Port Phillip 1800-1840
Discovery of Port Phillip. The discovery of Bass Strait in 1798
had rendered it possible for the captains of ships bound for Sydney to
shorten somewhat their voyage thither; and as this was recognised by the
English Government to be a great advantage, a small vessel, the Lady
Nelson, was sent out under the command of Lieutenant Grant, in order to
make a thorough exploration of the passage. She reached the Australian
c
and South Australia. Grant called the cape he first met with Cape
Northumberland. He saw and named Cape Nelson, Portland Bay, Cape
Schanck, and other features of the coast. When he arrived in Sydney he
called the attention of Governor King to a small inlet which he had not
been able to examine, although it seemed to him of importance. In 1802
the Governor sent back the Lady Nelson, now under the command of
Lieutenant Murray, to explore this inlet. Lieutenant Murray entered
it, and found that a narrow passage led to a broad sheet of water,
thoroughly landlocked, though of very considerable extent. He reported
favourably of the beauty and fertility of its shores, and desired to
name it Port King, in honour of the Governor; but Governor King
requested that this tribute should be paid to the memory of his old
commander, the first Australian Governor, and thus the bay received its
present name, Port Phillip. Only sixty days later Flinders also entered
the bay; but when he arrived, some time afterwards, in Sydney, he was
surprised to find he was not the first discoverer.
It was at this time that the Governor in Sydney was afraid of the
intrusion of the French upon Australian soil, and when he heard how
favourable the appearance of this port was for settlement he resolved to
have it more carefully explored. Accordingly he sent a small schooner,
the Cumberland, under the charge of Mr. Robbins, to make the
examination. The vessel carried Charles Grimes, the Surveyor-General of
New South Wales, and his assistant, Meehan; also a surgeon named
M'Callum, and a liberated convict named Flemming, who was to report on
the agricultural capabilities of the district.
On arriving at Port Phillip they commenced a systematic survey, Robbins
sounding the bay, and making a careful chart, while the other four were
every morning landed on the shore to examine the country. They walked
ten or fifteen miles each day, and in the evening were again taken on
board the schooner. Thus they walked from the site of Sorrento round by
Brighton till they reached the river Yarra, which they described as a
large fresh-water stream, but without naming it. Then they went round
the bay as far as Geelong. They carried a good chart and several long
reports to the Governor at Sydney, who would probably have sent a party
down to settle by the Yarra, had it not been that an expedition had
already set sail from England for the purpose of occupying the shores of
Port Phillip.
Governor Collins. This was the expedition of David Collins, already
mentioned. He brought out nearly 400 persons, of whom over 300 were
convicts. There is good reason to believe that Collins from the first
would have preferred to settle at the Derwent, in Tasmania, but at any
rate he carried out his work at Port Phillip in a very half-hearted
manner. Tuckey chose for the settlement a sandy shore at Sorrento, where
scarcely a drop of fresh water was to be had, and where the blazing sun
of midsummer must have been unusually trying to a crowd of people fresh
from colder climates.
It soon became apparent that the site selected would never prove
suitable, and Collins sent Lieutenant Tuckey in search of a better
place. That officer seems to have made a very inefficient search. He
found no river, and no stream better than the little one on which the
town of Frankston now stands. Here he was attacked by a great crowd of
blacks, and had a conflict with them sufficiently severe to prevent his
landing again. He was thus debarred from exploration by land, and the
stormy weather prevented him from remaining long in the open bay. Tuckey
therefore returned with a very gloomy report, and increased the
despondency of the little community. Every one was dull and dispirited,
except the two or three children who had been allowed to accompany their
convict parents. Among these, the leader of all their childish sports,
was a little lad named John Pascoe Fawkner, who was destined to be
afterwards of note in the history of Port Phillip. Everybody grew
dispirited under the heat, the want of fresh water, and the general
wretchedness of the situation; and very soon all voices were unanimous
in urging the Governor to remove. Collins then sent a boat, with
letters, to Sydney, and Governor King gave him permission to cross
over to Tasmania. He lost not a moment in doing so, and founded the
settlement at the Derwent, to which reference has already been made.
Before he left, there were four convicts who took advantage of the
confusion to escape into the bush, hoping to make their way to Sydney.
One returned, footsore and weary, just in time to be taken on board; the
other three were not again seen. Two are believed to have perished of
hunger, and thirty-two years passed away before the fate of the third
was discovered.
Western Port. When Hume and Hovell returned to Sydney after their
exploring expedition, Hovell insisted that the fine harbour he had seen
was Western Port. He had really been at Geelong Harbour, but was all
that distance astray in his reckoning. Induced by his report, the
Government sent an expedition under Captain Wright to form a settlement
at Western Port. Hovell went with him to give the benefit of his
experience. They landed on Phillip Island; but the want of a stream of
permanent water was a disadvantage, and soon after they crossed to the
mainland on the eastern shore, where they founded a settlement, building
wooden huts and one or two brick cottages. Hovell had now to confess
that the place he had formerly seen was not Western Port, and he went
off in search of the fine country he had previously seen, but came back
disappointed. The settlement struggled onward for about a year, and was
then withdrawn.
It is not easy to explain in a few words why they abandoned their
dwellings and the land they had begun to cultivate. It seems to have
been due to a general discontent. However, there were private settlers
in Tasmania who would have carried out the undertaking with much more
energy. For in Tasmania the sheep had been multiplying at a great rate,
while the amount of clear and grassy land in that island was very
limited. One of the residents in Tasmania, named John Batman, who has
been already mentioned, conceived the idea of forming an association
among the Tasmanian sheep-owners, for the purpose of crossing Bass
Strait and occupying with their flocks the splendid grassy lands which
explorers had seen there.
Batman. John Batman was a native of Parramatta, but when he was
about twenty-one years of age he had left his home to seek his fortune
in Tasmania. There he had taken up land and had settled down to the life
of a sheep-farmer in the country around Ben Lomond. But he was fond of a
life of adventure, and found enough of excitement for a time in the
troubled state of the colony. It was he who captured Brady, the leader
of the bushrangers, and he became well known during the struggle with
the natives on account of his success in dealing with them and in
inducing them to surrender peaceably. But when all these troubles were
over, and he had to settle down to the monotonous work of drafting and
driving sheep, he found his land too rocky to support his flocks.
Knowing that others in Tasmania were in the same difficulty, he and his
friend Gellibrand, a lawyer in Hobart, in the year 1827 asked permission
to occupy the grassy lands supposed to be round Western Port, but the
Governor in Sydney refused. In 1834 some of them resolved to go without
permission, and an association of thirteen members resolved to send
sheep over to Port Phillip, which was now known to be the more suitable
harbour.
Before they sent the sheep, they resolved to send some one to explore
and report. John Batman naturally volunteered, and the association
chartered for him a little vessel, the Rebecca, in which, after
nineteen days of sea-sickness and miserable tossing in the strait, he
succeeded in entering Port Phillip on the 29th of May, 1835. Next
morning he landed near Geelong and walked to the top of the Barrabool
Hills, wading most of the way through grass knee-deep. On the following
day he went in search of the aboriginals, and met a party of about
twenty women, together with a number of children. With these he soon
contrived to be on friendly terms; and after he had distributed among
them looking-glasses, blankets, handkerchiefs, apples and sugar, he left
them very well satisfied.
The Yarra.# A day or two later the Rebecca anchored in Hobson's Bay,
in front of the ti-tree scrub and the lonely shores where now the
streets of Williamstown extend in all directions. Batman again started
on foot to explore that river whose mouth lay there in front of him.
With fourteen men, all well armed, he passed up the river banks; but,
being on the left side, he naturally turned up that branch which is
called the Saltwater, instead of the main stream. After two days of
walking through open grassy lands, admirably suited for sheep, they
reached the site of Sunbury. From a hill at that place they could see
fires about twenty miles to the south-east; and, as they were anxious to
meet the natives, they bent their steps in that direction till they
overtook a native man, with his wife and three children. To his great
satisfaction, he learnt that these people knew of his friendly meeting
with the women in the Geelong district. They guided him to the banks of
the Merri Creek, to the place where their whole tribe was encamped. He
stayed with them all night, sleeping in a pretty grassy hollow beside
the stream. In the morning he offered to buy a portion of their land,
and gave them a large quantity of goods, consisting of scissors, knives,
blankets, looking-glasses, and articles of this description. In return,
they granted him all the land stretching from the Merri Creek to
Geelong. Batman had the documents drawn up, and on the Northcote Hill,
overlooking the grass-covered flats of Collingwood and the sombre
forests of Carlton and Fitzroy, the natives affixed their marks to the
deeds, by which Batman fancied he was legally put in possession of
600,000 acres. Trees were cut with notches, in order to fix the
boundaries, and in the afternoon Batman took leave of his black friends.
He had not gone far before he was stopped by a large swamp, and so slept
for the night under the great gum trees which then spread their shade
over the ground now covered by the populous streets of West Melbourne.
In the morning he found his way round the swamp, and in trying to reach
the Saltwater came upon a noble stream, which was afterwards called the
Yarra. In the evening he reached his vessel in the bay. Next day he
ascended the Yarra in a boat; and when he came to the Yarra Falls, he
wrote in his diary, "This will be the place for a village," unconscious
that he was gazing upon the site of a great and busy city. Returning to
Indented Head, near the heads of Port Phillip, he left three white men
and his Sydney natives to cultivate the soil and retain possession of
the land he supposed himself to have purchased. Then he set sail for
Tasmania, where he and his associates began to prepare for transporting
their households, their sheep and their cattle, to the new country.
The Henty Brothers. But even earlier than this period a quiet
settlement had been made in the western parts of Victoria. There, as
early as 1828, sealers had dwelt at Portland Bay, had built their little
cottages and formed their little gardens. But they were unauthorised,
and could only be regarded by the British Government as intruders,
having no legal right to the land they occupied. In 1834, however, there
came settlers of another class--Edward, Stephen, and Frank Henty. Their
father--a man of some wealth--had in 1828 emigrated with all his family
to Western Australia, carrying with him large quantities of fine stock.
But the settlement at Swan River proving a failure, he had removed to
Tasmania, where his six sons all settled. Very soon they found the
pastoral lands of Tasmania too limited, and as Edward Henty had in one
of his coasting voyages seen the sealers at Portland Bay and noticed how
numerous the whales were in that bay, and how fine the grassy lands that
lay within, he chartered a vessel, the Thistle, and crossed in her to
settle at Portland Bay with servants, sheep, cattle, and horses.
The land was all that had been anticipated, and soon Frank, and then
Stephen, arrived, with more stock and more men to tend them. Houses and
stores were put up, and fields were ploughed. Ere long other settlers
followed, and in the course of five or six years all the district lying
inland from Portland Bay was well settled and covered with sheep, while
at Portland Bay itself so many whales were caught that there were not
tanks enough to hold the oil, and much of it was wasted. The English
Government after some delay agreed to sell land to the settlers, and
before 1840 a thriving little town stood on the shores of Portland Bay.
Fawkner. John Pascoe Fawkner, who, as a boy, had landed at Sorrento
in 1803, had grown up to manhood in Tasmania through stormy times, and
had at length settled down as an innkeeper in Launceston; with that
business, however, combining the editing and publishing of a small
newspaper. For he was always a busy and active-minded worker, and had
done a great deal to make up for the defective education of his earlier
years. When Batman arrived in Launceston with the news of the fine
pastoral country across the water, Fawkner became quite excited at the
prospects that seemed possible over there. He accordingly began to
agitate for the formation of another association, and five members
joined him. At his expense, the schooner Enterprise was chartered and
loaded with all things necessary for a small settlement. On the 27th
July, 1835, he set sail from Launceston; but the weather was so rough
that, after three days and two nights of inexpressible sickness, Fawkner
found himself still in sight of the Tasmanian coast. He therefore asked
to be put ashore, and left Captain Lancey to manage the trip as he
thought best. The captain took the vessel over to Western Port, as had
been originally arranged; but the land there was not nearly so good as
they understood it to be in the Port Phillip district. So they sailed
round and safely anchored in Hobson's Bay, bringing with them horses and
ploughs, grain, fruit trees, materials for a house, boats, provisions,
and, indeed, everything that a small settlement could want. Getting out
their boat, they entered upon the stream which they saw before them;
but, unfortunately, they turned up the wrong arm, and, after rowing many
miles, were forced to turn back, the water all the way being salt and
unfit for drinking. For this reason they called this stream the
Saltwater; but next morning they started again and tried the other
branch. After pulling for about an hour and a half they reached a basin
in the river whose beauty filled them with exultation and delight. A
rocky ledge over which the river flowed kept the water above it fresh;
the soil was rich, and covered with splendid grass, and they instantly
came to the conclusion to settle in this favoured spot. Next day they
towed the vessel up, and landed where the Custom House now is. At night
they slept beside the falls, where the air was fragrant with the sweet
scent of the wattle trees just bursting into bloom.
They had not been on the river many days before Mr. Wedge--one of
Batman's party--in crossing the country from Indented Head to the Yarra,
was astonished to see the masts of a vessel rising amid the gum trees.
On reaching the river bank, what was his surprise to find, in that
lonely spot, a vessel almost embedded in the woods, and the rocks and
glades echoing to the sound of hammer and saw and the encouraging shouts
of the ploughmen! Wedge informed Fawkner's party that they were
trespassers on land belonging to John Batman and Company. Captain
Lancey, having heard the story of the purchase, declared that such a
transaction could have no value. When Wedge was gone, the settlers laid
their axes to the roots of the trees, and began to clear the land for
extensive cultivation. A fortnight later Wedge brought round all his
party from Indented Head in order to occupy what Batman had marked as
the site for a village, and the two rival parties were encamped side by
side where the western part of Collins Street now stands. A little later
Fawkner arrived with further settlers and with a wooden house, which he
soon erected by the banks of the Yarra, the first regularly built house
of Melbourne. He placed it by the side of the densely wooded stream,
which was afterwards turned into Elizabeth Street. Great crowds of black
and white cockatoos raised their incessant clamour at the first strokes
of the axe; but soon the hillside was clear, and man had taken permanent
possession of the spot.
William Buckley. Meanwhile a circumstance had happened which
favoured Batman's party in no small degree. The men left at Indented
Head were surprised one morning to see an extremely tall figure
advancing towards them. His hair was thickly matted; his skin was brown,
but not black, like that of the natives; he was almost naked, and he
carried the ordinary arms of the aborigines. This was William Buckley,
the only survivor of the three convicts who had escaped from Governor
Collins's expedition. He had dwelt for thirty-two years among the
natives. During this long time he had experienced many strange
adventures, but had not exercised the smallest influence for good upon
the natives. He was content to sink at once to their level, and to lead
the purely animal life they led. But when he heard that there was a
party of whites on Indented Head, whom the Geelong tribes proposed to
murder, he crossed to warn them of their danger. Batman's party clothed
him and treated him well, and for a time he acted as interpreter,
smoothing over many of the difficulties that arose with the natives, and
rendering the formation of the settlement much less difficult than it
might have been.
Excitement in Tasmania. The news taken over by Batman caused a
commotion in Tasmania. Many settlers crossed in search of the new
country, and, before a year had passed, nearly two hundred persons, with
more than 15,000 sheep, had landed on the shores of Port Phillip. But
they soon spread over a great extent of country--from Geelong to
Sunbury. They were in the midst of numerous black tribes, who now, too
late, began to perceive the nature of Batman's visit, and commenced to
seek revenge. Frequent attacks were made, in one of which a squatter and
his servant were killed beside the Werribee. Their bodies lie buried in
the Flagstaff Gardens.
Governor Bourke. These were not the only troubles of the settlers;
for the Sydney Government declared that all purchases of land from
ignorant natives were invalid, and Governor Bourke issued a
proclamation, warning the people at Port Phillip against fixing their
homes there, as the land did not legally belong to them.
Still new settlers flocked over, and a township began to be formed on
the banks of the Yarra. Batman's association found that their claims to
the land granted them by the natives would not be allowed; and, after
some correspondence on the subject with the Home Government, they had
to be content with 28,000 acres, as compensation for the money they had
expended.
Lonsdale. Towards the close of 1836 Governor Bourke found himself
compelled to recognise the new settlement, and sent Captain Lonsdale to
act as a magistrate; thirty soldiers accompanied him to maintain order
and protect the settlers. Next year (1837) the Governor himself arrived
at Port Phillip, where he found the settlers now numbering 500. He
planned out the little town, giving names to its streets, and finally
settling that it should be called Melbourne, after Lord Melbourne, who
was then the Prime Minister of England.
Latrobe. in 1838 Geelong began to grow into a township, and the
settlers spread west as far as Colac. Next year Mr. Latrobe was sent to
take charge of the whole district of Port Phillip, under the title of
Superintendent, but with almost all the powers of a Governor. The
settlers held a public meeting, in an auction-room at Market Square, for
the purpose of according a hearty welcome to their new Governor, whose
kindliness and upright conduct soon made him a great favourite.
A wattle-and-daub building was put up as a police-office, on the site of
the Western Markets, where it did duty for some time, until one night it
fell; some say because it was undermined by a party of imprisoned
natives; but others, because a bull belonging to Mr. Batman had rushed
against it. A court-house was erected, and four policemen appointed. A
post-office next followed, and, one by one, the various institutions of
a civilised community arose in miniature form. Numerous ships began to
enter the bay, and a lucrative trade sprang up with Tasmania. In 1838
the first newspaper appeared. It was due to the enterprise of Fawkner.
Every Monday morning sheets containing four pages of writing were
distributed to the subscribers, under the title of the Advertiser.
After nine issues of this kind had been published, a parcel of old
refuse type was sent over from Tasmania; and a young man being found in
the town who had, in his boyhood, spent a few months in a printing
office, he was pressed into the service, and thenceforward the
Advertiser appeared in a printed form--the pioneer of the press of
Victoria. Mr. Batman had fixed his residence not far from the place now
occupied by the Spencer Street Railway Station. Here, in the year 1839,
he was seized with a violent cold; and, after being carefully nursed by
one of his daughters, died without seeing more than the beginning of
that settlement he had laboured so hard to found. Mr. Fawkner lived to
an advanced age, and saw the city--whose first house he had
built--become a vast metropolis.
The year 1839 brought further increase to the population; and before the
beginning of 1840 there were 3,000 persons, with 500 houses and 70
shops, in Melbourne. In 1841, within five years of its foundation, it
contained 11,000 persons and 1,500 houses.
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