Category Archives: Sydney snaps

On the waterfront

03 Monday Sep 2018

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The Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia (WWF) was a force on the wharves until 1993, when it was amalgamated into the Maritime Union of Australia. The WWF had presided over massive changes on the waterfront, always battling for improved conditions – slow battles, with reports still appearing in the 1940s commenting adversely on the huge danger to a man’s health in working on the wharves, and the lack of even basic sanitary facilities. One of its early battles was around the weight of the bags that the workers had to carry into the ships: in 1904 it asked for a weight limit of 150 lbs (68 kg) – the weight limit at the time was 240 lbs (109 kg) but this was often exceeded. In 1970 the safe limit for lifting was deemed to be 55 kg. The WWF also conducted political actions, such as the Pig Iron dispute, where waterside workers refused to load pig iron onto ships bound for Japan in 1937-38 as a protest against Japan’s aggression against China, or the embargo of 1945-49 against Dutch shipping in support of Indonesian independence from Dutch rule.

In the 1950s the WWF expanded into social and cultural areas. The Sydney branch set up a Women’s Committee and organised the first WWF sports carnival. The Sussex Street headquarters were remodelled to include a range of facilities – a canteen, a library and reading room, an art studio, and even a theatre.[i]A film production unit was established, making short films to balance depictions in the mainstream press. The heroes are the trudging men bearing loads that bend them double, working in dirty and hazardous conditions.

In 1900 the NSW state government took control of the Port of Sydney under the Harbour Trust Act, following public shock over the outbreak of plague, attributed to the rats that infested the privately-owned waterfront. It wasn’t only rats that made conditions grim on the wharves – no toilets, shelter sheds, or even water taps; 30-hour shifts; no continuity of employment, with workers being chosen on a daily basis by the foreman.

The rats persisted, despite the Act, and in 1947 the Stevedoring Industry Commission authorised the WWF ‘to cease work on rat-infested ships in the port of Sydney’.[ii] I asked Bill Gosling about the rats when I interviewed him.[iii]

The rats around the wharf, the Sydney grey rats around the wharf are fairly common. But on this one occasion, the rat catcher came in to see me and he said, ‘I might have my lunch while I’m here’, so he opened his case, there was a dead rat, in a plastic bag. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘I stored it in a plastic bag first.’ He thought nothing of eating his lunch with a dead rat alongside of him. Another occasion, this concerns the same rat catcher, he went into a shed and one of the clerks said to him, ‘Look at that scabby old cat there, why don’t you give him a shot of something and put him out of his misery.’ He turned round, he said, ‘That scabby old cat’s my chief officer.’ He turned to the clerk, ‘If you touch that cat,’ he said, ‘you’ll have me to deal with.’ He said, ‘That cat works at night when I’m home in bed.’

 

[i]Wharfies – The history of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press, 1996.

[ii]Wharfies – the History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Margo Beasley, Halstead Press 1996, p133.

[iii]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.

The seventh prime minister

26 Sunday Aug 2018

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Two wharf labourers’ unions were formed in Sydney in 1872 – the West Sydney Labouring Men’s Association and the Labouring Men’s Union of Circular Quay. In 1882 they became the Sydney Wharf Labourers’ Union, but this collapsed after the 1890 strike, a strike that ran on the Sydney wharves from 19 August to 5 November. According to the unions, one of the reasons that the strike failed was because:

The whole artillery of daily journalism opened fire upon us. The few breaches of the peace that occurred, so much to the disgust of the [NSW Labour] Defence Committee, were magnified into riots, for which the very principles of Trade Unionism were held responsible. The most trivial circumstances, perverted into acts of intimidation, were gathered like so many rusty nails from the journalistic gutter for explosion in the shape of paragraphic bombs on the following morning. On the other hand, when clerks were dismissed from their employment for refusing to parade as special constables, when sermons and addresses favourable to the cause of labour were delivered by men in responsible public positions, the leader writers maintained an ominous silence.[i]

When the workers returned to the wharves they had to endure a loss of conditions and pay, and the stevedoring and shipping companies blacklisted anyone who attempted to resurrect the unions – so when William (Billy) Hughes started working to establish a Wharf Labourers’ Union at the end of 1899, he did it secretly. His strategy worked, and the union survived. Hughes was elected secretary.

Born in London in 1862, Billy Hughes came to Australia in 1884. By 1893 he was an organiser for the Labor Electoral League, travelling through country NSW, setting up meetings and signing up members to the fledgling party. He stood for parliament himself in 1894, and was elected, earning a decent wage for the first time in his life. In 1902 a national body, the Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia (WWF), was formed. Hughes became its president, and president of the Trolley, Draymen and Carters’ Union. In 1915 he became Australia’s seventh prime minister but left the Labor Party in 1916, walking out of caucus when the majority of his colleagues rejected conscription, despite his strong support for it. He was expelled from the Labor Party, and within weeks he had been expelled from the unions as well. Hughes retained the prime ministership until 1923, by forming new parties or setting up alliances with others.

 

[i]From the Official Report and Balance Sheet of the NSW Labour Defence Committee, Sydney 1890. Quoted in Select Documents in Australian History 1851-1900, CMH Clark. Angus & Robertson, 1955, p774.

On the wharves

18 Saturday Aug 2018

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Many years after Bennelong’s time, as Bill Gosling told me, Goat Island was the source of a strike.

I tell you what, they had a lot of sheep roaming loose on Goat Island. That was the cause of another disruption, because they had sheep on the island. One day the boss issued an instruction to the men to shear the sheep. They said we’re not bloody shearers and so they all sat down and went on strike.

… Talking about strikes, there was one occasion over Redfern they had a bit of trouble over the lack of repairs to the housing, which they complained they couldn’t get the corrugated iron needed to repair the roofs on all the houses.

And these were wharfies’ houses were they? I asked him.

No, this was general trouble. And a local parson had taken up the case to try and get supplies. There was a ship down in the Darling Harbour and it was loading steel, corrugated steel and that, to go up the islands and this parson chappy went down and addressed the wharfies, told them that the stuff they were exporting was needed at home here. So the wharfies went back to work, and instead of loading any more, they took out what they’d already put in. Of course, that caused a strike. But most of the things, when the wharfies went on strike, they usually had a very good reason and the way the waterfront was being run at the time gave them plenty of reasons. [i]

Bill Gosling was a senior inspector in the shipping branch, and his work covered everything on the waterfront: revenue, services, supplying ships with water, power supply from the shore, checking cargoes and dangerous goods. He was stationed at Glebe Island which, before containers took over shipping, was the main general cargo section of the waterfront.

I was Senior Patrolman, policing regulations, making sure that everyone had done the right thing … [One] time, I was working on a tanker at Balmain. One of the men that was working there said, you’re over here breathing down our necks, look across there. And I looked across the water to the other wharf where the wheat silos were, they were pouring wheat and the air was filled with wheat dust. And somebody was using an acetylene, a blowtorch on a winch, preparing a winch right alongside where they were pouring the wheat. Now, if a spark had ignited the dust it would have set up a chain reaction, like an atomic bomb. As soon as I saw it, I dived for the phone, rang up the boss of the silos and told him immediately to hit the emergency button which closed all the doors to stop the wheat from running until he’d investigated and stopped them alongside where the wheat was pouring. That chap had a reaction afterwards – that was the last thing he ever did. He had a heart attack at his desk that night.

[i]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.

Bennelong (part 2)

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Judge-Advocate David Collins clearly acknowledged that it wasn’t just Bennelong who could lay claim to a particular area of land:

Each family has a particular place of residence, from which is derived its distinguishing name. This is formed by adding the monosyllable Gal to the name of the place: thus the southern shore of Botany Bay is called Gwea, and the people who inhabit it style themselves Gweagal. Those who live on the north shore of Port Jackson are called Cam-mer-ray-gal, that part of the harbour being distinguished from others by the name of Cam-mer-ray[i]…

But Governor Phillip, the man who had carefully observed the Aborigines, had, within his own limitations, been positive about their courage and generosity, and in nearly every altercation assumed that the whites had been the aggressors; the man who had said, “Conciliation is the only plan intended to be pursued”[ii]returned to Britain in 1792. This left Major Francis Grose, as lieutenant-governor, in charge of the colony for two years, then Captain Paterson as administrator until John Hunter arrived as governor in September 1795. Grose “displayed no desire to follow Phillip’s practice of maintaining a close personal watch over every aspect of the settlement”.[iii]He encouraged members of the NSW Corps to trade, and to farm the land that he granted them. He opened up the Hawkesbury River area for settlement, taking the colony’s survival out of the hands of the governor and into the hands of private enterprise. It worked as a means of motivating trade and agriculture, but it removed the protection and respect for the Aborigines afforded by Phillip’s inclination, and instructions. By the time Hunter arrived the damage was done. The NSW Corps was accustomed to rule, and their rule was for personal profit. Land was for farming and making money from the proceeds – not for the Aboriginal people.

So although no-one in the very early days of the colony disputed Bennelong’s claim to custodianship of Me-mel, that claim wasn’t honoured. Me-mel became Goat Island, and it went the way of all colonised land. In the 1830s it was quarried, and the stone used to build a wharf and gunpowder complex by convicts housed firstly in the hulk Phoenix, and then on the island, in wooden ‘boxes’. They wore fetters around their ankles for the first two years and were controlled by the threat of the cat-o-nine tails. One convict was chained to a rock for several weeks in 1837. A number of Aboriginal people were also imprisoned there, separated from the whites. In 1900, during the outbreak of plague in The Rocks, Goat Island was used by the Health Department for bacteriological research. (Twelve years earlier, Rodd Island had been used for a similar purpose when a laboratory was set up to find a biological agent to combat the rabbit plague. From 1890 the laboratory was used to produce a vaccine against anthrax.) As the gunpowder complex neared completion on Goat Island, Cockatoo Island was selected as the next prison and workplace. Convicts dug silos out of the rock with hand tools, quarried sandstone for building Sydney’s edifices, and excavated the dry dock. From 1871 to 1887 there was an Industrial School and Reformatory for Girls on the island, and from 1888 to 1908 an overflow prison for Darlinghurst Gaol. Convicts also toiled away at Spectacle Island, building a Powder Magazine between 1863 and 1865 as Goat Island’s became inadequate.[iv]

These days Goat Island is a little green mound with a row of pretty stone houses. You’ll see it if it’s daytime as you come round under the bridge towards Balmain, Hunters Hill, Meadowbank or Parramatta, and you might dream of a life in the middle of the harbour.

[i]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[ii]The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, London 1789 (facsimile edition Hutchinson 1982, p140).

[iii]ADB online. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010444b.htm. Francis Grose.

[iv]The Islands of Sydney Harbour. Mary Shelley Clark and Jack Clark. Kangaroo Press, 2000.

Bennelong

04 Saturday Aug 2018

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Bennelong must have been a very adaptable man. Captured by the British in November 1789 he stayed in captivity, learning the English language and customs and teaching some of his own to the British – an act that seems voluntary as the man captured with him, Colbee, was able to escape almost immediately. In May 1790 Bennelong went back to his people, but returned to the settlement after Governor Phillip was speared at Manly in September – an event that Inga Clendinnen convincingly argues was a ritual spearing, designed to redress the many wrongs that the colonists had committed since settling the area.[i]

Not only was Bennelong willing to change from a life within the only framework that he and his relations had ever known – he was then willing to sail, with Phillip, and Yemmerrawannie, to England. They left Sydney in December 1792. Bennelong was presented to King George III in 1793, and didn’t return to Sydney until 1795, with Governor Hunter. Yemmerrawannie succumbed to respiratory disease in the damp British climate, but Bennelong survived, adopting the new clothes and customs that he found.

It’s hard to imagine a more courageous act than the steps taken by Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie onto the Atlantic, sailing with strangers, on a strange vessel, to a completely unknown land, when only five years earlier their physical world had been defined by what could be walked or travelled in a canoe.

Bennelong was from the Wangal people – most sources say that their territory extended from Goat Island to Auburn and Silverwater, although other sources say it starts further west at Leichhardt.  He told the colonists that Goat Island (more tunefully called Me-mel) belonged to him and his family. Judge-Advocate David Collins noted:

… Bennillong, both before he went to England and since his return, often assured me, that the island Me-mel (called by us Goat Island) close by Sydney Cove was his own property; that it was his father’s, and that he should give it to By-gone, his particular friend and companion. To this little spot he appeared much attached; and we have often seen him and his wife Ba-rang-a-roo feasting and enjoying themselves on it. He told us of other people who possessed this kind of hereditary property, which they retained undisturbed.[ii]

Bennelong’s understanding of ownership would have been very different to ours. Heather Goodall explains it as:

In Aboriginal societies, individual men and women hold particular relationships to land, inherited from parents and arising from their own conception and birth sites … Yet despite the specificity of these relationships, they do not allow automatic rights. Instead they confer obligations and responsibilities … It is the fulfilment of one’s obligations, the active embracing of responsibility, which allows a custodian to be accorded the fullest benefits of their landholding role …[iii]

So if you were barred from carrying out your responsibilities, by a fence or a gun, you would lose your whole heritage.

[i]Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Text Publishing, 2003.

[ii]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1X. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[iii]Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales 1770-1972, Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, 1996, p9.

The Harbour Bridge

22 Sunday Jul 2018

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If you come around under the bridge late in the day you may be treated to a rococo sky of billowing yellow and pink clouds. If it’s dark you’ll see the lights of Luna Park on your right, rotating and blurring in time with the screams of the riders on the Octopus and the Pirate Ship.

Of all the descriptions of Sydney harbour and its bridge, I love this one, from Marjorie Barnard.

Tens of thousands of homes look out over the harbour, every high building in the city has at least a glimpse of it. It is a playground, a waterway. The little beaches are still there, some of them seem as untouched, and the islands, at least from a distance, are as idyllic as ever. It is as beautiful as ever it was for all that the iron shackle of the bridge has been laid upon it.[i]

The Harbour Bridge’s architect, John Job Crew Bradfield, would have been shocked to hear the bridge described so harshly as an ‘iron shackle’. Not only was he providing a much-needed crossing between the northern and southern shores of the harbour, but he believed that the bridge’s ‘structural relationship to the City as a whole, and its place in the surrounding landscape must be taken into account; it must not mar the beauty of its setting.’[ii]

In 2005 I spoke to Bill Gosling about that ‘iron shackle’. Bill Gosling was born in London in 1913 and spent many years at sea on cargo ships, first coming to Sydney in 1928. Sydney was his ‘favourite port’, so he settled here in 1936, getting a job on the waterfront that lasted until he retired in 1973. When I spoke to him he was 92 and, although we didn’t know it, in the last months of his life. He sat crumpled in his chair, and the tape of our interview includes the big clock striking every quarter hour. His breath was going but his mind, his humour and his memory were sharp. There was still a strong man in that tiny frame.

On one of his trips out to Sydney, before he settled down:

… I was on a general cargo boat. We brought a lot of the steel out from England for the Harbour Bridge, which was a bit of a joke, because BHP were making steel here, every bit as good as the English steel.

Is the whole bridge made of English steel? I asked him.

No I don’t think so, but I know we brought a lot out for it. Brought a lot of steel out for the bridge. It might have been only certain sections but the steel they were making here in Australia was every bit as good. But the point was, business often takes over.[iii]

The contract for construction of the Harbour Bridge was awarded to an English firm, Dorman, Long and Co. Ltd in 1924. The calculations, designs and working drawings for the bridge were made in their London office, where staff also prepared complete lists of the materials needed from England and Australia. Iron ore from Yorkshire was made into steel plates at Dorman, Long’s works in Middlesbrough (North Yorkshire – port, Teesport), while steel rolled in Australia at BHP Newcastle used ore from Iron Knob in South Australia.

Milson’s Point was cleared to make workshops for the fabrication of steelwork for the bridge. Engineers from Dorman, Long supervised the work. The workshops were demolished in 1932 when the bridge was opened. Luna Park (1935) and the North Sydney swimming pool (1936) were built on the sites of the workshops.

 

[i][i]The Sydney Book. Written by Marjorie Barnard, drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. Ure Smith, 1947, p11.

[ii]JJC Bradfield 1929. Quoted in a caption at Bridging Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney December 2006-April 2007.

[iii]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.

Catching the tram

15 Sunday Jul 2018

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The other form of transport that Sydney people loved was their trams. Not these new trams – the light rail – that have the sense to be silent and unobtrusive, but not enough character to be lovable. No, the old trams. Despite the fact that they left you exposed to the weather, they would regularly become detached from their power lines, and you needed the agility of a monkey to get on and off. Alan Waddell, a man who has walked over more of Sydney than most of us know about[i], was passionate about trams.

The most exciting trams were what we called the “toastracks”. The seats were in large compartments, each having two seats facing each other and going from one side of the tram to the other. So there was no aisle inside the tram. The conductor had to collect fares by walking along the outside board, clinging on to the railings with one hand while handling coins and tickets in the other. It wasn’t much fun for him when it was raining heavily. The other excitement was when the power poles came off the overhead wires. You could fill in time waiting for your tram by placing a one-penny coin on the tracks and watch it get flattened and spread out by the trams before yours.[ii]

A publicly-run steam tramway system began in 1879, with electric tramways on the North Shore in the 1890s and through the rest of the system in 1899. People depended on the trams, and extra trams were made available for special events. The advertisement for the procession to Waverley Cemetery in 1898 to re-inter Michael Dwyer included the information that ‘A special tram service has been procured’.[iii]Special trams were made available for holiday events, race days and royal visits.

As each line was superseded by buses, people rode the tram for the last time, from depot to depot. The last tram to Manly was in 1939, the Enfield tram route closed in 1948, Rockdale to Brighton-le-sands 1949, Botany to Matraville 1952, the last tram ran along George Street in 1958, and finally, the last trams to Maroubra and La Perouse on 25 February 1961.[iv]

Passenger numbers were falling as the number of private cars increased, and buses had the distinct advantage, for the Transport Commissioner, of being able to be operated by one person, rather than two. The incompleteness of the Transport Commissioner’s calculations is captured by Patrick White:

In the big pneumatic buses, manners from the age of trams continued to reveal themselves: old men with raised veins on the backs of their hands still felt the need to apologise …[v]

Nevertheless, despite the new pneumatic buses, passenger numbers continued to fall throughout the 1960s – the falls were attributed to increased use of cars and taxis; regional shopping centres; new housing developments not serviced by buses; and, most interestingly, a growth in television watching and a decline in night-time travel.[vi]

 

[i]See http://www.walksydneystreets.net/obituary.htm

[ii]Alan Waddell, email interview 30 March 2006

[iii]Sydney Morning Herald, May 21 1898.

[iv]‘From City to Suburb … a fifty year journey’ Greg Travers, The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1982.

[v]White, P. The Vivisector. Vintage 1994 p520.

[vi]From City to Suburb … a fifty year journey, Greg Travers, The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1982. p139

Travel by water

08 Sunday Jul 2018

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The one form of Sydney public transport that is loved – something that will never be said about the buses or trains – is the ferry. Hurtle Duffield catches a ferry twice in Patrick White’s The Vivisector, once to Kirribilli, once to Manly. He’s looking for relief from paintings that have ‘died’, and he finds it.

Alan Waddell, with a more prosaic destination, used to catch the ferry to work.

I occasionally took the Mosman ferry from Longueville wharf. The owner/skipper, Charlie, never missed a morning, no matter how thick the fog. He used to say “the thicker the fog, the less other ferries are out to run into.” He was still doing the run in peak hours well into his 80s.[i]

The water has always been an important means of transport for the people of Sydney, as well as an important source of food. Late in 1788, Watkin Tench records with his usual humility that he undertook a survey of the harbour:

in order to compute the number of canoes and inhabitants which it might contain. Sixty-seven canoes and 147 people were counted. No estimate, however, of even tolerable accuracy can be drawn from so imperfect a datum, though it was perhaps the best in our power to acquire.[ii]

When the colony extended to Rose Hill – renamed Parramatta in 1791 – transport by boat was preferable to the road. For the farms on the Hawkesbury River – the first 15 colonial farms were established on the east bank in 1794 by lieutenant-governor Francis Grose[iii]– communication between the little settlements that sprang up on both sides of the river was generally by boat, and boats were used to transport the agricultural goods that the colony soon came to depend on. On Port Jackson the boat was also the preferred means of transport, even a century after Tench’s ‘imperfect’ survey. Balmain became a popular place to live largely because of easy access to the city via the steam ferries. In 1900 there were ten different ferry wharves servicing Balmain, from Elliott St on the north side of the peninsula, round to Reynolds St on the south side.[iv]

Traffic to the north of the colony was by boat, to ports like Morpeth, until the large-scale release of land in the Hunter Valley. Land had been held back while there was a penal settlement for secondary offenders at Newcastle, but after its closure in 1822 the governor started to distribute large grants in the area, encouraging wealthy settlers to establish farms. The Great North Road was built between 1826 and 1836 by convict labourers. At its full length, it ran from its current turn-off at Parramatta Road, Five Dock, to Abbotsford, where there was a punt to take you across the Parramatta River. You can chart its course from where it comes back out of the river into Punt Road in Gladesville, onto Victoria Road as far as Ryde, then north-west up to Dural. From there it joins the Old Northern Road (the original road north) and you can follow it all the way up to Wiseman’s Ferry where there is still a punt to take you across the Hawkesbury River, and further north.

[i]email interview 23 March 2006

[ii]Tench, W. 1788. First published 1789 and 1793. Reproduced in Flannery, T, Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration. Text Publishing, 2002, p92.

[iii]‘Exploring the Hawkesbury’ R. Ian Jack, Kangaroo Press 1986

[iv]‘Leichhardt: On the margins of the city’ Max Solling and Peter Reynolds, Allen & Unwin 1997.

The Busby family

30 Saturday Jun 2018

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Sydney Cove was chosen as the site of the colony because the harbour was a good safe haven for ships and the Tank Stream appeared to offer a good supply of water. But after 30 years of cutting down trees and creating a township, Sydney Cove was silting up, the Tank Stream was polluted and the wells were inadequate.

Happily for Sydney, over in Ireland, John Busby, an engineer and water-borer, applied to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, to be employed in NSW as a surveyor and engineer. Busby had fallen on hard times as the result of a swindle, despite his fame as inventor of a bore that provided water to Leith Fort in Scotland, and a commendation from the Duke of Wellington when his water-boring technique was used in the Peninsular Wars to provide the troops with water. Lord Bathurst appointed him NSW Mineral Surveyor and Civil Engineer in 1823.

John and Sarah Busby, their sons James, John, Alexander, William and daughter Catherine arrived in Sydney on February 24 1824. Their older son George joined them later, becoming Assistant Colonial Surgeon 1826-44. Their second son James more famously became the British Resident in New Zealand 1833-40 and his and his wife’s descriptions of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed at their house in February 1840, make for rivetting reading.[i]

But it was John Busby snr, and later William, who were to make the difference in Sydney. The family’s letters and journals are collected into four weighty volumes that tell, among other things, how John and William laboured over ‘Busby’s Bore’. Work commenced in September 1827 to bring water in a tunnel from the Lachlan Swamps (now Centennial Park – you can still see ‘Busby’s Pond’ there near the Robertson Road gates) to Hyde Park. Busby’s job was complicated by his uneven access to labour. He fumes that his convict labourers are lazy and incompetent, that if not chained together they abscond to do odd jobs for other people, and that sometimes he loses them altogether when they are re-allocated to the building of the Great North Road.

The tunnel was dug from both ends simultaneously, and by 1831 water from pools and underground streams in the tunnel reached Hyde Park.

The water ran out of a pipe with a raised end, and poured into large barrels on wheels and was retailed about the city at so much per bucket full. The price varied according to the distance from the standing pipe, being sometimes 2d [pence] a bucket, sometimes 3d a bucket and even for one period of drought, 5d a bucket.[ii]

The two excavations met below the intersection of Moore Park Rd and Driver Ave. It must have been with great relief that John Busby wrote to Deas Thompson, the Colonial Secretary, on 12 January 1837 to say that the tunnel was completed. However, it was not until 1852, when his son Alexander petitioned for payment for Busby’s work on the tunnel, that a government Select Committee found that the job was well done and that Busby deserved the £333/6/8 that he was owed. They also awarded a £500 gratuity to compensate for the long wait.

 

[i]A History of the Busby Family, Vol 3. Collected letters. Viewed at Woollahra Local History Library June 2006.

[ii]Ibid. Vol 1 p289.

A story of Sydney

24 Sunday Jun 2018

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As the ferry goes on, past Double Bay, I think of Patrick White’s The Vivisector, and of its main character, Hurtle Duffield, meeting Nance Lightfoot at the seawall on Rushcutters Bay. The Vivisectoris a story of Sydney, of a world of people who are cut off from their roots and collected into Sydney – a city that doesn’t appear to nourish them, but does at least provide shelter. Hurtle is an artist, who moves from his birthplace in ‘Cox Street’, in the slums of Surry Hills, to Sunningdale in Rushcutters Bay when the Courtneys purchase and adopt him.

The geography of the city is lightly placed around the drama of Hurtle’s art, but it’s a necessary and important part of the story. As a young man, after Hurtle meets Nance Lightfoot, he lives with her in Darlinghurst or in his own apartment on George Street. After a disastrous foray into the bush (Galston Gorge?) Hurtle buys a house in Paddington, meets one of his influential bystanders, Cutbush, on the edge of the cleft in Cooper Park, Bellevue Hill, visits Boo Courtney in her house with a balustrade between it and the sea, and Hero Pavloussi in her house at Rose Bay.

The journey from Cox Street to Sunningdale, from slum boy to privileged boy, is key to Hurtle’s development, and he only seems settled when he buys his own house in ‘Flint Street’ Paddington with a yard that opens onto the Cox Street-like world of Chubb’s Lane.

Here the clothes-lines and corrugated iron took over; ladies called to one another over collapsing paling fences; the go-carts were parked and serviced, and dragged out on shrieking wheels. In the evening young girls hung around in clusters, sucking oranges, sharing fashion mags, and criticising one another’s hair as though they had been artists. There was a mingled smell of poor washing, sump oil, rotting vegetables, goatish male bodies, soggy female armpits, in Chubb’s Lane.[i]

Hurtle is born with the twentieth century, and White marks the passing of time with careful hints at the changing features of the city. The story of Hurtle’s grandfather, who ‘died of a seizure on the Parramatta Road’ (p11) and fell off his mule, is suitably pre-1900. Hurtle’s father takes him in the horse-drawn cart on his first day of school, and Hurtle notices the smell of the animals in the zoo in Moore Park (which closed in 1916). World War I breaks out, and Hurtle’s adoptive mother Mrs Courtney makes decorations for “the Allied Ball. She sold buttons for Little Belgium from a little tray in Martin Place; she sold flags for Serbia; she represented la Belle France on an evening of tableaux vivants in the Town Hall” (p144). The detail is as particular as Hurtle going to town where he eats “a sandwich in a tea-room, sprinkling the ham with some of the dry mustard provided by the management.” (p230)

 

[i]White, P. The Vivisector. Vintage 1994 p264.