In the 1880s, night cart men were cutting their working hours short by dumping the human waste they were supposed to dispose of in distant sand dunes within the city itself. Typhoid and diphtheria were thus large killers and Melbourne, in its mere sixty years of existence, had managed to achieve a level of pollution and peril to health which was more akin to the public image of Manchester than of the golden city it had been and still wanted to be. In 1889, for example, there were 910 deaths from typhoid fever in Victoria, over 550 of those in Melbourne, mainly in the typhoid season from February to May. A doctor at Prince Henry’s Hospital declared in February 1888 that every time a typhoid death occurred a mayor should be hanged.
Adelaide and Sydney were healthier since they had each begun construction of a city-wide sewerage system. But the city authorities and the legislators of Melbourne were too busy with land shares to concentrate on installing similar schemes in the complicated urban topography. At the Intercolonial Medical Congress in January 1889, Charles Pearson, reforming Premier of Victoria, declared bitterly: ‘We value so highly our constitutional rights—the rights of a man to pollute running water . . . that many of us would oppose to the death any interference with . . . the vested right of every Englishman to carry death into his neighbour’s household.’ However, any attempt to attack the matter of public health on a broad front was often patronised in the legislature as ‘grandmotherly legislation’.
At last, in 1889, James Mansergh, a renowned sanitary engineer, was brought to Melbourne to consult on the idea of a deep sewerage system. He had devised a plan to supply Liverpool and Birmingham with unlimited clean water, had devised sewerage systems for a number of British cities and had been honoured with a Fellowship of the Royal Society. Mansergh visited Melbourne for a ground survey and ordered all the survey maps the colonial and city authorities had. He was shocked by Melbourne in comparison even to the worst British cities. ‘Open gutters conveying chamber slops and other foul liquids’ into the Yarra and Hobsons Bay were normal, and the yards of houses were sodden with human and other wastes. He submitted a plan by which street gutters would carry only rainwater to the rivers, and all other water would be carried by pipes to land treatment plants on the outskirts of Melbourne. He factored into the equation the high propensity of Melbourne people for baths and allowed in his plans for a population of 1.6 million people using over 400 litres per day. The press was outraged by the proposed price, £7 million, and so he adjusted the plan and cut out one of the treatment works.
Mansergh seemed to be the Empire’s favourite improver of water supplies and sewerage. After the Melbourne plan he worked on the water system of Toronto and sewerage schemes for Colombo and the lower Thames Valley. There can be no doubt that his involvement in Melbourne would save the lives of thousands of the city’s dwellers. ‘People who had never known what it is to live un-surrounded by cesspits, privies, night-soil pails, or ill-kept earth-closets, or other of the vile appliances I saw in Melbourne, will wonder how they could have existed under such conditions,’ Mansergh promised.
Through initiatives such as the Mansergh project, Australian life spans were increasing. The average life span of those attending the gold rushes was somewhere in the early thirties, lower than that of Britain. While the deaths of children dragged the average down, the squalor, poor sanitary conditions and inadequate housing of gold miners also contributed to the low figure. By the 1870s the average had improved to thirty-seven years for men and fifty for females. As for child mortality, at least the infant in the bush was protected somewhat from contagion by distance from other humans. In 1874, in the Sydney industrial suburbs of Alexandria and Waterloo, however, infant mortality was up to 46 per cent of births. Over a long period, mortality in Sydney suburbs was 50 per cent higher than amongst the same age groups in the Australian bush. According to the Illustrated Sydney News of 13 July 1878, a visitor to Sydney would be astonished by the number of funerals that thronged the streets. ‘But of what size are most of the coffins? It is the children, the little children, that are being borne so thickly to the grave . . . in what city (except Melbourne) could such havoc of the very young and the wholly helpless take place?’
Children who died in epidemic diseases were often buried half a dozen at a time and any person could simply enter a cemetery with a small coffin, give the grave-digger a few pence and have it deposited in a grave. A Brisbane fruiterer would bury a dead child for one shilling ‘in a coffin made from a fruit box’. Middle-class funerals were far more formal and some of them were organised through the Masonic and Friendly societies, which buried the deceased with solemn care after a considerable procession. As late as the 1880s Sydney people were still burying their dead in the Devonshire Street cemetery, where in rainy weather decay would ooze through the stone walls into Elizabeth Street. In 1886, after an outbreak of typhoid in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, it was found that the well of a dairy was contaminated from ‘so foetid a soakage’ from the nearby cemetery.
By the time Mansergh and other sanitary engineers had finished their work, and the Federationists had united Australia, Australian men could expect to live an average of fifty-five years and women fifty-eight.
Tuberculosis would still be a great curse, but tonics prescribed for it were laced with as-yet unbanned opium. Every year some thousands of pounds of opium were legally imported into New South Wales, Victoria and other parts of Australia. Holloway’s Pills and Holloway’s Ointment were laced with laudanum. The temporary relief it gave the sick person was taken as proof of the efficacy of the patent preparations.
THE FRONTIER WOMEN AND INFANT DEATH
The archetype of women’s hardship in the bush is a literary one, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, by Henry Lawson. It is easy to argue that Lawson’s woman, running a farm while her husband is absent droving, having given birth to six children, the second born with the aid of an Aboriginal midwife while her husband was away trying to persuade a doctor to ride out and attend to her, is the authentic experience of real women of the bush. When one of her children died while her husband was again away, the drover’s wife of the story rode 19 miles for help, carrying the dead child. These conditions of life and death would have been familiar to many Australian families, even after Federation.
In 1867 at Benayeo, beyond Ballarat, Louisa Geoghegan recorded the death from fever of a twelve-year-old child named Bessie Hinds, whom doctors did not reach for two days. Mrs Hinds seemed thereafter to take refuge at her piano, an item from Europe, somehow removed from the hard country in which her eldest daughter had died.
Mrs C.C. Richards from South Australia landed with her husband and four children at Albany in Western Australia in 1885. She lived under canvas in an environment of dust and flies and under conditions of questionable sanitation. One morning in 1886 one of her sons carried the body of his brother home, and the only clue to cause of death was that the elder brother saw blood on his younger brother’s legs. A month later Mrs Richards gave birth to a baby girl and thirteen months later the child, Ella, died from the same complaint, beginning with diarrhoea and ending with bleeding from the anus. A doctor told Mrs Richards he could do little to help the child as ‘the lining of her stomach was coming away’. But the acute fever that was killing the Richards’ children was caused by the water, she said. ‘After that, I felt I just wanted to die—our two lovely children taken from us in just over a year.’
There were so many ways parents could lose children, yet the fear of it became fixed on the statistically least likely cause—that children would become lost either in thickets of forest or in bare, waterless landscapes. Frederick McCubbin’s 1886 painting The Lost Child epitomised this fear that the settler’s child might be devoured by the environment if not epidemic disease. McCubbin’s painting was possibly based on the 1885 finding of a child named Clara Crosbie, who had been lost for three weeks in the bush near Lilydale in Victoria. In fact the incidence of lost children was small but stood a
s a token for the other ways children might be taken. When Elizabeth Anne O’Rourke of North Gippsland, Victoria, wandered away from the family home in March 1866, she had been trying to follow her father, David. The riveting detail for other parents who heard of the tragedy was that when Aboriginal people found her body a year later, she was still in her pink dress, at the bottom of a rock from which she had fallen. Mary O’Rourke moved away from the station where her child had died of exposure and buried her daughter on her father’s station at Black Mountain. Mary’s dutiful husband David transported his homestead from his run and re-erected it near his daughter’s grave.
The peril to children was real enough in dry regions. In the early 1890s Walter Allender, aged about eleven, died from exposure in the bush near Mullewa, Western Australia, and Darcy Ives followed a dog from his parents’ home in Mukinbudin into the bush in 1893. It was April but still ferociously hot, and he perished in the hinterland. Recently orphaned four-year-old Johnny Carney also wandered away from a relative’s farm in the Mullewa region. It was popularly believed when his remains were found with Aboriginal help that he had been cannibalised after death, but there is no evidence to prove this. At Pender Bay near Broome in 1912 Bertha Clarke of Wyndham, ‘half Aboriginal’, wandered off from a picnic party. Her body was found after two weeks.
Yet it was the bacterial thickets which claimed most children. And the death rate amongst child-bearing women themselves did not improve much between 1871 and 1905—it was roughly 6.5 per cent in 1871–80 and a little over 6 per cent in 1901–05. If these odds were acceptable for one birth, they mounted with each new child a woman bore, becoming over entire lifetimes of child-bearing a casualty rate equivalent to that of modern warfare. Puerperal fever, a form of sepsis of the birth canal or urinary tract following delivery, was the most common cause of such deaths and killed many mothers as well, and the figures did not much improve in the twentieth century until the arrival and use of antibiotics in the 1940s.
To have a doctor in the house at the time of birth was seen as an exceptional luxury by women in the bush. Ada Cambridge, an Australian novelist and wife of a Victorian Anglican clergyman whose postings took him to work in Wangaratta, Beechworth, Yackandandah and Williamstown, never forgot her own experience of giving birth to two children in the bush and observing the travails of other women. She wrote in 1903, after her novels had given her entree into the colonial aristocracy, that ‘the majority of bush women prefer to stay at home and make shift with the peripatetic gap [midwife], old and unscientific as she always was’. Lady Dudley, the beautiful, intelligent and forceful wife of a governor-general of no particular talents, was shocked by the conditions in which women gave birth in the bush, and in 1909 she founded Lady Dudley’s Bush Nursing Scheme, a project which was not as successful as she had hoped. Rose Lindsay, Norman Lindsay’s wife, remembered that when, at the time of Federation, her sister gave birth at Gosford without a midwife, the baby died. The father was sent to fetch the undertaker but instead spent the money on drink, so the baby had to be buried in a deal box near the shack. Perhaps that, as well as Norman Lindsay’s fast talking, persuaded the beautiful Rose to pose for Lindsay’s scandal-making drawing, Crucified Venus.
A young immigrant, Matilda Wallace, had a not-uncommon history. She married in 1861 and soon after wrote ‘we buried our first little baby’. Her husband was a wanderer, an amateur explorer, and so they travelled to Queensland in a wagon, an exceptional journey but not utterly abnormal for the time. While she was running the station and living in little more than a camp on a pastoral lease at Mount Murchison, inland from Gladstone, Matilda lost a second child while her husband was away hawking to supplement their income. Two more sons died in infancy in the mid-1860s. In 1868 she moved to a nearby town which no longer exists, remarking that it was her first sight of ‘civilisation’ in seven years. Her husband announced he must go to Burra in South Australia to take delivery of 5000 sheep, and now she complained that her health would not let her run the property without his presence. So she travelled with him that prodigious distance and drove the sheep along a long track on which her young daughter contracted sandy blight, the blinding eye disease. From that point Matilda disappeared from recorded history.
Constance Jane Ellis described in her autobiography the death of her premature baby girl in North Queensland in 1890. Her husband Tom was out ploughing when she went into labour, and the couple discussed whether he should seek help at the nearby station, but it was a day’s ride away and nobody there would be medically equipped anyhow. The child was delivered, but died within four days. Tom went to the nearest station for timber for the coffin. ‘Well, Tom chose a pretty spot beside the jungle and dug a grave and we buried our baby . . . about the saddest time we ever had.’
To add to the grief of the mothers of stillborn children, the Anglican and Catholic churches would not let them be buried in consecrated ground, since they had not been baptised. The stillborn baby of Henry and Laura Box was buried in 1913 on top of a hill behind the old orchard at the Popanyinning Pod Farm in Western Australia; ‘the Church would not bury him in the cemetery because he had not been baptised’. A Mrs Carmichael, living on marginal land at Wellington Mills near Bunbury, gave birth to a stillborn baby in 1915 and three years later delivered twin boys who lasted only eight hours. A doctor said, ‘The cause of death was through malnutrition as a consequence of his mother’s sickness and overwork.’ At the finish of the war to end all wars, it was still the norm for many pregnant farm women to be overworked and frequently malnourished.
MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE
In the 1880s Melbourne had the character of a great city of the Empire which had transformed itself from squalid village to urban wonder in a little over thirty years. In Collins Street, around the Italianate Stock Exchange, the worldly top hat and morning suit were de rigueur. The Crimean shirts and clay-streaked pants of the 1850s were but a memory, or not even that, for Melburnians on the make, who were a considerable crowd. Collins Street was the epicentre of fortune, and the privileged of the city considered the colonial legislature up the road, nearly every member of which was a director and investor in the banks and building societies of the city, as a mechanism for making easier still the inflation of bank shares and property prices.
For Victoria had no limit. The decade had begun with the triumph of the International Exhibition of 1880, for which the Exhibition Building was erected, and to which the world came. It showed up the less-than-brilliant Sydney Exhibition of 1870 by having the whole world of new technology and merchandise on display, and was followed by a further exhibition in 1888, this one astonishingly lit by its own electric generating plant. There were visitors from other states and the Victorian countryside who had had their first exposure to that new, intense, electric beam in the Exhibition Building in Melbourne.
James Munro, Presbyterian, Scottish-born temperance leader, the man whose acumen drove the exhibition of 1880, a cabinet minister and premier (1890–92), had founded in the 1860s the Victoria Permanent Property Investment Building Society. With the funds in hand he developed entire regions of the city. By 1882 he also founded the Federal Bank and the Federal Building Society and, to bolster them when his personal withdrawals or outside investments made them unstable, the Real Estate Mortgage and Deposit Bank, shares in which were sold to bolster the concealed losses of his other companies. The brilliant young lawyer and legislator Alfred Deakin was himself a director of a building society, though he did not play the games Munro played with his institution, lending investors’ and depositors’ money to relatives and friends on the loosest possible terms, in the expectation that endlessly inflating land prices would, like a rising tide, cover all sins. James Munro had, on the strength of his financial companies, acquired great pastoral stations and leaseholds in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia. The Munro of the 1880s was not a born criminal. The times made him. Escalating wealth unhinged him. On the floor of
the House he was a political progressive. He sought female suffrage because he believed that women voters would support temperance legislation. In the pro-pub electorate of Carlton he had been denied a hall in which to address electors, and so built his own. He also built a number of what were called ‘coffee palaces’—hotels which had considerable grandeur and comfort but which did not serve liquor. The Windsor, a famous Melbourne hotel, began its career as the Grand Coffee Palace.
In the 1880s banks and financial institutions like Munro’s mushroomed up with titles designed to imply solidity and permanence, indeed ‘Permanent’ was a favourite. So were ‘Imperial’, ‘Australian’, ‘Premier’, ‘Federal’, ‘Scottish-Australian’ and ‘Metropolitan’. What the building societies did was to finance ‘spec’ builders who ran up thousands of cottages in the inner suburbs. David Mitchell, the father of Nellie Melba, was building the mammoth Equitable Insurance Building at the corner of Elizabeth and Collins streets. The new hydraulic lifts made the building of such larger offices possible. As well as creating suburbs, David Munro was building bridges across the Yarra. There was no overestimating the impact of the telegraph on the works of Munro and others—now the Australian colonies knew what was happening in London virtually on the day it happened, and so did London investors see each day at rising what a gold mine Melbourne was, whether in bank stocks or in real estate.