Marvellous Melbourne
It was English journalist George Sala who coined the term Marvellous Melbourne, succinctly summing up the city as it was in the 1880s. As special correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Sala lodged stories with the paper from round the globe. Here he reports from a city made fabulously wealthy by gold, and a vast metropolis sprung from nothing in a single lifetime.
It was on 17 March, in the present year of Grace, 1885, that I made my first entrance, shortly before high noon, into Marvellous Melbourne…Melbourne at the noonday of which I speak was en fête. This is essentially holiday-making country. The Queen’s Birthday, the Prince of Wales’s Birthday, St George’s Day, St David’s Day, St Patrick’s Day all find crowds of merry celebrants; every trade and craft has its periodical outing, and not the least exuberant of their festivals is, I am told, the Undertakers’ Picnic.
The French critic of our manners was good enough to observe with a sneer that, when an Englishman had nothing to do he was wont to say, ‘Let us go out and kill something’. With much greater reason might it be hinted that whenever he had a chance of escaping from the irksome thraldom of labour the Briton in Australia says, ‘Let us go out and enjoy ourselves’…
It is desirable, for many reasons, that I should explain why I have called Melbourne a marvellous city. The metropolis and seat of government of the colony of Victoria has at present, within a ten-mile radius, including the city and suburbs, a population of more than 282,000 souls…Omnibuses, hansoms, and hackney wagonettes swarm in the streets, and very soon an extensive system of horse-tramway cars will be thrown open. The Anglican and Roman communions have splendid cathedrals, and there is a multitude of handsome and commodious places of worship for other denominations. The town hall is gigantic and imposing; the general post office vast, comely and admirably arranged. There is a splendid university…There are half a dozen theatres, more or less. There is a very grand permanent exhibition building and a fine aquarium…There are asylums, markets, hospitals, coffee palaces, public and private schools, clubs, parks, gardens, racecourses; and recreation grounds in profusion in and about the city; and I need scarcely say that there are any number of big banks and insurance offices, which in their architecture are more than palatial. The whole city, in short, teems with wealth even as it does with humanity. Well, you may say, what is there wonderful in all this? Melbourne is the prosperous capital of a prosperous British colony. What is there to marvel at in its possession of all, or nearly all, the features of the most advanced civilisation? But there is thus much that is marvellous in Melbourne. The city is not fifty years old…
I have never revisited Melbourne without finding plenty of blazing sunshine say for about four days out of seven, and without being grateful for the gentle umbrageousness afforded by the arcades which lead from Bourke Street.
Let me see. The first of the Bourke Street arcades is the Royal, nearly opposite the Post Office, which was erected a few years since by the Hon. H. Spensley, at a cost of some £20,000. Further east, nearly opposite the Theatre Royal, a handsome and commodious structure, you will find the second Melburnian arcade, the Victoria, which was built and opened by Mr Joseph Aarons in 1876. The cost, including that of a building called the Academy of Music, was about £40,000. Then, still further on, close to the vast Eastern Market, is the Eastern Arcade, erected by a well-known coach-proprietor named Crawford. The admission to all these pretty avenues is free, and they are all open and brilliantly lighted until ten at night. In this last respect the Melbourne arcades present a pleasant contrast to our Burlington, the gates of which are pitilessly bolted and locked at 8 p.m.—precisely the hour when people, especially foreigners, who have just dined, would most gratefully appreciate the advantages of a covered promenade. But they order these things differently and better in France—and at Melbourne. Indeed, but for the fact that prohibitions on smoking are conspicuously placarded about in the Royal, the Victoria, and the Eastern arcades, you might, without any very violent stretch of the imagination, fancy on a fine night that Bourke Street was one of the Paris boulevards instead of being a highway hewn not fifty years ago out of the trackless Bush, and that you were a flâneur from the Café du Helder, who had just strolled into the nearest passage to saunter from shop to shop, the contents of which you may have seen five hundred times before, and to rub shoulders with a throng whose faces from long acquaintance should be perfectly familiar to you. But does a Paris boulevard flâneur ever grow tired of sauntering?
…In the daytime the arcades at Melbourne are affluent in well-dressed womankind, and the shops are full of feminine finery and knickknacks. Anglo-Saxon womenkind at home, in the States, and in Australia abhor the odour of tobacco; while in the last-named country indulgence in the weed takes at least two very objectionable forms. In the first instance, cigars at the Antipodes, as I have elsewhere hinted are, as a rule, atrociously bad. In the next place the short pipe, charged with the strongest tobacco and reeking with essential oil, is the favourite calumet both of the beardless, sallow, weedy ‘cornstalks’1, with their hats at the backs of their heads, and of our full-bearded, broad-shouldered, brawny brother—and master—the Australian Working Man…
I think that it was the night after my arrival in the metropolis of Victoria that a great fire broke out in a warehouse in William Street, next door to Menzies’ Hotel. Both buildings are of stone, and there were some inches of clear space between the wall of the burning warehouse, which was full of combustible merchandise, and the wall of the hotel; still the propinquity of the incandescent to the unfired edifice was far too close to be pleasant. There was, naturally, a prodigious scare among the guests at Menzies’…Fortunately, the brigade were early on the scene of action. The local substitute for Captain Eyre Massey Shaw, C.B., did his work admirably; the police mustered in force, and did good service; the crowd, although dense, was, on the whole, well behaved. Soon after midnight the firemen had obtained a mastery over the flames, by three o’clock in the morning the conflagration had burned itself out; and the estimable Widow Menzies and her guests were able to return to rest, and to murmur, if they felt so disposed, ‘For this relief, much thanks’. But throughout that eventful night I had been conscious of a sound, reiterated at brief intervals, solemn, measured, strident, and, as I thought, minatory. It was the sound of a human voice, grimly sonorous, but to my ear, at first, not articulate. The flames roared, the water from the hose flashed and hissed and bubbled and gurgled from the main; the crowd shouted, the firemen clattered hither and thither; the crash of broken glass and falling timbers was incessant; but still the lugubrious chant of that human voice, now near, now distant, relaxed not in its monotonous cadence…Had some member of the Salvation Army felt a call to cry, ‘Woe to Melbourne!’? At length, when surcease came to the roaring of the flames, when the crowd had dispersed, and the last dog had barked itself mute, the lugubrious chanter had things all to himself, and I could make out what he said. His cry was of polonies. Yes; polonies. That variety of sausage tribe is, I hear, amazingly popular at the Antipodes. So are saveloys.
1. A term generally applied to New South Welshmen. It refers to the willowy, slim build and height of the ‘new’ nineteenth-century Australians.