Hollywood in Burwood, the transformation of a suburban backyard to a garden

Catherine Rogers, October 2014

In the nineteenth-century the expansion of the city of Sydney and increasing individual wealth encouraged the development of a new way of life—in suburbs. Suburban living was premised on an ideal of an independent, healthy existence and a lifestyle not possible in the crowded precincts of the city centre. Private gardens, or at least defined and privately owned spaces that created a setting for comfortable and even gracious living, were integral to that ideal. Yet for all but the most generous subdivisions, new-found independence was controlled and limited by the practical realities of suburban development. The ideal of self-sufficiency was compromised by lack of services such as piped water, drainage and sanitation systems and a safe means of dealing with refuse. Moreover, for all the prospect of more living space, there were the constraints in the size of the blocks of land. In order to deal with the exigencies of the necessary routines of daily existence a work area had to be set aside. This became known as the backyard.

Well hidden behind the house, this service area was important to the continued well-being of the householders, being a multi-functional, outdoor space in which a variety of necessary day-to-day living activities were located. The area of the suburban backyard was a critical space that sustained the household. In the nineteenth-century the backyard was a place that had to be carefully maintained and monitored. It was the source of water and much of the food for the household—it was also the site for all their waste. Managing it was a matter of fine balance. By the mid 1800s, Sydney backyards had acquired a bad reputation as the source of illness and deadly diseases such as smallpox, diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid, as well as bubonic plague, which regularly swept across the city and its new suburbs. Even the best managed area could not shield its household against a poorly managed neighbouring yard. In the nineteenth-century, the suburban backyard was both a contradictory and a contentious place.

BURWOOD

One way to encourage people to move out of the city into the new suburban developments in the mid nineteenth-century was to disparage the city and city living.¹ Advertisements for the unfailingly ‘healthy’ new suburban developments such as the Cheltenham Estate in Burwood, first advertised in June 1854, combined with many reports on the poor sanitary state of the city, all contributing to perceptions of the city as an unhealthy place. In contrast, the suburbs, effectively located in the country, were regarded as healthy, natural places. Nature, in romantic thinking, was preferable to modern industrialisation. Stories of diseases emanating from small yards, narrow lanes and a nature-less city filled many columns in the newspapers, the same reports also noting that the city was also filling with undesirable people, notably the Chinese who were roundly blamed for bringing smallpox, leprosy and malaria to the colony.² Another attractor to encourage people to leave the city for the suburban developments was the prospect of independent living—a life free of regulations, government controls and taxes. Yet such an apparently blissful state was only possible for a relatively short time, as growing health problems caused by rapidly increasing suburban populations and unregulated building and land development appear to have motivated the establishment of borough councils. Such was the case in Burwood in 1874, marking the end of a self-sufficient life-style out in the country. On another plane, the city with its social and environmental ills continued to be depicted as suffocating the fulfilment of human spiritual potential. The space of the country and the place of nature was considered good for the soul—and in what seem to have been much more pious times, nature brought people closer to God.

With the establishment of the Sydney to Parramatta railway in 1855, many of Sydney’s early suburban settlers were within easy reach of the city. But despite the presence of a railway station at Burwood, building there only started in earnest in the 1870s when villas, mansions, houses, terraces and cottages were constructed along the railway. The new suburbs represented an ideal style of living considered to offer the best of both worlds—location in the country but with easy access to the city. The idea of ‘country’ living in the garden areas of suburbs such as Burwood was essentially an English idea born of the picturesque, the prevailing framing aesthetic of the nineteenth-century.³ Romantic thinking, from which picturesque aesthetic was constructed in the late eighteenth-century, strongly contributed to the shaping of British settlement of Australia; picturesque ideals coloured and formed—or reformed—the land as landscape. The Australian landscape was not like that of England with its northern hemisphere flora and fauna, yet ideas of England and Englishness were the primary model for the large scale ‘development’ of the colony and for the small scale of the suburban garden.

The total eradication of all vegetation on the block was a common start for new suburban land owners wishing to establish themselves away from the city and away from their place of origin. The creation of a blank canvas, made of bare earth, on which to make an entirely new beginning must have been a very powerful idea for many people right across the social spectrum. Realising this vision of independent, pioneering living away from the city was regarded as a big step in life. At the same time, those wishing to re-imagine themselves in this new place, and in doing so, re-envision and re-plant the land—from scratch—had an image of England to guide them. They set about making their newly-fenced land echo the one that they had left. Just as settlers eagerly purchased engravings and prints by famous artists ‘depicting’ British and European landscapes to be looked at inside their new homes, settlers also imported plants to fill the gardens outside, English song-birds and animals intended to help make themselves feel more at home in the garden.⁴ Many of these imported plants and animals, such as rabbits and thistles, quickly became pests, however. So too, the natural spaces of the suburbs were not, in the end, free of social or economic ties, and suburban dwellers who started out with visions of an independent life sooner or later discovered that they could not live there without experiencing governmental regulation.

The suburb of Burwood, or Cheltenham Estate, as it was also known when some 250 acres were carved up for development in 1854, was advertised as the perfect place to live—a healthy, picturesque location in the country, away from the dirty, disease-ridden city. Burwood was only seven miles and twenty minutes by train west of the city of Sydney, where many of its professional and successful businessmen occupants of the later nineteenth-century worked. Despite much activity buying and selling land from 1854, little building took place in the development of Cheltenham until the 1870s. After that, Burwood enjoyed nearly 50 years as a premier Sydney suburb, regarded as an excellent place for gardens and, in particular, for growing roses—a stamp of gentility. By the end of WW1 this paradise of suburban garden living in the healthy space of the country had changed—visually, socially and economically. The once considered ideal landscape of well-to-do Burwood was rapidly becoming a suburb of purple brick bungalows, semi-detached houses and small blocks of home units, built on land further subdivided from the many large estates and farms that had made Burwood such a desirable place to live in in the first place.

The Cheltenham Estate development stretched from Liverpool Road to Parramatta Road on either side of what is now Burwood Road. It covered 213 acres owned by Thomas Rowley, who in 1833 had inherited this most favourable part of Burwood from his father; Thomas Rowley senior who had been given two land grants totalling 750 acres, in 1799 and 1803.⁵ The arrival of the Cheltenham Estate was publicly announced and first advertised for sale by ‘public competition’ on 17 June 1854 in all the Sydney newspapers:

SALES BY AUCTION. THE FIRST STEP TO INDEPENDENCE. BUY LAND AND BUILD YOUR OWN HOUSES. RARE OPPORTUNITY FOR THE PROFITABLE INVESTMENT OF CAPITAL.⁶

One thousand handsome, coloured ‘lithographic posters’, illustrated with local scenes and the artist’s ideas of the development’s picturesque potential, were produced as part of the advertising devoted to making this huge land sub-division and sale a great event.⁷ The first auction was to be held at ‘11 o’clock on the glorious first day of August next’.⁸ Much literary effort and many column inches in the newspapers were devoted to promoting this land sale. For over a month, almost daily, advertisements waxed lyrical about the virtues of ‘THE TOWN OF CHELTENHAM, now of TRANSCENDANT IMPORTANCE’⁹ entreating people across the social spectrum to buy land there because ‘CHELTENHAM is romantically situated on an elevated and picturesque spot, in the very heart of the celebrated BURWOOD’.¹⁰ The copy continued:

The verdure of the lands comprising Cheltenham, covered with cattle, reposing in an evening sun, with the picturesque appearance of the fertile orchard of Mr. Samuel Lee, and Mr. James Edrop present at every step vistas equal to the finest "morceaux" of Cuyp or Ostade. Such is the peculiar character of Cheltenham, where the very air possesses such elasticity that to breathe it may be also said to be an enjoyment.¹¹

Advertisements for the Cheltenham Estate were intended to create a pleasing aesthetic picture of a fine landscape—words used to view nature through art. The copywriter’s descriptions were intended to frame the whole Estate as a fine picturesque scene. Words helped potential purchasers come to terms with this place, playing on the strong links of verbal ‘description’ to provide a mental and emotional picture that would colour the visual experience of visitors and settlers. The landscape scenes of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Aelbert Cuyp, were invoked, no doubt, in order to create (for educated folk) an image of an ideal aesthetic location—one that also suggested some kind of acquaintance or familiarity.¹² Seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, now very well regarded by those with a picturesque view of the world, generally depicted a vast sky over a low horizon and a flat or gently undulating landscape not unlike Burwood’s gentle topography. The copywriter’s inclusion of Adriaen van Ostade, another seventeenth-century Dutch painter, who specialized in depicting village and boisterous tavern scenes, was perhaps intended to suggest genial country life. This reference seems a little misplaced as the estate advertisements were primarily appealing to genteel people and those wishing to better themselves—people of refined taste, keen to create their own picturesque garden within this Garden of Eden.

Cheltenham Estate had it all: ‘The climate is so genial, and the rains so regular, that the crops are always sure, and the measure of reward abundant.’¹³ Here was paradise on earth. ‘Wheat, corn, and potatoes, perpetually failing in other districts, always succeed here…’ enthused the copy.¹⁴

Seldom has it fallen to the lot of the Auctioneer, and probably the like may never occur, again, that so admirable an opportunity will be afforded him of offering to the public a property so pre-eminently valuable, so combining the grandeur, of scenery and richness of soil, with a superabundance of natural resources, that he feels totally inadequate to picture faithfully a description of this truly magnificent Estate now known as Cheltenham.¹⁵

The auctioneer advertised the land from many different angles including using religious draw-cards, such as present or prospective schools and churches in various denominations, further stating that:

It is well known that a city must be the seat of a BISHOPRICK, and as Her Majesty's Government have promised that CHELTENHAM shall be so…¹⁶

Importantly, however, the advertisements made poignant appeals to colonists’ desire for ownership, independence and self sufficiency in what were increasingly affluent times:

In this instance, he [Mr A Polack, the Auctioneer] advises the industrious and hard working mechanic to purchase an allotment at CHELTENHAM, for the future benefit of his children and children’s children, whereon he may erect his house where there will be no taxes, no rates, no landlords, no bailiffs, and in fact by industry and perseverance, he will soon became possessed of a property worth £10,000 a year.¹⁷

No doubt, this idea of personal autonomy and total independence free from all authority would have appealed to the many attempting to make a new life for themselves in this landscape, and in the colony of New South Wales. Independence implied that since there were no building and living regulations of any kind, suburban land owners could effectively do what they pleased on their own land. Independence also meant that each landowner and householder had to be self-sufficient in all the practical aspects of living and able to manage their land well. Developments such as Cheltenham Estate were laid out in blocks of land of differing sizes to suit a range of pockets and house sizes, but there were no utilities or services available, included or planned—there were no paved and kerbed roads or footpaths, no clean reliable water supply, no sewerage and garbage services and no organised drainage. Residents therefore had the responsibility of maintaining their own independent space—the backyard.

GARDENS TO BACKYARDS

In 1874 the borough council of Burwood was established and the dream of an independent, tax free life promoted by the new suburban estate developers came to an end with landowners almost immediately required to pay land-tax.¹⁸ It was already evident that there would be health problems arising from increasing populations in new suburbs such as Burwood where there were also farms and dairies, and where building, digging and land use had gone ahead unchecked. Health matters were of greatest concern, as contagious diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera in particular, regularly swept through both city and the suburbs. That these diseases had more than likely originated in plots which had been poorly maintained, and spread via pools of contaminated water, cesspits and piles of rotting rubbish, was of great and general concern. Belief in the greater health benefits of suburban living over city living did not make it true.

There was yet another smallpox panic across Sydney and suburbs in 1881. In the Burwood area the outbreak was attributed to a man from Croydon who had visited Surry Hills—now considered part of the city—bringing disease back to the suburbs and infecting his two children, and possibly others in the surrounding suburbs.¹⁹ Numerous reports on the state of backyards in the city had noted ‘the shameless disregard for cleanliness and decency which has been permitted in a city like Sydney’ and, in one instance, ‘that no less than six loads of filth were carted from a small back-yard in one day.’²⁰ Bad drainage was regarded as a major part of the problem of spreading disease, and the writer noted that while drainage was being improved in the city, this was not the case for the suburbs, and they were in danger of ‘getting worse.’²¹ Backyards were a steady, persistent subject for expressions of disgust in the newspapers, and there were regular calls to clean up backyards across the city and suburbs, with home owners as well as government being held responsible for the problem.

ANOTHER sitting of the Legislative Assembly was occupied yesterday in again discussing Mr. Copeland's motion censuring the Government for their conduct in quarantining healthy people in houses supposed to be infected with small-pox. The only new idea in the course of the debate was imported by Mr. William Clarke, who considered that all the blame for the out-break of small-pox is due to the City Corporation for neglecting to keep clean the back yards and drains of the city.²²

The sanitary state of Burwood became the subject of concern as house building accelerated over the 1870s. Following the Cheltenham Estate development, land was bought and sold by speculators who cut up large blocks into smaller building sites. Conversely, others amalgamated several blocks into larger assets, many in an effort to create substantial, inheritable, ‘family’ estates. Houses built on small blocks, according to one critic, were ‘run up of the cheapest possible construction, flimsy meretricious looking structures merely for the purpose of finding ready sale.’²³ As the writer also noted, in the absence of regulations such as a building act there was little or no provision made for drainage. In 1881, the borough of Burwood endeavoured to bring the municipality under the City Improvement Act, so

that the evils which have been allowed to grow up in the city, and which are now found to be exceedingly difficult to remedy, will not be permitted to become established in other parts of the metropolis.²⁴

The Act was drawn up in 1879 to ‘make better provision for the construction of buildings and the health of the inhabitants within the city of Sydney.’ In mid 1883 another typhoid epidemic threatened and a call went out for the populace to clean thoroughly any place with an ‘offensive smell’, that ‘no species of filth should be suffered to collect in any house, stable, backyard, or other premises’ further suggesting that the police should be used to enforce cleanliness.²⁵

In a report on a typhoid outbreak in 1878 the city’s health-officer was ‘of the opinion’ that the disease was attributable to ‘to bad water, to exhalation from cesspits, made ground, sewerage, and similar noxious agencies’, and recommended filtering drinking water.²⁶ This reveals the old miasma theory of disease transmission by gas and bad air incorporating newer ideas of germ theory. An account of the births and deaths of Sydney and suburbs for the first quarter of 1880 attributed the ‘zymotic class of diseases (both epidemic and contagious)’ as causing 119 deaths in the city and 107 in the suburbs, diarrhoea being the most fatal epidemic, having caused 70 deaths in the city, and 87 in the suburbs, with dysentery responsible for 11 deaths in the suburbs, 8 more than in the city.²⁷ In April 1889, it was reported that deaths from cholera in the suburbs far outnumbered deaths in the city by 27 to 9.²⁸ By those accounts then it is apparent that life in the suburbs was just as precarious as it was in the city, and as a place to live, the suburbs were no healthier.

‘HOLLYWOOD’ BURWOOD: THE DREAM EXAMINED

‘Hollywood’, pictured above in the middle of a bright slightly overcast day, in the mid 1880s, was generously set across two half acre lots of the original Cheltenham estate, and in a location that offered many advantages in the new suburb of Burwood. For most of its years the residents of ‘Hollywood’ had to contend with a lack of services, and, like everyone else there, quarantine a portion of the curtilage as a working area—as a yard, a work place hidden behind the house.³⁰ The photograph shows that a passer-by on Belmore Street would have seen only thick vegetation that effectively hid the front and back garden areas as well as the ground floor of the house from view. The second story of ‘Hollywood’ looms imperiously above the bushes. Overall, the image of the property suggests unruliness together with a strong sense of a cultivated privacy and protection also provided by the dense, untidy bushes which cover the fence. The street entrance leading to the front door of ‘Hollywood’ is a dark tunnel formed from the hedges growing on either side of the path, further making the garden visually and physically impenetrable.

While a passer-by would not have been able to see into the front (or back) garden area, the occupants of ‘Hollywood’ could not see much of the world outside their sanctuary created by the covered fencing which surrounded their house, garden and yard areas. Privacy was important to many of Sydney’s new bourgeois in the suburbs.³¹ The very reason many people had moved to Burwood in the first place—for the fine picturesque views across farms and countryside to the river and to the low hills beyond—could not now be seen from within densely vegetated and enclosed garden areas—only the sky above. Other new settlers in Burwood, however, were keen to show-off their house and landscaped garden area and did not obstruct the view from the street with walls or vegetation.³² But, while a thick hedge and a timber fence might make a good looking and effective physical and visual barrier against human intrusion, altogether it was not enough to contain a family dog. A notice in the Sydney Morning Herald, placed in January 1880 by the Reverend George King, announced that his black retriever ‘Jaques’, was lost. Perhaps ‘Jaques’’ escape and disappearance had been the reason for the addition of the very functional, metal wire fence to the rather charming timber one, seen in the photograph above.³³

Photographs of ‘Hollywood’ suggest that altogether, the garden was not an elaborate one. It appears to have comprised a substantial lawn area well bordered by hedges and shrubs, roses and some smaller trees. Running beside the house were narrow garden beds also filled with roses and assorted bushes, suggesting the occupants were not keen gardeners or greatly concerned with detailed garden maintenance, showy flower beds or floral ornament. None of the photographs suggests that the garden required much close attention, apart from keeping the lawn grass well mown, which it was—in every surviving photograph—the garden being an ideal setting for all of the family’s photographs. The occupants of ‘Hollywood’ seemed to have been more concerned with their own privacy and with creating a sense of seclusion, and a sanctuary behind a barrier of thick vegetation which also established and confirmed their social independence.

Among its many publicised virtues such as its healthy locality, Burwood was promoted as the best place to grow roses, having good soil and the right climate, whereas in the eastern suburbs of Sydney the soil was thought to be too sandy, and it was too windy for really successful rose-growing.³⁴ Similarly, the box hedge apparently grew best in Burwood. Photographs of ‘Hollywood’ also show that roses were a part of the dense tangled vegetation growing on the fences, implying that thorns were a useful component of a good protective hedge. The Cheroke Hedge Rose was recommended by the nearby Dobroyd Plant Nursery in 1869 as:

the cheapest and most economical and efficient evergreen hedge plant in cultivation, easily managed, requiring little or no attention after the first two years, and forms a cattle-proof fence quicker than any other hedge plant known.³⁵

Prickly vegetation was an effective barrier to unwanted human intruders, a common problem in the area at the time, and one that concerned Frank Rogers who lived in ‘Hollywood’ with his family from 1881 until 1919. He had strongly objected to ‘total strangers’ coming onto his property to remove ‘night soil’ pans in the 1880s when the Council’s controversial, unique, patented ‘pan system’ was proposed for the suburb.³⁶

Thick perfumed vegetation including roses and other flowers also formed a part barrier to the smells, dust and dirt of the world on the other side of the fence. Dusty and dirty, unsealed paths and street surfaces had long been subject of complaint as a health hazard right across Sydney, and while the roads were watered (by the council) from time to time, this was considered an expensive undertaking. Dirt and dust was stirred up by the wind, by activities on nearby farms, by passing cattle, horses and carriages.³⁷ Significantly, dust contained dried animal and human waste and was a source of disease. A good thick hedge like the one surrounding ‘Hollywood’ formed a partial barrier to the airborne filth.

Most of the new villas and cottages in developing suburbs like Burwood were constructed on land which had been entirely cleared of all vegetation. Massive tree stumps which remained after cutting down the tall eucalypt forests which once covered the slopes of Burwood also had to be pulled from the ground prior to building, the timber also used to fence the property. Clearing one’s block of land could generate a good income as much of the timber was suitable for house and ship building, as well as for firewood.³⁸ A defined plot of bare earth was like a blank canvas on which the new suburban dweller could create and establish a new home and garden—their own piece of paradise. Land ownership in the new suburbs, just as the Cheltenham estate advertisements had suggested, offered an extraordinary opportunity for colonists to fashion an identity through property and to make a new life for themselves, away from the city. People who otherwise would not have had any expectations for such an improved life enhanced by property had they stayed in Britain or Ireland were relatively free to re-present themselves through a plot of land in the suburbs.

ALICE IN ‘HOLLYWOOD’S’ BACKYARD

Alice Rogers (see her photograph at the beginning of this essay) was born at home in ‘Hollywood’ in January 1881, and lived in the fashionable and popular suburb of Burwood for nearly forty years—in its hey-days. Alice’s lifetime spanned the development and implementation of many significant changes to suburban living that are taken for-granted today. This photograph of Alice standing in the backyard, taken around the end of the nineteenth-century partly hints at the critical role of the back garden area. A number of garden stakes, with string still hanging from them can be seen to Alice’s left, suggesting that the family’s vegetable garden is just out of the camera’s frame. Alice herself would have been able to see across the entirety of the backyard, including the vegetable garden, as she waited patiently for the photographer to set up the camera on its tripod for this picture. While the photograph shows that ‘Hollywood’ had a neat yard, it has been carefully framed to eliminate further details of the back garden area. Alice, however, is looking out at an invisible backyard—an area generally considered unsuitable for picturing containing as it did ordinary, unattractive and unpleasant objects, functions and activities which were intimate and essential household places and roles.

In contrast to the contemporary suburban backyard, which is now largely a decorative (and diminishing) space, much like the front garden, the role and function of the back garden or backyard in the nineteenth-century was primarily utilitarian. The larger spaces of suburban backyards of houses like Alice’s family home, ‘Hollywood’, were absolutely essential, critical places responsible for the well-being of the household. The backyard was an extension of the house itself, it was an area which had to be carefully organised, tended, maintained and constantly monitored. It was in daily use. From within the fenced bounds of ‘Hollywood’ came all the family’s drinking and washing water (from a 10,000 gallon, buried cement tank, also from a well), and most of their food—vegetables, fruit and eggs, for example. Many larger Burwood dwellings such as ‘Hollywood’ had substantial orchards as well as vineyards and householders made their own wine—wine often considered safer to consume than water. Fuels were also stored in the backyard—large wood and coal piles for heating and cooking needs; valuable kerosene, in tins, was stored in sheds and oils (whale and seed oils) in large quantities were used for lighting around the house. The kitchen was at the rear of the house as was the laundry, and washing was dried on lines also well hidden behind the house. A compost heap of leaves, garden matter and grass clippings was located in the backyard too and when well-rotted was returned to the vegetable and flower gardens along with poultry manure.

In ‘Hollywood’, as elsewhere in Burwood and in the new suburbs, the very same space of the backyard which grew food and stored valuable water also had to contain all of the household’s waste. Waste disposal was a personal responsibility in the nineteenth-century and even well into the twentieth-century. In the absence of a piped sewage system and a garbage service, human waste, rotten meat and vegetable matter, washing water, broken crockery, old clothes and shoes, papers and all other waste all had to be carefully disposed of within the backyard. A large outdoor fireplace was often used to burn combustible rubbish creating a smoke problem at times. The cesspit was located some distance (where possible), from the house, with a closet placed over it and into which ladies’ chamber pots were emptied and other liquid waste was tipped. ‘Hollywood’s’ cesspit and ‘earth-closet’ was located at the back fence.³⁹ It is possible to imagine a trail worn through the grass lawn from the back of the house across the yard to the little building containing the privy. The cesspit had to be moved from time to time as it filled up; ashes, soil and carbolic were placed in it to dry its contents and deodorise it. ‘Hollywood’ had about an acre and a half of land over which to move the cesspit and keep it well away from their water supplies, but not every household was so fortunate. The much debated and heavily criticised introduction of a pan system by Burwood Council in the later 1880s and 1890s finally saw the closure and end of family cesspits, regarded as a source of many health problems.

Suburban dwellers had to be careful to keep liquid sewage, rotting vegetable matter and animal waste away from underground water tanks, wells and waterways—not only so that their own drinking water and soil would not be contaminated, but so that potentially harmful waste did not flow into neighbouring yards, the street and into local waterways. Cholera and typhoid were water-borne bacterial diseases, and a poorly maintained backyard could quickly turn into a community-wide health hazard as a result of a heavy downpour of rain. As Burwood’s run-off went into the Parramatta River the river too became the subject of complaint for its smell, colour and unsavoury appearance. The self-sufficient nineteenth-century suburban dweller, in order to protect their health, had to be very well organised in all aspects of living which meant that the backyard area had to be constantly supervised.

insert map: Burwood Parish of Concord, Mitchell library BRN563812, maps/1185c (c. 1876-1886)

Early maps of Burwood show that a creek ran through the backyard of ‘Hollywood’, effectively splitting the garden in half, although the size of the creek cannot be determined. A map drawn up for the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board over 1894/6 shows that the ‘privy’, cesspit and other small buildings were located at the furthest possible distance away from the house—right on the back, eastern fence.⁴⁰ This meant that the household had to cross the creek to get to the various ‘out-buildings’.⁴¹ The un-named creek had its origins some 150 metres up the hill, in Church Street and it ran due south, turning to the north-east at William (Belmore) Street, joining other creeks and finally running into the Parramatta River. The source of the creek had been the subject of constant complaint by many residents, who noted that rubbish was also dumped there.⁴² As a result smelly, contaminated water flowed through a large number of backyards, across several streets (which were occasionally swept of animal dung), across Parramatta Road, and into the river. As early as 1872 Sydney harbour itself was the subject of complaint:

At present the beautiful waters of the harbour are made the receptacle of the refuse of the city. All that is foul and abominable is conducted and emptied into them, and thus the resort of the citizens is converted into a pest-generator.⁴³

Despite these early warnings of what would happen to Sydney’s water-ways should sewage continue to be discharged and washed into the harbour, by 1875 there were five built sewage outlets into various parts of the harbour and each had become a problem. Sewage accumulating at each outfall was forming vast stinking mudflats that were exposed at low tide.⁴⁴

Concern about the creek which ran through ‘Hollywood’s’ backyard came to a head in 1889 when many affected residents presented a petition to the council, declaring it a ‘menace to public health’.⁴⁵ The creek now also ran across the new (unsurfaced) street, Clarence Street (between Church and William Streets) where it had pooled, spread and stagnated. There were numerous reported typhoid cases in Burwood over 1889 too, which only served to emphasize the severity of the problem. Drainage, or rather the lack of regulated or contained drainage, was a real conundrum. Burwood was on a slope, and water ran, undirected, every-which-way down the incline in heavy rain. Water ran across backyards, into and through cesspits, across rubbish heaps, over land where slops and other waste lay exposed, through dairy, pig and cattle yards and hen houses, over more backyards, causing ‘a sloppy state of affairs’ in times of heavy rain.⁴⁶ A well organised backyard in dry weather, could easily come to grief in wet weather. So much water running, uncontrolled, through many backyards and gardens meant the ever present possibility of picking up serious health problems in one’s own backyard, problems which had originated in another’s yard area. Water in the creek, or as run-off, could have passed through a backyard belonging to a family with a cholera victim—through a cesspit in which the patient’s excreta had been buried. Disease could not be easily contained and a pit could not keep such illnesses trapped. Contaminated water could also seep into an underground rainwater tank and ruin it. Good health could not be guaranteed, particularly in times of heavy and constant rain. The backyard cesspit and privy were like a ticking bomb.

At the same time as the adverse health effects of unregulated drainage were being hotly and publicly debated so too was the problem of how suburbanites disposed of liquid waste and how well they managed their backyards. Drainage and sewerage were related problems—more so for some than others. Successful management of the disposal of ‘night-soil’ and other liquid waste required a suitably large piece of land and a strategy such as growing plants around it to absorb some of the moisture, as well as a good supply of fire ash and earth. As land was subdivided new houses were built over old cesspits and contaminated earth, with more problems arising.

In the late 1880s, Burwood Council attempted to introduce their own unique, but flawed, ‘interchangeable pan system’ as a means of taking ‘night soil’ away thus eliminating the need for the problematic cesspit. This involved exchanging the full pan for an empty one, the full pan sealed with a lid held on with a large ‘india-rubber band’ for easier and apparently safer removal. The contents of the pan were to be dumped just outside the boundaries of Burwood, and the pan cleaned, at length, with steam.⁴⁷ One aspect of this debate was where waste could be safely dumped—on land or in the water—without causing further problems. There was strong scepticism as to whether pans would, or even could, be properly cleaned and, as the pans would be randomly re-distributed back among the residents, fear that diseases could easily be transmitted from one household to another.

Under the existing system of self-managing all waste within the garden area until the later 1890s, residents knew that as much as they thought that they could adequately deal with their own waste disposal, it was also a matter of luck as to whether a family member contracted typhoid or cholera from circumstances out of their control. A number of residents, including Alice’s father, Frank Rogers, defending his independence, claimed that there was no problem with personally managing cesspits and family waste. As ‘Another Resident of Burwood’ put it in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald:

I have resided in Burwood for nearly 16 years, and have all along adopted the earth-pan system, which has been systematically attended to by my servants with the most satisfactory results.⁴⁸

Those residents with large garden areas (and servants) wanted the pan system to be optional. When piped water was introduced to Burwood the problem of contaminating drinking water with sewage was considerably lessened, as there was no longer a need for underground tanks and wells. But now the council was sending out rate notices for the new water supply. It was not until after the turn of the century that a paid garbage service was introduced in Burwood. Alice, dressed for the special occasion of her photograph at the turn of the century, could gaze at the un-pretty but essential structures crucial to the functioning of the complex backyard and house, and contemplate the various discrete work places which made the yard area both a life sustaining and a dangerous place. She could also observe a few visible changes that had been made to the back garden over some twenty years.

This photograph of the rear, eastern face of Hollywood shows a number of plumbing pipes running up and down the side walls. The pipes include sewerage and venting pipes as well as new water pipes which were gradually added to the house some thirty years after it was built. They show that important household functions, long regarded as dangerous to health, and which had previously had been located within the large area of the backyard, had been relocated inside the house. These changes represented a significant transformation to the appearance, use and purpose of the substantial backyard enabling Alice and her family to hold a large fund-raising fete in the backyard and garden areas of ‘Hollywood’ in 1905. The otherwise very private, enclosed domain of ‘Hollywood’ briefly becoming available for inspection by all and sundry through a public invitation to the fete for which the grounds were described as ‘picturesquely set out.’⁴⁹

Alice Rogers grew up as a number of significant enhancements were introduced into everyday suburban living. These changes meant that Alice’s life experiences in and around the home were quite different from her parents’ youths—with the exception of piped gas which had been available to Sydney residents from 1841, but only available in Burwood from 1880. The arrival of the water mains to Burwood by 1887, however, was a significant step towards improved individual and community health, bringing uncontaminated, fresh water flowing to all. As a result, unreliable backyard wells and underground water tanks could be filled in or covered over. Council’s attempts to deal with the problem of the removal of ‘night soil’ finally saw the closure of backyard cesspits in the 1890s. Cesspits were possibly the greatest health hazard in the back garden. The parallel problem of unregulated drainage, particularly after heavy rain, was not so easily dealt with and it wasn’t until the turn of the century that sealed roads and footpaths, kerbing and guttering together with an organised drain system dealt with it. On the other hand, dust stirred up by wind and road traffic, was a constant irritant in both the city and the suburbs was also a health matter. The dust problem was remedied by the gradual sealing of roads and paths using ‘tar’ by-products of the gas-works at Mortlake from the mid 1880s. The photograph of the front of ‘Hollywood’ shows a new, black, ‘asphalt’ footpath had been laid along the front, but the street appears unsealed.

BACK TO THE GARDEN

Romantic thinking in the nineteenth-century enabled the unfamiliar and artless Australian landscape to be re-framed for broad public consumption. Seen from a picturesque perspective the land and its flora and fauna could be tamed into suburban submission, even if it did mean first erasing every plant on the block as the starting point for the new house within a new garden. On their own private piece of land, suburbanites could re-make it exactly as they pleased—a landscaped garden inside the larger garden setting of the picturesque Burwood area—just as the advertisements for the Cheltenham Estate had suggested. The new suburban dwellers were, effectively inventing the idea and the experience of suburban living, based, as it was, initially at least, on individual accountability and independent living. New and growing ideas of individuality—or the privileging of the individual—went hand in hand with land ownership. The early suburban settlers were responsible for developing the form, appearance and practices of suburban living, gardens being the defining characteristic. Gardens established and determined human relationships with nature they also shaped human behaviours within the sanctuary of a personalised and defined space.

Health was, arguably, prominent in the minds of most people in the colony during the nineteenth-century—both in the suburbs and the city. Health was not a private matter then. Health, or perhaps, ill-health, was a continuing public discussion as wave after wave of contagious and deadly diseases threatened the colony sweeping through city and suburbs—with backyards being blamed for harbouring and even promoting most of these diseases. Fear of these diseases, about which little was known about how they were spread, and when there were no effective cures, also affected and directed how individuals lived both in the house but more particularly within the areas of the garden. While living and health benefits for individuals and families could be realised through the possession of a large block of land, the critical place of the backyard was frequently (and rightly so) regarded as the source and carrier of much of the ill-health experienced at the time.

‘Hollywood’, built in 1868, well before any services and utilities were available in the suburb, was gradually modified internally and externally to accommodate functions which once had been the unpleasant province of the backyard. Just as ‘Hollywood’ was altered by the addition of plumbing pipe-work to the external walls, so too was the appearance of the backyard area changed as, gradually, most of its tasks were eliminated and the land turned over to benign lawns, flower beds and entertainment areas. These transformative changes to living comfort had occurred at the same time as the western, garden or ‘railway suburbs’ of Sydney enjoyed great popularity. But by the time that Burwood Council and the various state bodies had made available all the services taken for-granted today—piped water, sewerage, covered drainage, electricity, gas, sealed roads and paths and garbage removal—the hey-days of the well-to-do suburb of Burwood with its many large garden spaces were over.⁵⁰

Relieved of its essential role as a repository of waste and dangerous fuel storage, the backyard area could be re-imagined and a new role created for the space of the land at the back of the suburban house, opening possibilities in the twentieth-century for both a different kind of gardening and for the re-fashioning of the space once the location of intimate and private activities. Other kinds of personal activities could take place in the garden areas surrounding the house as more space was freed up for private leisure. Leisure once had predominantly been enacted in public garden spaces such as the Royal Botanical Gardens in the city, or in the local park—it was a public kind of leisure. Now, new, different, private leisure activities could be devised for the stage of the suburban garden. While remaining essentially a private space behind the house, the suburban backyard could be re-imagined as a place for leisure—as a pleasure garden.

Special thanks to Gretchen Poiner, Julie Marcus and Katarzyna Malicka (Librarian, Local History, Burwood Library), Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Bibliography

Newspapers

Australian Town and Country Journal 1870-1907

Bells Life in Sydney and Sporting Chronicle 1860-1870

Bells Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer 1845-1860

Empire 1850-1875

Illustrated Sydney News 1853-1872

The Sydney Morning Herald 1842-1954

Printed works

Dunlop, Eric, Harvest of the Years. The Story of Burwood 1794-1974, Council of the Municipality of Burwood, Burwood, 1974

Hunt, John Dixon, Gardens and the Picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1992

Poiner, Gretchen and Jack, Sybil, eds, Limits of Location: creating a colony, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2007

Other

Beder, Sharon, ‘Sewage Collection’, in From Pipe Dreams to Tunnel Vision: Engineering Decision-making and Sydney sewerage System, PhD thesis, 1989 https://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/phd.html

Rogers family archives, collection Catherine Rogers

ENDNOTES

1. See The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June 1873, for example. In a letter to the Herald, Robert Adams wrote ‘…let us begin in a small way helping our surplus (and soon to be dangerous) city population toemigrate into the country, and gradually help them to become useful producers, instead of useless consumers of the national wealth.’

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2. The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 1881, letter to the Editor: ‘Now the dreadful scourge of small-pox, generated here without a doubt by the Chinese, is in our midst, prompt measures should be taken by the Government to direct the flow of Chinese immigrants inundating our shore…’

   Another report in the Herald on 27 June 1881, p 4, declared that Chinese dwellings were ‘more cleanly than those of Europeans.’

   Sir Henry Parkes, speaking to the second reading of the ‘Influx of Chinese Restriction Bill’ claimed that Chinese were responsible for the introduction of leprosy and small-pox to the colony, see The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 July 1881.

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3. I am following John Dixon Hunt’s approach to the Picturesque as essentially English in its application to the expanding colony of Sydney.

   See Hunt, John Dixon, Gardens and the Picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1992

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4. See The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February, 1869, ‘AUSTRALIAN TROUBLES’ (copied from The Times, England, 2 December 1868)

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5. Cheltenham also included some of John Lucas’s (Lucas married Mary Rowley) land and a part of Faithful’s Farm jointly owned by the four Rowley children. Lucas had subdivided and sold some of his (and Mary’s) land in 1834.
   Eric Dunlop, Harvest of the Years. The Story of Burwood 1794-1974, Council of the Municipality of Burwood, Burwood, 1974, pp 26-29.

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6. Empire, 17 June 1854, p 8; also Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, p 3; and The Sydney Morning Herald, p 8

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7. Unfortunately no copies of this poster appear to have survived.

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8. The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 1854; also Empire; and Bells Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer

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9. The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 July 1854

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10. The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 1854, p 8

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11. The Sydney Morning Herald,17 June 1854, p 8

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12. Prints (engravings) made from Aelbert Cuyp’s (1620-1691) landscape paintings were popularly consumed in the colony in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Cuyp enjoyed a revival in the English speaking world. At least one settler owned a painting by Cuyp which had been exhibited at a large show of paintings gathered together from various private owners, in Parramatta in October 1847.
    See The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1847, ‘News from the Interior’

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13. The Sydney Morning Herald,17 June 1854, p 8

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14. The Sydney Morning Herald,17 June 1854, p 8

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15. Empire, 17 June 1854, p 8; also Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, p3; The Sydney Morning Herald, p 8

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16. Empire, 20 June 1854, p 4

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17. The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June 1854, p 6

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18. Payment of rates was established from the end of 1874, being 1/- in the ₤ on the rental value of property.

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19. The Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday 20 September 1881, ‘SMALLPOX’

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20. The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 June 1881, p 4

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21. The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 June 1881, p 4

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22. The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1881, p 5

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23. The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 1877, ‘ON SOME POINTS OF THE SANITARY QUESTION,’ letter to the Editor

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24. The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Feb 1881

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25. The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1883

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26. The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 June 1878, p 8

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27. The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1880, p 7, LAST QUARTER'S BIRTHS AND DEATHS IN SYDNEY

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28. The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1889, MUNICIPAL VAGARIES-A SANITARY QUESTION.

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29. William Street was renamed Belmore Street in 1886, about when this photograph was taken. ‘Hollywood’s’ address was always given as Burwood Road but the house was on the intersection of William/Belmore Street which ran east-west, and Burwood Road which ran north-south between Parramatta Road and Liverpool Road.

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30. Hollywood was built on lots one and two of section K, in the Cheltenham Estate.

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31. See John Dixon Hunt’s description of the ‘arrival of the French bourgeois’, post Haussmann’s re-design and re-building of a large part of the city of Paris, and the ‘almost obsessive theme’ of privacy created behind cultivated garden fences and villa walls in Paris’ new suburbs.
    John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp 263-4

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32. For example, the house of Eugene Dominique Nicolle, photographed in the later 1870s shows off a new house fronted by a sweeping front entrance and carriageway all created on a completely cleared block of land, without any visible fencing.

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33. The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 Jan 1880,’ LOST, Black Retriever, "Jaques" on collar. Finder please communicate with Rev. Geo. King. Burwood.’

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34. The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Nov 1883; Australian Town and Country Journal, ‘Floriculture. Roses’. A very active Western Suburbs Horticulture Society had been formed in mid 1877, meeting monthly to display, for competition, mostly decorative plants, but also vegetables.

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35. Illustrated Sydney News,18 July 1869, p 15

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36. The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 1889, p 9, The Burwood Sanitary System. Petition presented to the Burwood Council

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37. Eleanor Stephen complained bitterly of the dust in Sydney when she moved there, from Hobart, in 1839. See A Tate and M Bettison, ‘Portrait of a Family. The lost art of letter writing’ in Gretchen Poiner & Sybil Jack, eds., Limits of Location: Creating a Colony, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2007, p 82 and p 95

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38. The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 1876, p 8, The Effects of Forest Vegetation on Climate.

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39. Map drawn up by the new Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board (MWSDB) in 1891-1894 in preparation for the introduction of a sewerage system to the suburb shows several small buildings located on ‘Hollywood’s’ back or eastern fence.

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40. Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board, Burwood map, 1891-1894. ‘Hollywood’ was mistakenly drawn on this map facing west. The confusion no doubt arising from ‘Hollywood’s’ address always being given as Burwood Road, despite the house having been built to face north, on William Street as it was in 1868.

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41. Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board, Burwood map, 1891-1894

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42. The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1894, Typhoid in the Borough

    ‘Alderman Pawley (mayor) presided at Monday night’s meeting at which a letter from Mr. F E Rogers, Hollywood was presented, in which he asked that immediate attention might be paid to a drainage nuisance in Clarence-street, especially as it had been the means of causing illness in the neighbourhood. Mr. WC Willis drew attention to the condition of the drain passing by his property, which he described as a nuisance and an eyesore. ‘He offered to contribute towards remedying the evil.’ Others also reported drainage nuisances. The inspector reported that since his last report five cases of typhoid had broken out on various parts of the borough and he had consequently taken measures for disinfection. One of the persons affected was a carter in the employ of the council.’

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43. The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 December 1872, p 4

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44. Beder, Sharon, ‘Sewage Collection’, in From Pipe Dreams to Tunnel Vision: Engineering Decision-making and Sydney sewerage System, 1989, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, chapter 2, p 45. https://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/phd.html

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45. The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 May 1889, p 3

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46. The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 1889, p 9, THE BURWOOD SANITARY SYSTEM, letter to the Editor

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47. The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 1889, p 9, MUNICIPAL VAGARIES, letter to the Editor

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48. The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 May 1889, p 4, Letter to the Editor

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49. The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December and 12 December 1905

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50. ‘Hollywood’ was sold to a developer who demolished it in 1919 and built a row of shops in its place. ‘Hollywood’ had enjoyed a premier location only one block away from Burwood railway station.

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