South Melbourne

By Susan Priestley

"South Melbourne is a state of mind. Once you live there, you don’t want to shift." Doris Condon, South Melbourne resident from 1942 until her death in 1979, Mayor 1969 to 1970.

The first of Melbourne’s suburbs to adopt fuoll municipal status, South Melbourne has also been at the forefront of many of the forces that have shaped both the local and national landscapes. Having seen its Aboriginal inhabitants displaced by European settlers, what became of one of Melbourne’s first industrial suburbs then underwent a shift from manufacturing to commercial industry after the Second World War before experiencing the recent push for inner-city heritage conservation and urban renewal.

South Melbourne’s people have participated in the national dramas of immigration, federation, booms, busts, and world war. Not surprisingly in a suburb that boasts some of Melbourne’s most popular beaches and sporting grounds, the residents have contributed significantly to the national passions for beach culture and sport, producing cricket heros, football legends and playing host, most controversially, to motor racing. As the home of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Victorian Arts Centre and other cultural institutions, South Melbourne has a unique place in Australia’s cultural life.

Part of an amalgamated City of Port Phillip since June 1994, the suburb now looks to draw strength from what Jessie Kennelly, long-time resident and widow of Senator Pat Kennelly, calls it ‘good past’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522864427

Book preview

routes

INTRODUCTION:

URBAN AND SUBURBAN

BY its very nature a suburb does not exist in isolation. It comes into being because of the overflowing dynamism of the urban centre to which it is attached, and is sustained only by meshing with any subsequent gear changes in that dynamism. Complementing or competing linkages with other suburbs can also have a profound influence on its growth, and on its sense of identity. Whether a suburb attains a distinctive identity or subsides into homogeneous suburbia depends on the generations of people who have worked and lived there. A sense of identity is cumulative, even if not always continuous, the remnants from one generation being the imprint which moulds the next. Pinning down the nature of South Melbourne’s suburban identity and tracing its fluctuations over 160 years is the aim of this history. Such historical insights into one suburb may provide avenues towards understanding the urban/suburban environment in which the vast majority of Australians choose to live.

South Melbourne’s location is implicit in its name, south of and immediately across the Yarra River from the core business district of the Victorian metropolis. Melbourne is the State capital and its largest urban centre. It is also a primary historical site, having been chosen for settlement in 1835 by rival parties from Van Diemen’s Land headed by John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner. From the outset these two men contested the claim to be Melbourne’s founder, and rivalry between Batman and Fawkner factions did not cease with the former’s early death on 6 May 1839, but has persisted to the present. Most recently, descendants of John Lancey and other members of the original party on Fawkner’s Enterprise have made their own distinctive claims.¹

South Melbourne’s shared boundary with Melbourne was midstream along a sweep of the Yarra River from Princes Bridge to a point opposite the entrance to Victoria Dock. The curves of the river were more sinuous and swamp-edged in 1837 when Robert Hoddle surveyed the town of Melbourne as a rectangular grid on its northern bank. He was acting on instructions from Governor Richard Bourke who visited the upstart settlement in March of that year. Fortunate in its geographical location at the head of a bay affording safe ship anchorage, and with ready access to grazing country, the Yarra settlement was designated the Port Phillip District’s official centre in 1836, thereby fixing the commercial and mercantile focus of the region as well. Melbourne’s urban destiny was never challenged.

British law required that, before its sale, land had to be surveyed as counties, each divided into land parishes, which in turn were subdivided into sections, allotments and reserves for various purposes. The land parish of South Melbourne was proclaimed on 23 March 1840, and gazetted on 1 April.² It encompassed the former Nahram Reserve and matched the east-west extent of the Melbourne Reserve on the north bank, that Reserve also being proclaimed North Melbourne parish on the same day.

Partly in old Nahram Reserve and partly in the land parish of Prahran a short-lived Aboriginal Area was reserved on the south bank of the Yarra, where George Langhorne attempted to run a mission school and farm from 1836 to 1838. Originally 895 acres in extent, it was sold off as ‘suburban allotments’ of between ten and twenty acres beginning in June 1840.³ From that time the original brown-skinned people of Port Phillip faced increasing official pressure, moral and physical, to keep away from the urban centre spreading across their customary territory. The south bank of the Yarra immediately opposite Melbourne was part of the home ground of the Yalukit-willam, one of the clans of the Bunurong tribe of the Kulin people.

Land lots in the South Melbourne parish offered for sale in 1842 were at the bay landing of Sandridge (Port Melbourne after 1884) and at what was soon ‘the pretty marine village’ of St Kilda.⁴ Another decade passed before town allotments within the area which became the City of South Melbourne were surveyed in preparation for sale. These centred on ‘rising ground’, a grassy, lightly-treed hill somewhat isolated among swamps, reedy lagoons and sandy scrub. The hill was about half way across the three- or four-kilometre expanse between the Yarra and what was named Hobson’s Bay, the sheltered curve at the northern end of Port Phillip. It was the anchorage for ships, bringing immigrants, goods and stock, firstly from Van Diemen’s Land and Sydney, and after 1838 from Britain, Europe and America.

Passengers disembarked and goods were unloaded through ferry and lighter services originally based at Williamstown, proclaimed as Melbourne’s port in 1837. Town lots there were included in Melbourne’s first land sales held in the same year, giving Williamstown some claim as Melbourne’s first suburb. But a roundabout overland journey from port to Yarra Settlement was necessary to avoid the tidal estuary and a swampy lagoon just upstream of the river’s junction with the Saltwater (later Maribyrnong) River. The alternative bay landing on the beach to the east of the Yarra mouth meant a much shorter journey to the river bank opposite Melbourne where crossings could be made by ferry or punt. The Liardet family’s landing service from the end of 1839 has become the acknowledged genesis of Port Melbourne.⁵

The low rise between the Yarra and the port was designated Emerald Hill in November 1845 in newspaper publicity for a picnic, and a decade later the name was taken for the local municipality, the first to be defined under the Colony of Victoria’s original Local Government Act of 1854. Renamed South Melbourne in 1883, its most closely connected neighbour has always been Port Melbourne. The municipality’s eastern boundary curved along St Kilda Road from Princes Bridge as far south as Lome Street which is opposite High Street, Prahran. The City of Melbourne parklands— Alexandra Gardens and the Domain—and the school reserves which fringe the east side of St Kilda Road accentuate the divide between South Melbourne and Prahran. St Kilda abuts South Melbourne at Lome Street and a line from it which crosses Queens Road, cuts through the southern end of Albert Park, crosses Canterbury Road and runs along Fraser Street to the bay beach. The shoreline running almost straight north-west from this point to Pickles Street completes the boundary. Until the acquisition of Southbank by the City of Melbourne in February 1994, it enclosed an area of 2303 acres (944 hectares), about one-fifth of which is the open space called Albert Park from 1862, but originally South or Home Park.

By the time that news reached Melbourne in November 1850 that the Port Phillip District had been granted its long sought separation from New South Wales, the capital of the new colony of Victoria had been a city for three years. Like Sydney, it had had its own town council from 1842, its municipal domain being extended in December 1844 to encompass the whole parish of South Melbourne. Civic traditionalists link city status with the appointment of a bishop. Melbourne’s two bishops, Anglican and Catholic, were appointed in July 1847 and installed in their respective dioceses in January and October 1848.⁶

Residential suburbs had sprung up immediately adjacent to the city, beginning in 1839, when suburban allotments in Jika Jika parish, ranging in size from 4 to 25 acres, were sold at what became Newtown, later named Collingwood, and then Fitzroy.⁷ Like the South Melbourne allotments sold in 1840 and 1842, they were intended for households aspiring to the original suburban ideal of rus in urbe , country living within reach of the city. These original suburban blocks allowed for house room, orchards, vegetable gardens, stabling and enclosures for horses, cattle, pigs and poultry, providing for most if not all of a household’s fresh food and transport requirements. River or creek supplied fresh water, supplemented by wells where the ground was suitable or by water barrels set to catch roof runoff. Timbered blocks had a higher value, since they provided household fuel as well as rough building or fencing material, whether for home use or sale.

This concept of suburban self-sufficiency remained viable for a couple of generations, but only at one remove from Melbourne in what are now regarded as the middle ring of suburbs, from Essendon and Moonee Ponds, through Coburg, Northcote, Kew, Hawthorn and Malvern down to bayside Brighton. Closer in, suburban blocks were quickly subdivided by monetary sharp wits during the housing scarcity engendered by Port Phillip’s first wave of immigrants. Beyond Jolimont, which was the ‘new mansion of His Honor the Superintendent’ in November 1840, a block in what became Richmond was offered for sale as the ‘Extension of Melbourne . . . Thirty Capacious Allotments . . . adapted for Villa residences with gardens’. Six had 70- or 76-foot frontages to Erin Street, and the rest 60-foot frontages to narrower streets.⁸

Edmund Finn, who arrived in July 1841, recalled a less grandiose development in the backblocks of North Fitzroy. ‘In consequence of the manner in which the land was sliced up into small sub-sections at Newtown, bunches of cabin residences leaped up there, formed of sod, brick, wood, canvas, or any other sort of material available.’ The ‘conglomeration of huts’ was particularly noticeable near the corner of Brunswick and Moor streets, and was then a haven for the ‘rascality of the town’.⁹

A decade later in 1852 and less than a year after the original discovery of gold in Victoria, William Howitt commented on the suburbanisation of Melbourne.¹⁰ From his brother Dr Godfrey Howitt’s home on the corner of Collins and Spring streets he was driven

several miles into the country . . . Everywhere there is the same park-like look, the same erection of new houses of all kinds from the gentleman’s country seat. . . down to the little wooden hut, with tents pitched near it for accommodation which the house is too small to afford.

Within walking distance of town, however, settlement was quite intense. Howitt conjured up the ‘extraordinary spectacle’ from near Bishopscourt, Clarendon Street, East Melbourne.

. . . an immense suburb, stretching parallel with the town, from the high land in the north down to the vale of the Yarra, some two miles in extent . . . all covered over with thousands of little tenements, chiefly of wood, and . . . only one storey high. [They] have sprung up from the vast increase in the population . . . and from the prohibition by the Town Council of the further erection of wooden buildings in the city. A balder and more unattractive scene cannot meet the eye . . . Every single tree has been felled to the ground . . . [Amongst the] wilderness of wooden huts [are] timber and rubbish, delightfully interspersed with pigs, geese, hens, goats and dogs innumerable.

Tiny houses with no gardens were the result, Howitt told his overseas readers, of land being ‘preposterously dear’. ‘In the most genteel part of Collingwood’ in 1853, Brunswick Street near Gertrude Street, brick residences of 5 or 7 rooms with detached kitchen, pantry, shed, and stables, were advertised as ‘adapted for the most respectable families; apart from the bustle and excitement of town life in the most healthy locality about Melbourne’.¹¹ However, this healthy apartness was already something of a real estate myth. At the northern end of Brunswick Street, 26 acres sold by the Crown in 1838 were subdivided in 1853 into 255 tiny lots. Averaging one-tenth of an acre, they were unashamedly aimed at ‘the Working Classes’ who would ‘benefit by the alteration in the Building Act’. This referred to an 1850 embargo on building in timber imposed by the City of Melbourne as a fire control measure, but then revoked for parts of North, South and East Melbourne.¹²

Disincentives to suburban settlement west of the Maribyrnong were scarcity of fresh water, timber and good garden soil, compounded by distance from the commercial, official hub across a river and swamp barrier. Melbourne’s lopsided expansion was thus determined from an early date. Bayside locations were attractive because of the perceived health benefits of sea air and bathing in the hotter months, as well as retirement from the dust and bustle of town. This was reflected in the ‘village, marine residence, suburban and cultivation’ allotments advertised in the partial subdivision of Henry Dendy’s Special Survey in April 1841. Dendy’s 5120 acres, just outside the five-mile limit from Melbourne, evolved into Brighton.¹³

Melbourne people had seaside advantages much closer to town at St Kilda, where a bluff provided views and breezes. Used by picknickers, including C. J. La Trobe, from an early date¹⁴ its first land sales in 1842 sought to attract permanent residents, some of whom saw a market in holiday makers. In June 1846 the Argus¹⁵ was pleased to report plans for a ‘commodious and elegant’ hotel built by Joseph Howard of the well-regarded Union Hotel in Elizabeth Street. It was to be

well adapted for the comfortable entertainment of families who, not possessing a marine residence, may wish to enjoy for a time during the summer, the bracing and invigorating air of St Kilda . . . Mr Howard [intends] to lay out the surrounding grounds in walks, with seats interspersed along them, in which jovial companions can quaff their wine and smoke their cigars, or

A youthful, loving modest pair

In other’s arms, breathe out the tender tale

Beneath the wattle flower that scents the evening gale.

In the summer of 1850-51, Howard began an omnibus service between his Royal Hotel and the city, which he hoped patrons would find ‘cheap, commodious and comfortable’. He also hosted a New Year horse-racing carnival held over two days.¹⁶ By then St Kilda residents included Messrs Jackson and Walsh and Dr A. F. A. Greeves, ‘physician, politician and newspaper editor’. Early in 1853 they combined to offer twenty villa allotments hived off from their ‘charming properties’, and happily outside the influence of the ‘obnoxious Building Act’.¹⁷

St Kilda’s domestic or dormitory character predominated from the outset. The traveller William Kelly noted that by March 1854 St Kilda had ‘ripened into a large and attractive settlement’ from the scattered ‘olden villas and houses’ and the unstable ‘mushroom edifices’ of the previous year. Unhappy with the rapid suburban crowding around his former home on Emerald Hill, Kelly bought a St Kilda villa on half an acre. It fronted a main road, but still had ‘an air of seclusion about it which quite took my fancy’. Although of timber, it was

what was called a ‘brick-nagged house’, that is, with brick fireplaces and chimneys. It had, moreover, adobe gables, and lath and plaster partitions and ceilings, with detached kitchen and offices; and if the garden fence was in a porous condition, the soil was of a character that would compensate the cost of enclosure. I must not omit to mention that there was a pretty flower and shrub garden in front.

Kelly and the friend who shared the house mended the fence to keep out wandering pigs and goats, painted the woodwork and put ‘a coat of roughcast on the walls’. Crucial to enjoyment of their suburban retreat, however, was that it was within easy reach of their business interests in Melbourne along a ‘magnificent macadamised’ Brighton (later St Kilda) Road.¹⁸

William Kelly’s satisfaction with suburbia would continue to find echoes with succeeding generations. Suburbanism in Australia may have originated in middle-class or bourgeois notions of individualism, quiet and order, but such aspirations were shared by many of those deemed to be working class. So Mary Ann Hall, newly arrived from Gloucestershire with her carpenter husband in 1862, described for her mother the domestic delights of the Collingwood cottage they had rented. It stood ‘quite by itself. . . a very pretty one, all wood with a verandah over the door and a nice little garden all around . . . one end [of which] is covered with rose trees and jasmine and passion flowers’. Moreover, Collingwood was ‘a very large place and so healthy, not like the towns in England’.¹⁹ The intrusiveness of industry, particularly bootmaking for which Collingwood became widely known, was not yet apparent. Within this pattern of suburban development, South Melbourne carved out its own character.

Apartness, healthiness, and some form of economic rationale were the imperatives in the genesis of Melbourne suburbs, while linkages between home and workplace continue to shape their character. The resultant suburb may be a dormitory or primarily residential area, a mix of residential with local or regional commercial services, or a more complex mix of living, commercial and industrial space, including service industries like transport and tourism. The suburb of South Melbourne began with an industry rationale provided by brickmakers, stock keepers and boatbuilders during the 1840s. It developed as a residential and industrial mix intimately tied to the core of Melbourne. When industry retreated to the metropolitan outskirts after the Second World War, its place was taken by an expanding commerce and service sector which South Melbourne was able to incorporate, but not without sacrificing some living space in the process.

Given such ties and proximity, it is not surprising that proposals for amalgamation or partial amalgamation with the Melbourne core and/or Port Melbourne have studded South Melbourne’s history since 1883. Most have been foiled or foundered on an intangible but powerful sense of identity in one or other of the suburban parties. Such intangibles were nevertheless broadly discounted in 1993 by the Local Government Board charged with municipal restructure throughout Victoria, a review initiated more than thirty years ago. In May 1994 the Board recommended the amalgamation of South Melbourne, Port Melbourne and St Kilda into the City of Port Phillip. The change came into effect, under three Commissioners, on 22 June 1994.

1

BUNURONG TERRITORY

The Natives are a fine race of men many of them handsome in their persons and all well made. They are strong and athletic very intelligent and quick in their perceptions[;] they have fine foreheads acquiline noses thin lips and all of them very fine teeth . . . But as they advance in years their teeth wear down . . . The women and especially the young ones are particularly modest in their behaviour and also in their dress.

J. T. Gellibrand, Memorandum of a Trip to Port Phillip, 1836,

in T. F. Bride (ed.), Letters from Victorian Pioneers, p. 31

This morning we were visited by 3 males and 2 females of the Bonurong [sic] tribe. One of the men was a fine manly figure and remarkably intelligent; he is the first I have seen with the cartilage of the nose pierced. The two females were young and remarkably interesting, the prettiest black women I have seen and so modest as hardly to be spoken with. We obtained from them a benyak or native basket, and a piece of network worn as a band round the forehead to stick feathers in . . . the work of native females.

Journal of James Dredge, 20 February 1839,

Historical Records of Victoria, volume 2B, p. 424

Very soon we had an opportunity of witnessing. . . the admirable dexterity with which . . . [even] very little boys . . . fling the boomerangs. To our thinking, the thrower was only sending the instrument along the ground, when suddenly after spinning along it a little way, it sprung up into the air. . . its crescent shape spinning into a ring. . . round and round, until it came and fell at its [sic] feet. . . [The skill came from] abundant application, and great natural freedom and elasticity of limb . . . I met one day a black and two lubras; the man articulated his name in a way I could not understand it; the names of the women were, if I rightly heard them, Eligana and Torticalla. The old man, large limbed and grim-faced, would have made a good Neptune if he had had a trident in his hand instead of his fishing and fighting spear. . . I have never seen more graceful figures than many of the men, some of them venerable . . . with quite Roman-like nobility of contour; bold strong, well-rounded limbs, and fine countenances . . . [The women are] . . . large-bodied creatures with two very lean mop-like legs . . . flattish round heads, . . . [the] exceptions [being] not exactly handsome, but rather pleasant-looking women.

Richard Howitt, soon after arriving in April 1840,

in Impressions of Australia Felix, 1845, pp. 186, 195

Bunurong at home 1837, Yarra Yarra near the Falls

IMPRESSIONS recorded by European newcomers are among the few glimpses present-day Australians have of the Wathaurang, Bunurong and Woiworung people when they were secure and at ease in their own country around the shores of Port Phillip Bay. They were members of the Kulin nation, identified by a common language although there were dialects among the sub-groups known as clans. These ‘Port Phillip tribes’ had complex social, economic and spiritual connections, based in part on intermarriage, giving them conditional acces to each other’s home country.

On John Batman’s original inland excursion in June 1835 he and eight leading men from the Woiworung and the Bunurong went through a ceremony on the banks of a stream, possibly Merri Creek or even Edgar’s Creek at Thomastown. The eight put identifying marks on a land sale ‘treaty’ in exchange for blankets and other items, with promises of more to come. Five of the eight can be positively identified as influential Kulin leaders, which led anthropologist Diane Barwick to suggest that they saw the incident as Batman’s rather clumsy attempt at tanderrum, the ceremony of obtaining visiting rights to a particular territory.¹ Governor Richard Bourke’s proclamation of 26 August 1835 that the treaty had no legal standing indirectly, if unwittingly, supported the Kulin position.²

Tribal territories and clan sections can be outlined only tentatively, and accepted boundaries probably changed over generations of Kulin culture. The Werribee River was certainly the divide between Woiworung/Bunurong country and Wathaurang country to the west. The domain of the five Woiworung clans, known collectively as the Yarra tribe, was not just the Yarra valley but all the rivers which ran southwards to join it, including the Maribyrnong. The five Bunurong clans were known as the coast tribe, with land rights and responsibilities from Western Port across what is now Melbourne’s south-eastern sprawl to the Yarra about Gardiners Creek, then along the narrow strip between river and bay and across to the lower Werribee. South Melbourne comes within the preserve of the Yalukit-willam clan.

Corroboree c. 1840, engraving in Richard Howitt’s impressions 1845

The lower Yarra, however, had a special cultural place as a meeting ground for gatherings of all the Kulin perhaps two or three times a year. One particular campsite was afterwards chosen as a mission station by George Langhorne who came from Sydney as official missionary to the Aborigines in January 1836. It was ‘at the bend of the river . . . on a rising ground, forming a fine grassy slope to the river . . . In the rear was a large and picturesque swamp . . . To the southward was a rising ground, from which we could see Hobson’s Bay, about two miles distant’.³

For the Kulin people its amenities were manifold. It was near water but well drained, with timber for shelters and campfires, fish and yabbies from the river, eels and wildfowl from the swamp. In season, fish, mussels and oysters could be gathered from the bay shore. Crossing the river was never a problem. If the water was low, a rock shelf might make for easy wading but, as Surveyor Robert Russell noted,

a native black was rarely, if ever known to be drowned in the Yarra, in consequence of the perfection acquired in . . . the art of swimming. The children (male and female) . . . almost as soon as they could toddle . . . were pitched in like balls, watched for a short time, and . . . soon learned ‘to paddle their own canoe’. They could perform wondrous feats in swimming and diving . . . the mode . . . [being] unlike the European system, as the swimmer instead of lying flat in the water, went on his side with hand struck out from the shoulder as a steering apparatus, and the other hand and feet acting as powerful propellers.⁴

The hill behind the campsite was a convenient lookout and an occasional ceremonial ground, as were other rises, known to Europeans as Punt Road Hill or, to the north of the Yarra, Batman’s Hill, Eastern Hill and Flagstaff Hill. In simplified geological terms such hills arose from the uplift and folding of rock metamorphosed from ancient layers of marine sediment laid down in the Tertiary period dating back as far as 56 million years ago.⁵ Iron salts give a red tinge to the freestone which has the geological name of Black Rock sandstone. An early quarryface still shows in the Domain near the Swan Street bridge, while the bluff on the St Kilda foreshore is an outcrop of a band of rock extending to Port Melbourne, where it was overlain by sand. An old boatman, A. E. Monk, recalled in 1938 that it had afforded secure below-ground storage for gunpowder used in the battery of cannon set up along the bay shore about 1856.⁶ Kulin people also used the gritty rock to advantage. According to Garryowen (Edmund Finn) the name of the St Kilda area was Euro Yroke ‘after a sort of sandstone found there, with which the blacks used to shape and sharpen their rude stone tomahawks’.⁷ The axe stone itself is likely to have been diorite from the Mt Wiliam quarry near Lancefield, which was a notable Kulin resource, and remains a protected archaeological site.

Emerald Hill is geologically unique in the Melbourne area, being the only outcrop of older volcanic rock, which has the general name of olivine basalt. It is the worn-down core of a volcano which was last active probably sixteen million years ago. Also volcanic was the band of rock which once ran across the Yarra in the vicinity of Queens Bridge forming a low falls which was a bar for tidal water, although a gap in the middle allowed a small boat to pass upstream. Above the line of rocks the water was fresh, while below it the swirling tides had scoured out a relatively deep basin. More recent volcanic activity in the period 2½ to 4½ million years ago laid the ‘newer’ basalt base for the plains north and west of Melbourne, and minor volcanic effusions may have continued into the era of human occupation.

The time horizon for the arrival of Kulin ancestors in this part of the world has been steadily pushed back by new archaeological evidence and techniques for dating it. Forty thousand years is the accepted minimum for human occupation but it may have begun sixty thousand or even eighty thousand years ago. This was during the last glaciation period or ice age when sea levels were low enough to expose the Bassian plain, now the sea floor of Bass Strait, while the present Tasmanian land mass was enveloped in a large southern promontory of the continent. The Bassian plain was cut by ancient precursors of the Yarra and Werribee rivers which joined before flowing west into the ancient ocean.

Over twenty thousand years, Kulin ancestors then adapted to a drier, warming climate which resulted in major changes in the fauna and flora of the region. Large animals, megafauna like the Diprotodon, disappeared partly as a result of hunting by people. Ferns, mosses and beech trees, the common vegetation in cold climates, gave way to eucalypts, wattles and grasses. Rising sea-levels narrowed, then cut, the land bridge with Tasmania, and about eight thousand years ago flooded major river deltas to form Western Port and Port Phillip. That event stayed in the collective memory of the Kulin, as merchant William Hull testified before a Legislative Council Select Committee in 1858. A ‘tradition’ told him by three Melbourne blacks was that in their ancestors’ time, Hobson’s Bay had been ‘a kangaroo ground’ with the Yarra flowing out between the Heads, but then ‘the sea broke in’.⁸ Robert Russell interpreted stories about an upheaval and rerouting of the Yarra as due to a ‘plenty sulky’ (angry) being, whose home was a cave at Cape Schanck,⁹ while Assistant Protector William Thomas recorded a great flood story as one of the Kulin ‘myths’.¹⁰

The present landscape of the lower Yarra emerged during the last 5½ thousand years, as the bay slowly retreated from its most recent flooding of the Yarra delta when a tongue of sea water had reached inland as far as Essendon, and the ridge along which St Kilda Road now runs was one of its shores. Another story fragment says that rocks in the St Kilda area were sacred because they marked where the supreme ancestor, Pungil or Bungil, stopped the approach of the sea.

The old volcanic core that became Emerald Hill was first an island, then a landmark as the Yarra delta plain emerged. Chalky and sandy sediments from this marine period can still be seen in railway cuttings through the hill. The delta was then built up with deposits of silt and gravel brought down in the voluminous stream of the ancient Yarra. What geologists call the Moray Street gravel is a distinctive red colour, and seems to have formed Little Hill or Red Hill, a small eminence located in the area where Market Street and City Road now intersect. It largely disappeared before 1853, its ‘ironstone’ gravel going to build up the heavily used road between the Yarra bank and the port at Sandridge. A timber bridge at Little Hill on the Sandridge road was constructed in 1851.¹¹

The silt or silty clays in the delta are distinguished as Fishermans Bend and Coode Island silts after the areas where they are most readily identified. The bluish clay and dark red sandy soil thrown up from a well hole dug by a storekeeper in 1853 near the York–Cecil street corner were examples of the silts. Well digging stopped when a salt spring was struck at a depth of about 7 metres, but several months later some children were encouraged to fill a nearby sawpit with the earth. When they discovered grains of gold washed out by winter rains. Emerald Hill had its own brief gold rush. A half-ounce nugget was the largest specimen recovered, but ‘specks’ or ‘particles’ were the scant reward for most fossickers.¹²

Overlying the silts in bands which define the retreating bay shore are medium to fine sands containing shell beds, shaped into low dunes by wind and tides. Known as Port Melbourne sands, the thickest beds of 7 to 13 metres were in the Garden City area and on the bay side of the hill, where sand quarries were later located. The ancient river channel on the eastern side of the hill remained low lying, being regularly scoured during Yarra floods, when the water resumed an old outlet to the sea. Depressions there and elsewhere in the delta plain retained and collected water to become swamps, the largest being the basis of the present Albert Park. Another north of the hill became the military swamp since it lay behind the military barracks built during 1858–59 on the west side of St Kilda Road. In summer it dried to a grassy flat where circuses camped in the 1860s and 1870s, although they kept their distance from the sluggish creek dribbling into the Yarra at the western end. Creek and swamp became offensively polluted with human and animal wastes before the area was supplied with a rudimentary drain about 1890. But flooding remained endemic since the Hanna Street drain would go into reverse and back up with water whenever there was even a moderate rise in the Yarra.

Swampy land fringing the Yarra indicated the heavy silty clays which were the basis for Melbourne’s first brickfields. One of the occasional tongues of higher ground ‘opposite Batman’s Hill’ had good silty soil where J. P. Fawkner sowed Port Phillip’s first wheat in November 1835, and then fenced 10 acres near the falls for a vegetable plot.¹³ Horses turned out to graze by the surveyors Robert Russell and William Wedge Darke, soon after arriving from Sydney in October 1836, were said to have ravaged the crops. Russell and Darke had each built a small house near Fawkner’s garden by December that year. Surveyors Place is a 1980s office development named for them. Towards the western end of this higher ground where Boundary Road now approaches the river, were located fellmongering and wool-washing works in the 1840s and municipal abattoirs from the late 1850s.

Three decades before the Batman and Fawkner landings, in the summer of 1802–03, a shoreline circuit of the bay had been made by Acting Surveyor Charles Grimes and a party from the schooner Cumberland which had been sent from Sydney to investigate the recently discovered Bass Strait. James Fleming’s journal indicates that their day’s walk on a hot 1 February 1803 had ended near St Kilda before they were rowed back to the ship for the night. On the following day they walked ‘for about a mile’ over dry light sandy ground, and came to ‘a large swamp, with three lagoons in it, all dry. The land appears to be covered in water in wet seasons’. The Albert Park/Middle Park area fits the description, while the next feature to be noted was surely the former Port Melbourne lagoon, ‘a salt lagoon about a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide; had not entrance to the sea. Soon afterwards came to a large river . . .’ The party did not push inland to climb the hill behind the swamp.¹⁴

Glimmerings of the ‘natural’ or ‘aboriginal’ vegetation in this part of Bunurong territory come from botanist Daniel Bunce’s description as he was rowed up river from the bay in October 1839, after crossing from Tasmania in a small trading vessel. Another snapshot is from Richard Howitt, a new immigrant in April 1840 whose party camped for a few months on the south bank not far from one of the Yarra ferry crossings. Bunce wrote that the

river was then densely covered on both sides with mellaeuca or tea-tree, and the monomeeth parbine. This latter was called by the aborigines ‘the good mother’, from the seed pods, or receptacles for the developing process of the seeds, being attached in whirls [sic] to the stems or branches on which they are produced years after the trees at those parts have shed their blossoms . . . [Its] long heavy branches hung in graceful arches over the river’s side. Flocks of wild ducks were disturbed by our boat, as we glided up the stream. The notes peculiar to the . . . platipus, [sic] wattle-bird, and leather head or old soldier bird, added in no small degree to the novelties which on every side thrust themselves upon our awakened attention . . . Lofty eucalyptus or flooded gum trees formed a background to the natural plantation of tea-tree.¹⁵

Landing first without their luggage on Sandridge beach, the Howitt party

took the nearest cut to town through a pleasant flat, covered thinly with white, blue and swamp gum-trees, with she-oak and many very beautiful Australian shrubs, large and small. The day after [,] we sailed up the Yarra, a long tug for us in [our own] boat. The country on both sides is low and covered with tea-tree, similar to hop poles with a bunch of yew at the top. Under these grow reeds, just the same as in England. The kingfisher that we saw flitting about among them was even more vivid in its purple-crimson dress than the English one. We also saw a pelican, black swans, and wild ducks, very good each after their own kind.¹⁶

Modern botanists identify the river vegetation as swamp paperbark (Melaleuca ericifolia) and the common reed (Phragmites australis), possibly mixed with rushes (Juncus). The monomeeth parbine spotted by Bunce was probably coastal banksia (Banksia integrifolia), which flourishes on sandy shore sites. Gum trees on the plain behind can be identified as Eucalyptus camaldulensisy the lofty flooded gum or red gum, while Howitt’s white, blue and swamp gums were likely to have been coastal manna gum (E. pryoriana), narrow-leaved peppermint (E. radiata) and E. ovata still commonly known as swamp gum. Remnant indigenous plant species listed by the municipal Environment Officer in March 1994 hint at the varied and colourful Kulin environment. Some are known to have been used as food or medicines. They include thirteen grasses, two varieties of saltbush, chocolate lily, yellow rush lily, two varieties of native bluebell, pink bindweed, and the scarlet pea flowers of Kennedia prostrata, which could be sucked for nectar while its tough stems made useful twine.¹⁷

Edward Armitage, who came as a boy to live in Park Street in 1853, remembered the delights of the Albert Park area when ‘good sized’ eucalypts surrounded a

fair sized but shallow lagoon of fresh water well stocked with eels and small fish, wild duck and other water-fowl. . . [At] certain seasons the grassy ground near the trees was sprinkled over with small pieces—about the size of a shirt button but irregular in shape—of a dry very sweet sugary substance pure white in colour, which for want of a better name we called ‘manna’ . . . the birds and the boys picked it up during the daytime, but a fresh supply would be there next morning.

Armitage was describing a rich Yalukit–willam larder. Prior to the 1855 enclosure of the Protestant Orphanage reserve, he saw on the open ground near the Park–Clarendon street corner, a group of ‘the aboriginal lords of the soil throwing their boomerangs for the instruction and amusement of the race of white invaders who had displaced them and taken away from them forever their ancient and natural heritage of hunting and fishing grounds’.¹⁸

The air of possession retained by these Kulin twenty years after their ‘displacement’ by whites is also implicit in another memory from the 1850s, ‘At. . . times a number of aborigines, men, lubras and picaninnies, and especially dogs, would stroll along Clarendon Street to the Park’.¹⁹ Armitage’s sympathetic view of ‘the lords of the soil’ was not written until half a century after the event, but it reflected a contemporary viewpoint, even if a minority one.

More detail of Kulin lifestyle comes from Daniel Bunce who went with a group on a summer excursion to the ranges east of Melbourne,²⁰ at a time when European influence was not yet overwhelming. He had known the Batman family in Tasmania, and his second wife was to be Pelonamena Batman. Jemmy, identified in 1858 as ‘a Sydney black’ and a likely guide on Batman’s original excursion, introduced Bunce to the excursion party, which included women and children. Benbow, Derrimut and Yammabook are named members indicating that both Woiworung and Bunurong were represented on the excursion, which lasted five or six days. Benbow and Derrimut (more properly Bullourd and Derremart) were leading men, called arweets, of the Yalukit-willam clan. Yammabook was from a Woiworung clan whose home territory was the upper Maribyrnong.

Bunce says that, at the time, Benbow was living with his wife Kitty in a hut he had made ‘in a corner of Mr. Batman’s garden. Within everything was cleanly and in good order . . . the only teetotaller I ever met with among the aborigines’. However, Bunce may have merged memories of several elders who were known for refusing all offers of ‘spiritous liquors’. Especially notable was Woiworung chief Billibellary, who was identified on Batman’s document under an alternative, perhaps family, name of Jaga Jaga. As Jika Jika, the name was given to one of Port Phillip’s earliest land parishes and, more recently, to a prison division.

Benbow and Derremart attained significant standing with the European newcomers in December 1835 when they and others had warned the infant settlement of an attack by blacks, possibly Wathaurang. Derremart, his brother Negrenoule (Ninggerenowl), his sister’s son Dellah kal keth and a kinsman Bet bainger attached themselves more firmly to J. P. Fawkner after this incident. Fawkner gave them gifts of clothes on 13 and 15 December 1835, and ‘changed names’ with Derremart. A month later, on 16 January, his journal noted, ‘Derra-mert came to stop at my place’.²¹ Benbow seemingly attached himself to the Batman family at about the same time.

Benbow was one of three sons of and designate arweet to the venerable Eurernowel or Ningerranaro, known to Europeans as Old Mr Man. He seldom visited the settlement ‘unless something of importance is going on that requires the whole of the Tribe’. Given the complexity of his name to European ears, Eurernowel may well have been the King Neptune figure in Richard Howitt’s encounter, a grey beard and possum skin cloak worn with one shoulder bare reinforcing the impression.²²

Several observers mention the possum rugs or cloaks as standard dress, although by the time of Howitt’s arrival the cloaks often looked tattered or had been discarded in favour of officially distributed brown blankets. As Bunce described it, making the cloaks was largely the work of women. The skins were scraped, pegged out to dry and later sewn together using bone needles and thread made from fine animal tendon, although European steel needles and cotton thread or twine made ready substitutes. The men then decorated the inner side of the cloak by incising it with a sharp point of shell or volcanic glass, although the implements Bunce saw were shards of bottle glass and metal fragments.

Apart from the cloaks, dress was confined to a waist girdle of reed fibre. For males it supported a minimal apron, sometimes composed of possum skin strips; for females a short skirt, ‘a kind of bustle . . . which hung in pendant waves to the knees’. Girls wore simply a ‘rope fringe’, while boys went naked. Personal decoration might be a piece of bone or reed through the nose septum, a head band and string necklets, anklets or wristlets. The strings were sometimes threaded with short pieces of reed and called cornbut according to Bunce, the string being made from the fibre of hemp bush, Gynatrix pulchella which grows near streams. String also made a puzzle game played by two people using both hands, similar to the children’s game of cat’s cradle. Besides their ornamental use, the hollow-stemmed reeds made drinking straws and breathing tubes when swimming underwater after ducks or other wildfowl.

Bunce marvelled at the ease and simplicity of life on the camping excursion. At night the women used tomahawks to cut windbreaks of bark and leafy boughs laid against a framework of saplings. His comfortable bed was bark on a springy base of branches. The evening meal was possum which had been caught in their daytime nest-holes in trees by an agile climber using only toe holds notched into the trunk. Although the ‘flesh looked as delicate as an English rabbit’, Bunce found it too heavily tainted by the peppermint gum on which the animal had been feeding.

On another day eels were caught in a lagoon.

With a small spear in his hand, the eel-catcher walks slowly and cautiously about the shallow water until he has trodden so gently upon the [eel] as not to waken its attention. Although half-buried in the mud, its position is judged with such accuracy that with one blow the eel is pierced [by the spear] . . . Immediately he takes it out of the water, and disables it by giving it a crush between his teeth.

A fine kangaroo was taken by Jemmy using old skills, a large bough he used as stalking cover, and new technology, a gun probably acquired in Batman’s employ. Once skinned, the roo’s kidney fat was eaten immediately, while the hind part and tail were roasted separately, the tail being considered a particular delicacy. The fore part was given to the dogs. Bunce does not say how the roasting was done, but Howitt saw sheep heads being cooked in a steam pit on the banks of the Yarra. Wet grass laid over fire-heated stones at the base of a hole provided the steam cushion on which the food was laid.

While camping ‘at the foot of the ranges’, the menu was varied with food collected by the women and children—tree fern hearts or crowns, large white grubs, eaten lightly grilled, the tuberous roots from the myrnong daisy or varieties of orchid, a sweet drink made from the amber gum collected from wattle trees, and honey from a native bees’ nest. Echidna and wombat were specialty meats, three wombats captured on one day making the basis of a feast preceding a corroboree.

Just as the excursion was about to return, a visitor, ‘Old Jack’, appeared after dark one evening, turning in at the campfire with no ceremony and few words, to Bunce’s surprise. His name, and the fact that all the older men left next morning to engage ‘the Plenty blacks’ in a ceremonial confrontation, make it likely that he was Boronuptune, leader of another Woiworung clan, the eldest brother of Billibellary and with him one of the three identified on Batman’s treaty as Jaga Jaga (Jacky Jacky). By the time the rest of the group caught up with the ‘war party’, the dispute had been resolved peaceably.

Resolving disputes by talk or by a regulated form of battle were some of the reasons for the periodic Kulin meetings held near Melbourne. These judicial occasions were invariably followed by some form of ‘native dance’ or corroboree. Richard Howitt showed more insight than most white observers in describing the one he saw in 1840, held ‘among the trees’ half a mile from his river camp. It may have been the one later depicted in the painting by W. F. E. Liardet, who identified the location as Emerald Hill. Howitt estimated that a thousand people were watching with him. In simple white terms, the dispute was over lubras ‘stolen’ from the Goulburn blacks, and the killing of one who resisted being carried off. The warriors were

painted red and white, naked, with their long spears, their boomerangs, their waddies; and with the women and children belonging to each tribe, two groups of them, each under a tree apart. There was much noise and stir on both sides. One warrior would suddenly start out from amongst his comrades, and going up to the very front rank of the enemy . . . he there defied them taunted them poured upon them scornfully his utmost contempt; and they all the while . . . were crouched in a row, sputtering with their lips and tossing dust towards their defier. Then the same defiance was acted by the adverse party . . . [All] at once a commotion and a shout—or yell rather—and then a boomerang flew, many following after it—spears too—[while] shields were as actively used for defence as the weapons were for injury . . . Would to heaven all Christian wars were as bloodless! . . . Slain none; wounded . . . one man speared in the leg . . .

The next night we witnessed their dance of reconciliation, the corobery . . . Imagine fifty men of all ages dancing in images, first in one figure, then in another; one old man, apart from the rest, as the master of ceremonies, indicating the movements by his own, and the time beaten out by a group of women seated round a huge fire. Movement and voice . . . sometimes slow and solemn, then rapid and shrill, and as suddenly ended, and all hushed! . . . I had read of [battles and coroberies] and seen them pictured; but with all helps of a willing imagination they were beaten hollow by the reality . . . Glimpses of what was seen will haunt the soul for years afterwards.²³

The power of these ceremonials was attested by the crowds of Melbourne onlookers who assembled when they heard the ‘knocking of the sticks’ which heralded a corroboree. Assistant Protector William Thomas tried to dissuade the whites from attending because a year’s experience had taught that spectators often brought alcoholic liquor as well, with drunkenness and sometimes violence the result.²⁴

The Protectorate system, headed by George Augustus Robinson, was begun in 1838 to supersede George Langhorne’s mission on the Yarra. The first group of assistants did not arrive until January 1839, and it was months before they moved out to stations established throughout the settled districts. The sluggish start became endemic to the scheme which had largely collapsed before the official end in 1849. William Thomas, who had been made responsible for blacks in the Melbourne and Western Port districts, was the most assiduous and dedicated worker. His ‘almost childlike simplicity of manners and . . . his goodness of heart’ were recognised by Richard Howitt who visited him in the South Yarra encampment and, more significantly, by his charges who named him Marminata (good father). After 1840 he despaired of conveying his ideas of Christian enlightenment, concentrating instead on the practicalities of keeping the people alive, away from the contamination of city life, and in harmony among themselves and with whites.²⁵

Thomas’s journals ²⁶ reveal something of the complexity, the stresses, even the heartbreak, of the clash between white and black cultures and the conflicts within each of those cultures. One very public affair, and a crisis point in the encounter, started on 11 October 1840 with the surprise night raid on an encampment of Kulin, which included those from the Goulburn district. The raid was led by Major Lettsom of the Border Police, who came with orders from Sydney to capture some ‘ruffians’ said to have attacked stations along the Goulburn River.

With Superintendent La Trobe’s endorsement, although he wanted no bloodshed except in ‘extreme and imperative necessity’,²⁷ Lettsom and his companion, supported by a detachment of soldiers and town constables, rounded up three hundred men, women and children, marched them with petty brutality two or three miles into Melbourne and secured them in a temporary lock-up. One who resisted was shot dead, and another was killed in an escape attempt during the early hours of the morning. Many of his companions did escape, however, so that after the plainly innocent were released only thirty-three were held in custody. More were released a month later, and just ten were brought to trial in early January 1841. The nine found guilty were sentenced to 10 years gaol in Sydney. All were ‘Goulburns’, from the Taungurong or Ngurai-illam-wurrung tribes.

By this time many town dwellers were in considerable sympathy with the nine, partly because of the extremely heavy-handed raid, the immediate burning of spears, waddies and other domestic possessions of those confined, and the slaughter of many of their dogs. The sympathy may explain why the blacks were in leg irons, but not handcuffed, when they were put on the transport ship to Sydney, and they were kept on deck unlike other convicts securely confined below. The result was that the nine dived overboard some distance down the river and made for the tea-tree scrub on the south bank. Two were shot and sank immediately and one or two who had reached the reeds were possibly wounded. Despite a search by the military, none was recaptured.²⁸

The psychological effect of this raid was devastating. Trust in white justice was shaken, but more shattering was the failure of sorcery invoked by the Taungurong in retribution. In early February 1841 the blacks at Narre Warren urged Thomas to leave with them ‘for three Moons as a Cloud of Blood was about to fall upon the District of Melbourne . . . [A] celebrated Goulburn’ had called up the Mindye which brought a plague of sickness, known from past experience to wipe out whole communities.²⁹ This supports the view that prior to 1835 episodes of smallpox had been transmitted to the Port Phillip area originating from epidemics near Sydney. When no massive plague occurred in 1841, Kulin confusion deepened. Thomas was also deeply troubled, writing in his journal on the day the nine jumped ship, ‘Poor Blacks times is getting very hard with you. Please God do thou inter-ceed for these people’.

Thomas’s record of events over the months preceding the Lettsom raid throws some light on it. During April 1840 he had managed through long negotiation to persuade a 500-strong Kulin gathering at Melbourne, nearly half of whom were ‘my blacks’, to disband. Superintendent La Trobe’s considerable pressure on Thomas to achieve the dispersal prompted a revealing journal entry: ‘His Honor is a strange man he thinks that the Blacks can be led about as a pack of children’.³⁰ The weeks of dispute, high talk ( waa waa ) and corroboree finally ended when the Taungurong and Wathaurang, or Barrabools, left for their home territories while the Bunurong and Woiworung agreed to join Thomas and his family at a station called Tubberrubabel near Arthurs Seat. Nevertheless they took their own time in complying with the arrangement. Richard Howitt apparently saw the leisurely farewells at the end of April.

The men . . . more like holiday people, were stopping the settlers who rode through the streets, and very cordially did the settlers shake them by the hand, and gave them money . . . Loudly the black fellows talked to the white fellows, and loudly laughed also; especially when they received a silver gratuity. A vast deal of English and the native language we heard . . . chopped up together and odd enough it sounded.³¹

For all that, Assistant Protector Thomas found about eighty people still camped in the tea tree near the Yarra falls a week after his carefully managed leave-taking ceremonial on 21 April. It was described in his journal:

I begged of the Punt Man to cease plying carts etc till the whole of the Blacks has crossed; though several carters were waiting they acquiesced and seemed to enjoy the sight . . . there was in one punt load 187 men women and children . . . a curious sight, spears all up, to behold . . . His Honor was on the North Bank of the Yarra, I made the Blacks stand up . . . His Honor addressed them through me . . . By and bye plenty come and see them in their own country.³²

It was this promise of their own country and the protracted time it took to be realised which disturbed the rest of the 1840s. At Thomas’s urging, his group went looking for ‘good country’ on the Mornington Peninsula but returned to Melbourne in August to press their claims, and to protest about ‘expulsion from the settlement’. Thomas reluctantly followed them, hoping to fend off official displeasure. By 5 September, however, the blacks had chosen Narre Warren as a ‘site for their Station’ and despite Thomas’s concerns that it was too close to Clow’s station and to Melbourne, they convinced him that there was no water further back. The station later became the headquarters of the Native Police Corps.³³

On 8 September the blacks were again near Melbourne, staying first at South Yarra three miles from town, before moving pointedly to the police paddock adjoining La Trobe’s residence at Jolimont. Thomas spent several days trying to get them away from this site, arguing ‘often against my own conscience’, especially when Bet bainger and Benbow recounted all their ‘good services to the white people in past days when few white men here . . . [they] kept Barrabool Blacks from killing all White Men, and . . . get Black fellows that kill first white man—now many white people come and turn Black fellows away’.³⁴

The reminders were of the December 1835 warning of a likely attack on the settlement, and the 1836 search party, made up of eight whites, four Sydney and five Port Phillip blacks, who had tracked those responsible for killing Charles Franks and a companion, and plundering their camp. Fawkner’s journal of 16 July 1836, after the party’s return, noted that ‘the Native Blacks took full satisfaction on the Murderers & they found several Huts and some of the Property in each Hut’.³⁵

On 16 September 1840 Thomas had an angry interview with the Chief Protector, explaining that after nights spent in the open he wanted to pitch his tent with the blacks in the paddock. Robinson warned him against it since that would be seen as permission to stay. Thomas explained that the blacks would not move until the Goulburn tribe arrived for a gathering that had been called, whereupon Robinson exploded, saying

they shall be removed, and states that Mr. [William] Le Souef, another Assistant, had volunteered to remove the whole if he had orders with a few Mounted Police—I stated that it was

Reviews for South Melbourne

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A reasonable history of South Melbourne, known primarily as a Melbourne suburb that lost its Australian rules football team to Sydney. Priestley covers the history of South Melbourne from its days as the home for its Aboriginal owners, to colonisation and the building of a suburb and it's slow rise from working class roots to the gentrified suburb today, where house prices continue to astonish.