The Outcasts of Melbourne

Essays in social history

Graeme Davison, David Dunstan, Chris McConville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780868614465
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248111
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education
• Index: History

Behind the glittering image of 'Marvellous Melbourne' there existed in the popular imagination another, very different, picture of the colonial metropolis. This was the city of 'low life', of crowded slums, poverty, disease and vice.

The nine essays in The Outcasts of Melbourne attempt to reveal the social realities behind this picture. They include new accounts of the forces which created the city's physical environment. They show how perceptions of a city can be shaped by campaigning journalists, artists and writers. They present collective portraits of the poor and the 'criminal classes' - and of those who set out to save them. They describe how the city's guardians - the police, public health authorities and charity workers - responded to the challenge of the slums.

By imaginative use of the rich deposits in the public records, these explorations in social history present new ways of documenting the lives of people whose daily activities were seldom reported in the popular press. In doing so, they also map the chains of causation which link the actions of individuals - appearing before a committee of a benevolent society, getting arrested, evangelising at a Salvation Army rally - to the social forces which have shaped the cities in which we live.

GRAEME DAVISON AND DAVID DUNSTAN

1
‘This Moral Pandemonium’ images of low life

In 1849 the London Morning Chronicle commissioned Henry Mayhew to investigate the city’s working poor. The condition of the working class was then the question of the hour. Industrialisation and urbanisation had encouraged the growth of a huge new urban proletariat. Economic depression — these were the so-called ‘hungry forties’ — had drastically lowered living standards, and in 1848 London had witnessed the last and greatest of the Chartist demonstrations as tens of thousands of working people from all over Britain gathered on Kennington Common. Hard on its heels came the 1849 cholera epidemic. With revolutions erupting all over Europe it seemed that England too might collapse into class warfare at any moment.

A bohemian journalist and writer of light fiction, Mayhew was just the man to breathe life into the dry bones of social investigation. He became the Chronicle’s ‘Special Correspondent for the Metropolis’, and his ‘letters’ which ran for just over a year, were an enormous popular success.¹ Even after he left the paper in December 1850, Mayhew continued issuing twopenny weekly articles on his own, which he eventually compiled into his great work, the multi-volumed London Labour and the London Poor.² It remains one of the most graphic of all accounts of urban life, particularly in its conscious attempt to portray the city from below.

Like an intrepid explorer, Mayhew brought news of a tribe of city-dwellers ‘of whom the public had less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth’.³ London, he wrote, ‘may may be regarded as a distinct world … composed of different races like a world, instead of being made up of one cognate family like a town’.⁴ With his ‘coadjutors’ Mayhew pursued costermongers, sneak thieves and vagrants through crowded streets and depressed rookeries with all the disinterested curiosity of an anthropologist among South Sea Islanders.

By picturing London as a congregation of different races, and himself as a social explorer, Mayhew emphasised the gulf of mutual ignorance and suspicion which had grown up between the social classes of the nation’s capital. London was a city rapidly polarising between the fashionable town life of Kensington and Belgravia and the vicious low life of the East End.⁵ Each zone had its interpreters. ‘Up west’, in the world of Debrett, Trollope and Mrs Beeton, society was viewed complacently from above. From the glittering precincts of the court it extended down a finely calibrated scale of birth, rank and wealth. In ‘Outcast London’, on the other hand, Mayhew, Charles Dickens and other explorers attempted to penetrate the thickets of class prejudice and reveal, from below, the rough comedy of low life. These contrasting styles of social observation — ‘snobs’ and ‘slummers’ we may call them — shaped the understanding of many cities, including some like the colonial metropolis of Melbourne that never displayed London’s vast extremes of wealth and poverty, civilisation and barbarism.

It was natural that in trying to understand their immature capitals Australians should have returned to that universally acknowledged standard of civilisation, the ‘world’s metropolis’. London was the great urban yardstick — the first city to comprise a million people — and the centre of the English-speaking world. Many colonists were themselves former Londoners, or had visited the capital. Few would have escaped its influence or remained ignorant of its symbols, landmarks and characteristic dialects. As the chief seat of royalty and the imperial government it was the apex of British status and power. Living at the centre of the publishing world, and with a mass audience at their doorsteps, London writers exerted a powerful influence on image-making everywhere else. The visions of writers like Dickens and Mayhew became the lenses through which the colonial city-dwellers viewed their own urban landscapes. While the cities of colonial Australia certainly lacked the established upper class and huge seething underworld of London the language of that city’s snobs and slummers became as indispensable to critics of Australian urban society as it was to their originators. In vice as well as virtue, Melbourne obediently followed the London standard.⁶

As early as 1857 — when it was still a rough frontier metropolis — the worst parts of Melbourne had been identified as the ‘back slums’ and compared to ‘the most crowded parts of Spitalfields and St Giles’.⁷ Two years later the London journalist Frank Fowler reported in Southern Lights and Shadows neighbour-hoods that were ‘sacred to the rowdy and the Bohemian’, and noted that Stephen Street and Little Bourke Street were ‘as bad, in every vicious element’ as St Giles.⁸ The London-born novelist, and admirer of Dickens, B.L. Farjeon begins his Grif: A Tale of Australian Life (1866) in ‘one of the most thickly populated parts of Melbourne city, where poverty and vice struggle for breathing space, and where narrow lanes and filthy thorough-fares jostle each other savagely’. The central character is a slum waif, a colonial Oliver Twist, and the miserable hovel in which he is first met, although ancient in appearance, is, in fact, barely a dozen years old. Wickedness and depravity have brought about its premature decay.⁹

Marcus Clarke (1846–81) — ‘the most facile, most gifted, most charming writer in his day and generation’¹⁰ — was but one of a long succession of nineteenth-century journalists to frame his portrait of Melbourne within the conventions already established by Dickens, Mayhew and their contemporary the popular journalist George Augustus Sala. Clarke’s ‘Sketches’ of Melbourne bohemia focus typically on dosshouses, sixpenny restaurants, pawnshops and cab shelters — those way stations of urban life where the anonymous faces in the crowd suddenly revealed their comic individuality. His method is concrete and particular, but like his master Dickens he readily transforms details of landscape and character to suggest ‘the critically altered relationship between men and things, of which the city was the most evident social and visual embodiment’.¹¹ The idea of bohemia — ‘Humanity as it comes by nature, not as it is made and moulded by civilisation’¹² — expressed Clarke’s own sense of kinship as a conscious dissenter from the code of respectability (an ‘Upper Bohemian’), with those thieves, ruffians and vagabonds who had never felt its imprint (the ‘Lower Bohemians’).¹³ But the language in which he expressed his personal vision was borrowed from the English and French writers of an earlier generation. Even his one attempt to classify Melbourne ‘bohemia’ closely follows Henry Mayhew’s famous division of the London poor into ‘those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work’.¹⁴

A chronicler of Melbourne ‘s low life, the London-born novelist, B.L. Farjeon.

For the modern social historian concerned to present authentic portraits of deviant or depressed groups the writings of the slummer journalists pose a problem. Too rich to be ignored, too steeped in convention to be taken at face value, they call for a critical analysis of the complex interaction between writer, subject, literary conventions and the reading public. Upon closer inspection the slummer is revealed, not as a single type but as a range of sub-types. The worldy-wise cad or bounder, contemptuous of do-gooder sentiment and valuing his own masculine ego and desires above all else, draws a different picture of the urban underworld from the political radical who views the misery of the city’s outcasts as symptoms of a deeper social malaise. The street missionary or vice crusader, preoccupied with the war against sin, sees a different side of slum life from the sanitary reformer in his campaign against dirt and disease.

Marcus Clarke — the quintessential Melbourne bohemian and slummer-journalist. (State Library of Victoria)

Slummers generally stand in opposition to those optimistic writers who stress the finer features of city life. They are natural allies of the ‘knockers’, the prophets of doom and disillusionment who decry the pretensions of real estate promoters, business tycoons and other city boosters. Like ‘snobs’ and ‘slum-mers’, ‘boosters’ and ‘knockers’ are antithetical types, created through the cut and thrust of social criticism. For every booster’s extravagant assertion there was a knocker’s equally emphatic denial. The urban visions of the one have always, therefore, to be considered against the background of the other.

Alexander Sutherland, Melbourne booster and jack-of-all- civilised- trade s.

BOOSTERS AND KNOCKERS

As long as there have been cities there have been boosters to sing their praises, but it is in the United States that boosterism has reached its fullest development.¹⁵ Boosterism aims to create a favourable impression of its subjects, usually with a view to some commercial advantage. With the smallest grain of truth the booster may create an elaborate image. Although superficial, the snappy cliches and colourful terminology of successful booster imagery can outlive their creators.

Alexander Sutherland (1852–1902) was a jack of all civilised trades — university man, schoolteacher, poet, essayist, social investigator, philosopher and journalist — who valued his city as a citadel of culture as well as of mammon.¹⁶ His two-volume Victoria and Its Metropolis (1888) was one of the most lavish of colonial tomes of self-congratulation. This was a money-making venture that sought to capitalise on the exhibition and centenary celebrations of that year. The publishers, McCarron, Bird and Co., were responsible for the leading financial paper, the Australasian Insurance and Banking Record, and were soon to occupy smart new offices in the Rialto complex, in the heart of Collins Street. In 1888 Melbourne was riding high on the excitement of the land boom and instant tycoons were glad to celebrate the progress and achievement of their ‘metropolis’.

The booster naturally preferred to see the city from a height, so that he could appreciate its size and complexity. Popular illustrators recorded their impressions in panoramas and bird’s-eye views, while ordinary Melburnians could climb to the top of the Exhibition Building, or one of the new city skyscrapers, for an inspiring vista of urban progress. Alexander Sutherland imagined the reaction of a visitor who, ‘as he sails up Port Phillip, looks on the array of houses and factories and shops that starts from Williamstown and runs away without a break, mile after mile, till it is lost in hazy distance ten miles away at Brighton, has a sense of metropolitan vastness which no similar view of any other city can afford’.¹⁷

An imaginary visitor was an appropriate device, especially considering the likely arrival of travellers to the International Exhibition and colonists’ obsession with knowing what people from ‘home’ thought of their achievements. As the visitor approached the city, however, he was in for a nasty shock:

whether he speeds by train through the flats with scattered cottages of raw and unpicturesque weatherboard that lie between Williamstown and Port Melbourne and the heart of the city, or whether he proceeds at a slow speed up the black current of the Yarra, breathing the stench from the gas bubbles that burst on its surface after arising from the foul decay at its filthy bed, he enters Melbourne under unfavourable conditions.¹⁸

Yet, adroit booster that he was, Sutherland turned even the city’s ‘unworthy portals’ to advantage. ‘Are not all great cities so environed?’ he asks. An approach from another angle, he asserts, would have revealed ‘the charming mansions of the wealthy dotted out and out into the surrounding country, but it is not in the direction of wharves and railway termini that the wealthy build their secluded retreats’. Unruffled, he determines to ‘show our visitor the finer aspects first’, to bring him up to the city ‘when darkness has lent a kindly veil to the dismal and the unlovely’, and to awaken him some bright spring morning to see the city streets at their most gracious.¹⁹

Sutherland knew that the greatness of cities lay not only in their wealth and size but also in their social contrasts. The Chinese quarter of Little Bourke Street, for example, presented a fascinating contrast to the rest of respectable Melbourne. It was a world of dingy shops, dirty rooms, cheap and grimy restaurants, and worse — opium-smoking, illegal gambling and interracial sex. A simple-minded booster might have averted his glance from its ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘This Moral Pandemonium’: images of low life
• 2 Chinatown
• 3 From ‘criminal class’ to ‘underworld’
• 4 The poor people of Melbourne
• 5 The doorstep evangelist: William Hall in darkest Prahran
• 6 The salvation war
• 7 Dirt and disease
• 8 ‘Worst Smelbourne’: Melbourne’s noxious trades
• Notes
• Index