Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 39
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[Page 39]
19
only about ten per cent of the voting power was diligently courted by the two rival political parties at election times; often this vote held the balance of power in Parliament, and what was pretended to be rule by a democratic majority, was often very much minority rule.
Massive low masonary walls formed large open swimming baths at one end of the popular beaches. They were built close to the cliffs with the changing cubicles ranged along the inner side. Admission charges were, adults threepence, children one penny. But mixed bathing was forbidden and males and females had separate bathing periods.
One Sunday morning I happened to be on Tamarama Beach: its main attraction was a fine aquarium with a big tea room, and there was also a large hall where school and other concerts were held from time to time. But this particular morning in the year 1903, a score of daring sportsmen, in concerted defiance of the law, had entered the water (in bathing costumes) and began disporting themselves in the surf. Within an hour a large posse of uniformed police, led by a burly sergeant marched briskly to the edge of the water, and the lawbreakers were ordered to come out and have their names and addresses taken. This performance was repeated, within a very short time, at Manly by a number of well-known sporting celebrities. The magistrates took a rather lenient view of these incidents, which were the beginning of surf bathing without police interference, and of its popularity. Years afterwards the statute book still said it was illegal, but in the face of popular enthusiasm the blind eye was turned on it by Authority, and this law and The Sunday Observance Act of Charles II (forbidding sport on Sunday) was, with impunity, honoured more in the breach than the observance.
In the first decade of the new century Sydney had no blocks of flats or very tall multi-storey office buildings with steel or reinforced concrete frames. Flats as we know them today first arose immediately after World War I and even then the maximum allowable height of city structures was 150 feet.