by Tim Flannery
James Bonwick described Buckley in later life ‘aimlessly walking in the streets of Hobart, with eyes fixed on some distant object’. The man was unique among his peers as someone who had not only lived extensively but could communicate on both sides of the frontier. Perhaps the ‘distant object’ that held his attention was the panorama of the Bellarine Peninsula and the simple pleasures that he experienced to the full there in earlier days. Buckley died on 2 February 1856, from injuries sustained after being thrown out of a gig.
Now it is time to take up with William Buckley in his travels and adventures. It’s as well to keep your eyes open and your wits about you as you do.
The Passing of Birrarang
2002
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 pig-sized 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 p
it 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 w
ork. 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.