Surry Hills in the 1940s

Surry Hills spent the 1940s being treated and being worked, often in the same street.

The treating is painted on a wall. Large letters reading CHEST CLINIC run down the side of a terrace on Albion Street, dated 1893 in its own gable, and a woman with two children walks toward the arched entrance. Tuberculosis ran high in the packed terraces of the inner city, and this was the service that met it: the Anti-Tuberculosis Association's clinic, which X-rayed nearly 3,500 people in 1941 and found the disease in one of every twenty. That was the year of the photograph, before mass screening and years before the drugs that finished the disease off.

The working is a few streets away. Surry Hills made the city's clothes, the rag trade filled its warehouses, and hats were a trade inside the trade. Sam Hood photographed the steam-blocking and pressing machines in a Randle Street hat factory in 1941, felt bodies and shaped hats crowding the benches, the machines set close enough that the room is mostly people.

On the western edge something had just gone up. The Dental Hospital of Sydney opened on Chalmers Street in 1940 to Stephenson & Turner's design, its curved end bay glazed in continuous bands of windows, and the trams still run alongside it.

Robinson's street map of 1948 takes all of this in the way it takes in Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo, as part of one city. And along Elizabeth Street, beside the cutting where the electric trains drop into the tunnel, the rooftops carry painted billboards for Duco and Dulux above Mark Foys on the Liverpool Street corner — a store then, a courthouse now.