In the mid-19th century Melbourne was one of the fastest growing and most prosperous cities in the world, but it hadn't sorted out how to get rid of its rubbish or its poo.
There was a time in the 19th century when Melbourne was considered one of the richest cities in the world, but there were two things it hadn't worked out.The gold rush brought with it the promise of streets paved with gold, but in Melbourne there were streets literally made of garbage.Parks, rivers, streets, footpaths and vacant lots were strewn with Melburnians' refuse.
It was also used to bury existing properties entirely as part of a council plan in the 1850s to bring low-lying blocks up to a uniform street level. "Melbourne was a bit exceptional in that it had that unusual real steep rapid influx of people that meant that things got quite bad quite quickly," she said.The heart of the problem, according to Barry Green, director of archaeology consultancy Green Heritage Compliance and Research, was that Melbourne was never supposed to be a city at all.
There was no organised rubbish collection in Melbourne but, in his report that year on the sanitary conditions in Melbourne, city surveyor James Blackburne recommended the employment of a "public scavenger." Archaeological consultant Barry Green said there was also a thriving secondhand economy in the mid 19th century.
It was not uncommon for people to let waste collect on their properties over decades, providing rich pickings for archaeologists, who could later get an idea of how prosperous the tenants of a particular allotment were by the quality of their trash. Underground sewers were laid down in Sydney as early as 1854, but in Melbourne that didn't happen until more than 40 years later.
When the cesspit got full, you could pay someone to come and empty it for a fee that couldn't possibly compensate someone adequately for what they were being asked to do.The job of monitoring the state of cesspits fell to the wonderfully-named Inspector of Nuisances, who had the power to fine people 40 shillings if their cesspit runneth over.
Conveniently, that gave some people a place to dump all that garbage they'd been unable to get rid of. "You just don't really find as much stuff from any period after the 1870s after that cesspit closure."Congratulations on making it this far into the article, by the way. The contents of these pans was referred to as "night soil" which, I guess, makes the whole process sound slightly less disgusting.
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