THE METROPOLIS OF THE ANTIPODES
I am in Sydney, the fastest-growing city of Australia and the
commercial metropolis of this part of the world. People who look upon
the island continent as a big desert surrounded by a strip of pasture
should come to Sydney. They will find here a city that will open their
eyes. It has now about the population of St. Louis or Boston, but it
seems to have twice as much business as any place of the same size
in the United States. Situated south of the Equator and about the
same distance from it as Louisiana, it lies in the centre of the most
populous part of Australia, and just where goods can most easily come
in for distribution over a vast territory. Sydney is the capital and
distribution point for the two million people of New South Wales, a
state the size of Texas and Indiana combined. These two million are the
richest people of a country with a per-capita wealth of $1,624 or, at
five to the family, eighty-one hundred dollars per family.
I know one man who has a million acres of land, and I could hardly
throw a stone in the business part of Sydney without striking the
holder of five thousand acres and more. There are men here who have a
million sheep, and many who own flocks of tens of thousands. Australia
has no Fords or Rockefellers. Rarely does any one leave an estate
worth above five million dollars. On the other hand, the wealth is
more evenly divided than in the United States, and the workers live
much more comfortably than their brothers in Europe. Everywhere on
the streets of Sydney I see signs of well-being. There are no patched
clothes, and in fact there is no poverty as we know it.
Of all the big cities south of the Equator, I like Sydney best.
Especially do I like the people here. Buenos Aires has a population
of more than a million and a half, but it is a succotash of Italian,
Portuguese, and Spanish ingredients, with a mixture of Indian, English,
German, and French. Rio de Janeiro has a million and a quarter
inhabitants, sprinkled with so much African blood that one can hardly
tell where the white ends and the black begins. Moreover, as in other
cities of South America, most of the people are wretchedly poor.
Here the faces are all English, Irish, and Scotch, or, what is better,
pure Australian. The Australians are finer looking than their British
cousins. They are taller, straighter, and better-formed. Six feet
is not an uncommon height for either men or women. The latter are
Amazons. Many of them are slender and they tower above me like so many
giantesses. They are sometimes called “cornstalks,” because they spring
up so rapidly and grow so tall.
Its magnificent harbour and the enterprise of its people have made
Sydney the New York of Australia. The city does business with all the
world. It is the terminus of a dozen great steamship lines connecting
the continent with Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America.
To-day there are tramps in the harbour from Cape Town, ships from China
and Japan, fast vessels from France, and big steamers from England.
One American passenger line connects Sydney with San Francisco, and
three others carry freight to and from our Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
The Commonwealth Line, which now operates a number of Australian
government-owned ships of steel and wood, has a regular service from
Sydney to London via the Suez Canal. Besides being linked up with all
the great ports of the world, Sydney is a centre of trade along the
coast and with the countless islands of the South Seas.
The commerce here is enormous. The wool shipments alone have a value
of something like sixty million dollars a year, and there is a large
export of grain, coal, and meat. Considering the number of the
population, the imports are very heavy. Although New South Wales has
not so many people as Chicago, it buys three hundred and sixty million
dollars’ worth of goods from foreign countries every year, and most of
them come in through Sydney.
In beauty and commercial advantages, Sydney harbour equals the Bay
of Naples, the harbour of Rio de Janeiro, or the famous waters about
Constantinople on the Bosporus. At its entrance, which is not more than
a mile wide, great rocks rising to more than half the height of the
Washington Monument form a natural gateway. No matter how stormy the
ocean outside, when a steamer passes the Heads, it finds quiet waters.
It enters a winding lake or stream, with hundreds of bays, inlets, and
creeks studded with islands and walled with wooded hills. The harbour
has an area of twenty-two square miles of water held in a rock-bottomed
basin. There is a reef in the fairway, but since it runs parallel with
the direction of incoming and outgoing vessels, it is an advantage
rather than a drawback, for it divides the harbour into two deep-sea
channels. There are no large rivers depositing sand and silt to be
dredged out. At the Heads the water is eighty feet deep, and at the
wharves it is from thirty to fifty feet. The ships come right into the
town, so that one can step ashore, walk three minutes, and be in the
business section.
Since coming here I have climbed to the top of the Public Works
Building for a bird’s-eye view of the city. This building is on the
harbour in almost the centre of the town. Standing upon it one can see
the great ocean steamers landing goods at the quays, the ships entering
and leaving, and the little tugs and ferries moving this way and that.
Looking over the city I noticed that its buildings cut the skyline
like the teeth of a broken saw, one now and then extending for many
stories above its neighbours. There are indeed three Sydneys--the
fast-disappearing city of the early governors, with its gabled cottages
and brick houses; the Sydney of a later time with the ugly architecture
of the Victorian era; and the modern, up-to-date Sydney, which reminds
me of an American city. It has buildings of the skyscraper type, though
not so high as ours. Many of the houses are built of yellow sandstone
taken from local quarries.
Sydney covers a large area. Its streets wind about like those of
Boston, and it is facetiously said that the place was originally laid
out by a bullock driver with a boomerang. The city is noted for its
excellent wooden pavements, which, according to our consul here, will
last for ten years without repairs. Some time ago part of the pavement
of George Street, upon which are some of the chief business houses, was
taken up. The blocks were as good as when laid eleven years before,
save that they had been worn down about one fourth of an inch. These
blocks are of eucalyptus wood dipped in boiling tar and laid on a
foundation of cement. They are fitted as closely as a parquet floor,
and are so smooth that three-ton loads can be hauled over them by one
horse. Paving blocks of the Australian eucalyptus are now used by some
cities of Europe.
One of the most interesting rides I have had in Australia was my trip
from Brisbane to Sydney. This takes one through the better parts of the
states of Queensland and New South Wales. The road-bed is smooth and
the cars are about like those of the United States except that there
are no Pullmans until the boundary of New South Wales is reached. There
is no baggage checking system such as ours, although the traveller is
given a receipt for his trunks. The first-class car in which I rode was
divided into compartments with cushioned benches under the windows.
The scenery on this trip is worth noticing. A part of the way is over
mountains and across rolling grazing lands. Some of the ride was
through forests of eucalyptus trees, always and in all their numerous
varieties called “gums” by the Australians. The leaves of the trees
seemed to me to hang down as though in mourning and most of them had
lost half their bark. The old bark was black and hung in long streamers
down the trunks like dishevelled hair, while the new bark, white or
silver-gray, looked very pretty by contrast.
In some places there were groves of dead trees. They had been ringed
with the axe to kill them for clearing and stood stark and gray without
leaves or bark. In the glare of the bright sun their limbs looked like
clean and well-polished bones. A dead Australian forest is a veritable
skeleton forest, the deadest-looking thing in nature. Where the trees
have been felled the stumps are perfectly white, the logs lying on the
ground are white, and the whole makes one think of a bone yard.
When we passed over the Darling Downs we travelled for miles across
green fields as flat as a floor surrounded by wire fences, which
enclosed great flocks of fat sheep and herds of sleek cattle. On the
ploughed lands the soil was as black as that of the Nile Valley and
the dark ground looked soft and velvety in the brilliant sunlight. We
crossed tracts each of a hundred acres and more of luxuriant alfalfa,
and again went through fields where the green blades of wheat were just
poking their tips up through the dark earth. Where a stream had made a
deep cut I could see that the rich top soil was many feet in depth.
There were but few farm outbuildings, no big barns, and no farmhouses
of any great size. The homes were one-story cottages of wood painted
yellow and roofed with galvanized iron. In spite of Australia’s huge
forests, wood is still expensive and galvanized iron is largely used.
Most of the houses had big round iron tanks on their porches to catch
the rain from the roofs. Many had galvanized iron chimneys, and a few
were built entirely of this material, which is imported from England.
I noticed that some of the cottages were set high up on iron piles
capped by iron saucers with rims turned down, in the same way that
the American farmer protects his granary from the rats. The upturned
saucers are used to keep out the white ants which will devour almost
any wood or leather they can get hold of. In tropical Queensland the
piles have another advantage; for they permit a circulation of air
under the houses, cooling the floors.
[Illustration: Bondi Beach, near Sydney, is the resort of thousands.
Though sometimes accused of overdoing it, the devotion of the
Australians to outdoor pleasures has helped make them a healthy,
vigorous people.]
[Illustration: The water traffic of Sydney harbour centres at the
Circular Quay, where all the ferries dock, and the street-car lines
converge. The ferry system is one of the largest and most efficient in
the world.]
[Illustration: On the narrow neck of land separating Sydney harbour
from the ocean is Manly Beach, which divides honours with Bondi as a
place for surf bathing. On the hills some of the wealthy business men
have their mansions.]