CHAPTER XIV.

VICTORIA, OR PORT PHILLIP.

1835 TO 1850.

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

EVENTEEN 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-woolled sheep, a city furnished with all the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, two thriving ports crowded with ships, steam-boats, and coasters, farms, gardens, and vineyards, attested the colonizing vigour 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 building up 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 labour and capital.

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

In 1803 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 unfavourable 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 sight of the sparkling sand, which they took for gold; but of course, observes the narrator, it was only mica.* At 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 surveyorgeneral of the colony, had completed the marine survey of Flinders by making an outline of the harbour, where he reported the existence of the river now known as the Yarra Yarra, or "ever-flowing water."

In 1824 Messrs. Hume and Hovell, two stockowners of New South Wales, made an expedition to explore new pastures, and, travelling 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 really reached the western arm of Port Phillip Bay, near the site of the port of Geelong. In looking at a map of the Melbourne district a spot will be found marked Mount Disappointment, about thirty miles from Melbourne. It was this hill that the weary travellers climbed, calculating that from its summit they would behold the sea. They were right in the direction, and a long line of coast and a 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.

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

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, carpetted 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 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 neighbourhood of Sydney, landed in the middle of May, and, through his native interpreter, entered into an arrangement with the Port Phillip

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

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, tomahawks, &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 honour 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, warned them off his estate. Perhaps, in 1950, a young Victorian painter may assemble crowds in the Melbourne National Gallery, to see "Batman warning the intruders from Port Phillip Bay."

Some of the party, awed by his legal threats, retired inland, and set their flocks to feed on land they eventually acquired. Mr. John Pascoe Fawkner, a name still well known in Victoria, with more obstinacy and less good fortune, took up a position on the northern banks of the Yarra, overlooking the spot where a natural ledge divided the salt tide from the fresh river at the ebb, above a natural basin, which has since, by the aid of masonry, been converted into a port for the city of Melbourne, open to vessels and steamers of two hundred tons.

Batman had previously addressed a letter to Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, in which he informed him of his proceedings; described the country he had explored in glowing but not exaggerated terms; and requested the support of his excellency in his schemes of colonization, and for the civilization of the natives. Colonel Arthur transmitted copies of Batman's letter, and all the documents connected with his alleged purchase from the natives, to the Colonial Office; expressed his decided opinion that the settlement of Port Phillip would form a useful outlet for the settlers of Van Diemen's Land; and that Mr. Batman, "whose conduct had been marked by humanity as well as enterprise," was deserving of a grant of land, although his purchase, as he had already informed him, was clearly illegal.

Lord Aberdeen, and his successor, Lord Glenelg, followed the

A CONVICT CHIEF OF THE ABORIGINES.

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unfortunate course which has almost invariably been adopted by our colonial ministers. They began by saying no, and in a very short period were obliged to say yes-to acknowledge a fact!

Lord Aberdeen in December, 1834, and Lord Glenelg in July, 1835, wrote elaborate despatches, the one against the occupation of Twofold Bay, the outlet to Brisbane Downs, or Maneroo, as it is now called, on the borders of Port Phillip, as recommended by Sir Richard Bourke, and the other against the occupation of Port Phillip, as recommended by Colonel Arthur, objecting to measures "the consequence of which would be to spread over a still further extent of country a population which it was the object of the land regulations to concentrate," and declining, on the ground of " expense to the mother country, and danger to the natives and settlers," to sanction the proceedings of Batman and his associates.

But before the despatches were unsealed the thing was done. Mother Partington's mop was not more powerful to stop the Atlantic than paper proclamations to arrest the march of Australian settlers with sheep and lambs in sight of "fresh fields and pastures new."

On the one hand, shepherds and stockmen were spreading overland, following their flock from pasture to pasture toward Port Phillip; on the other, a Port Phillip fever seized the Tasmanians, and they crowded across the straits, like the patriarchs of old, with tents and all their woolly possessions.

"We went down," says a lady, then a little child, "to see the six adventurers embark for Port Phillip, with the same feelings as if it had been Cortez or Pizarro; but very soon there was the same universal rush for Port Phillip that there is now for the gold-diggings.”

It was while one of these early parties was landing from boats near the future site of Melbourne that they saw, amid a tribe of natives sitting under a tree, with all the arms and tokens of a chief, a man of large limbs and gigantic stature, lighter-coloured than his companions, as well as could be distinguished through tan, paint, and dirt. He stared hard at the strangers, and seemed muttering to himself; then, rising, he approached, and addressed them in a strange jargon, in which a few words of English were distinguishable. It was Buckley, one of the convicts who had escaped from the party of Colonel Collins, and, after seventeen years' sojourning with the aborigines, again found himself among his countrymen.

He had forgotten his native tongue, and had assumed all the habits of his savage companions, among whom he was a chief by virtue of his superior stature and strength. He at once joined the colonists,