CHAPTER V
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.
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.
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.
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.