A PRETTY TALE OF SYDNEY.

Evening Star, Issue 3413, 29 January 1874, Page 3

A PRETTY TALE OF SYDNEY.

The * Melbourne Telegraph ’ comments as follows Looking about us with extensive view, we may thank heaven that we are not so badly off even in Melbourne as some people are—say our neighbors of Sydney. The city health officer there has just made an inspection of the place, and in his report he alludes in terms of horror to the frightful state of .poverty, immorality, drunkenness, and filth ■ that exists on the shores of a harbor that, in the words of Trollope, is “beautifol as a d earn.” The inspector has fuund a number of houses which you cannot enter without the risk of being covered with vermin, and in which there were poor sickly children lying 'on the floor, revelling in their own dirt. “In this great city,” he writes, “where I 1 nd lords are generally wealthy and living iin fine houses, I find upwards of 200 ihouses with only one room, 1,785 with two 1 rooms, and 3,860 with three rooms; these ‘ houses are occupied with one or more families. and so scanty is the ac ommodation I that fathers, mothers, grown-up sons, and j daughters, sleeu in the same room. To increase the danger of causing disease there ia generally an open privy close, and some[times attached to the dwelling, and often ,one only for ten or fifteen houses. Such '.a state of affairs could scarcely be credited, ; especially when I find that a number oi j these badly-constrncted, ill-ventilated, and I poisonous dwellings belong to the moat respectable citizens, but too often left to save .trouble, to the care of an agent, whose ob jj«ct, it appears, is to collect the rents, and turn a deaf ear to the tenant if he mention*;a word about a nuisance.” One is not aur--1 prised, after this, to find Dr, A. Moffit writling to the papers, and pointing out that in -Sydney the mortality from typhoid fever (exceeds all other diseases. A fertile source io£ this terrible complaint, says Dr. -Moffit, ;are the wells sunk in the back yards of the I homes of the working classes in the suburbs. ;The closet will often bo found only a few tyards distant from the well, in a sandy soil, jand the sickening consequences may b* (imagined. The water is used for all purposes. • The inhabitants wash in it -when jthey do wash—and they drink it when they (cannot get “she-oak” or “water-bottle.” (There seems an eligible opening for a sani tary reformer in the terrestrial paradise ,of Port Jackson. . .. 1