TIM FLANNERY
All cities spring from twin fountainheads—the nature in which they are grounded and the human enterprise that builds them. Nature works slowly and at times can be set on her beam-ends by ecological disruptions, yet ultimately she determines the fate of every living thing. Melbourne’s history has been one of prodigious human activity and unimaginable ecological catastrophe. Just 170 years ago the city did not exist. In its place was Birrarang, a bountiful land beside a bay, through which ran the sparkling river Barrern. This was a place of astonishing beauty and abundance, with roots deep in Gondwana.
A remarkable insight into Birrarang’s origins came in early 1980 when a builder on Melbourne’s underground rail loop noticed a strange shape in a rock fragment that had broken off the tunnel wall. At first glance it looked like a Wild West sheriff’s badge—a suitable emblem of Melbourne’s frontier phase—but when held to the light it proved to be the immaculately preserved impression of a starfish. Although the creature lived 400 million years ago, even its smallest details remained discernible.
That lonely, pioneering starfish was probably entombed by a mudslide as it wended its way across the sea floor. Could we have taken a bird’s-eye view of Melbourne back then we would have seen nothing but water. Below that horizon-spanning expanse of salt water lay a vast gash in the ocean bottom called the Melbourne Trough—a sort of prototypical Marianas Trench. It occupied much of what is now central Victoria, and the muds and silts that filled it were destined to form the rolling hills of Melbourne, as well as much of the rock underlying the city itself.
A place near the outer suburb of Lilydale tells us how this ancient mud was transformed into solid rock. The Europeans called it Cave Hill and dug a quarry there. The Aborigines, however, knew it as Bukker Tillible, and believed that a falling star had created a bottomless pit on the site. The cave the legend refers to had been carved from a mass of limestone, rich in shells and other ancient marine life. How this great slab of limestone, kilometres in extent, ended up on the floor of a deep ocean trench was a mystery until geologists discovered evidence nearby of volcanoes. This primitive coral reef must have grown on the summit of such a peak, near the sunlit surface of the ocean, until a tremendous paroxysm of the earth’s crust some 380 million years ago detached the limey mass from its pinnacle, sending it hurtling into the abyss.
This was only one of countless geological movements that over tens of millions of years would bury errant starfish and close the Melbourne Trough—eventually folding and heating the sediment, then thrusting the mass of new-formed rock skyward. Tectonic forces also squeezed great bodies of magma into the rock, which slowly cooled and solidified to form the granite that now outcrops around Melbourne. In time these processes would transform the entire region from sea to land, creating the continental crust that would come to be known as Victoria.
These continent-creating processes also emplaced a thin trace of metal in the sediment, which was concentrated in north–south running ‘belts’—two to the east of Melbourne and one to its west. After lying dormant for over 350 million years the immense motivating power of this golden trace was released like a genie from a bottle. Although only 2500 tonnes of gold have been mined in Victoria, this was enough to create marvellous Melbourne in the geological blink of an eye.
From the age of fishes some 350 million years ago, through the age of dinosaurs and into our own age of mammals, we know little of what passed in Melbourne-to-be, for few rocks are preserved to inform us. But by around 40 million years ago a vital geological event took place that enables us to pick up the story once more. Volcanoes began erupting around Victoria, particularly in the west, and the rocks their lava produced— including Melbourne’s famous ‘bluestone’—can be dated by geologists. In time the basalt would break down to form the largest area of rich soils in Australia. This, combined with the region’s reliable winter rainfall, would make it one of the continent’s most productive regions, and it was this that drew Melbourne’s first settlers.
Lava flows occurred only to the west of the Yarra in the Melbourne area, so the city sits astride two very different natural realms—rich volcanic plains, and infertile sand-sheets and swamps to the east. The place is like a two-faced god, offering either fortune or heartbreak. The first Europeans to settle the area turned right when they passed through the Heads into Port Phillip Bay. This fateful choice meant that they encountered Melbourne’s poorer if more picturesque side, and were defeated by the sterility of the land. In 1835, thirty-three years later, Batman turned left on entering the bay and the natural riches he unlocked astonished the world.
When the volcanoes were first roused to life millions of years ago, the continental crust began to sag, allowing the sea to approach once again and sediment to accumulate. These deposits are preserved in many places around the bay, but nowhere are they as brimful of early life as at Beaumaris, some eighteen kilometres south-east of the city. There, in rocks that are exposed only at the lowest of tides, the remains of many unexpected creatures are found.
Huge bones attest to the fact that prehistoric sperm and baleen whales spouted in that long-vanished sea, while around them sported penguins, seals and diverse kinds of sharks, some of which made meals of the whales. One such species had teeth almost fifteen centimetres long, and one fossilised whale jawbone has the tooth of a shark embedded in it, testimony of an ancient attack.
Rivers or creeks—perhaps ancestors of the Barrern itself— debouched in the area, carrying the bloated carcasses of giant marsupials into the sea. As they decomposed, bones and teeth dropped to the sea floor, providing some idea of what life was like on land. They indicate that the region was inhabited by pigsized relatives of wombats, and wallabies the size of the larger living species. We can infer that the shores of the bay supported a rainforest vegetation, for the teeth of these animals seem capable of chewing little else.
At this time the human settlement of Melbourne was still six million years in the future, and earth was yet to enter the ice age. On seventeen separate occasions during this period the planet’s glaciers would advance, its oceans synchronously dropping as water froze at the poles. The ancestors of much of the modern Australian flora and fauna would take form during this period, and so would the topography of Birrarang.
We do not know exactly when human eyes first lit upon Birrarang’s seven hills. My guess is that it was around 47,000 years ago, perhaps just a few centuries after the first humans made landfall in northern Australia. Then, giant marsupials roamed the region. One such creature, the size of a rhinoceros, left its bones below what is now Arden Street in North Melbourne, while herds of others comprised a veritable graveyard of marsupial giants in the outer suburb of Keilor. By around 46,000 years ago such creatures had vanished across the continent. The cause of their demise is still debated, but it is likely that hunting by the first Australians was a significant factor.
Those same first settlers would begin burning the landscape, restricting fire-sensitive plant species like tree ferns and Antarctic beech to the wetter gullies and mountains, and allowing grasses and eucalypts to inherit the rolling hills and broad valleys of the city-to-be. We have no clear evidence of what those first, fire-wielding inhabitants were like, but later peoples did leave traces, including an ancient skull found during the excavation of a soil pit near Keilor in 1940. The bone, later to be known as the ‘Keilor cranium’, came to the attention of the Reverend Edmund Gill, one of the last parson-naturalists and the curator of fossils at the marvellously named National Museum of Victoria. Years later, using early Carbon-14 technology, Gill determined the skull was between 8000 and 15,000 years old.
In 1965, at a place called Green Gully, three short kilometres from the Keilor soil pit, a second spectacular discovery was made. It was a human grave so strange that it has baffled archaeologists ever since. The excavators at first assumed that the skeleton interred in the floodplain sediments was of a single individual. When they examined it more closely, though, they discovered that some bones were from a man while others, including the skull, were from a woman. The pair appear to have been exposed above the ground after death, allowing relatives to retrieve the bones. In a feat worthy of an expert anatomist, enough bones to make up a skeleton were subsequently placed in the grave, without a single bone being duplicated.
It is difficult to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary burial. Did the remains belong to a man and wife who loved each other so dearly that they wished to be joined in eternity? Or does the assemblage denote some other, long-lost meaning? Sadly, excavation of the Green Gully site has now ceased, a casualty of the great breach between Aboriginal communities and archaeologists in Victoria. Perhaps the site will yield its secrets to some future Australia, in which black and white can work together in exploring the continent’s past.
At the time Australia’s first human inhabitants were familiarising themselves with their new estate, the planet was about to experience a rapid cooling. As ice accumulated at the poles, the sea level dropped. By 20,000 years ago the waters had deserted the bay—indeed, all of Bass Strait was dry. Then the Barrern flowed through a vast, swampy bottomland as it meandered towards a distant ocean. Because the sea level was so low, it cut a deep valley. At Port Melbourne water flowed more than thirty metres below its present bed, and at the Spencer Street Bridge it was twenty metres below. The deep valley thus created has proved an expensive handicap for development as it greatly increased the building costs of structures such as Port Melbourne’s Breakwater Pier and the Westgate Bridge. The cost comes in the foundations, which must be sufficiently deep to reach the bedrock many metres below. In the case of Breakwater Pier, muck had to be first excavated to a depth of twenty metres, and sand from Hobsons Bay used to create a stable base.
During this period of low sea level, known as the last glacial maximum, Melbourne was a much colder, windier place than today. Huge dust storms borne on winds generated over a Sahara-like central Australia would have been a dramatic annual occurrence. The cold and aridity allowed a bizarre mix of species to proliferate. Red kangaroos (whose bones have been found at Sunshine) and desert wallabies grazed among the alpine tussocks and sphagnum-moss swamps, while stands of snow gums struggled to survive in sheltered places on what is now the eastern side of the bay. While this Melbourne seems very alien to us, it is not entirely unfamiliar, for El Niño brings similar, though milder conditions to the city. The last such ice-age reminder I recall was in 1983, when great dust clouds blew over the city and water was in short supply.
About 15,000 years ago, for reasons that no one fully understands, the last glacial maximum abruptly terminated. The sea rose, first flooding into Bass Strait and then into the Heads, so that by 6000 years ago the shoreline stood where it does today. When workers were excavating for the south pylon of the Spencer Street Bridge they were surprised to come upon the stump of a mighty red gum at a depth of twenty metres. It last saw daylight 8200 years ago. The sea continued to rise and by around 5000 years ago the waters of the bay lapped as far inland as Essendon. In the slightly warmer conditions that then prevailed, Sydney cockles thrived in the lower reaches of the Barrern. By 4000 years ago the sea had begun a gradual retreat and the river carried sediment towards the bay, smothering the ancient shell-beds. At the time the Egyptians were building their pyramids, the Melbourne that John Batman knew was finally taking shape.
By the time John Murray of the Lady Nelson sailed past the Heads in 1802 and named the waterway beyond, this dynamic history had given rise to a most beautiful and bountiful region. A limpid river flowed over a rocky waterfall known as the Yarra Yarra, at what is now the foot of Market Street, before debouching into a large, deep pool at the head of a paperbark-lined estuary. Billabongs and swamps were sprinkled right around the bay, and they teemed with brolgas, magpie-geese, Cape Barren geese, swans, ducks, eels and frogs. So abundant was the wildlife that we can imagine the Melbourne area in 1830 as a sort of temperate Kakadu and, as in Arnhem Land, it was the wetlands that were the focus of life.
Few pioneers saw the beauty of the so-called swamps, but George Gordon McCrae has left us a precious vision of the Blue Lake, which in his childhood occupied low ground near the Flagstaff Gardens. It was:
intensely blue, nearly oval and full of the clearest salt water; but this by no means deep. Fringed gaily all round by mesembryanthemum (‘pigs-face’) in full bloom, it seemed in the broad sunshine as though girdled about with a belt of magenta fire. The ground gradually sloping down towards the lake was also empurpled, but patchily, in the same manner, though perhaps not quite so brilliantly, while the whole air was heavy with the mingled odours of the golden myrnong flowers and purple-fringed lilies, or ratafias. Curlews, ibises and ‘blue cranes’ were there in numbers…black swans occasionally visited it, as also flocks of wild ducks.
When the wattles bloomed in the chilly air of August, the entire Yarra Valley was lit up with gold, and each spring the sand-sheets of what are now the city’s bayside suburbs would glow with orchids, banksias and other heathland flowers. This plant community was known as the ‘Sandringham flora’, and was remarkable for its orchids—in fact most of the state’s species were said to be found there.
For all its beauty and deep Gondwanan roots, much of this magical landscape was not entirely ‘natural’, for Aboriginal hunting and fire played a central role before, during and after the ice age in shaping and maintaining it.
The Aboriginal tribes of the Melbourne area—the Jajowrong, Wudthaurung, Taungerong, Woiwurrung and Bunurong—were impressive, for the land was bountiful and they were well-fed. The Jagajaga brothers with whom John Batman negotiated in 1835 were around six feet tall (183 centimetres). The tribes lived healthy, settled lives, and at densities far greater than was possible for the rest of Aboriginal Australia.
Some sense of the resources available to them can be gained from mid-1840s accounts of the superabundance of Melbourne’s fish. In four hours’ angling at the Yarra falls it was commonplace to catch over 150 bream, each weighing up to a kilogram. Great knob-headed snapper weighing over fifteen kilograms were so plentiful in the bay as to sell for a mere ninepence each, while crayfish and large flathead were to be had for the spearing in the shallows.
The Ocean and Calcutta, which comprised Victoria’s own ‘first fleet’, entered this beautiful bay in 1803. They were packed with convicts and stores, and were led by David Collins who had first arrived in Australia in 1788. They settled at Sullivans Cove near Sorrento, where the soils and water were so appalling that within a few months they gave up and fled, leaving the escaped convict William Buckley as the sole human legacy of this failed venture.
The next wave of settlers, led by John Batman and soon followed by John Fawkner, were very different. They had come in search of cheap land, and at least at the beginning were beyond the law. One of Batman’s earliest acts was to ‘purchase’ a vast tract of country—the first of many land acquisitions that would dispossess one people and enrich another. Batman himself had an enlightened view towards the Aboriginal people, and his treatment of them was the closest thing to a fair deal they would see from colonial Victoria. But Batman’s sympathy was rare and—once the veneer of legality had been obtained by the settlers—guns, sheep (which obliterated the yam daisy) and the black police would do the real work. The first ‘criminals’ to hang in the Old Melbourne Gaol were Aborigines, but for all the massacres, rapes and poisonings that so terribly marred Victoria’s first few decades, not a single European would be brought to justice. It is a shameful history, concealed by the perpetrators and largely ignored by today’s Victorians. Yet despite efforts to hide such racism, it is clear that from 1835 to around 1850 Victoria was one of the very worst places to be an Aborigine.
The ruthless treatment of Aboriginal society left the tribes in despair. In June 1837, as Melbourne’s first land sale was held with Robert Hoddle holding the gavel, they watched with increasing bitterness. Their disillusionment was given voice by Derrimut, who had saved the infant settlement from massacre in October 1835. ‘You see, Mr Hull,’ he told a magistrate he met on the street some years later, ‘Bank of Victoria, all this mine, all along here Derrimut’s once; no matter now, me tumble down soon.’ Hull asked if Derrimut had any children, at which the enraged Aborigine replied, ‘Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children, no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.’ A fragment of Derrimut’s vast tribal estate was at last regained by him when, in 1864, he was buried in the Melbourne general cemetery. The generosity of the settlers even extended to a headstone.
Melbourne’s first Aboriginal mission was established in 1837, near what is now the Royal Botanic Gardens. It lasted just three years before the land became too valuable and the blacks were removed to a site near Narre Warren, far to the east. William Thomas, a protector of Aborigines, wrote in his diary the day the Aborigines were relocated:
From sun rise to sun set spent in arguing, reasoning, and persuading the natives—They declare that they will not remove. They had camped on private property …I tell them again that they make willums on White Man’s ground, and cut down trees and cut off bark, make White Man sulky—they say no White Man’s ground Black Man’s.
The Narre Warren reserve was a catastrophe for the blacks, for despite the determined resistance of the elders it was used as a recruiting depot for the black police. The young men were taken away, armed and used to kill, dispossess and arrest other Aborigines. In an effort to avoid the loss of their finest youth the tribes finally deserted the site, leaving it as a base solely for use by the black police, most of whom suffered gross alcohol abuse and appallingly early deaths. Soon thereafter they were gathered up again and dumped on reserves at Mordialloc and Warrandyte, but these too failed. Then 23,000 acres was allocated on the Goul-burn River, and at first the Aborigines prospered because of new agricultural and employment opportunities. Again, though, the land was considered too valuable to remain in black hands, and after allegations were made by settlers about its operation, it was de-gazetted and sold to the whites.
In 1859 the remaining Woiwurrung took matters into their own hands, requesting land on the Acheron River in central Victoria where eighty-odd people had begun establishing farms. White hostility, primarily from local squatters, soon crushed this attempt at independence, and the bureaucrats ordered the Aborigines further down river. ‘No worse site could have been chosen,’ noted one observer, but the Melbourne blacks were to be moved a second time before the Acheron was permanently abandoned.
A brief halt to this hideous tale of greed, dispossession and official incompetence occurred in 1863 when the Coranderrk reserve near Healesville was gazetted for Aboriginal use. At 2300 hectares it was a flyspeck compared with the tribes’ holdings of twenty-five years earlier, but the Aborigines had also diminished terribly; only 200 remained from all five of the once populous Melbourne tribes.
There they developed several viable businesses, but their greatest success lay in the growing of hops. Coranderrk hops gave the Aborigines a sense of achievement and control worth even more than the cash, for the product was highly esteemed, winning prizes at the Melbourne Agricultural Show and being in demand by brewers. The Aborigines even employed white labourers to help harvest the crop. But, once more, the land that supported this remarkable experiment would not be left in black hands. In 1886, the land-boomers triumphed when a law was passed ordering the removal from reserves of all people of mixed blood. This effectively destroyed many Aboriginal families and removed most of the Coranderrk workforce, allowing the government to reclaim and sell the half of the reserve not subject to flooding.
William Barak was a boy when Batman landed and was the last traditional leader of the Woiwurrung. By the time he died on the remaining fragment of the Coranderrk reserve in 1903 there was just a handful of Victorian Aborigines surviving. Forty-five thousand years of Aboriginal occupation in the Melbourne area had come to an end.
From Batman’s time onwards the settlement experienced rapid growth as the pioneers, led by pastoralists, land speculators and traders, made the place their own. Just what they did with it hardly bears thinking about.
It started with the laying out of the town. Assistant surveyor-general Robert Russell recalled that it was done from ‘a plan in the Sydney office’. The ‘plan’ was nothing but a grid, which Russell plonked down in an afternoon on the undulating landscape adjacent to the Yarra falls. This meant that the city would start life at odds with its topography as well as with its traditional owners.
Much of the road grid running up hill and down gully was soon transformed into quagmires. The worst was Elizabeth Street, which during the 1840s was known as the ‘River Townend’, after the grocers’ store that stood near the head of the gully. There, entire bullock drays along with their bullocks were reputed to have been swallowed up. To highlight the appalling conditions of the street one wit placed an advertisement in a Melbourne newspaper:
Wanted immediately one thousand pairs of stilts for the purpose of enabling the inhabitants of Melbourne to carry on their usual avocations—the mud in most of the principal thoroughfares now being waist-deep.
Even worse, the plan and the populace abused their best asset—the Yarra River. Not a word of protest appears to have been raised when the pretty waterfall was blasted out of existence. In fact the settlers were busy turning the stream into a chamber of horrors. Here is how the wife of an Italian businessman recalled it in the 1850s:
these banks are merely a long series of slaughterhouses where sheep are killed; tanneries where their hides are prepared; and factories where their fat is prepared for the market. Here and there appear white mountains twenty-five, thirty and forty feet high; these are the bones. These slaughterhouses…give forth a pestilential odour that made me regard Port Phillip with horror even before arriving.
In the 1860s an event occurred that exceeded even these barbarities. A terminus was needed for the new country train lines, and to accommodate them Melbourne’s most picturesque elevation and favourite pleasure ground—Batman’s Hill—was gouged flat and the refuse used to fill the Blue Lake. With trains and pollution replacing eucalypts and herons, the Yarra had finally been made fit only for a fast getaway—and the network of railyards, roads and docks that now crowded its banks facilitated the exit.
While Melbourne’s environment and its Aboriginal inhabitants were on a slippery slope to oblivion, the city’s entrepreneurs were riding a crazy roller-coaster of boom and bust. Land purchased for as little as £54 in 1837 sold for £10,250 two years later. Champagne lunches were the inevitable prelude to frenzied auctions, and for years after visitors commented on the number of discarded champagne bottles that littered the region. Yet by 1842 this first bubble had burst, and the infant settlement fell into the grip of recession.
The discovery of gold a decade later revivified the city, paying for the erection of instant testimonials to European culture such as the town hall and treasury building. In 1856 alone around 95 tonnes of the yellow stuff was scratched from the ground, enough to intoxicate the whole world with gold fever and to bring whatever was wanted to Melbourne. Yet that golden fortune only added to the misfortune of the natives, for Melburnians now possessed the wealth to realise their European dreams, and what they wished to do was to re-create their homeland in the Antipodes. They yearned for English-style gardens full of English birds and animals and, once this flora and fauna was imported, Melbourne’s rich soils and defined seasons allowed them to flourish. Among the newcomers were foxes and rabbits, both released near Geelong. Within fifty years these creatures had turned the dream to a nightmare, for they both spread like wildfire, devastating native Australia and pastoralist alike.
Gold also created a frontier society on a scale never experienced in Australia before or since. Melbourne lay at the epicentre of this new world where the pursuit of wealth was the great raison d’être and where, in true frontier fashion, life was cheap. The British writer William Howitt described the place as being in the grips of a ‘hairystocracy’—men in bowyangs with flowing locks and beards who galloped their horses through the streets—and who brawled and drank equally freely whether at the opera or the pub. To the British upper class they represented a perversion of the social order, a complete breakdown of class and authority.
The social changes engendered during this period, however, were to endure. December 1854 saw government troops attack digger rebels near Ballarat, an incident which came to be known as the Eureka Stockade. Following the capture of many of the diggers, Melbourne juries refused to convict the rebels. These events were to precipitate radical administrative reforms. City workers were also gaining power, as was demonstrated in April 1856 when stonemasons working on the University of Melbourne quadrangle held a protest which won them an eight-hour working day. It was perhaps this freedom of the working man, along with other frontier aspects of Melbourne society, that led nineteenth-century visitors to describe the place as decidedly American in character, and unlike any other Australian city. Even Karl Marx commented upon the American flavour of the resolution passed during the Eureka protests.
By the 1850s Melbourne was already a multicultural city. It had large Jewish and Chinese communities, diggers from many nations and a floating population of sailors drawn from around the world. Then, as now, Little Bourke Street was Chinatown, but nineteenth-century Chinatown was a very different place from today. For a start it was profoundly masculine—almost no Chinese women came to Australia and few European women married Chinese—and perhaps as a result, gambling and opium smoking were rife. The opium dens also acted as hideouts for prostitutes and petty criminals, so although the quarter had an orderly veneer it hid many a dark secret.
By the 1870s and 1880s some of the frontier aspects of Melbourne had begun to fade. Grand buildings were giving the city gravitas, while new arcades and an elegant area known as ‘the Block’—Collins Street—were stages for the city’s elite to promenade and display their sophistication and wealth. The pursuit of riches and a determination ‘to get ahead’, however, still stamped the character of its inhabitants, and you did not have to go far to find reminders of a more raucous Melbourne. Larrikins—idle young men with no good on their minds— gathered in the lanes and on street corners, and after dark wild brawls would spill out of the more notorious pubs.
The city also had a decidedly quirky side. On Saturday evenings the Eastern Market—on the corner of Exhibition and Bourke streets—was taken over by large numbers of pigeon fanciers, and tumblers and other strange breeds were set loose to strut their stuff. Even the main streets displayed more than their fair share of the bizarre. Had you walked down Swanston Street in the late 1880s you might have seen, in a sombrely wreathed shop window opposite the town hall, an emaciated figure standing inside a coffin. He was the ‘living skeleton’, a man so wasted by tuberculosis that doctors gave him just two weeks to live. A freak-show operator had seen a way to make a buck out of this grim situation, and while the poor fellow’s strength endured he displayed his pathetic body in public. An easiness with death has always been part of the frontier make-up, and it is perhaps one of the city’s great incongruities that such displays could exist alongside a Collins Street that was described as having all the sophistication of a Parisian boulevard.
Living skeletons aside, the city’s entertainments were by this time almost modern. Australian Rules football, a thoroughly local invention, was well and truly established, cricket was being played at the MCG and the Melbourne Cup was run each November, drawing the most beautiful women and dashing men in the province to the course.
By the time the cupola of the Exhibition Building rose to dominate the city’s skyline in 1880 it stood above a rich and grand metropolis. This was the era of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, a place that the world looked on in amazement and envy—the commercial powerhouse of a continent. International exhibitions were held by the ebullient inhabitants, more ornate buildings constructed, and wealth pursued with a singular enthusiasm. ‘If you wish to transact business well and quickly, to organise a new enterprise— in short, to estimate and understand the trade of Australia, you must go to Melbourne,’ wrote English visitor Richard Twopeny in the early 1880s. Yet so dramatically had the natural environment of the city declined that he could also say, ‘The situation of Melbourne is commonplace if not actually ugly.’
Marvellous Melbourne could not last, for it was based upon a kind of boosterism that brooked no limits. By 1890 corrupt business practices, over-capitalisation in railways and irresponsible land speculation threw the city into a depression unprecedented in its length and severity. It marked a turning point in the outlook of Melburnians, for the mad speculations of the get-rich-quick brigade were succeeded almost overnight by a business community with a deeply conservative turn of mind, and so it would remain for much of the twentieth century.
Even during this economic slump, however, the metropolis still teemed with ideas. Melbourne has always been at the centre of Australia’s labour movement, and it has long acted as a great cauldron of politically liberal as well as conservative ideologies—home to both Trades Hall and the Melbourne Club. In the media and the arts, too, Melbourne proved to be no slouch. In the 1860s journalist and novelist Marcus Clarke was a columnist for the Argus, and in the 1870s John Stanley James aka The Vagabond was the same. The peripatetic political radical, poet and social commentator Francis Adams spent time in the city and found much to criticise. The 1880s also saw Melbourne as the setting for an international bestseller, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which would go on to sell more than a million copies and would help inspire a young English writer by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. From the late 1880s painters Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton—collectively known as the Heidelberg School— produced startling works of the town and bush that are now widely regarded as the true beginnings of Australian art.
Melbourne’s day of triumph came in May 1901, when the city was host to the first sitting of Federal Parliament in the new Australian nation. It was unofficially proclaimed the first city of the country, and it remained as interim capital until Parliament moved to Canberra in 1927.
The twentieth century brought an unending stream of visitors to Melbourne—from sex-starved Yank soldiers bearing silk stockings during World War II to the entire world at the Olympic Games in 1956. Yet some of its most interesting visitors went unheralded. One of the most extraordinary, to my mind at least, arrived in 1959. The first person to notice her was a Mr McInnes, who was busy collecting sea-water from the beach opposite North Road at Brighton to replenish his aquarium. While knee-deep in the shallows he was startled by a disturbance caused by a live paper nautilus. She was freshly arrived from the Great Southern Ocean and, in her shell, nurtured hundreds of eggs. Soon other reports made it clear that she was but one of a great maternal fleet that had been driven into the bay by wind and water.
I was three years old when that special fleet visited. My Melbourne had been in existence for just over a century then, yet it wore the aspect of a timeless and majestic city, surrounded by formal parks and gardens. Somehow, a few natural inhabitants had survived the transformation, for I remember as a child searching for banjo frogs amid the rockeries of the Fitzroy Gardens, and fishing yabbies out of its ornamental ponds. But it was the bluestone that provided the strongest link with Birrarang. Even now when I walk through the city on a hot summer afternoon I stop and sniff the stone, for its distinctive odour somehow tells me that I’ve come home.
My childhood city was also the city of politicians Bob Santa-maria and Henry Bolte—men whose focus was on re-igniting old European quarrels and oiling the engines of commerce. This city’s Yarra River was polluted and lifeless, its bay a receptacle of foul drains and rubbish dumps, and its suburbs vast tracts of sterile lawns and roses. I still remember as a teenager seeing a flock of birds feeding in a magnificent flowering gum in full bloom. My heart leapt at the thought that they might be lorikeets. But when I got close I saw that they were starlings, which in this mangled environment had somehow discovered that the sweet drink offered by the scarlet blossoms was going begging.
And yet my very earliest memories are of the semi-wild suburb of Sandringham, with its tracts of tea-tree, swamps and remnant heathland—the last of the magnificent Sandringham flora. By the time I was in high school that wild place had been replaced by a grid of development which like the city itself ignored the landscape and sought only to maximise financial returns.
The great fluted cliffs of Red Bluff were the wonderland of my early childhood. Erosion gullies ran right through them—a labyrinth of tunnels revealing glimpses of the blue bay far below. To the city council, however, that striking landmark represented nothing more than an opportunity to dump rubbish. Tonnes of old cars, whitegoods, even old road surface were thrown down the cliff-face—destroying and covering the spectacular red, yellow and white sandstone columns—to lie in great rusting heaps by the shoreline, near where a metre-wide pipe seeped a foul-smelling run-off into the bay.
While still very young I used to go fishing on an old trawler called the Taivy. It set out every Saturday morning from Middle Brighton pier with twenty or so keen fishermen, mostly men who could not afford their own boat, or kids like me. Tas the skipper was an ex-boxer turned fisherman, and he and his wife Ivy lived aboard, running the ship as a retirement project. Tas always seemed to know where the fish were, and along with the scads of flathead we were all sure to catch there was always some lucky bugger who’d hook a red emperor, a barracouta or, best of all, a huge, hump-headed snapper. Then a shout would go up, and we’d all stop to watch the battle—one man with his short rod struggling against the mighty red-and-blue-spotted fish that seemed to glow in the clear water; and Tas with his blue eyes gleaming in his weatherbeaten face beneath a black beanie, net in hand, waiting for the exhausted creature to come alongside.
The Taivy would set off at 8 a.m. sharp, regardless of weather, and Ivy would keep us all warm with black tea and homemade cake. On a rough day seasickness would afflict quite a few of us. Tas would then work what he called his wonder cure. He’d wait until you were looking really green, then sidle up and say, ‘Want to feel better?’ When he got the inevitable nod he’d continue. ‘Just imagine a big lump of rancid fat—with great, black horse-hairs running through it.’ After you’d fed the fish he’d say, ‘Feeling better now?’ Of course you always were.
Those childhood experiences left me with a love for the bay that has only intensified over the years. At sixteen I learned to scuba dive with a mate, Brian. We’d take an inflatable Zodiac owned by Brian’s family far out into the bay and slip over the side. It always seemed like magic to see the flathead move over the sandy bottom towards the bait, and to see the tiny crabs that the fish fed on dash down their burrows. Visibility was rarely more than a couple of metres, so you had to get really close to see the drama.
Other times we’d visit the rocky reef off Ricketts Point to search for snagged anchors, or dive around the sunken Cerberus— a nineteenth-century battleship that was once the pride of the navy. Sometimes we’d dare each other to enter the hold through a great rust-forged hole in the hull where a giant octopus supposedly lived.
But the place I returned to again and again with my aqualung was the magic world of the Beaumaris fossil beds. The best fossils were found off the beach in water two or three metres deep, and the time to search for them was in winter, when pollution-fed algal growth was at its lowest and the frigid waters were clear. Then you could see for metres, and the fossil whale vertebra, shark’s teeth and the like could be made out on the seabed.
Sometimes the pain in my teeth and face was almost unbearable as the water found gaps between face-mask and wetsuit hood. But as the triangular shape of a fossilised shark’s tooth became visible on the sea floor I would forget the pain in an instant. The dives were like a wonderful treasure hunt. You might come to the surface holding a shark’s tooth stained blue with age, part of a crab preserved in stone, a delicate bone from the wing of a penguin, or struggle airwards grappling with a hunk of long-defunct whale’s skull. When my air ran out, I would often snorkel until the failing light drove me to shore. Most of my findings are now lodged in the Museum of Victoria, which arguably has the most significant collection of its type in the country. A good thing too, because tonnes of landfill have been dumped atop the Beaumaris site to build a yacht club and car park.
Sometimes the living bay would distract me from my obsession with its ancient precursor. One still day as I swam offshore, I bumped into an almost surreal sight. Predators had forced a huge school of whitebait into the shallows beneath the cliffs. The tiny fish were heading determinedly north—a never-ending, shimmering curtain of silver passing by at high speed. As I swam into the mass they enveloped me, leaving a ghostly outline of my body as a safety margin between their flesh and mine. Below the school I could see the silver flash of barracouta, and the distinctive shape of small sharks. It took fifteen minutes for the fish to pass.
In Batman’s time the most special part of the bay was its northern end—the shallow, nutrient-rich and relatively warm waters known as Hobsons Bay. Judging from the piles of aged and bleached seashells tossed up on Middle Park beach, the place once hosted a fauna that would have made the Great Barrier Reef flush with envy. As as kid I sorted through the whitened fragments, finding pieces of the lustrous, orange-striped zebra volute and delicate, pink-frilled venus clam, two of Australia’s most striking marine molluscs. I only dived in Hobsons Bay once. The stinking, oily water and the foul, black sludge coating the bottom were enough to make you gag.
In my twenties I became so saddened by the increasingly sterile environment and mindless destruction around the city that I left for Sydney. I still remember my first morning there, and the exhilaration of counting five species of parrots in the very centre of the metropolis.
Even so, I frequently returned to Melbourne and, over the years, discovered that braver souls than I had stayed and effected a transformation. I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of the change until I found myself walking the shores of Hobsons Bay one hot summer evening in 2001, hand-in-hand with my young nephews. What I saw in the sand astonished me, for among the shards of long-dead shells we found first one, then another and another, recently living zebra volute. Their shells were still stained black by the enduring pollution, robbing them of much of their beauty, but these marvellous creatures had returned, reminding me of what Melbourne once was, and what it again could be.
Premier Jeff Kennett will probably be remembered for turning Melbourne into the Los Angeles of the south, with its crowning glories a racetrack on top of the Yarra’s old billabong at Albert Park, tolled freeways and the Bolte Bridge. But Kennett also completed other changes initiated by his predecessor John Cain. For over a century the city had squatted beside the lower Yarra like a person on a toilet seat, presenting its backside to the water. Cain and Kennett saw that there was money to be made from water views, and of course one could not sell real estate fronting a sewer.
So youthful is this city that in my forty-odd years I have personally witnessed a quarter of its history, my parents almost half. Melbourne now seems to be finding its place in the world. It is recovering from the booms and busts that were driven by men drunk with dreams of instant wealth and power. Those generations built a wondrous city and destroyed a paradise, and in the extracts presented here you can read eyewitness accounts of just how they did it. The present generation, however, is building roots deep into the environment. For my money, the Melbourne of the twenty-first century is the truly ‘Marvellous Melbourne’.
Where necessary I have modernised punctuation and spelling, silently corrected a handful of obvious errors, inserted the occasional explanatory date and sometimes added a word or two of clarification in a footnote, indicated by an asterisk (*). Otherwise, the writings are presented as they were first printed, with any omissions of text indicated by an ellipsis (…).