Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 57
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[Page 57]
28
The streets in the centre of the city were very well lighted by arc lamps with electricity generated by steam turbines at Ultimo powerhouse. All other streets, in the city and suburbs, were lighted by gas-mantled lamps. Just before dusk a lamplighter tramped around his quota of streets, poking a long bamboo with a small hook on its end through the bottom of each lamp, to pull on the main tap and thus allow the continuously burning pilot light to fully ignite the mantle: in the early morning he went around again pulling the gas off. The lamplighter who did our street was one of the few men who smoked cigarettes, Capstans, ten in a packet for threepence, with waxed paper holders and a nice cigarette card, which was one of a coloured series depicting soldiers, cricketers, or animals. I used to wait for him to come along and give me his card. But the sad day arrived when he told me that he had given up smoking because he could not afford it. The only other cigarettes on the market were "Three Castles", twenty in a green packet for sixpence, and supposed to be a superior quality; the cards certainly were. W.D. & H.O. Wills manufactured both brands and there were no others.
Labourers working in the streets and on buildings, smoked clay pipes filled with plug tobacco, wore hobnailed "Blucher" boots, and dungaree (heavy blue denim) trousers with "bowyangs" (leather straps tightened below the knee). Otherwise smoking was not very common, though a few men, including Dad, treated themselves to a cigar on special occasions: they were not so very expensive then. Women neither smoked nor drank spirits, even in private, but sometimes drank wine with meals at home, or at wedding breakfasts. Neither sex drank anything alcoholic at balls or dances. It caused quite a scandal if a man drank "hard stuff" and then danced with a lady, breathing alcoholic fumes in her face.
Other than Christmas Day and Good Friday, the statutory public holidays were Foundation Day on 26th January, the date of Captain Cook's hoisting the Union Jack at Circular Quay (later Australia Day); Easter Monday, when the trades unionists