HOUSES.

The inevitable 'newness' of everything cannot but strike the eye

disagreeably. This is especially noticeable in the buildings and houses,

few of which date back more than ten years. In the growth of towns, as

well as in the progress of individuals and institutions, there are three

periods to be gone through. Here the first stage is that of the log-hut.

This is succeeded by the weather-board cottage, which in turn gives place

to brick and stucco. Finally comes the stone building with its two or

three stories. The log-hut stage is of course far past. The weather-board

cottage still lingers in the poorer outskirts of Melbourne, but is

extinct in Adelaide, and fast becoming extinct in Melbourne. The choice

now is between brick and stone. In Sydney the abundance of stone on the

spot, gives it the preference; Adelaide, with less stone, builds chiefly

in brick; Melbourne, which has to get its stone from a distance, uses

hardly anything else but brick. This, of course, for private houses.

There are plenty of admirable stone buildings in Melbourne, as I have

already mentioned.

Now that the brick and stone age is firmly established the style of your

house becomes a mere matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. With wages

at from nine to twelve shillings a day, and with money so much dearer

than at home, the Australian has necessarily to pay a much higher rent

for his house. Excluding, of course, ground-rents, which make London

houses so expensive, I think one may fairly say that rents here are about

double the rate they are at home, and yet, _except for the rise in the

value of land_ in the cities and their suburbs, house-property is by no

means a remunerative investment. Nevertheless, there is always a great

demand for it. The colonist is very fond of living in his own house and

on his own bit of ground, and building societies and the extensive

mortgage system which prevails enable him easily to gratify this desire.

I believe that at least ninety out of every hundred house-properties in

Australia are mortgaged up to at least two-thirds of their value. Out in

the suburbs ground-rents are still low--very low indeed in comparison

with the selling value. The reason of this is, that it pays to buy a

house with a large piece of land attached, and to cut the land up and

sell it in building allotments a few years afterwards. If you can get a

fair rent for the house, the land will pay its own way.

Architecturally speaking, there is little to admire. If the public

buildings fail in this respect, the private houses have at least the

advantage over them, that for the most part they do not pretend to any

architecture at all. Many of the architects are self-taught, and have

served little or no apprenticeship to the profession. Indeed, it should

rather be called a trade, since they often are merely successful

builders, who have taken to planning and superintending the erection of

buildings, instead of erecting them themselves. This is one reason why

private houses incline rather to the practical than to the beautiful.

Another cause is the practical spirit of the colonists, which looks upon

expenditure for mere ornamental purposes as wasteful and extravagant.

Unless a man is really rich, he cannot afford the imputation of

extravagance which any architectural expenditure will bring upon him.

With his business premises it is different. Everyone understands that a

merchant spends money in ornamenting his business premises, just as a

tradesman dresses his shop-window. But the tradesman does not dress the

drawing-room window of his private house. Neither, therefore, the

merchant. Besides this, it cannot be too thoroughly understood that

Australia is before everything a money-making place, and that anything

like unremunerative expenditure with no possible chance of profit is

considered foolish in all but a man who has made his fortune. With money

so dear, and the chances of turning it over rapidly so frequent and so

remunerative, such expenditure becomes little less than a sin. Everything

ornamental not only costs twice as dear in actual money, but the money

itself is worth at least twice as much as in England.

Really large houses of the size of the manor-houses and halls which are

scattered over England in tens of thousands, can be counted in Australia

in scores. Of these but few have any architectural pretensions. Houses of

this class cannot be built under £10,000 here, whereas in England they

would cost from £4,000 to £5,000 and can be bought still cheaper. If

there is any style which colonists particularly affect, it is the

castellar. Both in the large houses I have just been speaking of, and in

the ordinary wealthy man's house which has cost him from £3,000 to

£5,000, turrets and flagstaffs abound. The passion for flagstaffs must, I

think, be derived from the fact that most of the people who build these

houses have had a long sea-journey from England, and retain a little

ozone in their composition. There is also something assertive about a

flag. A man who has a flag floating on his house is almost sure to have

some character about him. Not unfrequently, when the builder of a house

intends to live in it himself, he wishes to imitate his old home in

England, or if he has risen in the world, some particular house of the

village or town he was brought up in, which he admired in his boyhood.

The man who builds for himself at least takes care to build soundly, and

to have his rooms large and lofty.

By far the majority of houses are built by speculators; which means that

they are very badly built, run up in a tremendous hurry, constructed of

the cheapest and nastiest materials, with thin walls--in short, built for

show, and not for use. Everything looks very nice in them when you walk

round just after they are built, and it is only after you have lived in

them eighteen months that you begin to understand why the owner was in

such a hurry to sell, and would not hear of letting the house to you,

even at a good rent. You know something of this in London, but not nearly

to the same extent as here. In these speculative houses there is often

some little attempt at ornamentation--a bow-window thrown out, or the

veranda lifted to form a Gothic porch, or the drawing-room brought out

beyond the rest of the house, so as to form what is known as a T cottage,

though it should rather be a P, with a protrusion of the drawing-room

representing the straight line, and the body of the house the loop of the

P.

But the favourite type of Australian house is laid, out in an oblong

block bisected by a three to eight foot passage. The first door on one

side as you go in is the drawing-room, on the other the dining-room. Then

follow the bedrooms, etc., with the kitchen and scullery at the end of

the passage, or sometimes in a lean-to at right angles to the hinder part

of the house proper. This kind of cottage is almost universal in Adelaide

amongst the middle and upper middle classes, and invariable in the

working-class throughout Australia. In the other colonies the upper

middle classes often live in two-storied houses; i.e., ground-floor and

one floor above. Their construction is almost as simple as the cottage,

the only difference being that the bedrooms are on the upper story, and

that a pair of narrow stairs face the front-door and take up half the

passage-way, directly you get past the drawing and dining-room doom

doors. The cottage is not high enough to strike the eye, but the

squareness, or more properly the cubeness, of these two-storied houses is

appalling. They look for all the world like houses built of cards, except

that the cards are uncommonly solid. For my own part, I should never care

to live in a two-storied house again, after experiencing the comfort of

never having to go upstairs, and having all the rooms on the same floor.

At first one is prejudiced against it. I was so, until during my second

year in Australia I had to live on the third floor in Sydney. It was only

then that I realized the advantages of the simpler plan.

The strong light and heat of the sun has the effect of a window-tax in

limiting the size and number of the windows. A few French windows are to

be found in Adelaide, but the old sashes are almost universal. Of, late a

fashion has sprung up for bow-windows, which, however pretty, have here

the great disadvantage of attracting the sun unpleasantly. Shutters are

not much used. Venetian blinds are more common. On a hot summer day it is

absolutely necessary to shut all windows and draw down the blinds if you

wish to keep at all cool. About five o'clock, if there is no hot wind,

the house may be opened out.

Nearly every house that can afford the space has a veranda, which

sometimes stretches the whole way round. The rooms are usually lofty for

their size, in winter horribly cold and draughty, in summer unbearably

stuffy in small houses, the science of ventilation being of recent

introduction. Even in large establishments all the living-rooms are

almost always on the ground-floor, both on account of the fatigue of

going up and down stairs, and owing to the paucity of servants. As a

rule, the kitchens are terribly small, and in summer filled with flies.

How the poor servants manage to exist in them is more than I can

understand. It is no wonder they ask such high wages. In a few larger

houses a merciful fashion has been adopted of making the kitchen a mere

cooking galley, the cook preparing the dishes and doing all that does not

require the presence of fire in a large back-kitchen. Happily every house

has a bath-room, though it is often only a mere shed of wood or

galvanized iron put up in the back-yard. In many of the poorer households

this shed does double duty as bath-house and wash-house, or the

wash-house consists of a couple of boards, with a post to keep them up,

and a piece of netting overhead to keep the sun off. In larger houses,

both bath-rooms and wash-houses are much the same as in England. Nearly

all families do their washing, and often their ironing also, at home. Of

the sanitary arrangements, it is almost impossible to speak too strongly;

they are almost invariably objectionable and disgusting.

There are very few establishments large enough to indulge in the luxury

of a servants'-hall, and sculleries and pantries are much smaller than in

England. Even the ordinary entrance-hall of an English house has to

shrink into a mere enlargement of the passage. All over the house, in

fact, the accommodation is on a much more limited scale, unless it be

with regard to stables, which, owing to the low price of horses, are more

numerous, if less luxuriously appointed.

If the upper and middle classes suffer from want of room in their houses,

and are wont to huddle much more than people in the same position would

at home, the working-man is not much better off, although his four or

five-roomed cottage at twelve shillings to fifteen shillings a week is

more easily within his means than the five shillings a week that he paid

in England. I do not of course mean that the working-man here knows

anything of model cottages, such as are seen on large estates in England.

I should even say that during the first year or two after his arrival

there is little improvement in his habitation; but before long he

acquires a small freehold, and with the aid of a building society becomes

his own landlord. Directly he has reached this stage, an improvement is

visible in his condition. It is difficult to over-estimate the social

value of the work that has been done by building societies. In the

suburbs of the large towns you see whole townships built entirely by

these societies; every inhabitant of these townships in the course of a

few years becomes a proprietor, and the society further aids him by

making loans to him on mortgage of his property. It is the defect of

these townships that the houses are all as like one another as peas in a

pod--four-roomed squares or six-roomed oblongs built of red brick, and

with every detail exactly the same; but their plainness and similarity

does not detract from their manifest virtues.

Terraces and attached houses are universally disliked, and almost every

class of suburban house is detached and stands in its own garden. These

gardens are laid out much in the English fashion; but there is little

need of greenhouses, and unless you have water laid on to your lawn, it

is difficult to keep it green in summer. In Adelaide but few people try

to keep lawns; the summer sun is too scorching, and towards February and

March the gardens look dreadfully dried up. But on the other hand,

flowers of all kinds grow in abundance, and to a size which they rarely

attain in colder climates. The garden needs little attention beyond the

summer watering and you can get flowers all the year round. Fruit-trees

grow with wonderful rapidity and bear most abundantly.

With the aid of the hills you get several climates within a small area,

and in Adelaide especially the abundance of flowers and fruit is all that

can be desired. There is naturally some tendency to coarseness,

especially in the fruit. The price of labour makes it difficult to keep

large gardens in good order. For this reason few people keep large

gardens. Another thing that accounts for the smallness of the gardens

attached to middle and working-class houses, which are often no more than

patches, is the speculation in land. The smaller the portions into which

the speculator cuts up his building sections, the more he gets for them.

I myself on one occasion bought an eight-acre section of land in one

block for £1,100, cut it up into blocks of an eighth of an acre each, and

resold it within six weeks for a little over £2,000. This

land-speculation is quite a feature of Australian life, and at certain

periods it is difficult to lose money by it. Large gardens are generally

long leaseholds or freeholds belonging to rich people, who will not sell

during their lifetime. At their death their gardens are cut up into small

blocks and yield large profits. Nor do I think that the love of gardening

is at all common here; it is not a sufficiently exciting occupation.