Snow’s discovery dramatically confirmed the importance English public health reformers already placed upon the need for a pure supply of water and the safe disposal of human wastes. The most influential of them, Edwin Chadwick, author of a famous 1842 inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, placed clean water and underground sewers at the top of his agenda. Like many of his contemporaries, Chadwick conceived the city as an organic system, analogous to the human body (Sennett 1994; Davison 1982: 364–6). A healthy city, like a healthy body, depended on the free circulation and exchange of vital fluids. Sanitary reformers sought to imitate the marvellous economy of the human body by integrating the supply of water, the disposal of sewage and the production of food in a single self-regulating system. Chadwick believed that piped water was as important for the safe disposal of human wastes through underground sewers as it was for clean drinking and washing. Combining water-supply and sewerage systems, he argued, would create ‘an unseen, unostentatious, self-acting system of excretory ducts’ (Chadwick 1965: 135 n.2). Chadwick’s organic conception of the city, and its corollary, the interdependence of water-supply and waste disposal, deeply influenced the first generation of Australian public health officials many of whom, like Sydney’s George Dansey, Melbourne’s Tharp Girdlestone and Hobart’s Robert Officer, had been trained in mid-century London (Mayne 1982: 58; Dunstan 1984: 244–6; Petrow 1995: 7–9).

The completion in 1865 of Sir John Bazalgette’s massive underground sewerage system for London confirmed water-carriage as the preferred method of disposing of human wastes in towns. Designed for a city 10 times as populous and five times as dense as colonial Melbourne, it nevertheless remained the standard to which most Australian sanitary experts aspired. ‘It is generally conceded that the sewerage or water-carriage system is the only one which collects and carries away the night soil and foul waters of a large town effectively’, affirmed Melbourne engineer James Styles in 1888. ‘Its action is prompt, and what is of equal importance, it is automatic. A substance dropped into any closet in Melbourne would not only be swept into a sewer at once, but it would be carried outside the city boundary in less than a hour.’ (Styles 1888: 11) Underground sewerage was not just the best but, seemingly, the inevitable solution to human waste-management. Although it cost more than alternative methods of disposal, experts believed that its high cost would be justified in the long run (Girdlestone 1876: 12; Culcheth 1881: 191).

Between 1880 and 1910 both Sydney and Melbourne adopted underground sewers as the main means of disposing of human wastes. As the cholera had hastened the arrival of London’s sewers, so the outbreak of typhoid epidemics in both cities during the 1880s had hastened the change. Sydney’s sewers emptied into the ocean, Melbourne’s to a large sewerage farm at Werribee beyond the city’s western rim. Contemporaries welcomed the coming of the water closet to Australia’s seaboard cities with relief, as at last removing a shameful blot on Australian civilisation. This was in spite of the fact that very few British cities other than London were any further advanced. ‘At the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, W.C.s were still unknown to the majority of her subjects’, the British historian Anthony Wohl wryly observes (Wohl: 95).

Contemporaries probably exaggerated the benefits of water-carriage as a method of waste disposal. Historians who have closely examined the course of its introduction have sometimes wondered whether it was either efficient or effective. The economic historian W. A. Sinclair suggested that it was only when the costs of the old pan system exceeded those of underground sewerage that Melbourne opted for change. But his argument was convincingly challenged by David Merrett, who estimated the cost of the new system as actually twice that of the old (Sinclair 1975; Merrett 1977). The connection between improved health and the advent of the water closet was no clearer. While urban mortality, especially from typhoid and other contagious diseases, fell during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the decades when Sydney and Melbourne were being sewered — the decline actually began before the inauguration of the sewerage system and was attributable, at least in part, to factors incidental to it, such as improved habits of personal cleanliness and street drainage (Dunstan 2003: 67–78). ‘We are left with the fact that a major investment in public sewerage was established in Sydney and expanded, on what were essentially false premises’, Dan Coward observes in his penetrating study of Sydney’s environmental history (Coward 1988: 67). The decision to adopt underground sewerage was a momentous one determined not by economics or medical science — though both had some influence — but largely by the power of Chadwick’s vision of a sanitary city linked by an ‘unseen, unostentatious, self-acting system of excretory ducts’. Henceforward Australians, like Britons and Americans, would come to regard the water closet and the flush cistern as indispensable markers of civilisation.

Those who designed and built the sewerage systems were convinced that they would use no more water than the earth-closets and privies they replaced (Culcheth 1881: 190). However, between 1900, when the first houses were connected to the Melbourne system, and 1911 when most were connected, per-capita water consumption rose by almost 30 per cent, from approximately 50 to 65 gallons. Some observers put this down to the increased volume of water required for underground sewerage, but MMBW Chief Engineer William Thwaites was not persuaded. Not as much water was wasted as before in washing down yards and drains, he contended. Garden watering and extra showers in hot weather accounted for the increased consumption (Dingle and Rasmussen: 115). Yet there seems no reason why hosing and showering should have suddenly increased, and it may be significant that per-capita consumption levelled out after the system was completed.

In Melbourne water closets were flushed by pulling a chain connected to a three-gallon (13.6 litre) overhead cast-iron cistern; in Sydney the two-gallon (9 litre) cement cistern was standard (John Danks Catalogues, 1906, 1952). A contemporary who attempted an estimate of household water use in New South Wales allowed six gallons (27 litres) per head for water closets (Bruce and Kendall 1901: 55). In an era when the journey to the backyard dunny was longer, and every bedroom had a chamber pot, families may have held on longer, collected faeces and urine in a single vessel and flushed less frequently than today. The advent of the indoor loo from the 1920s and the multiplication of bathrooms and toilets in the post-war era finally banished the chamber pot, but the technology of flushing changed little until the 1970s when the Caroma company introduced the dual-flush toilet (Department of Environment and Water Resources). A standard dual-flush toilet uses less than half as much water as an old-style overhead cistern (3–6 litres per flush compared to 11 litres) and more recent ‘smart-flush’ models use even less (3 or 4.5 litres per flush) (Water Efficiency Labelling, 2007; Caroma website). Since nature presumably called as frequently in 1900 as in 2000 these technological improvements might have been expected to reduce the per-capita consumption of water for flushing, yet it is unclear whether they did so. Water closets currently account for between 15 and 23 per cent of household water consumption (around 50 litres) (ABS 2004 in Troy 2007), a similar proportion of per-capita use, but about twice the actual volume per head, as in the early 1900s (26 litres), if the rough, and perhaps inaccurate, contemporary estimates are accepted.