A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip

The boards were swimming past. Picton--Campbelltown (which flowed with milk and wine)--Liverpool (the portmanteaux and ginghams, were hauled down from the racks, coats were folded and strapped, and miscellaneous property collected from divers places and stowed away)--Granville (the women put their gloves on and asked each other if their hats were straight)--Sydney, the Queen of Australian cities--and a general scatter.

This congested centre, which contained within its boundaries about three-parts of the population of the State, was called "Sydney the Beautiful" and "The City of the Beautiful Harbour." With its notorious bottle-neck railway system, its narrow, crooked streets and their numerous dead ends, and the hoardings that everywhere met the eye, and its thousands of jerry built houses, we found it beautiful only in spots. Nor was it as clean as Adelaide and Melbourne. The council's idea of cleaning the city was to sweep up the backyard and dump the smellful refuse in the front garden. The rubbish was punted a few miles out to sea, whence a good deal of it was shortly washed back and strewn along the beaches, where thousands of people gathered on holidays for fresh air and surf bathing. They went there on Saturday afternoons and Sundays to recuperate after a week in a packed, stuffy city. Particularly did they resort to these places for their children's sake, and when the beaches and the water were polluted by the dirty methods of civic housekeepers, what should be a health resort and magnificent recreation ground became a positive danger to them.