DISCOVERING BEARBRASS

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