The second screw of the interviewer’s mental thumb-smasher is, “What do you think of the Post-Office carvings?”
The third query is generally, “Have you been to Paddy’s Market?”
Now experience has shown us that to the first two questions the simple words “Awfully jolly, bai Jove!” especially if accompanied with a long drawl, will put the knowing if unscrupulous candidate upon his way rejoicing. That he may be able to answer the third in a satisfactory manner, we ask him to follow our story through the wastes that lie over against Cambell and Hay Streets.
It is a curious and interesting fact that no one, whatever command of language he may possess, can describe a place, or thing, successfully to another, if his auditor has never had personal experience of something similar. Who could picture up in his mind the ocean in a storm, or a cavalry charge, from a mere verbal or written description?
The best literary effort would be thrown away upon a man of no experience. Such an individual would, after reading or hearing of the glories of the sea, probably still have only a vague idea that it was in appearance something similar to an animated potato-bed of a green colour.
We trouble our readers with all this in order that they may assist us in picturing the scene we are about to describe, by conjuring up “in the mind’s eye,” one of the flaring midnight markets of the Old World,—Petticoat Lane, Seven Dials, Deptford, the more ancient parts of the Cité, Paris, or the like.
The best admirers of Sydney—and it rightly has many of these—will scarcely proclaim it as a moral city. The unlimited license granted to its youth of both sexes and every class, by the custom and habits of the community, is fraught with those dangerous elements that encourage the growth of the worst sorts of crimes. Monied and unscrupulous blackguards are to be found here, as elsewhere in the world; and nowhere can they have their fling—that every devil’s dance—to better advantage than in Sydney.
Paddy’s Market is one of the hunting-grounds of this class of individuals.
As evening draws over the city vast crowds are to be seen hurrying homeward past the glaring shops and brilliantly-lighted hotels. Now dodging red- and green-eyed steam-trams, as they screech and rumble along the handsome but narrow streets; and anon dashing in open order like frighted sheep across the bus-covered squares, the migratory sojourners of the city flock nightly outwards from the business centres.
Let us allow ourselves to be carried down George Street in the human stream “Southward Ho!” till Cambell Street is reached. Here in the slack-water of the comparatively deserted footpath of a side street we can look around us. A vacant space of ground surrounded by a white railing is on the opposite side of the way, and we become aware of a Chinese quarter being at hand from the acrid stench that reaches us from up the street.