On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

At midday on Saturday they flock home and start to turn out their rooms, and wash, and dust, and sweep, while whole stories may be read in the little odds and ends of furniture which take an airing in the passage while the cleaning goes on. Then, as often as not, they do their week’s washing, no inconsiderable task in the hot weather, when print dresses and blouses are worn. Still, they get through their work quickly enough—for the Melbourne girls are fine workers, sharp and decisive in all they do—hang their clothes on lines across their room, then dress and go out for the rest of the afternoon, with some friend, often ending with an evening at the theatre; for, though they work hard enough, goodness knows, yet they enjoy life on the whole. There are sweethearts, or “boys,” as they are always called, in plenty; and cottons and muslins are cheap; and the beach, with all the gaiety of bands and sideshows and bathing, to be reached for the small sum of threepence.

Then on Sunday mornings there is profound peace hanging over the building till well over nine o’clock, when the primus smell begins to be replaced by a distinct odour of ironing proceeding from every girl’s room for about an hour before she starts off—with flying white veil, crisp muslin skirts and blouse, long white washing gloves and beflowered hat—for a day by the sea or in the country with her “boy,” and another girl and her “boy”—the usual quartette. No wonder that these girls are more fearless-looking, healthier, brighter, and less neurotic than their fellows at home; for, apart from the greater facilities for fresh air and cheap, healthy amusements which they enjoy, they are better paid, a typist with a machine of her own getting half a crown a thousand words; while, if she is any good, she can always demand £2 a week in an office, with extra pay for overtime. The same thing holds good in every branch of women’s work, the domestic servants demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages every year.

In Melbourne it is no good trying to get a servant by merely stating your requirements at a registry-office, and asking that a likely girl should be sent out to see you. On the contrary, it is the mistresses who line the waiting-rooms at the offices. They come early and stay late, often bringing books with them, and only slipping out for a hurried meal when they are quite certain that every possible domestic is comfortably enjoying her dinner at home, or in some restaurant. If it is very hot or wet, no maids turn up at all, though the ladies still flock to town by each early tram and train; a wistful-eyed and weary host, so evidently bent on that all-absorbing quest that one gets after a time to recognize them at first glance as servant-hunters. When a smiling and self-satisfied young woman is brought into the room by the harassed person who runs the office, and introduced to some eager mistress, all the other ladies glare at the possibly successful candidate for the girl’s favour, and meanwhile smile at her in the most beckoning and easy-going way; though even when she has thrown the glove, so to speak, they all know that she will not have the faintest compunction in breaking her agreement. These are a few of the questions a mistress may have put to her:—Does she keep a piano for the maids? If not, are they allowed to practise in the drawing-room? Are there any children?—an unforgivable sin in the eyes of a Melbourne domestic; as one hopeless lady said to me, after many days of weary waiting:—“They expect us to put out the work and kill our children.” Is she allowed every evening out, and half a day a week, and a whole day a month, and every Sunday? And is she expected to wear a cap?

For the most part even the best of them refuse to call you “ma’am.” It is, “Hey, you there,” if they wish to attract your attention, and “All right” in response to any order. A little less in the rough, and they repeat your name every moment, till you are sick of the very sound of it. One woman I know, who remonstrated with her maid on the constant reiteration of “Mrs. —” was met with the response that if she was Mrs. — she ought not to mind being called so, and if she was not, she ought to be ashamed of herself!

But I have strayed far from the subject of the chambers and their inhabitants, of which, indeed, a whole book might be written. One sees the cheery, independent-looking girls walking, with that characteristic swing of the hips, along the passages, or hurrying to their work through the sunny streets; but this is all the brightest side of the picture, to which there is, as in all pictures true to life, a reverse side. Even here there are not always billets to go round; a girl may lose her situation, and not get another at once, and then the primus roars less frequently, and there is no odour of bacon or sausages mingled with the kerosene. The door is kept jealously closed. Sometimes the men from the shops which let out furniture on the hire system come and fetch it away. The inhabitant of the room tells you jauntily that she is moving, and that it is not worth while carting furniture about; but she stays on, with lips that every day grow whiter and more persistently smiling, while you meet her in the street during business hours, trying to look very busy and full of affairs.

Some girls will talk of their position; they are “out of a billet”; they are “awfully hard up,” and one need not fear greatly for those who can do this. We have all been in the same box, and are only too ready to give her a meal here and a meal there; to lend her a lounge-chair by way of a bed, till something turns up, and help out her scanty wardrobe, if she wants to appear particularly smart and prosperous when interviewing some possible employer. But it is those who do not and will not complain who are the difficult ones to deal with. One such girl, I remember, was found by the caretaker—when the busy people about her at last began to realize that they had not seen her go in and out of her room for some time—lying on the floor behind the locked door, as nearly dead as any woman could be, from sheer want—starvation, to put it bluntly—though there was not a single woman in the building who would not have helped her, if only the real state of things had ever been guessed at; for the uncharitableness of the Australian woman is, for the most part, verbal; they will abuse you like a pickpocket, but, while they will not leave you a shred of character, they will literally strip themselves in other ways that you may be clothed.

But girls such as I have been writing of do not comprise the whole inhabitants of these chambers. There are married couples, for the greater part, living as much on the edge of things as the girls. I remember one quite cheerful matron confessing to me that she and her husband at that moment had only twopence between them. He was an engineer, of sorts, and when he was out of a billet she used to take in dressmaking by the day, and get a small part at one of the theatres in the chorus, or as part of a crowd; or—being possessed of an extremely fine figure—pose for a photograph or sketch of some newly imported model gown for one of the larger drapery firms, or as an example of the newest styles of hairdressing for a ladies’ paper. Then there are more prosperous couples, sometimes with children—or more likely with one child—and various men who “batch” in places such as these, getting their meals out at some handy tea-room or restaurant.

Cheaper than these rooms are others, to be found for the most part in the narrow back-streets—buildings with long, echoing, uncarpeted passages, kept very moderately clean by occasional charwomen, with no hot-water supply whatever, and for the most part no bathroom. They are badly lighted, shivery places even on the hottest days, and though some of the rooms are bright and cheery enough, the doors, with the dirty, cracked, chipped paint, bear an ominous look, as though the wolf were for ever pawing at them. They are failures as buildings. Mostly they have not been designed for residential purposes at all, but as huge blocks of offices, in those days of swollen pride “before the boom.”—In England things have happened before the Conquest and after, but even B.C. and A.D. are letters which here have no significance—except to the geologist—and it is as “before the boom” or “after the boom” that all affairs of any importance are said to have occurred, unless the date is further particularized as “the year So-and-so won the Cup.” Among many other mementoes of the great bubble these buildings stand confessed failures: as unadapted for the purposes they are put to as are the many human failures, who drift into them, aimlessly as a stray leaf is drifted through an open door by some passing breeze.

From places such as these people are always moving, whether from an inborn restlessness or a desire to escape their creditors, I cannot say; but one day you see them toiling up and down stairs with the oddest, and most intimate, household and personal belongings clasped in their arms. There is an eddying whirl of dust and straw outside some room door, while from within it comes a persistent sound of hammering. Then only a week or two later you run across the very same people staggering downstairs under the same burdens, or dropping soft bundles over the banisters to the hall below; and pass a widely open door, which shows you an empty room, with fresh stains on the walls, and a fresh irruption of tin-tack holes everywhere; while a perspiring “char-lady” tussles valiantly with the dirt-begrimed floor, for these “flitters” take little or no pride in their surroundings.

The army of “char-ladies” in Melbourne is a large one. It is a “legion that never was ’listed”; it has no commander and no regulations; it is managed by no Acts of Parliament; is included in the affairs of no Board; has no fixed minimum wage; in fact, has no protection of any sort, beyond what lies in the tongue of each individual member; though that is, indeed, most often a two-edged sword. But, for all that, these women have one weakness, and that is their strength. If they were not strong enough to work their husbands would be supporting them. If they had not willingly and bravely put their shoulders to the wheel at the time of some crisis, scarcity of employment, or illness, their husbands would never have found out how much more capable they were than they themselves; for, with very few exceptions, the women that one sees scrubbing miles of passages and mountains of stairs, in warehouses and offices and chambers, long before it is light on a winter’s morning, are married women.