Night Life

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 8, 10 January 1936, Page 3

Night Life

SYDNEY IN 70’s. i : TOUE OP CAFES (From Sydney Sun). Many gaps in the Mitchell Library's collection of early Australian pamphlets are being filled from a large bundle of odds-and-ends of print acquired at the recent sale of the W. H. Harris library.

You get quaint glimpses of an earlier Sydney as you turn over the crumbling pages of these booklets. What, for example, were the citizens bothered about in 1835? Some of them must have felt that the community was slack in patriotic endeavour, because one finds generous subscriptions coming in .to the “Australian Patriotic Association," which was meeting at “Committee rooms at tho Horse of Mr. Simmons, opposite the post office, George Street.”

W. C. Wentworth contributed £SO, as did W. E. Eiley, S. Lyons and Sir John Jamison. But anything from £2 up was acceptable. Wanted Steamers Seven years later, you find “Benjamin Sullivan, a retired officer," urging Britain to form a colony at New Caledonia, by the method of “a company under Eoyal Charier, without causing expense to tho British Government," but requiring £3,000,000 from shareholders.

By 1546 they are eager for steamer communication with England, and Lieutenant Waghorn, 8.N., is publishing as a pamphlet a “Letter to the Et. Honorable Wm. Ewart Gladstone, M.P., Secretary of State for the Colonies," urging “the extension of steam navigation from Singapore to Port Jackson."

Waghorn's style might have pleased a Parliamentarian of the period. He begins: “My object in addressing this pamphlet to you is obvious and cogent. My motive disinterested, for you are personally unknown to me; my modo of address shall bo brief, simple, and to the purpose." Ho then ramble,: through 54 pages of small print. Cafes After Midnight Sydney after dark, in the '7o's, seems a lively town as pictured in a series of “Tho Pilgrim, a Sensational Weekly Pamphlet." Tho pilgrimages of tho writer (“Harold Grey" or T. E. Arglcs) were made after midnight, and chiefly to certain cafes, with such names as The Little House Bound the Corner, the Cafe Maas, and the Cafe Blind.

As to the last of these: “The Cafe Blind is, I should think, the most dangerous ‘Midnight Temple’ in tho city." The proprietor, a foreigner, had “a complexion like verdigris and a nose like a tiger’s claw." Tho Pilgrim finds Madame Blind behind tho counter. “Her attire is of whito silk, and her ornaments diamonds.- Her face is ‘made up’ to an extent, that is positively ludicrous; her eyebrows are artificially pencilled, her eyelashes blackened, and her lips smeared with some unctuous preparation of red. Her hair is dyed—and inartistically dyed—a dirty yellow. “Conversing with her is a prominent member of the Legislative Assembly, who is supposed by his family, to be in his seat supporting tho Administration."

Tho Pilgrim explains that he writes without help from any of the “journalistic cracks.’’ And you believe him when he adds, “Not having raked them in, I, of course, owe them nothing.” Melbourne Morals In Melbourne, the Pilgrim finds morals at a lower ebb than in Sydney. When he ventures into tho Theatre Royal, a roomful of “demi-reps,” apparently always there by local custom, fling themselves upon him “Gracious —a Man! What a throw-in! ” Making a tour of the back streets, he comes on a wretched hovel “Lying upon a heap of rags in one corner is a young girl. “Her eyes, which have large black rings round them, are closed, her face is of a deathly pallor, and her lips, drawn together as by a vice, are darkly purplo in colour. Upon her brow the perspiration has started out in greut beads, and her breath comes slowly in deep, convulsive gasps.” She is dying. “Yet +ill a few short months ago sho was working on her father’s farm at Warrnambool. It was the old, old story.” ‘ ‘ Fever-stricken Air ’ ’ Moved by such tragedy, the Pilgrim bursts into doggerel:—

“In a pestilential alley Where the light of day’s excluded, Where noxious vapors dally In those dwellings so denuded, With the fever-stricken air, O’er a ragged couch extended

Was a form which fitly blended With the squalor of that lair.”

By comparison with Melbourne, Sydney’s night life seems to have been wicked but cheerful. Othej places where the prominent M.L.A. coulo forget duty and decorum were The Nymphs’ Retreat, Nelly’s Bow, the Cafo Suette, and the Haw t of the Houris. .