74-5, 79: medical students, 119;

Tucker, Rev. H. FE, 308-11, 363 n.101 prostitutes, 354-5 n.14; public servants,

Turner, H. G., 232, 254, 265 153; shopkee pers, 233; supplementary

Turner, lan, xiv wage-earmers, 233; typists, 31-2; and

Twopeny, R. E. N., viii, 7-8, 141, 171, 231, child-rearing, 169-70, 248-9; and dress, 233, 234, 238, 241, 254, 280, 282, 318 244 254-5: and marriage, 235-8; and

typewriter, 31-2, 40, 151, 160 social life, 249-52; see also domestic economy

urban history, x, XH, xv, 318 Worthington, Judge, 39 United Furnishing Trade Society, 75, 82 Wren, John, 179

Universal Brick Co., 60 Wright and Edwards, 59, 78 University of Melbourne, xi, 115, 118-20,

122, 127-8, 248, 340 n.2: History Yager, J. G., 61

Department, vul, ix Yarra, as social barrier, 178-8; pollution of, 51,58, 180

Varley, Henry, 288—9 Yeomans, George, 187 — 382 —-