Stagnant Water, Open Drains and Human Waste
If you had taken a turn off Princes Street in the winter of 1862 and headed south toward Walker Street, the first thing you would have noticed was that the respectable, ordered vision of Victorian Dunedin was rapidly dissolving beneath your boots.
The Town Board made a grand show of passing bylaws to compel householders and business owners to keep their causeways clean, but in wet weather, the footpaths were little better than the roads themselves. As one long-suffering pedestrian observed at the time, anyone venturing on towards Walker Street would find that, unless they were remarkably careful, they would simply sink right back into the mud. At the southern edge of the neighbourhood, the streets gave up the pretense of being thoroughfares altogether, disintegrating into a chaotic landscape of deep mud holes, unlined ditches, and treacherous quagmires.
Walking home in the Devil’s Half-Acre wasn’t a matter of strolling down a public street; it was a daily exercise in tactical navigation.
The neighbourhood had expanded with terrifying speed following the 1861 gold rush. Landowners, eager to milk every possible penny out of the sudden influx of fortune hunters and drifters, carved up their steep hillside sections into tiny, suffocating allotments. In some places, as many as fifteen separate dwellings were crammed onto a single quarter-acre plot. The resulting maze of narrow right-of-ways, most notably the notorious Bird’s right-of-way—were lined with rickety, timber “dog-kennels” that sat so tightly together they almost touched overhead, shutting out the sunlight and trapping the damp below.
Because the housing was packed so tightly, there was nowhere for the neighbourhood’s waste to go except straight out into the thoroughfares.
The streets were not equipped with modern underground drainage or covered storm sewers. Instead, the Half-Acre was intersected by what medical inspectors would later describe as “foul open surface drains”. These were essentially shallow, unlined channels carved directly into the dirt, running alongside the footpaths and directly past the thresholds of the cottages. Everything ended up in them: household slops, dirty wash-water, decaying kitchen refuse, and human effluent.
In the flat spots and narrow alleys where the gradient failed, the water did not flow away; it sat. Green, putrefying pools collected in depressions and remained there for weeks at a time. As early as January 1864, the city’s nuisance inspector was already complaining that the watercourses in Walker Street were serving as little more than stagnant open sewers.
To make the journey even more perilous, these open drains sat alongside brimming, primitive cesspools. In sections 27, 28, and 41, human waste collected in unlined earth pits nestled mere feet from residential doorways. In dry weather, the stench blowing off these pits was described by residents as “simply abominable”. In wet weather, the cesspools routinely overflowed, spilling their vile contents directly into the muddy lanes where children played and workers walked home from the docks.
The contamination did not stop at the surface of the street. Because many residents relied on shallow surface wells or roof runoff for their daily domestic needs, the foul liquid pooling in the streets gradually seeped down into the local water supply.
In 1864, one alarmed Dunedin citizen wrote to the press describing how the water his family used for cooking and drinking was drawn from a well that received the direct soakage of sewage from the hospital. The 1865 Sanitary Commission confirmed the nightmare, warning that the city’s drinking wells were regularly collecting filthy soakage from nearby cesspools and open drains, directly linking the city’s rampant disease rates to bad water and dirt. Carrying home a loaf of bread through the Half-Acre meant stepping around the very filth that was poisoning the water used to bake it.
Even when the City Council attempted to fix the issue, the infrastructure itself seemed to conspire against the residents. By the early 1870s, the Council had laid down stretches of asphalt along parts of Walker Street, but without proper foundations, the ground shifted underneath. The asphalt cracked and buckled, creating a dangerous obstacle course of jagged pits and broken stone.
In 1871, the Council scheduled basic metal laying, kerbing, and channeling for Walker and Stafford Streets to try and keep the mud at bay, laying down 350 yards of blue-metal road surface. Yet these surface improvements did little for the inhabitants of the inner lanes, where the city’s municipal efforts rarely reached.
The full scale of the crisis was exposed in March 1888, when Doctors Frank Ogston and Millen Coughtrey were dispatched by the Council to conduct a thorough sanitary inspection of the area between Walker and Stafford Streets. What they found was a total breakdown of urban infrastructure.
The doctors reported that the area was thoroughly intersected by foul open surface drains that needed to be immediately “swept away,” alongside multiple cesspools in states that were “highly dangerous to public health”. Out of 58 dwellings inspected, the medical officers concluded that 44 were in such an appalling state of neglect and decay that they should be immediately demolished in the interest of human life.
When the report reached the City Council, Councillor Gourley went even further, stating that after visiting the area three or four times, the committee was unanimously of the opinion that none of the dwellings were fit for human habitation.
For the ordinary people living in the Half-Acre, the simple act of coming and going was a constant struggle against decay. You stepped over open ditches of foul wastewater, dodged overflowing cesspools, and balanced on crumbling timber planks laid across deep mud holes all while trying not to breathe in the heavy, stagnant air.
For the mean time, this will be the last post in the series Tales From The Devils Half-Acre. I’ll be taking a break from writing them for a bit, but I’ll let you know when they’re going to return.