Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 47
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[Page 47]
23
above: city firemen were employed full-time. In a matter of a few minutes, steam pumping engines with shining brass-bound vertical boilers topped with squat brass funnels, were on their way to the scene of the fire, horses galloping madly, sparks scattering on the roadway as the boiler was stoked by the man on the rear footplate, and the shrill steam whistle sounding its warnings with the accompanying beat of the horses' hoofs.
Close behind came the simpler four-wheeled hose waggons and hand-pumpers, on which the remaining firemen sat perilously, side-ways under their shining tall brass helmets.
In Summer, policemen on the beat wore white drill trousers and a navy blue serge tunic with a high white helmet. The constant laundering of these trousers was an irksome task, and a few years later they were abolished, long before there were any traffic-control police.
Permanently moored out on the harbour lay the "Sobraon", an ex-French sailing ship now converted to a reformatory for delinquent boys. Many an unruly boy was made to behave by being told that he would be sent to the "Sobraon" if he didn't. We heard some fearsome stories, no doubt exaggerated, of how boys on board were flogged, and fed on only bread and water. Later on these delinquents were transferred to establishments ashore, and the ship became the Navy's training ship for boys and was renamed H.M.A.S. "Tingara".
As in London, the principal thoroughfares right in the centre of the city were paved with hardwood blocks about the size of bricks, but all the suburban streets had macadamised surfaces of compacted broken stone ("blue metal") which had to be watered frequently in dry Summers to lay the dust stirred up by traffic.
On steep grades these surfaces were often just a layer of loose stones, which provided convenient ammunition for stone-throwing brawls which sometimes flared up in side streets between rival gangs of young hooligans, known as "pushes", especially if empty beer bottles were not handy to be used as missiles.