On 6 April, 2014
It’s nearly two decades since I first encountered Meyer
Eidelson. He was then conducting a
walking tour for the Council of Adult Education, a tour arranged around the
numerous laneways of the inner suburbs of Melbourne; lanes separating what
would otherwise be back-to-back allotments and whose purpose was to provide
access for the collectors of the sweetly sounding but not so sweetly smelling
nightsoil.
The European settlement of Melbourne, and the orderly property
subdivisions of the town centre and the early suburbs, pre-dated the great
engineering endeavour of the underground sewers and the resultant outflow to
Werribee some 20 miles to the west. The
reticulated sewage disposal system did not get under way until 1897, and in
the meantime we had “marvellous Smellbourne”. Early on the streets were polluted directly,
not only with horse droppings but with human waste from chamber pots and
thunderboxes; and the later outside lavatories had their own piquancy. The outside lavatories were typically placed
at the rear fence-line with a trapdoor opening on to the laneway, and the
nightman’s horse and cart traversed the lanes on collection day, taking the
spoil to distant fields, often to market gardens! In the Australian vernacular the outdoor
lavatory is universally known as the dunny (well, perhaps not in refined
company), and the collector known more often as the dunnyman than the nightman.
Meyer Eidelson’s tour those years ago was titled In the Footsteps of the Dunnyman; he
conducts a similar tour still today. He
is a devoted urban historian, and has made a life of devising and conducting informative
walking tours, indeed he today runs a business now involving his children, and
extending beyond CAE registrants – to schools, to the corporate world, and to
the public at large:
www.melbournewalks.com
Anyway, here we were again, this time the walking tour Discovering Bearbrass. Meyer has changed little, full beard replaced
by a trimmed month’s growth, bushman’s hat replaced by a baseball cap, but the
same earnest demeanour sprinkled with the occasional droll witticism. I haven’t changed much either!..........although
the lead-up to Meyer’s tour had been an ageing process. I had been given a voucher for a CAE walking
tour of the St. Kilda Cemetery, but the event had been cancelled for lack of
live participants. The CAE’s operating
routine is not to issue cash refunds, but to hold over a credit for use against
the cost of some subsequent course.
There’s a catch, however: the credit note expires after one year. I awoke to the problem just in time, and
enrolled for another course - only for it too to be cancelled! So I discovered Bearbrass on the double
rebound; most affably though, with about ten others, on a delightful Melbourne
autumn day.
Somewhat prosaically the settlement on the Yarra River was
known early on as The Township, but it was also known as Bearbrass (with
several variants). The word was likely a
corruption of a Wurundjeri word meaning “river of mists”. In the event, the currency of the name Bearbrass
was short-lived: there were barely 21 months from the time of Batman’s landing
to the proclamation from Sydney of the name Melbourne by Governor Bourke in
March 1837. Meyer Eidelson’s tour and
“discovery” focussed not only on that initial period but on the few subsequent
years before gold was discovered less than 100 miles inland. He re-wrote history for me.
There were two threads that I found intriguing, indeed
revelatory. First, given that Arthur
Phillip set up the Sydney Cove settlement in 1788, why did the Bearbrass
settlement not kick off for another 47 years?
Why such a huge time gap? The
second thread: what happened in
Melbourne to achieve such spectacular population growth in its first 16 years –
before the 1851 gold rushes? The
relationship between the two threads is one of contradistinction. The first: why so long? The second:
why so short?
Although recent research has spotlighted the strategic
aspects of the British Government’s Australian adventure, it is manifestly true
that the Government saw the new southern continent as a destination for the
transportation of its surplus convicts, and hence a solution to a serious
domestic problem. Harsh laws,
widespread poverty, and the withdrawal of the American colonies from British
rule, had led to unmanageable numbers of convicts. When the jails were full, the Government -
with the fortuitous oversupply of warships post the American Revolutionary War
(1775 to 1783) - made prisons of de-commissioned vessels. These ships were rendered unseaworthy, and anchored
in the Thames and elsewhere, and known as hulks. The prisoner dilemma and the “solution” had evolved
rapidly, and almost as rapidly was adjudged as no solution at all. James Cook’s discovery and charting of the
east coast of New Holland in 1770 had generated an awareness of available land
and colonial possibilities; cessation of transportation to the American
colonies in 1776 had triggered the commissioning of the first hulks in the same
year. Transportation to New South Wales
commenced in January 1788. In the words
of Professor R.M. Crawford: “Necessity not vision founded Australia.”
During the ensuing years it was not as though the British
Government was unaware of the southern regions of the Australian continent; and
it was certainly not about to ease up on its transportation programme - new
penal settlements were set up in Hobart (in 1803) and Brisbane (in 1823). There
was also continuing disquiet at the presence of the French in the region, and
their colonial intentions, and British settlement of other parts of the
continent would have been seen by the Government in London as having some
tactical significance. The key to the apparent official indifference
to the whole area that was to become Victoria, including the place that was to become
Melbourne, lies with the two unsuccessful attempts to create penal settlements
– first in 1803 at Sullivan Bay near present-day Sorrento in Port Phillip, second
in 1826 near present-day Corinella in Western Port. The Sullivan Bay site was chosen because of
its strategic position near the narrow entrance to Port Phillip, but planning
had been inadequate. There was little
fresh water, the soil was poor, and there was insufficient usable timber. Furthermore, the (now notorious) rip at the
entrance to the Port Phillip made for perilous navigation into the Port. Sullivan Bay was abandoned in under six
months. It is an historical anachronism
that Sullivan Bay was chosen as the site of what became the abortive penal
settlement, because the region of the Yarra River outflow further north on Port
Phillip had already been explored earlier that year, but the results of that
exploration were not known to the Government at the time. Earlier in 1803 Charles Robbins and Charles
Grimes had explored the whole of Port Phillip, discovered the Yarra River, and
rowed upstream as far as Dights Falls.
We’ll never know whether, had the decision to set up the penal
settlement been made a year later say, the amenity of the Yarra region would
have led to a successful establishment.
Twenty-three years after Sullivan Bay the Western Port
adventure was also a failure, a failure that rode on the back of the 1824 Hume
and Hovell expedition. Hume and Hovell
had journeyed overland from Sydney, arriving at the southern coast on Corio
Bay, an indentation of Port Phillip.
They erroneously figured that they had found their way to Western Port more
than 100 miles to the east; and, moreover, they did not see the Yarra River
much closer to their north and east (and, hence, could not express a view about
the area around the river mouth as a potential convict settlement). Thus it was that the possibility of a
settlement at an amenable location was missed; and thus it was that in 1826 and
1827 some 34 convicts were sent to Western Port . The settlement lasted 15 months, abandoned
because of insufficient arable land, and insufficient fresh water.
So the governments in London and Sydney, although their minds
were still focussed on places suitable to locate convicts, but with two aborted
attempts, kept the lid on the region to the south of the continental land-mass.
Professor Crawford asserts: “The fact
remains that the convict system dominated the first fifty years of Australian
history” [this written in 1952 when aboriginal history was not “mainstream”], and
the deferral of the white settlement of Melbourne – a deferral of 47 years! –
is evidence of that domination.
Just think, Queen Victoria had been reigning for 16 years,
and Melbourne still did not exist! But
when white settlement came, it came at a pace unprecedented in the old world. From zero in 1835, until 1851 when gold was
discovered to the north, the population rose to around 77000. [The discovery of gold at Clunes and Mount
Alexander and several other locations in central Victoria triggered a gold rush
that resulted in population growth that spectacularly overtrumped previous
statistics, though. In the decade to
1861 the colony of Victoria’s population rose to around 540000. This truly astronomic increase is a story for
another day.]
The winds of change that drove the foundation and settlement
of Bearbrass were due to the demands of free-enterprise, the expansion of
agriculture. And these winds came from
the south.
Although Hobart and the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land (whose
name, incidentally, wasn’t changed to Tasmania until 1856) had begun in 1803 as
a penal settlement it was not long before free settlers arrived, free settlers
who within 20 years had taken up the whole of the island’s central plains. The thriving pastoral industry that resulted, and the burgeoning
wool exports to England, demanded more land than Van Diemen’s Land could
provide.
Not being one to miss an opportunity to plagiarise myself, I
quote from an earlier Pieces to Share blog:
Edward
Henty, seeking new grazing opportunities, brought sheep across from Van
Diemen’s Land in 1834, to a spot near present-day Portland. In June 1835 John Batman, representing a newly-formed
group of Van Diemen’s Land businessmen – the Port Phillip Syndicate – talked
the aboriginal people into “selling” him some 600000 acres of land around Port
Phillip. Wasting no time, in September that
year he returned with a group of settlers, only to find that John Pascoe
Fawkner had arrived with the same intention less than a month earlier. There was enough land for all. Accepting the inevitable, the Governor in
Sydney, just one year later, declared the town to be the capital of the Port
Phillip District; and in March 1837 officially named it Melbourne. That same year the “Hoddle Grid” laid out the
plan of the town, the same Central Business District we know today.
Meyer Eidelson told the same story while we discovered the
Bearbrass of that era.
And so the rush was on, not the rush for gold that started in
1851, but the rush for land. The Government
in Sydney that had been reluctant to encourage settlement in the southern part
of the mainland except on its own terms, and whose attempts at convict
settlements had been a failure, was outmanoeuvred by pastoralists seeking to
expand their flocks. The tide was
unstoppable – the Government simply did not have the policing resources – and
the influx of sheep, land-grabbers, and all the opportunists who followed, created
a Melbourne of 77000 souls within 16 years.
It’s not too presumptuous, I think, to quote Shakespeare,
from Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in
the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” And so it did.
Gary Andrews
