HORRIBLE SYDNEY.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 82, 27 December 1884, Page 4

HORRIBLE SYDNEY.

The " Sydney Morning Herald," referring to the present outbreak of small-pox, makes some unsavoury revelations of the horribly dirty and insanitary condition of many parts of Sydney. It says :—: — "It is much to be feared that our immunity hitherto from any serious widespread visitation of epidemic or disease has lulled us into a false sense of security. Abuses have sprung up in our midst which may precipitate upon us the evil from which we have come to regard ourselves as secure. A visit to some of the localities where the recent cases of small-pox have occurred cannot fail to impress the visitor with an opinion that unless a very radical change is effected in the sanitary state of the croAvded parts of the city, we will be visited at no very remote time with a terrible punishment for our neglect such as no human skill can hope to avert before many lives have been sacrificed. The man or woman whose walks are confined to the wide cleany streets, and whose eyes see only the wellkept fronts of rows of houses, has no idea of the filth and squalor of the lanes and allies in which men, women, and children are crammed 'like salted fish in their barrel.' The filth one finds in such places is not so much the result of poverty as of that tendency among the peoplo to live dirtily, not because or order are costly things, but because dirt and disorder are regarded as natural surroundings. In the filthiest lanes one finds amidst garbage rotting in the mud such evidence of ' good living as the cans which have held preserved meats, ale bottles, sauce bottles, then as evidence of wastefulness, pieces of bread, bones with the meat but half cut.

from them, and many other articles, which, in cities less prosperous than this, would have been used to the test fragment. Here plenteousness and filth appear to go hand in hand. The slattern woman, with dirty gown and towzled hair, fares on the best meats, and would not think of taking her dinner without her pint of beer. The rooms of the houses of this class present equally strange contrasts. In one room you may find abundance of good furniture, greased and foul smelling, - the floor halfcovered with frowsy carpet, and, where the bare boards are exposed, blacK* >and shiny with the accumulated dirt ot -months. From the back door you look out oh.a yard j literally 'not big enough to swing a cat in.' |In one corner of it is a closet, in another a j pile of rubbish, composed of rotting pieces of wood, old canvas, tin, and a topping of j decayed potato peelings and cabbage leaves. Such are hundreds of the homes packed in terraces and rows in the thicklypopulated parts of the city." Proceeding to describe a visit paid to the localities where small-pox had broken out, our contemporary says:— "Here is a house in a somewhat pretentious terrace. A policeman paces up and down the pavement in tront of it, and on the door is posted a yellow placard bearing in black letters the following words : ' This house is infected with small-pox. The public are cautioned against approaching it. Any person so doing will incur the danger of infection.' Leaving the front of the premises, a visit is paid to the back ; here again one finds a policeman, and more placards are pasted up. The entrance is from a lane, whose gutters are filled with greasy dirty water. The yard of the house from which the inmates have been removed is in a state of filth and disorder, with piles of kerosene tins and garbage in a corner, an old tub with dirty clothes in a tumbledown shed,'and with fragments of rag, vegetables, and other rubbish strewn about. The yard is asphalted, but the water has gathered here and there in pools in the worn places. The yard next to it is much the same. Looking on the lane is a row of small houses, whose back yards extend to the dividing wall between them and the infected houses. The yards of these houses are about nine feet square, and in one corner, within six feet ot the back door — where a dilapidatedlooking fellow is binding up his bruised foot — is the water-closet, whose odour fills the stuffy little room, where dirty tea-cups, beer bottles, and babies are mixed in confusion. The next infected house is several streets away ; it is the end one of a small two-story terrace, and is next a greengrocery shop. Here the yard is larger, and some attempt has been made to keep it clean. The lane at the back of this place is just wide enough to permit a cart to pass along. It is on either side margined by what was a paling fence, but what is now virtually a fence without palings. Along the line are closets in various states oi dirt and stench. The lane itself is a puddle, with all sorts of garbage, including a rat and other decomposing matter scattered about. The constable states the stench in this place on a warm day is abominable. "A few streets further away the next house is reached. Here iron railing has been placed across the foothpath, and inside the house a couple of men are engaged fumigating the rooms with sulphur. The yard of this house is cleanly, and the neighbours say the people were cleanly and used plenty of carbolic acid about the place. The houses here are crowded on top of one another, and in the back premises everyone ?ees everyone else's business. The ground slopes a little, and pipes are carried under the houses to take off the drainage into the street gufceer. The sink where the pipe enters the yard is, no doubt, in the majority of cases, made the receptae'e for all the suds and slush about the houses, and thus emptying into the gutter is carried along it to the entrance to the sewer at the corner of the street. The next infected house is some distance away. There is some difficulty in reaching the back yard, and a neighbour is interviewed. ' That yard,' says she, pointing to one adjoining that of the infected house, 'is ; simply awiul. All the winter it is covered t with green, stagnant water ' After climbing a fence or two the back yard of the house itself is reached. It is absolutely a mass ot rubbish, with an avenue cut through it. A couple of boxes, piled one on the other, hold a collection of dirty pots and pans. A broken-down shed is stuffed with a miscellaneous collection of rubbish, an old torn pillow with the feathers soaking in the mud, a sheepskin, what appears to be the remnant of a dish of beans, old mouldy timber, and any quantity of tins and old bags, make up as motley a collection as could be crowded into such a space. And in the midst of all this rubbish and its musty sickly stench is a scarlet geranium in a tin can. The flower is in full bloom, and its brilliant blossom and green leaves are conspicuous against the rags and rottenness that surround it. Such are some of the dirt spots in the c ty, and looking at them one realises how terrible would bo the visitation were disease but to become firmly rooted in their midst. " A correspondent writing upon the subject of the carelessness of the municipal authorities with regard to ths sanitary condition of Sydney, says: 'For instance, at the lower end of Palmer street there is a piece of vacant ground on which all sorts of rubbish, dead cats, rats, <fee, are deposited, and the footpaths are a chain of stagnant water puddles, strewn with filth and rubbish. This has been the case for the last two years to my own knowledge.' "

That the Scotch are an extremely econmoraical race goes without saying. Here is a recent illustration :— A Scotch gentleman had been entertaining borne of the baillies of his native town to dinner, and when the cloth was about to be removed the waiter put upon the table a wineglass containing quill toothpicks. Several of the baillies availed themselves of the opportunity, but imagine the horror of the host when he saw one of them replacing his toothpick in the gla&s after he had used it! Being a man of ready wit he at once said, 11 Oh ! they will let you keep that." " Oh, will they ?" replied the innocent Scotchman, and at once pocketed the toothpick. The London correspondent of the ** Manchester Guardian" says:— " A letter purporting to give a description of an eyewitness of the execution of Queen Mary will be published at the end of the present year. It has been found in a manuscript book among the papera of Lord Eliock, the judge, who died iirls93. The book is all written in one hand, apparently in the first half of the eighteenth" century, and the account of the execution is a copy of a letter sent by spocial desire. Lord Eliock'sfather managed the affairs of the Duke of Perth and of other families devoted to the Stuart cause, and it is conjoctured that the documont now discovered is a copy of a letter written by a member of one oi them. What next? An inventive genius has applied the electric light to the destruction of bugs. Hint to colonial visitors— The first day a guest, the second a burden, the third a nuisance. A Frence writer has described a young lady as a croature that ceasos to kiss gentlemen at tAelvo and becrins again at twenty.