In the space of barely half a century Melbourne had grown from a patch of grass on the riverbank to a city larger than such ancient cities as Edinburgh and Lisbon. Victoria's population was approaching one million, and some of its older residents could recall when hardly a house stood on Victorian soil. In transforming the land, titanic energy had played a part. The standard of living of everyone depended on a volume of sweat and energy and on long hours which we would find forbidding. When a shovel had to do the work of a bulldozer, when a hand axe had to do the work of a chainsaw, and when the housewife had to make with her hands what an automated factory now makes, people had no alternative but to work hard. Moreover, social services did not exist: if you did not work hard, how could you save in order to provide for unemployment or sickness?

Hard work was also seen as a moulder and a tester of character, just as idleness was the slippery path to crime. That slightly disapproving phrase, ‘the work ethic’ – a phrase unknown in 1890 – is increasingly used to describe the old attitude to work, but hard physical work was much more than an activity enshrined by the pulpit and the nursery rhyme. It was a necessity and, for a large section of the population, a source of contentment.