SLUMS OF MELBOURNE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2211, 8 June 1908, Page 1

SLUMS OF MELBOURNE.

(From the Special Correspondent of the Dominion”) Right in tlio heart of one of Mel hour tip’s most thriving suburbs stands llie Gipps Street Mission Church, Collingwood ; and connected with it is a bund of earliest workers who labor long and lato to ameliorate to some extent the social conditions largely brought about by the industrial system of Victoria. They quite realise that drunkenness and gambling are the causo of niltioh of the poverty with which they have to deal, and they wage war continually with these twin vices of humanity; but much of it is attributable to causes fur deeper than the vicious habits of the individual. It was into examples of this last particularly that I sought information from one of the Mission Sis- (it, and, at her. request, accompanied the lady on one of her morning rounds. The first homo visited was- that of a rich-poor man whose weekly wage (is. i.‘2-.-when he is in work. A Rothschild in finance could not compete with this housemother in making 40s cover meat, vegetables, groceries, milk, boots, clothing, tobacco, schoolpence, lodge fees, lighting, firing, and house rent for a family of seven. The woman is an excellent* housewife, and fortunately had also a trade at her finger tips. “How I shoe <i have managed without a trade wi.f.n th children were babies and my I i sbiiiiJ sick and out of work, the Almighty only knows,” she said to her cisitoi..; (.“many a time have 1 sat down till dark machining shirts, niton uitii my baby lying across my lap, to make sufficient for rent and food. I receive 2s per dozen for the shirts—that is good pay, for I’m reckoned a competent hand.” Tlio tiny house of four rooms is scrupulously clean and tidy, but even so is mean and sordid in every sense of the words. Time payment is necessarily the way in which 'most of'the necessaries of iife are purchased with such people. •Indeed, the only way of procuring a new garment or article of furniture Is by time-payment. “A shilling at a time you don’t miss so 'lunch,” said another woman; “but it comes awfully hard when my husband is out of work, and the man comes round for payment, and you haven’t got it and all is lost.”-

Down a sweltering hot alley lies another house in which a woman lies sick and weak—too weak almost to flutter the light paper fan which keeps swarms of vicious black flies from worrying her. Her husband gave her a. cup of tea before leaving at 7 a.m., and now it is near noon'. “But he’ll be in soon now. Sister,” she cheerfully assured her visitor. And so one goes on through street after street of hot, stifling houses; here a row of grimy yellow brick ones that sneer at you as you pass; there some old tumble-down hovels that ,ieer and leer alike at visitors and inhabitants. Going into one of the worst, through the door which opens straight' on the street, there is a small crooked room, a few bits of small oilcloth on tlie floor, one ricketty table and a couple of'chairs, some .fly-marked colored prints, and a photo of tho woman and her husband when ■they were married. Tho listless, weary look of the woman and her ragged clothes mark her as tho wife of the “casual laborer.” Opening out of -this, room is another ; nothing on the floor, two beds made of packing cases,, and covered with rags and bags—not a sheet or a blanket—that constitutes the entire furniture. At the-back of tliis is a dark and dirty kitchen, opening on to a still more dirty yard. 11l it there is not a flower, not a blade of jp-ass, not a tree, nothing blit stark, flank dirt, from the midst of which a. couple of half-clad and woodenfaced children stare at tho visitors. Tho next woman’s husband has deserted her, and she- is ’left worse than a widow with two little children dependent on her. She earns her living Gy cleaning rabbit skins. working from dawn till dark for 3s per day, with only casual employment. Her sister (an adult), who lives with her, earns Is per day as a “peeler” in a jam factory. Both women are obviously unskilled laborers, and aro saturated with that cold, listless inertia which springs from long-continued poverty and degradation. Is it any wonder that the children of such homes grow up weak-kneed, narrow-chested, guiltless of stamina and virility, fit only to swell the throng of inelficients P Is it any wonder that this herding together, these ■ insanitary habits, tliis malnutrition, are all .serving, to permanently injure the growing boys and girls, and to foster those diseases of civilisation which in seme quarters seemi to become daily more rife? And not physical disease alone, but moral disease also. “My eldest daughter earns 10s per week now,” said one mother, in a wretched hovel of a home, “but most of it goes in dress and finery and amusement.;- and I daren’t say she must give me more lest yslio take to worse courses to get tlio money.’ The woman did not speak bitterly or even crossly, but in calm, level tones as if she were stating an ordinary fact of daily occurence—as, indeed, she was. It is easy,enough to blame such a girl, but look round at tho children in these streets, and wliat can one expect from human ‘ beings thus bred and born. They are not children at all. Children are bright-eyed, chubby, shy. These are dingy, grimy, screeching little elves, their faces already withered, their minds already seared, their eyes unholily wise as thev watch the orgies of their elders. One turns away appalled. Surely oi such is the Kingdom of Hell! And all this right in a heart of a city that has just been termed the “Queen of the South;’ Melbourne, with its wide streets, its voluptuous gardens, its beautiful women, its sunny skies, a city barely three generations old, and yet repeating line lor line all the vices of the Old \\orkl, wealth -and development in art and science and literature oil tlie one hand, noverty and degradation in crime and misery on tlie other.