Chapter 3

The drainage is defective, but the water-supply good. There is still a great deal to be done to the footpaths, and until quite recently the municipal arrangements were in every respect almost as bad as those of Sydney. But an able, energetic, and liberal mayor, Mr. E. T. Smith, in the course of two years so stirred up the citizens that pavements have been laid down, additional gas-lights provided, the Torrens artificial lake constructed, the squares and park-lands transformed from untidy wildernesses into handsome oases, and the general aspect of the city entirely transformed. I do not know that I ever saw so much done entirely at the initiative and by the energy and persistence of a single man.

Of the shops there is not much to be said. They are not at all up to the average of most of the institutions of the town, with the one exception of those of the jewellers and silversmiths, the work in which is original and artistic, throwing altogether into the shade similar shops in Melbourne and Sydney. The cabs are all waggonettes, similar to those used in Melbourne, but drawn by two horses instead of one. Adelaide abhors hansoms. They exist, but are never used by respectable people, who have come to look upon them as unholy in themselves. The tramway system is the most complete in Australia. All the trams are drawn by horses; to such of the suburbs as are too thinly populated to have trams large waggonettes for the most part run in lieu of omnibuses. Adelaide is the only Australian town in which the American system of buying land, and making a railway to bring population to it, has been carried out. The idea was first tried with tramways, the writer having taken some part in originating and promoting it. Of the hotels of Adelaide, the best is the York. It is better than the best, in Sydney, but inferior to the best two in Melbourne.

Owing to the excellent plan on which the city is laid out, it is surrounded on every side by suburbs at the short distance of half a mile, connected by horse-tramways. Beyond these, however, there is the flourishing watering-place of Glenelg at a distance of only seven miles by train; and now that the railway has been carried into the hills, it will not be long before large suburbs grow up in them. Wealth in South Australia is more equally divided than in the sister Colonies. Hence there are only a few large mansions, but comfortable six to ten-roomed cottages abound.

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.

FURNITURE.

I closed my last letter with an account of the way in which houses are built here. I am now going to try to describe their contents. And perhaps the best way to do this will be to describe a type of each class of house, omitting all exceptions, which are necessarily numerous where so large a field has to be covered.

We will begin at the top of the tree. Whilst the ambition of the wealthy colonist not unfrequently finds vent in building a large house, he has generally been brought up in too rough a school to care to furnish it even decently. His notion of furniture begins and ends with upholstery, and I doubt whether he ever comes to look upon this as more than things to sit on, stand on, lie on, eat off and drink off The idea of deriving any pleasure from the beauty of his surroundings rarely enters into his head, and it is not uncommon to find a man who is making £5,000 a year amply satisfied with what an Englishman with one-tenth of his income would deem the barest necessaries. The Australian Croesus is generally very little of a snob, though often his 'lady' has a taste for display. When this desire for grandeur has led them to furnish expensively, they are unable to furnish prettily, and usually feel much less comfortable in their drawing-room, in which they never set foot except when there is company--than when their chairs and tables were made by a working carpenter or with their own hands out of a few deal boards.

One or two millionaires have had upholsterers out from Gillow's and Jackson and Graham's to furnish their houses in the latest and most correct fashion, and many colonists who go on a trip to England bring back with them drawing and dining room suites; but even then there is an entire want of individuality about the Australian's house--which is the more remarkable seeing how much his individuality has been brought out by his career, and shows itself in his general actions and opinions. He may know how to dogmatize on theology and politics, but when he gets down to furniture he confesses that his eye is out of focus. The furniture imported or (in Melbourne) made by the large upholsterers is, with few exceptions, more gorgeous than pretty; whence one may reasonably infer that the taste of their customers--when they have any--is better suited by the grandiose than the artistic. But most of the expensively furnished houses show plainly that the upholsterer has been given _carte blanche_ to do what he will. Look at his shop-window, and you may make a shrewd guess at his customer's drawing-room.

Nor is the furniture universal in Australia, as one would naturally suppose, after the style of that in Italy and the South of France. The frowsy carpets and heavy solid chairs of England's cold and foggy climate reign supreme beneath the Austral sun. The Exhibitions have done something towards reforming our domestic interiors, but it will be a long time before the renaissance of art as applied to households, which appears to be taking place in England, makes its way here in any considerable force.

But instead of generalizing, it is time we should go through Muttonwool's house room by room. On entering the drawing-room the first thing that strikes the eye is the carpet, with a stiff set pattern large enough to knock you down, and of a rich gaudy colour. You raise your eyes--find opposite them the regulation white marble mantelpiece, more or less carved, and a gilt mirror, which we will hope is not protected from the flies by green netting. Having made a grimace, you sit down upon one of the chairs. There are nine in the room besides the sofa--perhaps an ottoman--and you can take your choice between the 'gent's' armchair, the lady's low-chair, and the six high ones. If they are not in their night-shirts you can examine the covering--usually satin or perhaps cretonne. The pattern is unique, being, I should think, specially manufactured for the colonial market. Bright hues prevail. Occasional chairs have only lately been introduced, and the whole suite is in unison, though harmony with the carpet has been overlooked, or rather never thought of, the two things having been chosen separately, and without any idea that it would be an improvement if they were to match.

As for the make of the chairs, they are to be found in plenty of English middle-class drawing-rooms even now. The shape may be named the 'deformed.' The back is carved out into various contortions of a horse-shoe, with a bar across the middle which just catches you in the small of the back, and is a continual reproach if you venture to lean against it. The wood of which the chairs are made is mahogany, walnut, or cedar. The large round or oval table which stands in the middle of the room is of the same wood, and so are the card-table, the Davenport, the chiffonier, and that Jacob's-ladder-like what-not in the corner. In some houses the upholsterer has stuffed the room with useless tables. Of course there is a fender and fire-irons, and probably a black doleful-looking grate, which during two-thirds of the year is stuffed with paper shavings of all the colours of the rainbow and several others which good Mother Nature forgot to put into it. On the chimney-piece is a Louis XVI. clock and a pair of ornaments to match. A piano, tune immaterial, is a _sine quâ non_ even in a middle-class house, but when Muttonwool has got all these things--in short, paid his upholsterer's bill--he thinks a ten-pound note should cover the rest of his drawing-room furniture. Household gods are terribly deficient, and it would not be difficult to fancy yourself in a lodging-house. There may be a few odds and ends picked up on the overland route, and a set of stereotyped ornaments bought at an auction sale or sent out as 'sundries' in a general cargo; but of _bric-à-brac_, in the usual acceptation of the term, there is little or none.