GOSSIP FROM SYDNEY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9257, 10 January 1889, Page 6

GOSSIP FROM SYDNEY.

[BY AN AOOKLANDER.] Sydney, January 3. I have said that in Sydney one sees no drunkenness, no children without shoes or stockings, and that vice does not obtrude itself in the city during daylight. That was true enough of the city proper; but go down to the purlieus of the south end of Castlereagh-street and you will see both drunkenness and immorality; go to Newtown, or the skirts of any of the other suburbs, and you will see poverty and squalor, hovels and human misery, children shoeless and in rage, women dirty and degraded. Here, as in every great city, violent deaths are frequent, and most of them have their primary cause in drink. Since I have been here there have been suicides and stabbings and other violent assaults ; but these we find in most cities of large proportions, especially at holiday times. Among the lower stratum of society libations of beer produce ebullitions of brutality, and the caso of the man who came home drunk the other day, and threw his young wife, aged twenty, down a flight of stairs, causing such injuries as necessitated her removal to the hospital, excited very little remark. He had been to the races and got drunk, and that was explanation enough. Races on Saturday, on Monday, and on Tuesday, following races of tho Christmas week, show that the noble sport is appreciated by the Sydne3' people as much as by Auck landers; and this love for the national pastime is reason sufficient to account for the number of showilydressed men wo see lounging about the front of some of the larger hotels, and for the crowds that were standing in front of Tattersall's during several recent evenings. Ifc would be interesting to know exactly how many men in the Australasian coloniee live upon racing. Some, I know, who commenced to back horses in a small way are now worth many thousands, all made by laying tho odds. One of these was a fellow passenger of mine to Sydney. He is a weather-beaten man, who in his youth had found it hard to make a living, and if ho liked he could tell you of the many shifts he had to keep his head above water ; until some 25 years ago in Melbourne, when heacquiredtheartof the " metallician." He has had troubles eince.but they have not been of a monetary kind. Misplaced affection caused him much worry until the fickle one eloped, and now he has a pretty young wife, who plays and sings and entertains hiscompany; and he is respected, and drinks the best claret, and lives at the rate of £3000 a-year. Ho never does anything "shady," that is, nobody says he does, and somehow he manages to nearly always win. There are to my knowledge some dozens of these men here and in Melbourne, though all are not so much above suspicion. Then there are the smaller fry, who may be counted by hundreds ; and there are the speculators in totalisatore, and the secretaries and handicappers, and the mon who combine betting with other employments, such as card-sharping, and pocket-picking, and an occasional burglary. It is a wonderful thing, this great national sport. But there have been other amusements during the holidays besides horse-racing, and all have been largely attended. The Caledonian Gathering on New Year's Day wa3 a great success, 12,000 people being assembled in Moore Park to witness the Highland games. Then there were many excursions by train and by water, and thousands spent the da}' at popular places of resort, such as Bondi, Manly, and Coogee. At such as these there are aquariums, where fish of all kinds can be seen alive and swimming about, from sharks of different species to tiny fishes about an inch long. The seals at Bondi are really worth a visit. At stated times they are fed by their keeper, who calls them by name, and whose command they obey. Thus he will tell " Jack" to go on the ledge of the rocks that fringe the pond ; and there Jack will wait and catch, unerringly, the fish that are thrown to him. "Bob" will come at call to the bars which enclose the pond, and there receive the fish from the hand of the keeper. The other two are equally obedient, and all will comei out of the water when ordered to do so, and mount a sort of step ladder about five feet high, there catching the fish which are thrown to them. To see the four racing in the water, for tho food thrown to them is great fun. There are several specimens of the hideous octopus in the aquarium. Then there is the switch-back railway, and the skating rink, and the concert hall, where you can sit down and have a cup of tea, etc., and listen to good music, discoursed on a grand piano, during the afternoon, or to a concert in the evening. Mention of Bondi brings me to the subject of nomenclature. In New Zealand wo do not pronounce native names phonetically—Taupo, Waimakariri, Tokomairiro, are instances. The new chum in Sydney is apt to pronounce Bondi. as Bondy, and Bulli as Bully ; but ho is quickly set right. You must say Bond-eye and Bull-eye, and so on. In other respects, however, the "Cornstalks" are not so particular in their pronunciation. I was at a little festivity the other night where there were a number of High School boys. One corrected the other, who had used an ungrammatical expression, but the whole of them, without exception, dispensed altogether with the letter " h," and all dropped the " g " in words ending with that consonant. They belonged to the volunteer cadet corps, and had been to Melbourne at Government expense to fire at somo rifle matches; and they talked about " shooten " and " walken " and "fiingen." They said there was no " smoken" among the cadeta, nor any "drinken" of intoxicants, "an , comen home in the train they did an awful lot of sleepen." On Sunday I went to a large Anglican Church in one of the suburbs. There were two officiating clergymen. One was very old—l should think a nonagenarian—with a voice so shrill and harsh and an inflexion so peculiar that it was sometimes painful and sometimes almost provocative of laughter. The other was a young man, who preached a good sermon, but he used no " h," and he shortened the affix " ing" in a manner similar to that of the High School boys. I suppose he was a native of Sydney. Let mo add that the singing ot the choir was poor; and that, taking tho service as a whole, if any of the Auckland congregations had to put up with it, there would be much more reason for grumbling than there is at present. It was evening, and the church was not half filled. Judging from the public meeting at the Town Hall last night, the people of Sydney like impassioned oratory. The audience had met; to discuss the question of hanging Louisa Collins, who has been condemned to death for poisoning two husbands. This wretched woman has been tried four times by four different juries and four different judges. Three of the juries failed to find her guilty; but the fourth did so. The first speaker was a mild gentleman, who would not go so far as to say that the woman had not committed tho crimes ; but he thought she ought not to be hung, but given time to repent of her sins. The next was a member of Parliament, who waxed warm on the theme that it is repugnant to our humanity to hang a woman. Then followed a young fellow about twenty-two, who appeared to be the pupil, or factotum of a phronologist, and wished to give his master a cheap advertisement. He contended that he and the phrenologist could prove that the woman's mental capacity removed her beyond the pale of responsibility for the crime ; but finding his audience not quite so sympathetic as he could wish, he dealt with mercy and capital punishment, and waxed so furious that he received thunders of applause. After him came another member of Parliament, a gentleman of about 30 summers, who spoke correctly and well, commencing with sympathy for the Executive Council in its painful position. Then he, too, took oratorical flights, said that if we hanged Louisa Collins we should degrade her "entire" sex, that if we consented to her death we should be engaged in the horrible task of dragging her to the scaffold and shooting the bolt at the gallowa. Great applause

followed this sally, and then ho got more impassioned, grew very hoarse, took a copious draught of water, said he told the Legislative Assembly that the woman was " a she devil," and he said so now, and wound up by announcing that if this woman be hanged, there will never be another woman hanged in New South Wales, and sat down amidst continued demonstrations of approval. Mr. Thomas Walker, the noted Freethinker, who is also a member of Parliament, came next, and I was somewhat struck with his quotation of the words of Christ to the accusers of the woman who was brought before Him for a breach of the Seventh Commandment. I have heard this Mr. Walker quote from the Bible before, but it was not to impress his audience with the beauty and goodness of the Book. Walker let himself out in rhodomontade; got purple in the face; waved his arms about like the limbs of a windmill when a stiff breeze is blowing; and when he said that the woman was convicted on tho evidence of her children, who did not know ! what they were doing, but were coached by the police, he created a perfect furore. There is one good thing about Sydney audiences—they use their hands and their voices more than their feet in applauding. The Town Hall audience passed two resolutions asking for tho commutation of the sentence. Most people whom I have spoken to on the subject think the woman ought to suffer death. Touching the Town Hall: fit is small. Tho audience could not have numbered more than 700 or 800 last night, and yet it was closely packed. A new and much larger hall, to be called " The Centennial," is being built on the opposite wing, and as it is on the site where Tho rude forefathers of the hamlet slept, it was necessary to cart a number of boxes full of human bones away to llokewood, bofore the foundation could be laid. The pioneers of civilization here little dreamed of the extent to which Sydney would grow within the century. On the south side of Belmore Park, between that reserve and Newtown, is an old cemetery, disused for many years ; but there are people living who can remember when it wae some distance out of town.