Town Life in Australia | Page 5

decked with all the variety of flowers
which this land of Cockaigne produces in abundance. Besides these,
there are several pretty reserves, notably the Fitzroy, Carlton, and

University Gardens, and the Regent's Park, which are all well kept and
refreshing to the eye after the dust and glare of the town.
The proportions of the commercial buildings and business premises are
on the same large and elaborate scale. Of the architecture, as a rule, the
less said the better; but everything is at least more spacious than at
home. The climate and the comparative cheapness of land give the
colonists an aversion to height in their buildings, and even in the
busiest parts of Melbourne most of the buildings have only two
stories--i.e., a ground-floor and one above--and I can hardly think of
any with more than three. The sums which banking companies pay for
the erection of business premises are enormous. Thirty to sixty
thousand pounds is the usual cost of their headquarters. The large
insurance companies have also caught the building mania, and the
joint-stock companies which are now springing up in all directions
emulate them. The Australian likes to have plenty of elbow-room. He
cannot understand how wealthy merchants can work in the dingy dens
which serve for the offices of many a London merchant prince. In this
matter, contrary to his usual practice, he is apt to consider the surface
rather than what is beneath it; and it is an accepted maxim in
commercial circles that money spent on buildings--which is of course
borrowed in England at English rates of interest--is amongst the
cheapest forms of advertising a rising business and keeping an
established business going. Nobody in a young country has a long
memory, and nothing is so firmly established but that it may be
overthrown if it does not keep up with the times.
The general run of shops are little better than in English towns of the
same size, if we except those of some dozen drapers and ironmongers
in Melbourne, and two or three in Sydney, which are exceptionally
good. Of these it may be said that they would be creditable to London
itself. Both trades are much more comprehensive than in England. A
large Melbourne draper will sell you anything, from a suit of clothes to
furniture, where he comes into competition with the ironmonger, whose
business includes agricultural machinery, crockery and plate. The
larger firms in both these trades combine wholesale and retail business,
and their shops are quite amongst the sights of Australia. Nowhere out

of an exhibition and Whiteley's is it possible to meet so heterogeneous
a collection. A peculiarity of Melbourne is that the shop-windows there
are much better set out than is customary in England. It is not so in
Sydney. Indeed Melbourne has decidedly the best set of shops, not only
in outward appearance, but as to the variety and quality of the articles
sold in them. Next to the drapers and ironmongers, the booksellers'
shops are the most creditable. The style of the smaller shops in every
colonial town is as English as English can be. The only difference is in
the prices, but of that more anon when we go into the shops.
The river Yarra runs through the city, and is navigable as far as its
centre by coasting steamers and all but the larger sailing craft. Above
the harbour it is lined with trees and very pretty, and in spite of many
windings it is wide enough for boat-races. Below it is uninteresting,
and chiefly remarkable for the number and variety of the perfumes
which arise from the manufactories on its banks. Next to the monotony
of the Suez Canal, with which it presents many points of resemblance, I
know few things more tiresome than the voyage up the Yarra in an
intercolonial steamer of 600 or 700 tons, which goes aground every ten
minutes, and generally, as if on purpose, just in front of a boiling-down
establishment.
If the Australian cities can claim a sad eminence, if not an actual
supremacy, in the number of their public houses, of which there are no
less than 1,120 in Melbourne, I am sorry to say that they are as much
behind London in their ideas of the comforts of an hotel as London is
behind San Francisco. Melbourne is certainly better off than Sydney or
Adelaide, but bad are its best hotels. Of these Menzies' and the Oriental
are most to be recommended; after these try the United Club Hotel, or,
if you be a bachelor, Scott's. The hotels, I think without exception,
derive their chief income from the bar traffic, with which, at all but the
few I have mentioned, you cannot help being brought more or less into
contact. Lodgers are quite