Despite the ever-increasing confidence of nineteenth-century medicine, despite the delivery of intelligent and highly trained graduates from ancient universities such as Oxford and St Bartholomew’s into British hospitals and surgeries, despite the volumes written about new advances in medical treatment of all kinds, most of the virulent and destructive diseases of the day remained essentially mysterious and completely incurable. With typhus, for example, despite the millions it killed there is no evidence to suggest that anyone, anywhere—prior to its pathogen being finally described by Henrique da Rocha Lima and Stanislaus von Prowazek in the early 1900s—had so much as suggested the possibility of its cause being linked to human body lice.
In the 1850s, therefore, doctors such as Sanger and Veitch, despite their best intentions and tireless concern for their patients, could barely even scratch at the symptoms with the knowledge and medicines at their disposal. Prior to the modern comprehension of infection, a disease having taken hold was simply left to run its terrible course. The only bulwark against its spreading was avoidance, in the form of isolation or quarantine.
With the advent of the gold rush, the colonial backwater of Melbourne, founded only seventeen years previously by John Batman (a syphilitic conman and slaughterer of Tasmanian Aboriginals, described by artist John Glover as ‘a rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known’,1) suddenly began to burst its established boundaries, even up to the threshold of its hitherto isolated quarantine station at Little Red Bluff. This had been established by the government in 1840, its hand forced by the arrival of one of the unluckiest vessels ever to set sail, the Glen Huntly. This purpose-built 450-ton barque departed Greenock on her maiden voyage from Scotland under the command of a Captain Buchanan in December 1839, laden with 157 mainly Scottish emigrant passengers bound for Victoria. On her very first night at sea, she collided with a coastal vessel, then in the English Channel as fog set in, she missed a marker and struck a submerged rock, which damaged her timbers even further. A few days later, despite being in the open waters of the North Atlantic, the hapless Buchanan managed to plough into yet another vessel, this time an American packet ship, which tore away the Glen Huntly’s masthead and lower spars. Then, while crossing the equator, typhus broke out, resulting in her arrival into Melbourne with 50 cases of ‘fever’ and ten passengers fewer than had embarked.
When the unfortunate ship limped into Hobson’s Bay with the yellow flag at her topmast, the people of Melbourne, already spooked by a recent outbreak of typhus that devastated Hobart and reports of the disease in Sydney, went into such a panic that the then Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, was later reported by The Age of 1931 as becoming ‘considerably perturbed and anxious to avoid the introduction of what might prove to be a serious menace to the well-being of the small but flourishing community’. He ordered the Glen Huntly to depart forthwith to a small sandstone promontory known as Little Red Bluff, 4 miles south-east of the city. It was a lonely, windy place, isolated in the bush but bordered by a swamp on one side, which had been a former meeting place for the now dispersed Bunurong Aboriginal people.
To accommodate both the Glen Huntly’s sick and healthy passengers, a hospital of sorts was set up in tents along the foreshore, which evolved by default into Melbourne’s first quarantine or ‘sanitary’ station, as it was dubbed initially to dampen public fears. In any case, it was a facility for which the burgeoning city was long overdue. Accepting its sudden establishment as a fait accompli, La Trobe appointed Dr Barry Cotter, Colonial Surgeon and the man described on a family biographical website as ‘Melbourne’s first doctor’, to oversee its proper development. Cotter decided that the sick would remain on board their anchored ships to either recover or die, while those still healthy would be housed in canvas tents along the shore and up on the bluff. These twin camps were named, appropriately enough, ‘Sick’ and ‘Healthy’, and the arrangement apparently worked, as only three more deaths eventuated from the Glen Huntly. To bolster the station’s position of isolation, La Trobe also provided a contingent of soldiers to prevent any contact between the patients and the outside world, as well as a water patrol in rowboats to deter any notions those confined to their ships may have had about swimming ashore. Cotter’s diary of April 1840 captured some of the scene:
The remainder of the emigrants were landed yesterday from the Glen Huntly, with an addition of six fresh cases for the sick camp. There are at present in the healthy camp one hundred and eight, including children; many of them appear much emaciated from long and continued illness but I have every reason to hope that the change of quarters and diet will soon restore them.2
Despite Cotter’s efforts, and the considerable interest shown by La Trobe, who became a regular visitor, Little Red Bluff was, by all accounts, a miserable place. Cold and windswept by the southerlies slicing up the bay in winter, baking hot in summer, it remained for more than a decade no more than a flimsy canvas city filled with miserable people who desperately wanted to get out of there. Hemmed in by the sea on one side and a swamp on the other, and under permanent armed guard, its inmates would have felt little better than convicts. Nor was the gloomy atmosphere alleviated by one part of the camp evolving eventually into one of the city’s first burial grounds.
However, as Melbourne’s southern seaside residences expanded further southwards, the camp became untenable—particularly when gold was discovered, at which point even the guards proved unable to prevent the escape of those determined to head inland and try their luck in Bendigo and other places. In September 1852, the Wanata—one of the twin-deck clippers that preceded the Ticonderoga—likewise having had a terrible journey with many cases of typhus, arrived; she was followed two days later by HMSS Vulcan, a Royal Navy frigate recently converted into a steam-powered troopship. She carried several hundred Somersetshire soldiers of the 40th Regiment of Foot, arriving for their second tour of duty in Australia, who were destined to see a good deal of action fighting off bushrangers on Cobb and Co. stagecoaches as well as storming the Eureka Stockade in 1854. First, though, they had to make it off the boat, and as one of their ranks seemed to be presenting signs of the dreaded smallpox, they were all ordered into quarantine at Little Red Bluff, which was now struggling to cope. The entire regiment was placed on board the hulk Lysander, an ageing veteran of several runs from England, currently sitting idle and empty in Hobson’s Bay. The Lysander was quickly fitted with 50 beds and a generous amount of stores, and the men of the 40th were told to settle in for a long wait.
A new quarantine station was obviously needed, and Charles La Trobe, recently elevated to the position of Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor upon the colony becoming independent the year before, demanded that another location be found, accessible by sea but preferably a long way from the city. In early 1852, he sent his Port Health Officer, Dr Thomas Hunt, on a surveying mission.
Two possible sites were decided upon, one at Swan Island on the west side of the Port Phillip Bay, the other on a section of the long sandy peninsula which made up one arm of the bay’s eastern entrance. Hunt eventually concluded that Swan Island was too marshy, too hard to land at and generally too depressing, but the bright little cove over on the eastern shore around from Point Nepean had potential. In a report to La Trobe, he described this area as
admirably adapted for the purposes required; its position isolated, its anchorage good and easy of access both from inside the Heads when a vessel takes a pilot there and from Shortlands Bluff. The soil is sandy and at all times dry, the air pure. Water is procured by sinking wells to the depth of 12 to 15 feet, in abundance and sufficient purity, although somewhat aluminous and impregnated with lime. A root resembling sarsaparilla, wild parsley, and a root known here as pennyroyal, grow wild and cure scurvy in a short time.3
The site in fact already had its own short history of White settlement. Edward Hobson, a sailor turned grazier (and cousin of Captain William Hobson, a recent Governor of New Zealand and in whose honour Hobson’s Bay had been named), was probably the first European to establish himself in the area, arriving overland from Parramatta in 1837. Seeing the potential of the area as cattle country, he used his connections to secure permission to graze across two large runs he established around the southern part of the large spit of land stretching south-east from Melbourne known as the Mornington Peninsula. He gave his runs two Aboriginal words, Kangerong and Tootgarook, the latter being the local Aboriginal Bunurong word to describe the croaking frogs in the many nearby swamps.
Over the next decade or so, a handful of other hardy families arrived and set themselves up along the peninsula’s southern and western ends—including Point Nepean—taking out pastoral, fishing and lime-burning leases or squatting. Patrick Sullivan, who with his brother-in-law William Cannon had observed the Ticonderoga’s arrival from across the other side of the bay, was part of a large family of ten who had been evicted from their ancestral land in County Kerry, Ireland, by their English landlord (who at least agreed to pay their passage to Sydney, where they arrived, as free emigrants, in 1839). Before long, the Sullivans had ventured south to the Port Phillip District, where they liked what they saw, taking out several leases, constructing modest dwellings and generally living completely removed from interference by government—or, for that matter, anyone else. Other families arrived and likewise established themselves into a tight-knit and inter-marrying community. As Crown Land leaseholders, however, their tenure to the land they had come to regard as their own was uncertain, and in faraway Melbourne, those in power were preparing to bring that tenure to an abrupt end.
Throughout 1852, with Little Red Bluff’s time as a quarantine station coming to an end, a stately procession of paperwork passed between the desks of Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, his Port Health Officer Dr Hunt and the Victorian Surveyor-General Robert Hoddle. In October, La Trobe requested that due diligence be applied in establishing exactly what rights the lessees at Point Nepean may have:
what are their expected tenures, and what power the Government possesses of removal, now or at the expiration of lease, whenever that may be.4
On 27 October, Surveyor-General Hoddle replied that with one month’s notice, and a balance on the remaining leases—roughly £12—being refunded to each individual leaseholder, such lands as His Excellency might require may indeed be secured without too much fuss. He suggested that the Harbour Master, Charles Ferguson, might be granted sufficient legal and administrative powers to execute such an arrangement. La Trobe thought it an excellent idea. In this fashion, the bureaucratic wheels slowly revolved, and the plan for a new quarantine station to protect the people of Melbourne began to take shape—at least on paper.
A few days later, on the morning of 3 November, Ferguson sat in his office in Williamstown when the wild-eyed figure of Captain Wylie burst in. The two men knew one another, but Ferguson had never seen his old friend like this. He had sailed at haste all through the night, he said, and was wrung out and exhausted. He stammered:
A … ship has come. A large one. From Liverpool. A hundred … yes, a hundred! … dead on board, many more sick. You must inform the Governor … and send help.5
The leisurely progress of the planned, but entirely prospective quarantine station had been overtaken by a very real emergency.
* * * *
Meanwhile, the passengers on board the Ticonderoga were close to despair. Three days earlier, believing their arrival into Melbourne would lead to better care, or at the very least the chance to get off this wretched ship, the passengers had felt that the worst was over. Those well enough and not numb with grief could finally allow themselves the luxury of contemplating some kind of future. When instead they dropped anchor off a lonely bluff with little signs of habitation, bar a couple of cottages, some tents and a signal station, then the pilot ordered them to remain there for an entire day, then another, followed by a third, they once again began to lose hope. Finally, though, the pilot boarded once more and as the sound of the anchor being raised reverberated through the ship, hopes rose again. But these too would be dashed when, instead of heading north to Melbourne, the pilot took them just a short way across the bay to an even more desolate-looking location, and left them there.
At this small and seemingly deserted little cove, where all that could be seen was scrub, sand dunes and empty beaches, rumours began to fly that they were to remain here for the foreseeable future, in quarantine.6 When this was confirmed by the sight of the pilot once more departing, many began to curse their decision to leave their beloved homeland to travel on this death ship to the far side of the Earth, only to be left alone and forgotten by the rest of the world. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth.