Life
Page 23
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 Goulburn 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 that 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 that 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 Jewi
sh 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 seawater 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 Santamaria and Henry Bolte—men whose focus was on reigniting 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 fi
shermen, 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.