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CHAPTER XI.

VICTORIA, OR PORT PHILLIP-1835 TO 1850.

SKETCH OF THE RISE OF A COLONY FOUNDED BY COLONISTS WITH SHEEP, WITHOUT AN ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

SEVENTEEN years ago Victoria, or Port Phillip, was a desert, barely known to Europeans, except by the reports of wandering shore parties of whalers and sealers. In the year 1852 between seventy and eighty thousand inhabitants, six millions of fine-wooled sheep, a city furnished with all the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, two thriving ports crowded with ships, steamboats, and coasters, farms, gardens, and vineyards, attested the colonizing vigor of the English race; the advantages of its soil and climate, and, not least, of administrative and legislative neglect; for Port Phillip has attained all its solid prosperity without the aid of colonizing companies or acts of parliament, or governors or regiments, or any of the complicated machinery with which sham colonies are bolstered up, and real colonies are so often encumbered.

A small band of experienced colonists, a succession of flocks and herds from the opposite coast, a magistrate, a few policemen and customs officers, then a sort of deputy governor under the modest name of superintendent these were found sufficient for buildup the most flourishing dependency of the British crown, without calling on the home country for a single shilling.

The history of Port Phillip is singularly barren of incident, and may be comprised in a very few pages, while volumes might be filled with the moving accidents which have chequered the career of colonies which have not attained, and are not likely to attain, one-tenth of its wealth and importance as a field for British labor and capital.

In 1798 Bass, in the course of his whale-boat expedition, visited Western Port, one of the harbors of Victoria. In 1802 Flinders sailed into Port Phillip Bay, having been preceded ten weeks by Lieutenant John Murray, of the Lady Nelson.

In 1805 Colonel Collins was sent from England with a small force and a party of convicts to found a settlement in Port Phillip. He arrived in 1804, and took up a very injudicious position on the southern shore of the bay, where the beach was unfavorable for landing, and there was no fresh water. It is evident from a narrative published by one of the party, that, from the first, Collins had no earnest desire to form a settlement at Port Phillip: he had heard glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of the opposite shores of Van Diemen's Land, and, after a very cursory survey, he decided on removing thither. In the course of a walk round the bay, undertaken by the officers of the ship, a fast-flowing stream was discovered, and at one moment the hopes of the seamen were excited by the sparkling sand, which they took for gold; but of course, observes the narrator, it was only mica.* At

* "Lieutenant Tuckey's Voyage in H. M. S. Calcutta, to found a Settlement in Bass' Straits, 1803-4."

EXPEDITION OF HUME AND HOVELL

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the present day we cannot be so sure that it was mica.

During their encampment on the shores of Port Phillip three of the convicts escaped into the interior: one of them was William Buckley, a native of Macclesfield, who had been a grenadier, served under the Duke of York in Flanders, and had been transported for striking his superior officer.

Previous to the arrival of Collins, Mr. Charles Grimes, the surveyor-general of the colony, had completed his marine survey of Flinders by making an outline of the harbor, where he reported the existence of the river now known as the Yarra Yarra, or "everflowing water."

In 1824 Messrs. Hume and Hovell, two stockowners of New South Wales, made an expedition to explore new pastures; and, traveling from near Lake George four hundred miles, in the course of which they traversed the flanks of the Australian Alps, and crossed three rivers, which they named the Hume, the Ovens, and the Goulburn, emerged on shores which they imagined to be those of Western Port, but there is now little doubt that they had reached the western arm of Port Phillip Bay, near the site of the port of Geelong. In looking at a map of the Melbourn district a spot will be found marked Mount Disappointment, about thirty miles from Melbourne. It was this hill that the weary travelers climbed, calculating that from its summit they would behold the sea. They were right in the direction, and a long line of coast and stretch of the finest sheep plains

lay in a line before them; but, unfortunately, lofty, broad boled trees hid everything from their longing eyes, and they descended sad and disheartened.

It would seem as if there had been a spell over this fortunate land which guarded its wealth from the discovery of a series of explorers, from Cook to Hovell and Hume.

Mr. Hovell was afterwards employed by the government to form a settlement at Western Port, which was, however, soon abandoned; and the fine pastoral district traversed in the course of his journey with Mr. Hume excited little attention, in consequence of the discovery, about the same time, of Brisbane Downs, which were more accessible from the previously occupied districts.

In 1834 Messrs. Henty, engaged in the whaling trade at Launceston, in Van Diemen's Land, formed a branch establishment at Portland Bay, and soon afterwards imported a few sheep and cattle to feed on the splendid pastures which there, unlike the other districts of Australia, carpeted the shores almost to the water's edge; and, in the same year, other flockowners from Van Diemen's Land crossed the straits to Port Phillip.

Already the Tasmanians had found the pastures of their island, covered as the greater portion of it is by inaccessible mountains and forests of gigantic timber, too limited for the annual increase of their flocks. The reports of the pastoral resources of the opposite shore became a constant subject of discussion, and in April, 1835, a party of settlers formed themselves into

SETTLEMENT OF PORT PHILLIP.

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an association,* for the purpose of taking possession of an estate in Port Phillip; but, before they could execute their project, Mr. John Batman, a blacksmith, born in New South Wales, but then visiting Van Diemen's Land, secretly set sail from Launceston, accompanied by a party of tame blacks from the neighborhood of Sydney, landed in the middle of May, and, through his native interpreter, entered into an arrangement with the Port Phillip aborigines for the purchase of some of their land, returned to Van Diemen's Land, and, again crossing the straits with a store of goods, induced the savages to put their marks to a deed prepared by a Tasmanian lawyer, which purported to transfer a large tract of land, altogether about half a million acres, in consideration of certain blankets and tomahawks. This transaction, like all similar purchases from hunting tribes, was mere child's play. The aborigines of Australia have no idea of cultivation, and consequently no idea of possession of land or anything else. They accepted Batman's blankets, tobacco, flour, &c., and only understood that by that payment he became their ally.

Batman selected the site of his future manor-house at Indented Head. Thence he soon beheld the approach of the ships of the association whom, by his rapid proceedings, he had forestalled in the honor of founding the future Victoria.

It is said, we know not with what truth, that he mounted his horse, and, galloping down to the beach,

*The association consisted of Messrs. S. and N. Jackson, Fawkner, Marr, Evans, and Lancy.

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