SYDNEY'S SLUMS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 20, 8 February 1937, Page 7

SYDNEY'S SLUMS

-Presi Assn.-

Caustic Comment by Woman Writer LICE AND DIRT

(By Telegraph-

-Copyricht.)

(Received 8, 8.45 a.m.) SYDNEY, Feb. 7. Miss Betty Riddell, in the "Sunday Sun" after mentioning ihe commencomeixt of the Housmg Improvement Board' s efforts to replan the slum areas in Sydney says: — "Everybody seems to know about the slums of Sydney except the people of Sydney. Visitors from -overseas are taken by un-named guides through the industrial suburbs and return to tell ihe world, or their corner of it, that we have bere slums as baff as or worse than the slums of London, Glasgow and Belfast. "If a slum is a dirty'house in a dirty ^treet where men play cards sitting in the gutter with their boots off and babies cry and lie down with starved dogs, then we do have slums, anil I saw them last week. "And if a slum is a house with the Iron gone from the roof, holes in the floor, dirty paper shredded from the walls, th© guttering taken from the roofs by thieves, and dirt and lice and cockroaches on the floors whose board* are bo black and grimed that no scrubbing could got them clean, then we have slums." The Housing Improvement Board's rebuilding schemes when formulated are to be submitted to the Government.