A History of Victoria [2 ed.] 9781107290389, 9781107691612

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A HISTORY OF VICTORIA Second Edition

A History of Victoria is a lively account of the people, places and events that have shaped Victoria, from the arrival of the first Aboriginal peoples through to the present day. In his inimitable style, Geoffrey Blainey considers Victoria’s transformation from rural state to urban society. He examines John Batman’s treaty with the Wurundjeri elders, the gold rushes, the boom of the 1880s and ensuing bank crashes, and Melbourne’s time as the federal capital. He speculates on the contrasts between Melbourne and Sydney, and, with a distinctive eye for detail, describes formative events in Victoria’s history, including the exploits of Ned Kelly, the rise of Australian Football, and the Olympics of 1956. Melbourne’s latest population boom, sprawling suburbs and expanding ethnic communities are explored. Blainey also casts light on Victoria’s recent political history, from the turbulent Cain and Kennett years, to the Bracks and Brumby governments and the electing of the Baillieu government. This edition features sections on the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, the end of the long drought and the controversy surrounding the Wonthaggi desalination plant. New photographs and maps enrich the narrative. Written by one of Australia’s leading historians, this book offers remarkable insight into Victoria’s unique and complex position within Australian history. Geoffrey Blainey is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne. He has written thirty-seven books, including A Short History of the World.

A History of Victoria Second Edition

GEOFFREY BLAINEY

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, ˜ Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Singapore, Sao Cambridge University Press 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107691612  C Geoffrey Blainey 2013

This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published by Methuen Haynes as Our Side of the Country: The Story of Victoria in 1984 Revised edition published by Sun Books in 1991 Revised edition first published by Cambridge University Press as A History of Victoria in 2006 Reprinted 2007 Second edition 2013 Cover design by Anne-Marie Reeves Typeset by Aptara Corp. Printed in China by Print Plus Ltd A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au isbn 978-1-107-69161-2 Paperback Reproduction and communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact: Copyright Agency Limited Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street Sydney NSW 2000 Telephone: (02) 9394 7600 Facsimile: (02) 9394 7601 E-mail: [email protected] Reproduction and communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act (for example a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

Preface Preface to the First Edition Conversions

PART ONE

page vii ix xi

Feathers, Fleece and Dust of Gold

1 A Turban of Feathers

3

2 Australia Felix

18

3 A Golden Ant Hill

43

4 The Silver Stick

64

5 One in Ten Thousand

84

6 ‘My Lord the Workingman’

102

7 Sunshine and Moonshine

116

8 Who Am I?

132

PART TWO

Whirlwind and Calm

9 When the Bubble Burst

147

10 The Horse and Its Conquerors

166

11 Hope, Depression, Fire and War

178

12 The Rise and Fall of Albert the Great

198

v

vi

Contents

13 The Jolting Merry-Go-Round

209

14 A Long Race: Melbourne and Sydney

230

15 Whirlwind in Spring Street

243

16 The New Victorians: Life, Work and Play

257

17 Koala, Growling Frog, Drought and Fire

274

18 A Bulging City

287

Short Chronology of Victorian History Sources Index

295 302 319

PREFACE

This book was first published in 1984 as Our Side of the Country, and each subsequent edition has been revised and updated. There are now eighteen chapters in place of the original fourteen. To this edition – the second under the title of A History of Victoria – have been added short sections on those early voyagers, Captain James Cook and the unknown captain of the mysterious ‘mahogany ship’; on John Batman and his treaty with local Aboriginal people; the notable Jewish contribution to Melbourne; the busy Bonegilla post-war migrant camp when it was Victoria’s back porch; and the remarkable survival of one of the world’s largest network of street trams. Larger sections have been added on the changing attitudes to wildlife and climate; on the long recent drought and the 2009 bushfires; and the rapid expansion of Melbourne and its suburbs and provincial cities since the late 1990s. In earlier chapters, some errors have been erased and the interpretation fine-tuned. In revising the book I gained help from Dr Anna Blainey Warner, Dr Peter Yule, Tim Warner and Alistair Urquhart and the files of his valuable Letter from Melbourne. The new edition carries more than forty illustrations, many of which come from the camera of John R. Reid. A Melbourne architect, for half a century he has photographed many significant Victorian landscapes, buildings and events. The earlier photographs come through the courtesy of the University of Melbourne Archives, the pictures collection of the State Library of Victoria and Newspix of News Limited. I thank all who have helped to design, edit and vii

viii

Preface

illustrate this latest edition, and especially Philippa Whishaw, Jodie Fitzsimmons and Lily Keil of the Cambridge University Press’s office in Melbourne. The new and revised maps in A History of Victoria were drawn by Tony Fankhauser. April 2013

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

My aim was to write a book which was short rather than long. Hence I chipped away at each chapter in order to reduce its length. At the same time I tried not to make the story too tight, too abbreviated: I did not want it to taste like condensed water. I divided this history of Victoria into three parts in order to give more weight to the kind of social history which we often neglect. The first part examined Victoria from the coming of the Aboriginals to the end of the boom in the early 1890s. The second part looked at everyday life, especially around the turn of the century, with glimpses backwards and forwards. And the third part took up the story in the depression of the 1890s and ran through to the present. I am grateful to Ian McLaren who gave me, many times, the benefit of his knowledge of Victorian history and its sources; to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria for permission to use extracts from my essay on the history of leisure which was published in The Victorian Historical Journal of February 1978; to Thomas Nelson Australia and David Syme & Co whose book 125 Years of Age published some of my remarks, repeated here, about David Syme and his newspapers; to Frank and Keir Strahan for finding many of the illustrations used in the book and to the University of Melbourne Archives for allowing us to use them; to Marion Adams, Eric Bird, Anna Blainey, Max Chamberlain, Sir Ernest Coates, Sir Ronald East, Judith Keene, Margaret Manion, Dinny O’Hearn, Bob ix

x

Preface to the First Edition

Phillips, Colin Richards, George Slater and Frank Waters for guiding me to information or for correcting errors; to Liz Carey who typed the manuscript; to Suzie Boxshall who drew the maps; to Elizabeth Wood Ellem who made the index; and to Susan Haynes for her skill as editor and publisher. January 1984

CONVERSIONS

Length 1 inch = 2.54 centimetres 1 foot = 30.48 centimetres 1 yard = 91.44 centimetres 1 mile = 1.61 kilometres Mass 1 ounce = 28.3 grams 1 pound = 454 grams 1 ton = 1.02 tonnes Area 1 acre = 0.4 hectares 1 square yard = 0.836 square metres Volume 1 cubic yard = 0.7 cubic metres 1 bushel = 0.0364 cubic metres Volume (fluids) 1 gallon = 4.55 litres Currency There were 2 farthings in a halfpenny, 2 halfpennies in a penny, 12 pennies in 1 shilling and 20 shillings in £1. When Australia converted to decimal currency in 1966, $2 was equal to £1.

xi

part one Feathers, Fleece and Dust of Gold – from the great rising of the seas to the boom of the 1880s

1 A Turban of Feathers

When Aboriginal people reached Victoria the land was not as we know it. That exposed part of the coast which is now pounded by surf was silent and dry. No waves rolled majestically towards the beach at Lorne and Portsea and Lakes Entrance. Those dark people who first roamed near the site of Melbourne had to make a long journey in a canoe if they wished to reach the sea. There was no Port Phillip Bay: the present bed of the bay was dry and across that land flowed the Yarra. A piece of tree has been found in the bed of that old river, and the tree was alive only 8000 years ago. The big ships which now enter the bay tend to follow that old Yarra bed, close to the Mornington Peninsula. If Aboriginal people canoeing down the old Yarra had reached the twin cliffs which we now call Point Nepean and Point Lonsdale, they would still have been far from the sea because Bass Strait did not exist for most of the human history of Victoria. The Yarra then flowed across the Bass Plains towards the south west, where it must have met the River Tamar, flowing from the present Launceston and northern Tasmania. Where the Yarra and Tamar joined would have been a swirl of waters more dramatic than the junction of the Murray and the Darling, especially when the rivers ran strongly. At times the Tamar was the larger river because it carried away, in late spring and summer, the melted ice from the cold mountains of northern Tasmania. So the combined waters of Tamar and Yarra seemingly flowed west, in a valley between the high ground of the present King Island to the south and the present Cape Otway to the north. 3

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A History of Victoria

Somewhere to the west of King Island this powerful river ran into the Southern Ocean. About 50 000 years ago, in the early Aboriginal era, the level of sea everywhere in the world was lower than today. With the sea more than 400 feet below the present levels, land bridges joined countries which are now severed by ocean. An Aboriginal person could walk from Victoria to Tasmania, swimming a river here and there, and he or she could also walk from Victoria to New Guinea, for Torres Strait did not exist and the Gulf of Carpentaria was a plain. The seas separating the continent of Australia and New Guinea from the nearer islands of the Indonesian archipelago were often narrow, and when the Aboriginal pioneers had made their slow, island-hopping trek across that archipelago towards Australia they did not have to cross long stretches of water. The sea was so low that the island of Bali was part of Asia. In Europe, people could walk from England to Holland or from Scotland to Denmark. It was also possible to walk from eastern Siberia to Alaska, without encountering slippery impassable ice, and that was probably how the Americas were found. That discovery came long after the discovery of Australia. The place now called Victoria was intensely cold in winter. Between 40 000 and 20 000 years ago those Aboriginals living on the Victorian foothills experienced the intense winter cold which Mt Kosciuszko now experiences. As the deep snow and ice of winter covered many of Victoria’s higher mountains, the thaw in spring and early summer must have swelled the rivers running into the Murray. On the other hand the Mallee probably had a kinder climate, and lakes which now are salty were filled with fresh water, and their banks for much of the year teemed with wildlife, and fish and mussels abounded. In the Western District, too, the lakes were larger, and at one time Lake Corangamite overflowed into the Barwon. On those western plains the winter winds must have been bitingly cold. Tasmania had permanent ice and glaciers, and the Antarctic was much larger and therefore closer to Tasmania, and some of its icebergs might well have drifted close to the southern Australian coast. There can be no doubt that Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania at least 20 000 years ago. One of their shelters has been excavated in a

A Turban of Feathers

5

cave overlooking the Franklin River, which, in that epoch, drained a bleak terrain dominated not by rainforest but by the scrawny plant life of the tundra. Enormous quantities of water were locked up in the ice at both ends of the world. Areas of land that now yield annual harvests were covered with ice for much of the year. About 17 000 years ago there came slight signs of a warming. In the following few thousand years the world’s climate slowly became warmer, the permanent ice began to melt and the level of the oceans became higher. About 12 000 years ago the warming accelerated. In places where the plains rolled gently down to the sea, the rising waters were shatteringly intrusive. In the Great Australian Bight it is believed that over a period of 4000 years the sea invaded the flat lands at a rate of about one mile in every twenty-five years. In the lifetime of old people on the Victorian coast many familiar landmarks would have been flooded: the rock pools where as children they had dived for abalone, the little gully where they built a windbreak in winter, the trees in which they hunted the possums, the native well where fresh water was drunk, the patch of ground where edible grains were gathered at a certain time each year, and the seashore cave on which they painted symbols and animals. In the span of several thousand years a whole tribal territory could be flooded or made uninhabitable. The rising seas continued to lap new areas, forming islands, inlets, rips and salty marshes, and then redrawing the map by drowning a young coastline and creating another. The Yarra–Tamar river became shorter as the seas rose higher. About 14 000 years ago the sea cut off King Island from Cape Otway. The sea, still rising, separated Wilson’s Promontory from Flinders Island about a thousand years later. Another thousand years passed, and Tasmania was almost completely cut off from Victoria. Bass Strait was still far from its present shape, but it was now a strait and becoming wide. Some tribal territories must have been cut into two or three separate pieces, or even drowned completely, by the incoming sea. A tightly knit group of people with their own pride, their own language or dialect, and their own marriage patterns and religion, was pulled apart by the sea. For some centuries those members of the same tribe who lived on opposite sides of the narrow waters could have continued to congregate, periodically, by

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A History of Victoria

paddling across the strait in tiny canoes in order to meet relatives and perform ceremonies. As the straits became wider, and the strong winds whipped up that wider expanse of water, many Aboriginals crossing to and fro must have been drowned. Slowly the distant shore receded, while still seen on clear days. Finally all contact ceased. The Tasmanians were completely isolated, and remained so for more than 10 000 years. When the first European explorers – Dutch and French and British – arrived, they found a society and people who were very different from those in Victoria. The Tasmanians had no boomerang and did not have that half-domesticated dog, the dingo, which helps to explain why the Tasmanian tiger and the Tasmanian devil survived there long after becoming extinct in Victoria. Likewise the languages spoken by the 4000 or 5000 Tasmanians were different from those on the opposite shore, and even the people themselves seemed so different in face and physique that early observers thought that they must have immigrated long ago from Africa or Melanesia. The Tasmanians were often described as a light black, and often as brown, though the brown perhaps came partly from the ochre with which they decorated their body. Their lips were full and their nose broad. Their black hair grew in tightly coiled locks and had a woolliness which was unlike that of mainland Aboriginals. They were small in build though few adults were as small as Trucanini, the last full-blooded Aboriginal in Tasmania, who was said to have been only 4 feet 3 inches high when she died in 1876. A likely explanation of why the Aboriginals in Tasmania so differed, physically, from those in Victoria was that the Tasmanians were originally mainland Aboriginals who were subjected to micro-evolution in the course of a long isolation. Certain characteristics, initially present perhaps in small numbers of people, had become predominant. At the same time there is increasing evidence that in the course of the millennia several waves of immigrants reached Australia. If this is true the Tasmanians might have represented an earlier wave. There were even marked differences in people living in Victoria and the Riverina. Excavations in northern Victoria, at Kow Swamp near Cohuna, have discovered the remains of people whose skulls

A Turban of Feathers

7

were more rugged than those of other Aboriginals living in the region at that time. Those who were buried at Kow Swamp about 10 000 or 13 000 years ago had strongly sloping foreheads, large teeth and jaws, and a small ridge of bone above the eyes. In profile they seemed to belong to a slightly earlier period in the evolution of the human race, and yet within a few days’ journey of them were living Aboriginals who resembled many of the present-day Aboriginal peoples. Whether the Aboriginals of Kow Swamp eventually died out or simply intermarried is a puzzle to which no confident answer can be offered. Whether they were really so different is still debated hotly by anatomists and archaeologists. Meanwhile, the seas continued to rise. They lapped what are now the Port Phillip Heads and eventually formed that wide bay inside; they quietly flowed into what is now Westernport; they entered the Gippsland lakes; and all along the coast the Victorian Aboriginals had to retreat. For about 11 000 years the seas were rising, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. About 6000 years ago they came close to their present shores. Even the Victorians who lived far from the sea could not escape this momentous event. Groups who had lost their territory must have been slowly driven inland, and many regroupings, violent or peaceful, must have been made. Even Aboriginal people far from the intruding seas were affected by the changing climate. The Mallee was a casualty of the first warming phase, which came with the rising seas. As the climate became drier, the vegetation suffered in that region of marginal rains. The lakes were empty for part of the year and the wind blew the light soil into great dunes. A dryness such as the Mallee has not experienced in the European era gave way to a moister period. The evidence suggests that 10 000 years ago Victoria was moister than today. About 8000 years ago it was probably warmer than today. Such changes in heat, rainfall and the flowing of the rivers affected the animals, fish, insects and plant foods on which Aboriginal people depended. Neither the landscape nor the people were unchanging. During the long Aboriginal epoch, volcanoes erupted in south-western Victoria and just across the present South Australian border. To the south of Hamilton, both Mount Napier and Mount Eccles poured out molten lava, which flowed towards the sea: from Eccles the lava

8

A History of Victoria

flowed about thirty miles and, if the season was summer, must have set fire to surrounding grasses and bushes. Further west, Mount Schank erupted some 18 000 years ago and the crater of Mount Gambier marks an eruption of a mere 4000 to 4300 years ago. That seems only yesterday on the human clock of this land: if the Aboriginal history is divided into a 12-hour clock, that eruption must have come at the start of the last hour. Tower Hill, close to the western Victorian coast, erupted 6000 or 7000 years ago, and the cloud of ash settled to the east of the crater, burying an Aboriginal axe abandoned maybe in haste. Further east at Red Rock, near Lake Colac, another eruption could have been as recent as 4000 or 5000 years ago. In addition another six volcanoes in Victoria were probably alive in Aboriginal times. These eruptions, though frightening to the thousands of Aboriginal people who saw them, did not last long. The volcanoes, once they cooled, erupted no more. Victoria, when the first Europeans arrived, was apportioned between some thirty-three tribes, and in addition certain strips along the border belonged to tribes whose main territory lay in South Australia and New South Wales. Each tribe had its own language or distinctive dialect. Each tribe had its own customs, rituals and laws. Each tribe believed that its land was unique and superior to all other places. The patriotism, the sense of belonging, of the average Aboriginal person was probably far in excess of that of even the typical fourth-generation Australian today. As Professor T. G. H. Strehlow argued, few white Australians can understand the affection felt by Aboriginal people for their own soil, rocks, trees, animals and sacred sites. For Aboriginal people the spirits who had created the earth and all its living creatures were still alive, and the landscape and all living things testified to a divine presence. The Aboriginal peoples were not united. Enmities thrived, and tribes used derogatory names against their neighbours. Thus the Bunurong, whose territory embraced Westernport and the Mornington Peninsula, were referred to as the Thurung by the tribe to the east: that was the word for the tiger snake. The Bunurong people were said to sneak up on their enemies like a snake, and kill them. Some names were simply descriptive. The Jupagalk near the Mallee were known to a neighbouring tribe as ‘people of the native

A Turban of Feathers

9

box country’, while those who occupied the site of Melbourne and the country stretching from Macedon to Warragul were known as the ‘white gum people’ or the Wurundjeri. The typical tribal territory occupied about 2000 square miles or an area of say 50 miles by 40 miles. At one extreme the Tatungalung, near Ninety Mile Beach and the Gippsland lakes, occupied only about 700 square miles, while the Jaara of the Avoca and Upper Loddon rivers occupied about eight times as much territory. Within each territory the inhabitants spent most of their life in small groups embracing a few families and maybe ten or twenty people in all. They were nomads living off the land, and their migrations were based on the seasons and were purposeful and systematic. As a group might move camp forty times in the course of a year its shelters were meagre, being sometimes made of boughs and sometimes a mere windbreak. The most elaborate shelters were on the western volcanic plains and were so soundly built, with turf roof and wooden frame, that it was later said that a horse and rider could tread on them safely. Normally Aboriginal people were naked. The list of ornaments and apparel worn at one time or other by men and women in the various tribes would fill many pages, but not often were these pieces of decoration or apparel worn. The first British settlers in Port Phillip Bay in 1803 observed that Aboriginal people from the Bunurong tribe were normally naked and they concluded erroneously that any man who wore a little clothing was a chief: in fact an Aboriginal tribe had neither a king nor chieftains. One light-complexioned, handsome young man was assumed to be a king, for he wore a large cloak made of small animal skins and ‘a beautiful Turban of feathers’. Further around the bay another member of the Bunurong tribe wore a head-dress made of cockatoo and parrot feathers, and kangaroo teeth. When the feathers were freshly plucked, they must have presented a dashing spectacle. Women, too, were seen with feathers in their headgear, but nothing so concealing as a feather was usually worn below the neck. After the first Europeans arrived, most Aboriginal people were given clothes and blankets to hide their nakedness. They did not understand the dangers of wearing wet clothes or lying on a wet blanket, and chills and pneumonia and influenza were to wipe out hundreds of them.

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A History of Victoria

In many tribes both the women and men decorated themselves with a bone or reed, protruding from both ends of the pierced septum of the nose. On the lower Murray, in the vicinity of Swan Hill, the hole in the septum was made by a sharpened bone taken from the thighbone of an emu, and in some tribes the bone worn in the nose of women was shaped from the leg of a kangaroo. In length, the horizontal bone ranged from about three inches to perhaps a dozen inches. On ceremonial occasions, white and red ochres – possibly traded over a long distance – were vividly painted on the naked body, painted so lavishly that sometimes more of the body was painted than unpainted. Their best possum-skin cloaks were magnificent. One preserved in Museum Victoria is made of eighty-one possum skins; it must have been heavy for people who liked to travel lightly. Before the cloak was assembled each skin had to be stretched, and the inside scraped clean with a chip of basalt or a sharp mussel shell. In sewing the skins neatly together Aboriginal people usually worked from right to left, and their needle was a bone and their thread was made of animal sinew or plant fibre. Many of these warm cloaks were ornamented on the inside with drawings: the actual animal skin was worn against the Aboriginal’s own skin and the fur was exposed to the weather, like a decorative fur worn by wealthy western women in modern times. The possum-skin cloak, usually square, had no sleeves, and could be fastened in front by a skewer. Other items sometimes worn by Aboriginal people were necklaces, armbands and loin aprons made of animal skin, and a forehead band perhaps jauntily capped by the feather of a lyrebird, brolga or eagle. Few of the objects which they made for daily life have survived. Victoria, moreover, is deficient in examples of Aboriginal rock art. Many rock carvings and paintings have been discovered within the granite country of the north east, but the granite chips and weathers easily, and only a tiny fraction of the art once visible in that district has survived. The suitable sites for long-lasting rock art are in sandstone and limestone, and protected by caves or an overhanging ledge, but Victoria has few such sites. Most of the known sites are in the Grampians where the finest known gallery, the Glenisla rock shelter, displays stick figures painted probably by a finger dipped in red and, occasionally, white and yellow ochre. Archaeologists who

A Turban of Feathers

11

excavated the floor of this rock shelter found the remains of many camp fires and the bones of bandicoot, rat kangaroo and other animals which were cooked at countless meals in the past 3000 years. We imagine that the Aboriginal people were essentially hunters. When depicted they usually carry a spear and a boomerang. As we eat no fruit or vegetable eaten in Aboriginal times in Victoria, we assume that plant foods did not exist or were too hard to find. It is likely, however, that most Aboriginal people gained more energy from plant foods than meat. They could call on an astonishing variety of such foods. On Wilson’s Promontory, on soil far from fertile, about 120 edible plants can be found, and more than 100 of them were known to Aboriginal people. Many plants that we see every day and would not dream of eating were valued. They ate the underground stems of the Austral bracken – so plentiful on the Gippsland hills – and pummelled them into a paste and roasted them. They ate the tiny carrot-shaped roots of the yam-daisy whose delicate yellow flower resembles a dandelion; they ate the shoots of the bulrush and the seeds of the old-man saltbush; and they ate a wide variety of nuts, roots, seeds, greens, flowers and fruits. Women gathered these foods, and their main instrument was a strong stick, sharpened at each end and used like a lever or crowbar to dig out the roots. The typical digging stick was taller than a woman and gave her a long reach if she took her part in a fight. Of the meat brought in by the men, possum and kangaroo and wallaby were common. In the breeding season, birds’ eggs were collected in the thousands; and many of the early British settlers were to see, at old Aboriginal camp sites, the broken shells of the big egg of the emu. An intimate knowledge of the ecology of their own territory guided the nomadic groups in their movements. They were likely to visit the same place – trapping fish or collecting eggs or gathering plant foods – at the same time each year. The quest for food and for variety in their diet made them constantly move on, carrying their few implements and their lighted firestick and perhaps a carrying basket. Occasionally they stayed for a long period in the one place but only if the supply of food was sure. A seasonal glut of food – the eels of the western plains, the beached whales on the south-west coast and the native raspberry which grew near the Glenelg River – enabled several hundred people

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to come together for perhaps a week or more, and that week was the occasion for ceremonies and exchanges. At some gatherings as many as a thousand were said to be present, but the estimates might well have been inflated. With rare exceptions Aboriginal people did not hoard food. As they lacked a large supply of food, they could rarely assemble in the hundreds in the one place. As they regularly moved from camp site to camp site, they saw no point in hoarding food. So their way of life, like our own, was imprisoned in its unbreakable circle of cause and effect. The way of life varied from region to region, depending on the terrain, the climate, the foods available, the traditions which Aboriginal people long ago had acquired, and their own ingenuity. Thus in the mid-Murray valley can be seen hundreds of mounds, many of which are more than three feet high and cover 1000 square yards. Aboriginal people probably camped here in certain months, and cooked their food in a special hearth composed of small pellets of burned clay. As these deep-soil plains offered no stone which could be placed in the fire and so retain the heat for cooking, the pellets of burned clay were probably a substitute for hearth stones. Who invented this unusual hearth will never be known, but many of the thousands of baked clay pellets buried in some of the mounds had been quietly heating food before the time of William the Conqueror. The northern plains possessed no suitable stone from which axes or spearpoints could be made, and so the stone arrived as part of a long chain of barter. The finest quarry of such stone in Victoria in the past 5000 years was Mount William, a low hill standing not far from Lancefield and almost within a day’s walk of Port Phillip Bay. Here a hard, dense hornfels or greenstone was quarried by Aboriginal people from about 250 circular or oval holes, and the discards from the quarrying now cover an area the size of a small racecourse. The axes of Mount William were prized as far to the west as the Murray River in South Australia and as far north as the Riverina plains. We should not be surprised that a network of exchange could send these sharp-edged axes so far from the quarry. The explorers Hume and Hovell, entering northern Victoria in 1824, saw that in the hilly forest between the Murray and Ovens ‘many of the trees bore the marks of iron tomahawks’; and to sharp-eyed bushmen the marks of an iron blade could not be mistaken. They offered no explanation

A Turban of Feathers

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of why English tomahawks should have found their way more than 200 miles south of the very frontiers of English settlement but the existence of a tribal trading network is the likely answer. Here and there, Aboriginal people had devised earthworks and stoneworks which, when we think of their simple equipment, quite take the breath away. On the volcanic plains of western Victoria the eels swam up the rivers from their breeding ground in the Southern Ocean, and each autumn they swam relentlessly downstream towards the ocean. In the headwaters of one river the Aboriginal people had cut through a low rise to link swamps a mile and a half apart with a channel that served both as an eel trap and a hydraulic scheme. It is estimated that more than 3000 cubic yards of earth had been removed in digging the channel – enough earth to fill a hundred or so large tip trucks. Similarly on the western plains, at Lake Condah, deep canals had been cut through the hard volcanic rock, some of them a quarter of a mile long, and at the end of the canals stood eel traps made of a trellis of strong sticks or eel pots made of plaited rushes or matting or bark. A government official reached Lake Bolac in the autumn of 1841 and saw a stupendous catch of eels stacked on the beach – the Aboriginal fishermen, seeing him, had no doubt disappeared. He estimated that at the annual eel harvest, 800 to 1000 Aboriginal people were living close together, enjoying the happening as they had for countless years. No museum has yet caught the essence of their way of life simply because they were weak in hardware and objects – the essence of a museum display – and strong in skills and ingenuity. Their wooden spear and club were not sophisticated but Aboriginal people made up for a deficiency in weapons by their skill in using them and in creeping close to their target. Sometimes they caked themselves with mud to prevent their odour from reaching the sensitive nose of a kangaroo or they hid in moving foliage and approached the emu in carefully timed steps and shuffles. They also had impressive gifts of mimicry and trickery and could often induce the animal they were hunting to become inquisitive and approach them. In the 19th century, an English explorer might obtain an improved pistol which, through technical ingenuity, was accurate at 60 instead of 40 yards, but an Aboriginal person could steal the same 20 yards by his own ingenuity.

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A History of Victoria

The first Europeans were astonished when they saw these ingenious hunting methods. Thus in the Pyrenees Ranges they chanced to see an Aboriginal man wearing a camouflage coat, so made of green boughs that the big birds he was hunting could not see him. As a decoy he used a small bird which could not hop more than a few feet away because one leg was tied by string. When a hawk saw this helpless bird it swooped down, but the concealed Aboriginal man held a string noose on a stick and deftly pulled the noose around the hawk’s neck. Fire was the essence of many Aboriginal skills. They used fire to drive out animals when hunting; they probably used fire to encourage green shoots of fresh grass, which in turn attracted grazing kangaroos; and they used fire to sharpen digging sticks and to manufacture bark canoes. They used fire to send smoke signals on the plains, as an illuminant around the camp at night, and as a mosquito repellent inside their poky huts near the swamps. They used it for felling trees needed for firewood and they used it for cooking – they possessed no pottery and no cooking utensils. Above all they used fire for warmth, preferring to sleep between two tiny fires rather than in front of a blazing fire. As the making of fire through the friction of two pieces of dry wood was a slow and patient task, most Aboriginal people carried a burning stick whenever they moved camp. To be deprived permanently of fire was a nightmare and the topic of legends. On the Gippsland lakes Aboriginal people believed that a benevolent god named Bowkan lived in the clouds. One day the Aboriginal women refused to give him any of the fish they had netted, and he became so angry that suddenly he took away their fires and presumably even the power to light a fire. The women ran after him but they could not regain the fire. Then a crow came to their aid, snatched a black snake from the ground, and threw it straight at Bowkan who, in fright, dropped the fire. For Aboriginal people fire was infinitely more important than is oil for our way of life. When early European explorers saw the Victorian coast they observed the fires and not the Aboriginals. James Grant, sailing in the little Lady Nelson of 60 tons, saw the Victorian coast on 5 December 1800, not far from Portland Bay, which he named,

A Turban of Feathers

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and he noted a heavy rolling swell was setting in and that ‘several fires’ were visible on the shore. Again he noticed smoke arising from that beautiful wooded country as his ship sailed towards Bass Strait: ‘Towards evening saw many fires a little way inland’. In March 1802, the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, sailing westwards along the Victorian coast from Wilson’s Promontory, could not be sure that the land was inhabited but passing Cape Otway he saw smoke in the distant inland, and later he saw a fire burning ‘on top of a rise on the shore’. In the following year, just inside Port Phillip Bay, Lieutenant Pateshall deduced that ‘the place was swarming’ with Aboriginal people because fires were constantly burning around the bay. In 1824 Hume and Hovell crossed the Murray and Ovens and complained that their whole route one November day had passed through freshly burned country and that nearby the ‘grass was still blazing to a considerable height’. The experience of most explorers was similar: they frequently saw smoke but rarely an Aboriginal. The paradox gave mystery to the land. The firestick was Aboriginal people’s main technology and was vital for people who had to travel with few possessions. But soon their land would be invaded by people with immeasurably more equipment: with firearms, large ships, compasses, chronometers and clocks, all kinds of metal tools and utensils, record books, tinder-boxes, telescopes, and, above all, the domesticated plants and animals culled from nearly every corner of the world. Such an invasion, coming in ceaseless waves, could not be repelled by a firestick, a spear and a proud turban of feathers. Who were the first Asian or European navigators to see the Victorian coast and so herald the arrival of the new way of life? It remains a topic of fierce debate. Several historians argue that the Chinese in the 15th century were the first to arrive: others declare that the Portuguese in the following century were the discoverers. Vital to each argument is a wrecked ship seen on the coast near Warrnambool in western Victoria in 1836. Usually called the mahogany ship because its timber was darkish red or brown, it is said by some to have been a large Chinese junk and by others a Portuguese caravel. The available evidence suggests that it was not a large vessel plying the oceans. It was more like a smallish barge or lighter, used for unloading ocean-going ships and carrying the cargo to a nearby

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A History of Victoria

beach or pier. Moreover, specimens of the ship’s timber tested scientifically in recent years indicate that it came not from a foreign land but from the northern rivers of New South Wales. The name ‘mahogany’ was coined not by the first seamen to report the wreck but by an imaginative Melbourne journalist who arrived nearly half a century later, after the wreck itself had disappeared from sight. The theory that in the 15th century a large ship came from China to eastern Australia and to southern Victoria rests, so far, on effervescent evidence. It is beyond doubt that Captain Cook and his crew saw the Victorian coast. During a voyage around the world, his ship Endeavour crossed the Tasman Sea from New Zealand in 1770 and, after experiencing a storm in which a gigantic westerly wave almost washed several of his men overboard, reached the eastern coast of Victoria. He actually expected to find land in that vicinity, for he carried the map made by Abel Tasman the Dutchman who, after discovering the east coast of Tasmania more than a century previously, assumed that the same east coast might well extend north all the way to New Guinea. The existence of Bass Strait, separating Victoria from Tasmania, was then unknown to both Tasman and Cook. On Thursday 19 April, in pale daylight at about 6 am, a lieutenant in Cook’s ship, Zachary Hicks, could just discern land about 15 or 18 miles away. A butterfly landing on deck had already hinted at land nearby. At noon a prominent cape was seen sharply – until another gale sprang up. The cape with its sandy beach and its granite boulders is now known as Point Hicks, and at night the beam from its tall lighthouse can be seen well out to sea. During this stormy April day in 1770 Cook was not certain how to proceed. For several hours his Endeavour actually sailed along the Victorian coast towards the entrance to Bass Strait before reversing course and sailing north towards Botany Bay and the entrance to Sydney harbour. On the ship’s second day in Australian waters, Cook and his distinguished botanist Joseph Banks rejoiced in the appearance of the land, the tall trees, which suggested fertile soil, and the clearings, which they called ‘small lawns’. That night they saw separate fires burning in the forest and felt convinced that they had been lit by people, still invisible, whom they called ‘the Indians’.

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After the Endeavour visited Torres Strait, Java and Cape Town and returned safely to London, Cook and Banks described several small districts on the east coast of Australia, and their harbours, soils and grasslands. On the strength of their enthusiasm the British planted a colony of convicts on the shores of Sydney harbour in 1788. But the Victorian countryside, which they first saw is, to this day, settled sparsely. From the lighthouse at Point Hicks it is some 80 kilometres in a direct line to Orbost, the nearest Victorian town of any size. A coastal highway linking Melbourne and Sydney passes within 30 kilometres of Point Hicks, but few of the cars and campervans make a detour to see one of Australia’s most significant sites.

2 Australia Felix

As the sun rose on a winter’s day in 1834, and the pale light successively shone on that wild coast stretching all the way from Eden to the outskirts of Albany, only the sparsest signs of activity could be seen. Here and there the smoke drifted from a fire. On a few stretches of sand a rowing boat might be seen, resting well above the reach of the high tides. An alert eye might have discerned, in a few places, the green of a vegetable patch and the fresh unpainted wood of a hut and a new grave or two with a name and a date carved on a spar or the lid of a wooden cask. Along that 3000 miles of coast, Aboriginal people were probably stirring in the early morning from their sleeping places beside their tiny fires. Maybe a hundred Europeans could be counted. Most were camped on the coast of the present Victoria, the advance troops of an invasion which suddenly was to shake and then shatter the old Aboriginal way of life. Bass Strait, to the British, was still more important than Victoria itself. The land was simply an intruder, a hazard, for the sea captains who passed through the strait on the last phase of their voyage from England to Sydney. Charts of this coast existed, and indeed western Victoria had been charted in 1800 by James Grant, in 1802 by Baudin the Frenchman and by Flinders the Englishman who saw a rather high sandy terrain ‘in the intervals of thick squalls’. Most Europeans living on this coast could not even read a chart. They made their living by killing seals, by catching whales near the shore and boiling them down for oil, or by gathering tanner’s bark from the wattle trees. Some were former convicts and some were 18

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runaways, and many probably kept Aboriginal women who shared bed and work. These were the pioneers of the coast near Portland and Port Fairy and many bays and inlets further east. Along the Victorian coast in 1834 many Aboriginal people could have pointed out the site of larger British settlements, which hoisted the flag and were then abandoned. On a sandy peninsula inside Port Phillip Bay, many hand-made bricks and a few graves and ruins marked the place where in 1803 about fifty marines, 300 convicts, and a band of free settlers and officials had landed. The Sorrento settlement lasted only seven months and was moved to Hobart. Further east, on a low headland overlooking Westernport, another military camp was opened in 1826. That camp, now Corinella, lasted only 14 months. The camps at Sorrento and Corinella reflected the importance of Bass Strait and the need to prevent the French from occupying such strategic positions where they could molest passing British ships in time of war. Britain was a sea power first and foremost, and was slow to realise that the richest Australian resources did not lie within sight and sound of the sea. Victoria was part of the big colony of New South Wales but was of more interest to the colonists in Tasmania, especially its sealers and whalers. Ships from Tasmania increasingly anchored in Victorian bays, and sealskins, kegs of oil, whalebone and wattle bark were collected. By 1834 a few Tasmanians were interested not only in Victoria’s sea coast but also its land. Tasmania lacked land but not sheep and cattle. Every second Tasmanian knew that attractive land lay on the other side of Bass Strait but the cost of shipping livestock was dear and the risk of the New South Wales government driving out any unauthorised settler also had to be weighed. It was duly weighed and ignored. The Henty brothers conveyed the first livestock across the rough sheet of water. Sons of an English farmer, they had spent four years in Western Australia and Tasmania in search of suitable land and at last they believed they had found it. They sailed from Launceston in a small schooner, and in the wild seas they lost half of their bullocks, heifers and cows before they landed the survivors on the whaling beach at Portland on 19 November 1834. The month-long voyage was worthwhile. They toured the land behind Portland, and Edward Henty swore that the lush grass would make his merinos, when they arrived, ‘shake with fat’. The Hentys had

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A History of Victoria

come to stay. They caught whales and ran their sheep and cattle with hardly a soul – or at least hardly an official – in Hobart or Sydney knowing of their existence. A year and a half later the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell, after crossing western Victoria from Swan Hill to the Grampians and almost to the sea, was surprised to see some grey rocks, which, on examination through the telescope, proved to be whalers’ sheds. Following the tracks of carts he came to the Hentys’ houses at Portland. In the gardens on the overhanging cliffs he was shown potatoes and turnips surpassing any he had ever seen, and looking down on the sheltered bay he was told that only a few days ago five ships lay there at anchor; and from the Hentys’ verandah on a crisp August day he was fascinated to see three whale boats, each with a harpooner standing in the stern, set out to chase a ‘hunchback’ whale. Mitchell began the slow journey overland towards Sydney, and climbing Mount Macedon at sunset on the last day of September 1836 he wondered if he could see the new village of Melbourne. The bay was far away but the horizon became clearer in the fading light. He looked in vain for rising smoke but at the northern end of the bay he ‘saw a mass of white objects which might have been either tents or vessels’. The white objects were Melbourne, which was then one year old. Port Phillip Bay had quickly displaced Portland as the spearhead of the Tasmanians’ invasion. A capacious harbour, Port Phillip was a gateway to a wider sweep of grasslands. John Batman, a Tasmanian landholder in his mid-thirties, had long eyed those grasslands. The son of a convict, and married to a convict, he had made a success of his rugged land near snow-capped Ben Lomond in northern Tasmania, but he wanted more land. As far back as 1827 he had unsuccessfully sought permission to graze livestock near Westernport in the present Victoria, and now he altered his tactics. In May 1835 Batman, with seven Sydney-side Aboriginals and three Europeans, set sail from the mouth of the Tamar in the schooner Rebecca and slowly crossed the strait to Port Phillip Bay. Once there he inspected the surrounding pastures – so green that autumn – and made a treaty with eight members of the Kulin people to take up a huge tract of their land on the shores of the

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bay in return for an annual rent of flour, red shirts, blankets, knives, mirrors, tomahawks and other goods. With Launceston and Hobart men he planned to form the Port Phillip Association, intending to ship sheep to the fine pastures and to employ a preacher and a doctor to help the Aboriginals whose land he would occupy. There can be little doubt of his sympathy with favoured Aboriginals, and little doubt that he had also shot two Tasmanian Aboriginals. The lands claimed by Batman formed only a fraction of the present Victoria but did include the heart of Geelong and Melbourne. They included the Bellarine Peninsula as far west as Torquay, the plains between Melbourne and Geelong, and a large tract of adjacent land extending north to the Dividing Range. The most northerly points were probably Mt Macedon and Pretty Sally Hill near Kilmore. While Batman’s lands did not include the sites of most of the present suburbs to the east of Melbourne they did extend to the north east as far as Hurstbridge. It was impossible for Aboriginal people to understand the implications of the deal. They believed that they owned the land and would always own it. They could conceive of white people perhaps using the land under certain restricted conditions but certainly not permanently controlling it. In clinching the deal with the eight Kulin people, who made their mark on several of the legal documents they were shown, neither Batman nor his colleagues viewed them as simpletons or savages. Batman’s legal adviser, Joseph Gellibrand, who was to reach Port Phillip Bay seven months later, called them ‘a fine race of men’. He added, with a sparseness of commas, that they ‘are strong and athletic very intelligent and quick in their perceptions’. Learning lessons from the tragic clash of black and white people in early Tasmania he and Batman and other members of the syndicate believed that Aboriginal people should be taught how to settle down and become active farmers growing their own food, be accepted into mainstream society, and taught the rudiments of Christianity and the art of reading. Today, John Batman is often derided for trying to make a bargain at the expense of these black inhabitants. But in the founding of the other major cities in Australia, no similar scheme of financial goodwill was offered to the local peoples. Batman clearly had a sense of duty; and when he initially settled in Melbourne he cooked

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A History of Victoria

a daily ration of food – cakes made of flour and sugar and a serving of boiled rice – for the numerous Aboriginal people living nearby. John Batman returned to Launceston, acclaimed with audacious exaggeration as ‘the greatest landowner in the world’. Though the governor in Sydney disowned his treaty he went ahead as if nothing had happened, shipping sheep to Port Phillip and occupying the shore at Indented Head and then a hill on the banks of the Yarra. A warm-hearted, intelligent, pushing, hard-drinking man, he became a physical wreck soon after setting up house for his large family in the village of Melbourne. He saw many of his countrymen make fortunes by occupying the grassy ‘downs’ which his initiative opened; but his share in this wealth was small. He lived only four years in Melbourne, dying there at the age of 38. John Pascoe Fawkner, small and cocky and fiery, was the lesser founder of Melbourne town. He too came from Launceston where at various times he was auctioneer, baker, coach-owner, bookseller, journalist, farmer, timber merchant, and the proprietor of the Cornwall Hotel and anything else he could lay his hands upon. His 11th birthday he had spent near the Port Phillip Heads, at the early convict settlement of Sorrento, where his father was a prisoner. Now, when talk grew louder of the wonderful pastures of Port Phillip, he imagined them in all their lushness and decided that he would inspect them. He sailed from the mouth of the Tamar in July 1835, in the wake of Batman, but became so seasick or so nervous of the debts he was fleeing that he had to turn back. The tiny schooner sailed without him, edged her way up the Yarra River – the first ocean vessel to follow that twisting river – and sent ashore horses, pigs, hens, cats and dogs at the site of Melbourne. By the time Fawkner and his wife arrived, the horses had ploughed a paddock for wheat. By the time Batman moved to Melbourne from the Bellarine Peninsula, Fawkner was strutting the grassy slopes. Fawkner was a jack of all trades and did in Melbourne what he had done in Launceston – almost everything. He wrote by hand Melbourne’s first newspaper, and he opened the first hotel, though unlicensed, and he launched a lending library. There was a wonderful eagerness and jumping-jack energy about this half-educated man, and it is rather humbling to find in secondhand bookshops in Melbourne today, copies of learned books which he once owned.

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Map 1 Australia Felix

They are easily identified, for he signed them with boyish handwriting right across any page which caught his fancy. He was eager to possess, and that was true of most of the early settlers coming to what they called ‘our side of the country’. Batman and Fawkner glared at each other. The settlement consisting of eight turf huts and five other buildings was too small to accommodate such enemies. Moreover, should disputes erupt, there was no magistrate and no policeman within a fortnight’s ride, because the settlement was illegal and everybody was a trespasser. And when in September 1836 the governor in Sydney at last authorised settlement in the Port Phillip district, and Captain Lonsdale of the King’s Own Regiment arrived as police magistrate, he was at first far from certain whether Melbourne – known oddly as Bearbrass – should even be the main town. Williamstown and Port Melbourne were closer to the bay but lacked fresh water: that was the

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A History of Victoria

deciding fact. In March 1837 Melbourne was formally named after the prime minister of England, and streets 99 feet in width were laid out. On 1 June the first blocks of land were sold at prices ranging from an extravagant £95 at the north-east corner of Collins and William streets to £18 in the valley of Collins Street: £18 was the price of a half-lame horse. Melbourne was still a hillbilly camp rather than a town. Sailing ships, which slowly worked their way up the river to Melbourne, were moored to stumps close to the banks. The water was fairly deep, and even without a wharf the unloading of a ship was not difficult. The favourite mooring place was at the foot of William Street where the river briefly bulged, opening out to three times its normal width and forming a natural basin where ships could be turned around with ease. Eventually the customs house was built on the north bank of this wide basin, but the bulge in the basin has since been filled in, making the river today more like an industrial canal. Behind the customs house was an open square bound by William, Collins and Market streets. For some years virtually nothing stood in the square except tree stumps, and facing that square was the Lamb Inn in Collins Street, and side-on to the square, at the corner of Collins and Market streets, stood Fawkner’s two-storey hotel with its cramped balcony looking onto the river a few hundred yards down the slope. The Melbourne Club in 1839 took over Fawkner’s hotel as a clubhouse, and members down from the country enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the ships tied to the riverbank. In 1839 the riverbank was given a rough wharf, partly to prevent the bank from eroding. Two years later, wharf space remaining scarce, the retired naval captain and Honolulu whaler George Ward Cole bought a strip of river frontage at the bottom of King Street and began to build a long wooden wharf and a dock and a bond store. Melbourne was, like Niagara Falls, a town of falls and rapids, but the waterfall on the Yarra was the most baby-like fall one could imagine. A little below Queen Street ran a ledge of rock – long since blasted away – over which the river spilled. The painting of the falls by the early settler Wilbraham Liardet suggests with a little exaggeration that the water fell with surprising evenness, almost as if it spilled over a tiny weir and made just a murmur of

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turbulence in the wide basin or rock pool below. The falls actually gave their name to the river. J. H. Wedge, the surveyor, saw the falls in September 1835 and the Aboriginal people travelling with him at once called out ‘Yarra Yarra!’ Wedge imagined that was the name of the river – he spelled it ‘Yarrow Yarrow’ in his notebook. Later, hearing the Aboriginals use the same words to describe a waterfall on the Werribee River, he realised his error. By then the Yarra was firmly named. The falls were a barrier. Above them was fresh water, and there the water carts filled their barrels and tanks with water for sale in the town, and below the falls was salt water and there the smaller ships from the deep sea were moored. So land and ocean came neatly together. At very high tides in summer the salt water actually pushed across the rock ledge and made the slow-flowing water upstream undrinkable. In 1838 a rock dam or breakwater was built to keep apart the salt and the fresh waters. The breakwater was destroyed by floods a year later, was rebuilt in 1842, destroyed again, and rebuilt. To cross the river was difficult. The first bridge was not built until 1845, and so boats and punts had to suffice. Just upstream from the falls was a suitable crossing place and in 1838 a long rope linked the trunks of two trees on opposite sides of the river. A wooden punt was propelled to and fro, the man in charge pulling at the rope to drive the punt slowly through the water. The punt had no roof and sufficient space to allow a dray and two pairs of bullocks to stand on the platform. Nearby a second punt was launched a year later. Further upstream, at Richmond, another punt was such a landmark that it gave its name to the Punt Road. The Yarra was the artery of early Melbourne. It provided transport from the bay to the town. It gave fresh water until the first reservoir was opened at Yan Yean. It was the gutter for abattoirs and boiling-down works built on its lower banks, and the stormwater drain for Melbourne’s streets. Further upstream, on the river flats, sat the market gardens and dairies and orchards which fed the town. Close to the river, Joseph Hawdon and John Gardiner, two of the first men to drive livestock overland from the Sydney-side, established their rural properties. Even further upstream, in 1851, gold diggers rushed a tributary creek at Warrandyte. And along that

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A History of Victoria

same valley in the 1880s the young nationalist painters of the Heidelberg School saw Australian skies, hills and valleys with wide eyes. The river is no longer seen as a unifying artery. In fact it soon came to be seen as a social barrier, dividing the wealthier southern suburbs from the poorer northern suburbs. The Yarra above the city was also a physical barrier, because as late as 1890 no bridge spanned that long stretch of river between Studley Park and Bulleen. Whereas we see the Yarra as tame, early citizens saw it as wild. In December 1839, they saw how quickly the Yarra could rise. For three days and nights the rain poured, and as the Yarra became swifter, all traffic across the river was halted. Brickmakers working on the south bank lost their kilns and huts. A newly erected wharf floated out to sea. The water swept along Flinders Street, lapping doorsteps. In 1842, 1844 and 1848 the floods again were severe. They were most devastating when a south-westerly wind was blowing strongly, thus bottling up the river and preventing the quick escape of the flood into Port Phillip Bay. In those days the swampy ground in South Melbourne and West Melbourne was virtually unoccupied, so that a flooded river could spread over a vast estuary before it reached the sea near Williamstown. In November 1849 the combination of prolonged rain and fierce wind brought a mightier flood, creating a lake which seemed to stretch all the way from Emerald Hill, now marked by the South Melbourne town hall, to the site of the racecourse at Flemington. Even St Kilda Road was submerged, and people living nearby were rescued by rowing boats. The absence of the embankment now leading up to the south end of Princes Bridge allowed floodwaters to cross St Kilda Road and cover the flat lands around Albert Park, and eventually flow into the bay. High-flying birds would have noticed the enormous patch of brown water along the bay. On the little farms in the wider stretches of valley, especially between Templestowe and Alphington, post-and-rail fences protected the orchards, vineyards, vegetable patches, and paddocks of wheat and oats. The flood of 1863 ran through farmhouses which had been built too close to the river. It swept away fences and many of the paling sheds and huts. Here and there it gouged a new bed, tearing up fruit trees and carrying potatoes in their thousands

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towards the bay. Many wives were bereft by the loss of furnishings and bedding and all those homely touches they had added in the moments of leisure. When the floodwaters vanished, the full misery was visible. To walk along the valley after the 1863 flood was to see mud and desolation where once was a hive of energy. Many tenant farmers and their families walked from the land, defeated. At Banyule near Heidelberg, Peter Fanning lost cabbages, potatoes and fruit trees as well as his personal possessions, but he was one of the luckier farmers because he retained his mud-browned house, his livestock and his plough. Four years later he was still farming but his children were now dressed so raggedly that he refused to allow them to go to school. Similar floods rushed down the Maribyrnong River, or Saltwater as it was then called. Its catchment was smaller than the Yarra’s, and in a high flood it carried only about one-third as much water. Running for much of its way through deep gorges it endangered few farms and villages. The first bridge across this river was built upstream at Keilor, and from the mid-1840s it conveyed the topheavy wool drays making their way across the Keilor Plains towards Melbourne. On the plains the winds could be strong, and it is said that heavy bales of wool were sometimes ‘blown about the plains as if they were bundles of feathers’. Meanwhile, in the late 1830s the village of Melbourne was still close to the falls which separated the drinkable water from the salt water. The village was entirely on the north bank and no land was sold on the south bank for many years. Moreover the village huddled at the western end of the present city, being bounded by the river, Spencer Street, Lonsdale Street and Swanston Street. Early in 1838, James Clow, a Presbyterian clergyman, built from Tasmanian timber a thirteen-room house at the south-west corner of Swanston and Lonsdale streets, and his house and his three acres were virtually on the edge of the bush. Two hills dominated the little town. The western hill, known as Batman’s Hill, stood just west of the corner of Spencer Street and Flinders Lane and from John Batman’s house atop that hill he saw Mount Macedon sharp and clear to the north west, saw with his telescope the ships riding in the bay at Williamstown, and saw the

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A History of Victoria

River Yarra at the foot of his own vegetable garden. The hill has since been flattened. The northern hill, Flagstaff Hill, where the gardens now stand, had such a commanding view that in 1840 it became a signal station displaying the flags which announced the arrival and departure of ships from Williamstown. Later a small cannon was mounted on the hill, and it was fired whenever a ship could be seen arriving at Williamstown. The Flagstaff Hill was a radio and television station and satellite crammed into one, and to people conscious of the isolation from Sydney and Hobart and London it was more important than Telstra is today. Most Melbourne people knew the meaning of at least twenty different flags. Thus the hoisting of a white and red flag on the hill indicated that a ship sailing up the bay was from Asia, and a yellow and blue and white pennant announced that the incoming ship was from South Australia. Williamstown, where Batman’s schooner anchored during the first voyage, remained for years the busiest port. Here ships could anchor safely in its bay, protected by Point Gellibrand from the prevailing winds. Here flocks of little Tasmanian sheep were landed and driven slowly inland. Year by year in the adjacent bay the ships arriving from Europe, Tasmania and Sydney were unloaded by muscular men and the cargoes carried ashore. Here the Victorian navy later made its base; here was erected a fort and a timeball tower where sea captains could correct their chronometer or clock before beginning the long voyage home. To carry correct time was allimportant. Port Phillip was mainly governed from Sydney, just as Sydney in most matters was governed from London. Such an indirect mode of government fostered a sense of grievance, but at least there were segments of local administration in Port Phillip. In 1839 the local police magistrate was replaced by a superintendent, Charles J. La Trobe, who was subordinate to the governor of New South Wales but far from powerless. In 1842 a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Mr Justice Willis of quarrelsome disposition and frosty tongue, took up residence in Melbourne. In the same year Melbourne was granted a town council, which controlled not only markets, drains, street lights and the supply of water but its own police force. Localities were also given the right to form a road trust –

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the forerunner of the shire council – and Heidelberg formed a road trust which, between 1846 and 1851, turned that stretch of Heidelberg Road running between the Merri and Darebin creeks into the first macadamised road in Port Phillip. At the Merri Creek stood a toll gate, and the keeper of the gate lived in a humpy nearby and came out to collect a fee from every rider and driver using the new road. On Sunday, people owning carriages and gigs gladly paid the toll and drove at spanking pace along the road, reminding themselves what it was like to live in England. Melbourne itself did not see or smell sheep in a normal week but it rode on the back of the sheep. The town provided shops, banks, hospitality and fun for the sheep stations which now stretched far into the interior. Since the last months of 1835 small ships loaded with sheep and sometimes cattle had arrived from Tasmania, unloading their livestock at Williamstown, Geelong, Portland and a variety of landing places, from which they were driven inland. With the sheep went a dray, loaded with food and equipment and drawn by pairs of yoked bullocks. When the squatters passed beyond the furthest sheep station, they made camp and occupied for a token fee an area of land which was rarely less than 10 000 acres and occasionally more than 50 000 acres. The late 1830s were years of drought, and even Lake Burrumbeet beyond Ballarat was dry, but the grasslands at first were stocked so lightly that the drought did not greatly matter. The squatters marvelled that such fruitful country was awaiting them, and its new name announced their sense of pleasure. They called it Australia Felix, which meant Happy Australia. Here was the lucky country, in the eyes of its new owners. Major Mitchell had given this Latin name to the country he explored in 1836. Slowly travelling, he recalled, ‘over flowery plains and green hills, fanned by the breezes of early spring, I named this region Australia Felix, the better to distinguish it from the parched deserts of the interior country’. His rapturous words influenced many sheep-owners in New South Wales and they journeyed south in 1837 and 1838 and 1839, crossing the Murray and actually following the wheel marks left in soft soil by Major Mitchell’s heavy dray. They came in a white fleecy procession, the sheep jostling each other at the river crossings for the right to go first. The best sheep from New South Wales were merinos, the best from

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A History of Victoria

Tasmania were Saxons, but most sheep were skinny mixed-breeds which would have gained only a glance of contempt from a serious sheep-breeder. The overlanders coming from Yass and Gundagai and the Sydneyside followed roughly the present Hume Highway. The big flocks of 2000 or 5000 sheep made slow headway, grazing as they dawdled along. The crossing of the rivers was slow, because the sheep had to be swum across and the dray had to be floated across. Aboriginal people along the way raided the sheep on the perimeter of the flock, and dingoes tore at sheep at night. On that long trek it was not always easy to find an evening camp site with drinking water and grass for the hobbled horses and the bullocks, and safety for the huddled sheep; and when the site was chosen, the tents had to be erected, a sheepfold had to be made from fallen tree limbs or rope nets, the damper and meat had to be cooked and the pannikins of piping-hot tea prepared, and the men in turn had to keep watch throughout the night. John Hepburn, a strong-jawed mariner, was one of the first to reach the Ballarat district. He had set out from near Canberra early in 1838, with a horse and covered cart for his wife and two children, 18 bullocks and two drays, three horses, and a flock of 1650 sheep. His ten men were convicts, still serving their sentence but holding tickets of leave which enabled them to work for wages. For them the three months’ journey, the silence of the long night, the sense of danger, and at last the sight of those grassy, breast-shaped hills where the flocks were finally halted must have been as memorable as their long voyage to Australia as convicts. They too were fortune seekers. Of these ten convicts who walked with Captain Hepburn’s sheep, two remained petty thieves, two were touch and go, while the others branched out on their own and, Hepburn reported years later, ‘have done well’. Hepburn also did well. Within eight years his flocks had multiplied by eight and he could walk for miles in any direction and rarely be out of earshot of the bleat of his sheep. Several years after a sheep run was established, the life was still primitive. Dogs ran in and out of the huts, the blowflies and bushflies swarmed in summer, and the smell of grease and fat pervaded almost everything. It was the autumn of 1844 when Annie Baxter and her squatter husband reached the sheep run of Yambuck near the surf

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in western Victoria, and her eyes did not light up when she saw the thatched whitewashed hut in which they had to live. The floor was earthen and a haven for fleas. In the window space a piece of nailed hessian took the place of the glass. Cold draughts came through the gaps in the slab walls, and the nailing of a pair of blankets to one wall had not sealed the cracks. There were two rooms and no door between them, only a hanging rug. The poky bedroom was also used as a store; and a chest of tea, a cask of corned beef and a bag of salt did not leave much room for the bed, which was discomfort itself. In the other room a fire was burning when Mrs Baxter pushed past the dogs and entered the hut. The chimney did not draw well and the smoke floated in the room. When she saw the abject scene, she felt like crying. While the western plains were the paradise – home of the golden fleece – Gippsland was ignored. Isolated from Melbourne by forest and steep ranges and the wide Kooweerup swamp, Gippsland was also separated by steep ranges from the sheep country near the Snowy Mountains. Eventually a drought in the Snowy foothills persuaded bushmen to explore southwards, and the boldest of these private explorers was Angus McMillan, a devout and dogged young man who had come from the Isle of Skye to be a station manager. With the aid of convict servants and Aboriginal people he reached the fine rivers and green pastures near the Gippsland lakes in 1840. Many cattlemen followed his tracks and took up land in east Gippsland. Port Albert became the harbour for virtually all the settled parts of Gippsland and for the cold country around Omeo as well. A shipwreck placed Port Albert on the map. Late in 1840 the new English paddle steamer Clonmel, a model of polished brass, entered the Melbourne–Sydney route and aroused such hopes that many people in Melbourne said that their isolation had ended. A few weeks later, steaming from Sydney towards Wilson’s Promontory with seventyfive passengers and crew, the steamer ran onto a sand-spit in the early hours of 2 January 1841 and soon became a total wreck. The rescue ships sent from Melbourne found that she was lying close to the entrance of ‘a noble inland lake’, Corner Inlet, and in the following month the barque Singapore sailed from Melbourne with a few colonists who were eager to take up the new region for their

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livestock. They reported that the view of the mountains of the Promontory, ‘with the salt sea lashing their base’, was all ‘desolation and solitude’. In contrast, on the banks of the small Tarra River, their Aboriginal helper Charley Tarra killed a kangaroo which was too heavy to carry away – a sign of how lush were the pastures. Port Albert became the port for these pastures, and in 1842 the town of Alberton was surveyed nearby and an official pilot was appointed to steer ships through the sand spits which guarded the port. Port Albert probably did more trade with Hobart than Melbourne, its main export being cattle, but later it would serve new goldfields as far apart as Omeo and Walhalla. It was the only port along that coast until, in the mid-1860s, little steamships and schooners regularly entered the dangerous opening at Lakes Entrance. Most Aboriginal people at first were not hostile towards the newcomers who poured in. Many were welcoming in gesture and spirit, and many felt an intense curiosity or excitement at the strange sights. Many imagined that the white-skinned people were the friendly spirits of dead Aboriginal people ‘returning to their former haunts’. Possessing no domesticated animals, Aboriginal people were puzzled to see the sheep and the shepherds following each other around: they assumed that a human kinship linked man and sheep. Likewise an astonished Aboriginal person seeing for the first time a man on horseback was not sure whether the man and animal formed a distinct species, a kind of centaur. Many of the customs and belongings of the newcomers were pleasing, and the flour was relished and the sugar even more. Aboriginal people also treasured any piece of iron they were given because it was often stronger and sharper than stone and bone as a cutting instrument. They marvelled at the tinderbox, which made the lighting of fires so simple, but they were bewildered by firearms and the noise of the firing and the invisibility of the shot as it sped through the air. The Aboriginal people and the British settlers were worlds apart in their beliefs, their understanding of cause and effect, their social organisation, and in their ways of winning food. They were probably as far apart as any societies thrust against each other in the history of the human race. Even if hand-picked mounted policemen had been posted at camps every few miles across Australia Felix,

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and even if all Aboriginal people and all newcomers were overflowing with goodwill, the coming together of these societies would have been chaotic. The Aboriginal people’s way of life was dislocated by the arrival of the sheep. Their nomadic movements were checked; their waterholes were now drinking places for sheep; and the kangaroos and game they hunted were disturbed, though not eaten out. The river flats where their plant foods grew might now be out of bounds when sheep clustered there; and their sacred sites were desecrated by huts and drays and sheepfolds. Likewise the squatters were resentful when Aboriginal people killed and maimed sheep; and shepherds out with their flocks returned in the evening to find their hut ransacked and flour, clothes or firearms stolen. The Aboriginals, travelling through the grasslands in summer, habitually lit fires, and the squatters feared that all the pastures and half of the flocks would be destroyed when the fires were fanned by hot winds. Through fear or aggression or simple misunderstanding, shots were fired at Aboriginal people and spears thrown at shepherds and stockmen. The retaliation was usually quick: the fears multiplied. On most sheep runs in most years relations with Aboriginal people were calm, but on some runs they were explosive. Newcomers travelling across country with sheep could usually defend themselves. Armed and well organised, they kept watch throughout the hours of darkness. Occasionally they were not alert enough. On 11 April 1838, flocks owned by the Faithfull brothers were coming overland in convoy from the Murray and were attacked near the Broken River: eight men were killed, and the others ran for their life. Of the sixty or so newcomers killed by Aboriginal people in the first 15 years of the pastoral era, most were shepherds, hutkeepers or travellers who were alone when attacked. A few were disembowelled by Aboriginal people, and that increased the will to avenge. Aboriginal people were the victims of massacres. In March 1840 in the far west of Victoria two brothers, perhaps seeking reprisals after some of their newly arrived sheep had been stolen, hunted down and killed at least twenty and perhaps forty Aboriginal people. Some time in 1840, on Glengower station, adjacent to Captain Hepburn’s, a cook was disembowelled and left hanging from the rafters. His friends eventually set out in

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pursuit and came across Aboriginals hiding in a waterhole in a creek with their nostrils protruding like periscopes above the water: some of the Aboriginals did not leave the waterhole alive. East of Mount Alexander, the mounted police in 1839 had shot dead four young and two old Aboriginals and wounded others. After investigating the episode, E. S. Parker penned his abhorrence of the saying amongst pastoral people that when unknown Aboriginals commit an offence, ‘the tribe to which they belong should be made to suffer for it’. How many Aboriginal people were killed will remain the subject of dispute. At least 400 must have been killed by firearms, though it is very doubtful whether the death toll reached the figure of 2000 occasionally alleged. The British government tried to protect Aboriginal people in Victoria in 1838 by setting up a costly system whereby a chief protector and four assistants would protect Aboriginal people and give them practical and moral instruction. The protectors could rarely offer strong protection, and the law and the courts did not protect the Aboriginals. In Melbourne in the 1840s nine Europeans were each tried for ‘shooting a black’ but only one was found guilty, and he was sentenced to imprisonment for a mere two months. In the same decade three local Aboriginal people and two who had come from Tasmania were hanged for murder. The Aboriginal people suffered not only from British firearms and British justice but from their old tribal rivalries, and their practice of avenging deaths. Aboriginal people themselves killed more Aboriginals than Europeans in the early pastoral era. Indeed some Aboriginal people thought that one advantage of the coming of the British was the decline of deaths caused through their own internal strife. ‘Before you came here’, said one Aboriginal person, ‘the country was strewed with bones, and we were always at war’. Now it was a different kind of war, and by 1845 it was largely over. The fiercest enemy of the black people was disease. They had no immunity to influenza and smallpox and measles and tuberculosis, and they died in their hundreds. Venereal disease ran amok, and in the Loddon Valley protectorate nine of every ten Aboriginal women were said to be infected at the end of 1841. According to the official count of the two Aboriginal tribes around Port Phillip and Westernport, their population fell from about 350 in 1836 – when disease had already done its work – to a mere seventy-nine in 1850. The

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guardian of Aboriginal people, William Thomas, who knew these two tribes, wrote sadly alongside the statistics of decline: ‘Their decrease is astonishing; the more so, as these two have ever been on friendly terms with the settlers’. If warfare was not the destroyer, what was? Thomas gave a wide-ranging answer that encompassed alcohol, prostitution and an inability to fend for themselves: ‘Their dissipated habits have, I may say, been their executioners’. But their dissipation was largely the result of illness, bewilderment, the breakdown of the old tightly knit society, and their alienation from the beloved tribal land which had sustained them for thousands of years. Everywhere the death rate was appalling, and the birthrate was hardly worth recording. Perhaps as many as 15 000 Aboriginal people – and no fewer than 7000 – lived in Victoria before the British reached the continent, and that number was reduced by fasttravelling diseases even before the first British settlements were made at Port Phillip. By 1850 the number of Aboriginal people was to fall below 3000. Disease was the early killer and demoralisation the later killer. Here were a people of whom it could almost be said: they died of grief. Little, it seemed, could save the Aboriginal people. Perhaps an end to the frantic stocking of new sheep runs, perhaps a halt to the slow march of sheep towards the Mallee and the other fringes of settlement, might at least give respite to the surviving Aboriginal people. Such a respite came in 1842 and 1843. Depression set in, and wool prices fell. As the stocking of new runs virtually ceased, the price of sheep slumped, crippling many squatters who had depended more on sales of sheep than on sales of wool. Insolvencies became common, and in the Portland Bay district alone about twenty squatters went to the wall. ‘Melbourne is no longer Melbourne – no money, no credit’, was the lament. New immigrants were shocked that they could find no work after crossing the world especially to seek it. The name Australia Felix was now infelicitous and even had a mocking sound. Despite the low price of wool the whole industry soon grew rapidly again. By the late 1840s labour became scarce. In the surviving letters of pastoralists are many complaints about the scarcity and inefficiency of shepherds. One shepherd would not work without a sheep dog. Another must have fallen asleep or gone

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wandering, and lo and behold the flock had strayed out of sight. Said his master with astonishment: ‘Nothing but gross carelessness’ can lose a flock on the plains. The flock was found three hours later, the shepherd was dismissed, and a fine deducted from wages owing him. The thousands of shepherds too had their complaints: rations were second-rate; some masters went bankrupt, owing them money; the pay was low even by town standards; and the life was monotonous and trying at the height of summer and winter. Many squatters turned elsewhere for labour. In all, 1700 of the English convicts known as Pentonvillians came to Port Phillip and at first were welcomed by most of the squatters. English convicts who had served part of their sentence, they received a conditional pardon on promising that they would not return to England until their term had expired. They were joined in 1848 by the first of small bands of Chinese and Malays who came under four-year contracts from Singapore to work on the sheep runs. Like all shepherds they received the normal weekly ration of eight pounds of flour, seven pounds of fresh meat, one and a half pounds of sugar, plus a few ounces of tea and their cooking pots. Their annual wage, however, was only about half that of local shepherds, partly because a sum was always deducted to repay their fare from Singapore and their fare home when their contract had expired. For the squatter the main worry was that the Asian shepherds would abscond or die, leaving him to pay the fare. One small clause in the contracts of Chinese who had come from Singapore reveals the fear that these men from the tropics would die of pneumonia, their debts unpaid. Thus most Chinese shepherds had to agree always to possess a great coat, woollen shirt, jacket, strong trousers, boots and a pair of blankets. The increase of the flocks was remarkable. Between 1843 and 1851 the sheep in the Port Phillip district were multiplied by four, and the 6 600 000 sheep now equalled the total sheep grazing within the boundaries of what we now call New South Wales. The Victorian sheep ran on 1200 different stations or runs, and perhaps half of those runs were held by Scots. The squatters still held no title to their runs, and some did not even know exactly where their runs began and ended though a few did plough a single furrow around those boundaries which they claimed. Most squatters lived in huts or humpies or cottages, and a few dug a simple vegetable garden and

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grew wheat in a small fenced paddock, and killed their own beef or mutton. Few women lived on the sheep runs: it was an austere, rough land of single men. After 1847 the squatters were allowed to buy a tiny fraction of their sheep estate – one square mile as a homestead block – and that freehold land enabled John Hepburn of Smeaton and John Winter of Ballarat and many other squatters to build substantial houses. The fierce calendar of sun and rain ruled the pastoral districts. The climax of the year was September and October when the flocks one by one were brought to the rough shearing place and first washed in running water or with one of the washing spouts or contrivances to be increasingly seen on the plains. Crammed together for a few days before shearing, the sheep were then shorn by small teams of shearers. The shearers from Tasmania wore tall hats and carried everything in kangaroo knapsacks known as Derwent drums and were the slower but better shearers, whereas those from the Sydneyside were distinguished by a careless speed in shearing and by their habit of carrying a blanket swag. The fast shearers were already the princes of labour, earning in a successful week as much as a shepherd earned in two months. On a few sheep stations the shearing might continue into December but by then the creek water for washing the sheep was scarcer and dirtier and the grass seeds and burrs were likely to tangle themselves in the fleece. After the shearing the wool was pressed into square bales, each holding about a hundred fleeces and weighing perhaps one-eighth of a ton. The wool drays were piled high with these bales, so that they sometimes looked from a distance like little galleons venturing across the grassy plains, for the eight or twelve yoked bullocks which hauled the dray were almost out of sight. By December and January hundreds of drays were crawling into the wool ports, and the ships at anchor were ready to take their wool on the long voyage past Cape Horn to England. A year later, thousands of European families were sleeping under new woollen blankets, which many could not have afforded but for the cheapness of wool grown under unusual Australian conditions. Geelong became the destination of most of the wool drays. Founded later than Melbourne, it was rarely worth looking at until 1841 when it had 450 people, its first church (Presbyterian, of

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course), its first race meeting, its first lending library, its first regular steamship service to Melbourne, and a paper – the Geelong Advertiser – owned by John Pascoe Fawkner and edited by that genius James Harrison who soon was to devise the world’s first effective ice-making machine. In 1841 Geelong also sent a shipload of wool direct to England. By 1850 it was the fifth largest town in Australia, its port was probably busier than Melbourne’s, and it was the heart of a farming district and the home of factories making tallow, soap, candles, salt, flour and felt hats. Geelong smelt of wool and tallow: it was built on wool. It was even possible that Geelong might eventually overtake Melbourne because it was closer to the finest wool country. But Geelong had two impediments. A long sandbar prevented the deep-sea sailing ships from approaching the town, and they were forced to anchor four miles away at Point Henry, the headland where the aluminium smelter now stands. Geelong was also too close to Melbourne. In the end the one port or the other was bound to win, and to win decisively. Farming as well as grazing made headway. A surveyor whose work led him to most places within 10 miles of Melbourne would have seen scores of small farms along the valleys: up the Yarra and the Darebin Creek; on the Moonee Ponds Creek where Johnny Fawkner at rural Pascoe Vale kept what some said was ‘the best garden of the district’; and on the bends of the Merri Creek where, once the huge trees and massive boulders had been removed, the black soil grew vegetables as prolifically as it was to nourish the cricket pitches in Bradman’s day. The widest sweep of Victorian farmland was now on the Barrabool Hills, at the back of Geelong, and the little sandstone village on the shoulder of those hills was rightly called Ceres, after the ancient Roman goddess of agriculture. Victoria’s acreage of wheat was increasing faster than that of the colonial granary, South Australia, and nine of every ten loaves of bread were now baked from local flour. New vineyards were flourishing, and the merchant William Westgarth received several bottles of Bear’s local champagne before he sailed to Scotland in 1847. He saw such a future for local wines that he made the suggestion – ignored for a century – that winemakers should invent new names rather than copy European names against which Victorian wines would thereafter be slavishly measured.

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Few people travelled far within the Port Phillip district, unless a strong reason made them travel. An occasional sailing ship went to Port Albert, Port Fairy and Portland but their sailings were irregular and, in winter, storm-tossed. Once a week, by 1847, a horsedrawn gig with room for a passenger or two carried the mail from Melbourne to Portland, travelling by way of Ballan, Buninyong, Fiery Creek (Beaufort) and The Grange (Hamilton) and frequently making detours around boggy or stony ground. Hugh Childers, fresh from England and preparing to journey into western Victoria in January 1851, bought a gig-cart, fitted to its side an outrigger, which enabled a second horse to run alongside the cart horse, and set out from Geelong at six o’clock one morning. In this land of no signposts he quickly lost his way because the ‘bush tracks are very puzzling, and in some places almost invisible’. The roughest part of his route lay through the Stony Rises, towards the present Camperdown. ‘They call it the Stony River, the road being all the way like the bed of a dry creek’, he explained to English friends. Travel to Sydney was also a vexation. Passengers could travel by sailing ship but they could not predict on what day or even week the ship would leave nor when it would reach Sydney Heads. The steamship Shamrock carried passengers to Sydney but first she had to call at Launceston before changing course for Sydney. Fares were dear and the roundabout route and the roughness of Bass Strait in such a tiny kettle of a ship deterred passengers whose business was not urgent. The mail to Sydney went overland by way of Kilmore and Albury, and the horseback mailman had given way to a horse and gig that left Melbourne every Tuesday and Friday. The unbridged rivers were barriers during months of heavy rain and the winter of 1847 was notorious and Aboriginal people in bark canoes ferried the mail across the Murray. At Yass on 23 May the mailman and his horse were drowned, and the mail was carried away in the brown flood. The loss of a letter was a blow because the postage from Sydney cost the same as from London, namely 15 pence – and for that sum a labourer could buy enough food to feed a family of seven for a day. In 1850 the postal charges were drastically cut and for the first time postage stamps were sold, though they carried no adhesive gum on the back.

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Isolation from Sydney was the strongest reason for the campaign which called for the creation of a separate colony of Port Phillip. Even in 1840 some Melbourne voices demanded separation. The voices grew louder after 1842 when New South Wales was given a reformed legislative council with twenty-four elected members, of whom six came from the Port Phillip district. Local candidates were hard to find: Sydney was too far away. In the space of five years, seventeen different members occupied the six local seats, and most were quick to resign. The Church of England recognised that Port Phillip and other districts could not effectively be administered from Sydney, and in 1847 the vast bishopric was cut into four: Sydney, Newcastle, Adelaide and Melbourne. In London Earl Grey, the secretary of state for colonies, had also decided that Port Phillip should be separated but he had not decided when and how. The electors hastened his decision. On 19 July 1848 an election was held for the six Port Phillip seats, but at the last moment all candidates withdrew and only one nomination remained. The name of the lone candidate was unexpected, and even he did not know because he was living 12 000 miles away. Earl Grey was the candidate and was duly elected. The bush lawyers promptly demanded to know how a member of the House of Lords, and therefore ineligible for even the House of Commons, could be allowed to take his seat – should he miraculously appear in Sydney – in an infant colonial assembly. The fact remained that he was eligible. The governor in Sydney now called for another election for the remaining vacancies, moved the seat of the election from hotheaded Melbourne to peaceful Geelong, and duly attracted enough candidates in October to fill the vacancies. Even so, the declaration of impatience had been issued, and Grey eventually responded. The news of the impending creation of the colony of Victoria eventually reached Melbourne, in a copy of a London newspaper, on Monday 11 November 1850, and the cheering and celebrating went on for a fortnight. The prosperity of the district was in itself an argument for separation. It was the fast-growing part of Australia in the late 1840s and even passed South Australia and Tasmania, though nobody knew until the census of 1851 disclosed the startling fact. In 1846 Victoria had a mere 33 000 people but five years later they had more than doubled to 77 000. Melbourne was being built anew. The town of

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wood was replaced by stone and brick although nearly every roof was still made of wooden shingles. In September 1850 a Melbourne merchant proudly wrote to a friend that a thousand houses had been built in the past 10 months: ‘you would be surprised at the immense place it is now’. Victoria was a land of surprises. Just as the richness of nature was a surprise, so too was its fickleness. On Thursday 6 February 1851, a day of fierce northerly winds, bushfires broke out in so many places that half of Victoria seemed ablaze. At the sheep run of Captain Hepburn the volcanic hills towering above his new twostorey homestead were both alight. On the western plains the fires ran like herds of wild horses. Melbourne and Geelong filled with smoke. The gale-strength wind carried a cloud of ash and smoke across Bass Strait, and in north-western Tasmania a silent darkness descended on that afternoon of Black Thursday. In Victoria hundreds of thousands of sheep were incinerated; on some stations not a blade of grass was visible. Many shepherds were heroic in the face of the fire, and on a sheep station near Ballarat the boss recorded with humility how the Chinese shepherd Yensoon did not desert his huge flock when the fire roared towards him: The poor fellow had no dog, but had done all he could to move the sheep. He stayed too long amongst them and was suffocated by the dense smoke. Before he recovered his senses his clothes became ignited. Poor Yensoon was so very much burned that he died three days afterwards.

Australia Felix was also seen as the land of miracles. Charles Dickens, writing in 1850 the last pages of David Copperfield and wondering how to provide a happy ending, sought a plausible haven for that genial but perpetual debtor Mr Wilkins Micawber. The character who more than any other in fiction had the abiding faith that something would turn up – when in all likelihood it wouldn’t – was finally transplanted by Dickens to Australia Felix, the land where all things, both social and economic, were possible in the eyes of Englishmen. Later, surprising news of him reached England. An odd-looking colonial newspaper reported that in Port Middlebay, alias Melbourne, the large room of a hotel was crowded to suffocation when a dinner was held in honour of that prosperous, distinguished magistrate, ‘the ornament of our town’, Mr Micawber.

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The man who was always hoping something would turn up could not have been in a better place. Not long after the colonists in the crowded hotel had toasted his health with the words ‘May he never leave us but to better himself’, there occurred an event which made it unlikely that even Mr Micawber would leave.

3 A Golden Ant Hill

The gold rush began in the month Victoria was formally separated from New South Wales. Never had a new colony received such a birthday present. On 5 July 1851 a Melbourne publican broke the news that he had found gold up the River Yarra at Warrandyte, only 16 miles from Melbourne. Those who collected pick and shovel, tin dish, tent and supplies, and set out to try their luck at his diggings soon received news that they had travelled in the wrong direction. Richer gold was found west of Melbourne. A bush sawyer who had not long ago returned from the Californian diggings found gold at Clunes, within a stone’s throw of the homestead of a Scottish squatter. Early in August the Buninyong blacksmith found gold only a mile from his bellows and forge, and in a couple of hours he collected enough gold to fill a matchbox. In several months of hard work as a blacksmith he would not have earned that much money. Geelong was the point of departure for these first rushes in the western half of Victoria, and the Melbourne Argus reported that now the ‘whole town of Geelong is in hysterics’. Men who had just left Victoria for the goldfields around Bathurst in New South Wales began to hurry home when they heard that the gold here was richer and dispersed over a larger region. In the spring and early summer of 1851 great rushes set in. Ballarat, Mount Alexander (Castlemaine) and Bendigo were found in a few months of easy discovery. Much of their early gold was dug within a foot of the surface. Only men with heavy commitments at home, or with 43

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a strong sense of duty or a weak imagination, were able to resist the temptation to rush to the goldfields. At the end of 1851 about half of the men of Victoria, and thousands from Tasmania and the Sydney-side, were working on the diggings. Of Melbourne’s forty municipal policemen, thirty-eight had resigned. In the port most of the ships were unable to sail away with safety because too many of their crew had deserted, leaving their pay uncollected. In some districts the harvest would have been eventually flattened by the winds but for the teams of Aboriginal men and women replacing the farm labourers who had vanished to the diggings. Society was topsy-turvy. The economy was strengthened but dislocated. Not even the oldest resident could remember, here or in England, such a rise in the prices of food and housing. Between January 1851 and January 1854 Melbourne’s price of bread was doubled, butter trebled and eggs sextupled. That flurry of goldrush inflation was at least four times as severe as any later inflation, whether that of the Korean War in the early 1950s or the inflation of the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Once the news of gold reached Britain, gold seekers clamoured for quick passages to Melbourne. The first overseas gold seekers arrived in the winter of 1852, and by the end of 1854 more than 140 000 immigrants had arrived from the British Isles, more than 20 000 from China and other foreign ports, and nearly 110 000 from other Australian ports. The clamour for a berth in a ship leaving Liverpool or London was such that the fastest sailing ships were placed on the Melbourne route. The Marco Polo, Lightning, James Baines, Champion of the Seas and other new Boston clippers were probably the quickest sailing ships the world had known, and several sailed more than 400 sea miles in the space of 24 hours while running with the strong westerlies in that vast windy ocean between the Cape of Good Hope, Melbourne and Cape Horn. In the course of a round trip to Melbourne they circumnavigated the world. Most of these gold clippers were out of sight of land from the day they left the English Channel to the day they approached Bass Strait. Many of their passengers had never seen the sea until they boarded the ship, and then for 70 to 90 days they saw nothing but sea. In the Southern Ocean their ship was often buffeted by mountainous seas

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and freezing winds, and the passengers were kept below or preferred to stay below day after day in a half darkness. Then came that magical moment when they saw land or, before it was in view, smelled land. The faint scent of earth or of the wattle in season, wafted perhaps across the ocean by a northerly wind, remained one of the sweetest smells in their memory. It told them the voyage was almost over. As their ship sailed slowly up Port Phillip Bay, the passengers lined the decks, hungry to see the hills beyond which the goldfields lay. Their first glimpse of Melbourne was the bare masts of dozens of ships, unloading cargo into small boats in the bay between Williamstown and Port Melbourne. Merchants in ports as far apart as Bristol and Boston were supplying the cargoes that were piled high on Melbourne’s wharves and the vacant land nearby. By 1853 more imports were arriving than people could consume. Just five years before, the total value of the imports into Victoria was not quite £400 000, but in 1853 about a dozen items each exceeded that sum. The Victorians now spent more on English beer and cider than they had spent five years previously on every import added together. They now spent more on foreign boots than they had spent on all imports added together in 1848. The spirits came pouring in: £629 000 of brandy alone, and for every 10 gallons of brandy came six gallons of rum, four of gin and one of whisky. Little ships brought timber across Bass Strait: seven million palings arrived, and for the roofs of diggers’ huts came 11 million wooden shingles, all in the one year. Prefabricated houses of iron and wood came from England in thousands of pieces. So Victoria, with its relatively small population, its wealth and its appetite for goods, was briefly one of the most important customers of the greatest trading nation in the world. Bullock drays and faster horse carts carried the supplies to the diggings. The carters knew where they were going: many new diggers did not. If a new chum set out from Melbourne in 1855 and decided to walk to the latest gold rush, he carried his heavy load up Elizabeth Street towards a vital crossroads. The road ahead, the Sydney road, went past the new university and stretched towards the diggings of Beechworth or Heathcote, but on his left hand side the wide Mount Alexander road went towards such goldfields as

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Map 2 The gold rushes

Bendigo, Maldon and Ararat. The decisions he made at such crossroads often determined whether, a year hence, he would lie beneath a fall of clay in a shallow shaft or be sailing home to England with a bag of precious gold in the strong-room of a ship. Chance played a part in the career of most gold diggers. The crucial decision was sometimes reached on the afternoon of the first day, on the plains just beyond the village of Keilor. There one road went to Ballarat and the other to Bendigo, the two richest goldfields of the decade. If the digger stepped along one road rather than the other his life probably followed a different course. In the first years of Ballarat most people came on foot. In four years, at least 150 000 people must have come, for there was a high turnover of people. If they carried their own baggage from the coast, their possessions usually consisted of tent, blankets, cooking utensils, occasionally a prospecting pan and light implements, and perhaps flour and sugar and tea. Often this was too heavy, and so a passing drayman had to be paid to carry the swag or bundle: many walkers were hitchhikers.

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William Baker reached Melbourne in 1855 from Southampton. He decided first to try the diggings around Ballarat and so with a brother he went in a ship to Geelong and then began to walk. Along the road they met the driver of an express cart who agreed to take their swags on the cart while they walked alongside. They spent the first night at Meredith by a huge fire, listening to the yarns of the carters who were camping together. On the second night they slept under a dray at Warrenheip until a huge thunderstorm broke and the water began to flow beneath the dray. The carters, however, hardly heard the thunder, for they had broken into a cask of spirits and were drunk. On the third day, in Ballarat, Baker was impressed by the sight of ‘thousands of the finest men I had ever seen, in their serge shirts, white moleskins and knee boots’. It must have been wet weather because the serge shirts and knee boots tended to be winter dress. A newcomer did not quite know what to expect when he saw for the first time a busy diggings. The chaos caught him by surprise. William Howitt, not long arrived from England, reached Beechworth at Christmas 1852 and mounted the brow of a hill and saw a wide valley dotted with hundreds and hundreds of tents. As he came closer the sordidness and stench, confusion and din captured his senses. He saw a ‘desert of pale clay’ where the ground had been dug for gold. He visited the bark-lined shafts, some down about 30 feet, and watched grubby miners climb down on a rope and then send up buckets of the gold-bearing clay. He saw the undrinkable water in the Spring Creek where men washed the gold-bearing clays and sands they had carried there. Their most useful tub was a barrel or hogshead sawn in half, in which they stirred and rocked the mixture of water and clay so that the heavy grains of gold worked their way to the bottom. The congestion was unforgettable, with diggers ‘thick as ants in an ant-hill’, and shops and butcheries stuck in unlikely spots, and trees indiscriminately felled or stripped of their bark. At nightfall Howitt heard the sound of dozens of pistols and guns fired in rapid succession by diggers. The discharging of guns was a daily ritual, a reveille which summoned the night. After the sun set, few diggers moved from the vicinity of their tents, and their faint lamp could be seen briefly through the canvas. They were

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prisoners of their hazardous and unlit surroundings and their own tiredness. Each gold digger had to pay for a licence which permitted him to mine and to keep the Crown’s gold. As the licence at first was costly, being equal to about one-third of a shepherd’s or sailor’s wage, most diggers tried to evade this tax. Hunts for unlicensed diggers were to become common. A digger who held no licence could pay an additional penalty because his gold mine or plot could be legally ‘jumped’ or occupied by another digger. The licence system had been created in Sydney in May 1851 to meet the upheaval caused by the first rush to Ophir, and Victoria simply copied it. Victoria also copied the regulation that no digger could possess more than a tiny square of ground. Devised so that each man who had rushed to the cramped valley of Ophir could have a chance of sharing in the small expanse of gold-bearing ground, such a stringent regulation was not necessary in Victoria, where the gold was unbelievably extensive. Nonetheless, on many of the early Victorian fields each digger was allowed an area or claim which was as cramped as eight feet by eight feet. That was little larger than a family grave. Whereas the government in Sydney had handled the gold crisis of 1851 with masterly commonsense, the new government in Melbourne continued to handle its own gold crisis with less skill. In April 1853 it decided that on every goldfield, rich or poor, deep or shallow, each man should be allowed no more than 12 feet by 12 feet. Here was administration by the tape measure rather than the brain. It was as if a government had decided that every building block in a city should initially be the same size, whether it was for a factory, house, church or shop. In the long history of apportioning the land, minerals and other natural resources of Australia, this decision was probably the most mindless. Without this decision, the rebellion at Eureka in 1854 would not have occurred. Governor La Trobe retired to Europe and was replaced in June 1854 by a starchy and aggressive governor, Commodore Sir Charles Hotham. He inherited La Trobe’s now-outdated policies on how to cope with the invasion of diggers but did not change the policies. A man of the quarterdeck, he simply enforced them. As nearly half of the 77 000 diggers, either by hiding or by moving from rush

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to rush, succeeded in evading the licence fee, Hotham eventually ordered the police to hunt for unlicensed diggers twice a week. That aroused the unlicensed diggers, but a section of the licensed diggers was ultimately the more indignant. At east Ballarat, on the Eureka Lead, parties of diggers were searching for gold in deep ground and were spending up to nine months sinking their shafts before they knew whether they would even find gold. In different ways they were the acute sufferers from the government’s policy. They could not dodge the licence tax, being residents of the one place rather than wanderers. Moreover, even if they struck gold, they usually received a reward which was inadequate for their risks. They also suffered more through the caprices, incompetence and disabilities of the local goldfields administrators. Above all, being settled residents with some savings, and already working in partnerships of eight or ten men, they were more able to organise a protest movement than the typical digger who worked shallow ground and did not remain long in the one place. Ultimately these deep miners were the main rebels. Hotham toured the diggings, felt goodwill and loyalty all the way from Avoca to Heathcote, and sensed little danger of a rebellion. The danger crept up on him. On 8 October 1854 at Ballarat, a digger named Scobie was murdered, but the three magistrates acquitted the owner of the Eureka Hotel and his associates of a charge of murder. Diggers burned the hotel, and three of the rioters were imprisoned. All the grievances seemed to come together in one campaign of detestation and despair against the government. By the end of November the tension at east Ballarat was acute. Licences were burned; a republican flag was hoisted on a tall flagpole; and miners began to drill under the leadership of Peter Lalor, a young Irish engineer. Hotham feared he might lose control in this deepening crisis. His soldiers and police at Ballarat were outnumbered; their supply line to the coast was fragile. Moreover he himself believed that the miners, if aroused, could easily defend themselves. Their ‘network of rabbit burrows’, he wrote privately, were ideal for guerrilla warfare. The hilly terrain, the dug-over ground and the numerous trees offered shelter to armed miners but obstacles to the government’s cavalry or foot soldiers trying to advance in disciplined formation.

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Early on the morning of Sunday 3 December the miners who were sheltering in their wooden fort or stockade at Eureka seemed to forget that they were rebels. Many had gone home for the night. Some were drunk. Even the sentries must have been half asleep. Hotham’s soldiers and police seized the initiative, marched in the darkness towards the stockade, and captured it in the first light of day. Five soldiers and about thirty miners were killed in the brief fighting, and several of those miners were killed by shots or bayonet thrusts after the stockade was overrun. The rebellion was crushed but public opinion was not. Thirteen miners, including an American negro, were tried in Melbourne for high treason. The jury refused to convict them. The rebellion took place at the crucial time when Victoria was about to make a decisive step towards democracy. The rebellion did not initiate or make the first step but it hastened the second. A new constitution, devised in Victoria and allowing a local parliament to govern Victoria, was already under consideration in distant Westminster. It was accepted with some amendments in July 1855, and proclaimed two months later. Henceforth a parliament of two houses would govern the colony. The first election for the legislative assembly, the important house, was held in 1856. William Clark Haines, nicknamed ‘Honest Farmer’, became the first premier, and on the backbenches sat Peter Lalor who had lost an arm at Eureka. Lalor saw the legislative assembly become more democratic than even he probably wished. The secret ballot was introduced for the first time in the world at the elections of 1856, and in the United States it became known as ‘the Victorian ballot’. From 1856 virtually every man in Victoria had the right to vote at a time when perhaps only one in every five men in England had that right. From 1857 a candidate for the legislative assembly, unlike a candidate for the House of Commons, did not have to own property in order to stand. In 1859 another plank of the English Chartist movement – elections held every three instead of every five years – became the rule for the legislative assembly. In 1870 members of the assembly were paid for the first time, thus permitting people of small income to hold a seat. Victoria and South Australia were now far and away the most democratic of the Australian colonies.

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Map 3 Melbourne, the river, the port and nearby suburbs, June 1855

Melbourne, in the year of Eureka, had passed Sydney in population. The largest city in Australia, it was more like a staging camp with tents jamming one stretch of St Kilda Road, piles of uncollected cargo near the Yarra wharves, bundles of unclaimed letters at the post office, and scores of sailing ships riding at anchor in clawshaped Hobson’s Bay. In that same year, 1854, several of the wonders of the century reached the makeshift city. The first telegraph in Australia was erected on red-gum poles between Williamstown and the city, and the first steam locomotive carried passengers from Port Melbourne to a little station in Flinders Street. In the same year Mr Justice Redmond Barry, late of Dublin and one of those publicspirited people which every new city needs, was proud to see two

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of his ambitions take shape, for on the same day Governor Hotham laid the foundation stones of the university and the public library. The university seemed premature: five of its fifteen students were to drop out before the end of the first year. Almost before people realised it, Melbourne was beginning to resemble a city. The happy-go-lucky street scenes were now rarely to be seen, and people began to reminisce how these days no digger lit his pipe with a banknote or threw a gold nugget to his favourite actress from the balcony of a theatre. By the late 1850s the main streets were lit by gas; the water pipeline from the Yan Yean reservoir had replaced the horse-drawn water carts in the streets; and buildings of stone and brick were replacing wood. And enthroned at the top of Collins Street was that elegant gem, the Treasury, designed in this land of the young by a 19-year-old immigrant from Liverpool, J. James Clark. It had been an astonishing decade. Its like would not be seen again. Victoria held only 77 000 people in 1851, on the eve of the gold rushes, but in the next seven years it so grew that its halfmillion people now equalled the white population of all the continent on the eve of the rushes. In 1858 Victoria must have held just over half of the population of Australia, a proportion which no colony or state was likely to hold again. The dramatic part of the increase had taken place in the first years of gold. Two long and expensive railways – from Geelong to Ballarat, and from Melbourne to Bendigo – were approaching the goldfields. The day seemed near when diggers would cease to tramp along the main roads but would reach the goldfields by train. Some critics, however, thought that the railways were an act of folly. Pointing to the recent decline in the output of gold they predicted that the main goldfields would be dying before a railway reached them. Gold’s long-term future depended on mining the white, hard quartz rock, but was that rock really worth the mining? A few Victorians must have shuddered when they read the new book Siluria, written by the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, who warned that mining for gold in hard rock rarely paid. The prophets of the Bible, he added, had come to the same conclusion, and he quoted chapter 28 of the Book of Job: ‘Surely there is a vein for the silver . . . The earth hath dust of gold.’

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Was Murchison correct in his pessimism? The Victorian government in 1857 sent a group of experts to the goldfields to seek an answer, and their leader, Professor Frederick McCoy, reported that Victorian gold reefs seemed to become poorer as they became deeper and that, at a depth of a mere 200 feet, the outlook was poor. The government’s own gifted geologist, Alfred Selwyn, disagreed but for the moment McCoy’s message of gloom was heeded. His message was gloom itself, and he warned that the government might burn its fingers by financing railways to goldfields which could quickly disappear. When the Victorian exploring party led by Burke and Wills set out in 1860 on their tragic journey, the vast crowd which clamoured around them as they left Royal Park showed more than idle curiosity. If, in crossing Australia from south to north, the explorers found new gold or pastures, restless Victorians would follow in their steps. Thousands of Victorians, now that gold was declining, were poised to begin a new life elsewhere. Thousands hurried away to the new goldfields at Lambing Flat, Forbes, Adelong and Kiandra in New South Wales. In 1861 another 20 000 sailed to the South Island of New Zealand where they showed their origins by giving their gold towns such Victorian names as Ballarat Hill, New Lamplough and Rutherglen. Victorian politicians deplored this exodus of gold miners. Few, however, deplored the sight of Chinese miners filling the stagecoaches or carrying their goods on long poles as they went north. The first Chinese in Victoria had been pastoral labourers, but after gold was found thousands arrived from Canton to dig. In 1855 the government, alarmed at the inflow, imposed a heavy tax on every Chinese immigrant landing at a Victorian port and an additional tax on the ship-owner. Victoria was now conducting its own foreign policy because it was discriminating against subjects of a nation with which England was on tolerably neutral terms, and yet Victoria as a colony did not really possess the power to pursue its own foreign policy. The Chinese gold seekers, more than the government in distant London, rapped the knuckles of the Victorians. The Chinese found it easy to evade the tax by landing at the South Australian ports of Adelaide in 1856 and Robe in 1857. Hong Kong alone sent

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twenty-two ships crammed with Cantonese to Robe where, hiring Australians as guides, the gold seekers began the long walk eastwards to the goldfields. Shepherds in western Victoria were astonished to see the crocodile of Chinese, wearing peaked bamboo hats and loose blue jackets, carrying their possessions in baskets and boxes balanced on the end of poles and jogging slowly across the plains. Victoria was powerless to halt this invasion. The border with South Australia was unguarded. The small contingent of soldiers and police on the goldfields could not hope to arrest these taxevaders, and all the prisons in Australia could not have held the Chinese who came jog-trotting into Victoria. The foothold of the Chinese in many parts of Victoria was precarious. At the Buckland River, on 4 July 1857, Chinese were driven from the nearby gold diggings. In many gullies on many goldfields they were insulted, especially by children. Most were not maltreated physically but were probably the victims of at least one jibe, shove or act of contempt annually. A few Victorian groups positively tolerated the Chinese. Clergymen saw them as ripe for salvation. Most housewives relished their cheap vegetables and fruit or the fish they hawked from door to door. Many citizens respected them for their courtesy and their peaceable disposition, and many employers thought they gave better value for money as hired hands in mines and on farms. In 1873 at Clunes, the directors of the Lothair gold mine, which included the Eureka hero Peter Lalor, resolved to break a miners’ strike by recruiting Chinese miners and bringing them from Creswick in horse-drawn coaches. On reaching the edge of the town the Chinese were driven back. Fear that they would lower the high standard of living of the average Victorian was the strongest of all the fears directed against them. The Chinese were so different in their dress, their religion, their social habits and their vices. The Reverend William Young reported on the Chinese in Victoria in 1868 and wrung his hands when he read the stories of opium addiction which came to him from the Chinese interpreters employed by the government. At least half of the Chinese were said to smoke opium. At Maryborough the typical Chinese miner spent one-tenth of his income on opium, and in some districts even more money went into opium. At least eighty

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opium shops operated in Victoria, and the government did not discourage them. And what were the effects of prolonged smoking of opium, Young enquired of the Chinese interpreter at Castlemaine? ‘Every wicked thing’, he was told, ‘comes from this practice. The first evil is the eating up of the smoker’s earnings; the second is the loss of physical strength – he is unable to work.’ Many Victorians feared that opium addiction would spread to the British and become as widespread a curse as drunkenness. From that curse the Chinese were spared. ‘I have neither met with nor heard of a Chinese drunkard’, wrote one journalist who had toured the goldfields. The Chinese gambled, and they gambled on Sunday, and that compounded the indignation. The interpreter at Maryborough estimated that four of every five Chinese he knew were persistent gamblers. The interpreter at Daylesford saw gambling as the king of vices and complained that when a Chinese won at gambling he became licentious and extravagant, and when he lost ‘he steals like a mouse, and pilfers like a dog’. Here, exclaimed the Reverend William Young, is a ‘monster evil’. All but a handful of the Chinese immigrants were men; they had no family life and many were said – with more exaggeration than truth – to hire child prostitutes. Most Chinese were ‘heathen’, and that was not held in their favour. Young was one of many who strenuously tried to convert them to Christianity, and from the 1880s the effort was to be extended to China itself. Victoria, more than any other colony, sent across missionaries. R. H. Mathews, who produced the first great Chinese–English dictionary, came originally from Ascot Vale. From that same district came Susie Garland, the missionary who devised a way of teaching braille to the blind in China. In Victoria the Chinese became entangled in the nets which each country in each generation, wrongly or rightly, erects to protect itself against outsiders. To the Reverend William Young and ‘the moral majority’, and even to the Chinese-language interpreters, the Chinese diggers endangered Victoria with their social vices, their opium pipe and fan-tan table. Young and many others were content for them to remain, so long as they became Christians, but most Victorians also resented them because they were willing to work long hours

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for low wages. Most of the social and economic arguments against the Chinese were understandable. Most nations today would use them if confronted with an inflow of similar proportions, but many of these valid arguments were expressed wildly and offensively. Chinese civilisation and all its achievements was derided with a sweeping ignorance and arrogance, especially late in the century when pride in the British Empire was at its height. Gold was the main lure for the Chinese and it no longer allured them. There were more than 42 000 Chinese in 1859 and they fell to 12 000 by 1874. The biggest remaining Chinese camps were at Avoca, the Buckland and at Beechworth where the funeral ovens and headstones in the cemetery still mark their presence. Many of the successful had returned with their gold to Canton or gone to other rushes outside Victoria, and those staying behind turned mostly to laundries, market gardens and hotels. Most Chinese who remained in Victoria were poor. That was why they remained. A few Chinese merchants amassed wealth in Melbourne, and in the mid-1860s two were elected to the board of the new Commercial Bank of Australia, which had the bright idea of printing some of its own banknotes in the Chinese language in order to widen its clientele. Several thousand Chinese went to the trouble of taking out Victorian citizenship, but in 1887 Victoria decided not to confer this right on new Chinese applicants. Curiously the fence against the Chinese became highest, and the slogans painted on that fence became the most offensive, long after the real danger had passed. Pride and prejudice has its own temperature chart, and some of the rises and falls cannot be explained quite rationally. A fence against foreigners also called for sentries. In August 1854, Melbourne had become the headquarters of the British army in Australia, and two regiments from Somersetshire and East Suffolk were stationed in Melbourne and were sent that year to Eureka. As the British navy wisely preferred to use Sydney as its far southern base, Melbourne was nervous that it might be attacked from the sea. It was the richest gold port in the world, a place infinitely richer than the Spanish Main had been, and if the Crimean War

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continued Melbourne would be a prize worth plundering by a Russian cruiser. Victoria began to plan a small navy, and in May 1856 its new naval sloop, Victoria, arrived from the Thames. In 1861 the Victoria, using sails and steam, made its way to the Gulf of Carpentaria in search of the lost explorers Burke and Wills. The port of Normanton is named after its commander, Captain W. H. Norman. Later it carried supplies and despatches to New Zealand during the Maori War, and even landed the troops which stormed a Maori stronghold: this was the first Australian military venture across the seas. When the iron vessel Cerberus – now a breakwater at Black Rock – reached Melbourne in 1871, Victoria’s own navy became more forbidding. The British government continued to maintain a regiment in St Kilda Road until 2 August 1870 when the soldiers marched from the Victoria barracks and filed aboard a ship at Port Melbourne. The withdrawal of the last regiment of the British army was, symbolically, one of the important events in the slow, sporadic movement of Australia towards independence. If it had been demanded by the Victorian government it would now be a landmark, a day to commemorate. In fact most Victorians watched with regret those soldiers fade away. The idea of paying for their own land defences, whether by a permanent army or by volunteers, did not appeal. Eventually Victoria spent far more than any other colony on its navy and army. It even appointed a minister of defence in 1883 and set up a council of defence which could call out the volunteer forces ‘in all cases of actual invasion of Victoria, or hostile or predatory attack thereon, or of imminent danger thereto’. Victoria was called a colony but it sometimes acted as if it were a sovereign nation. The apportioning of power between Victoria and London was not always clear, nor was it clear within Victoria. The wealthy members of the legislative council sometimes obstructed the legislative assembly: there was no accepted solution to deadlocks between them. As legislative councillors held their seats for a term of 10 years they were not frightened by the eddies of public opinion. The governor, appointed by Westminster, also had substantial power when he dared use it.

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The political career of James McCulloch highlighted disputes between Britain and Victoria. A wealthy Melbourne merchant, Glasgow-born, intelligent and determined, he was decidedly solemn, and his long face made him seem like the king of the undertakers. He was four times premier of the colony, first taking office in June 1863. That year he quarrelled with Westminster over its plan to send more convicts to Western Australia and to open other convict settlements. Victoria was not directly involved but McCulloch made it his business. In the face of colonial protests and threats the British government began to retreat. Supported by a huge majority in the democratic lower house, McCulloch tried to introduce a protective tariff which would tax all imports including those from Britain. The small Victorian upper house objected. A long political and financial crisis ensued. The governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Darling, though discreet and experienced (he had previously governed St Lucia and Jamaica in the West Indies, and the Cape Colony and Newfoundland), was condemned by Westminster as siding too much with McCulloch and the lower house and the voice of the people. When the governor was recalled in disgrace to London, McCulloch persuaded the lower house to grant a large testimonial sum to the departing wife of the governor. More importantly, Victoria’s protective tariff remained in place. In retrospect the gold rush was like a whirlwind, and for several decades the damage and dislocation were slowly repaired. The schools were one casualty. How could schools be supplied to towns which rose and fell in a year, or to diggings where the children were scattered or had no fixed address? The easiest solution was to erect tents but the light inside was dim, and the maps could not easily be hung on sloping walls. If the canvas was torn by wind and wear, the rain came in and cold draughts flowed in winter, and the floorboards were wet. ‘The noise also of the canvas, when the wind is high, makes it difficult to hear a class’, complained one school inspector. Likewise, the children were suddenly taken away when their parents moved to a new rush, and if they enrolled in another school the teachers might use a different technique of teaching because they had been recruited from Irish and English national systems, American schools, regimental schools, private English or Victorian

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schools, and a medley of teaching backgrounds. Rarely have schools faced such difficulties. Victoria in the late 1850s possessed a freak composition of age groups. Males outnumbered females by three to two, and families were relatively few. By the early 1860s thousands of single men had emigrated to new gold rushes in other colonies and more single women had come as subsidised immigrants from the British Isles. The balance of sexes was restored, more people settled down and married, and the birthrate soared. As a result Victoria experienced another astonishing phenomenon. In the 1860s the number of boys under the age of 14 increased at 10 times the rate of increase of the boys and men over the age of 14. Between 1861 and 1871 the population of Victoria increased by one-third but those attending school actually trebled. To provide all those teachers and schools, many of them in remote places, was a remarkable achievement, even if the education given was rather less noteworthy. The government subsidised two kinds of schools, the denominational and the national, and in many towns they stood within a stone’s throw of each other. In the national schools an elected committee of local worthies selected the teacher, preferably somebody of their own religion, and in the fifth hour of the school day the teacher was allowed to give a religious lesson to the children. The national schools, in practice, were not very different from the denominational or church schools where part of the day was devoted to the Bible and religious instruction. To subsidise two kinds of schools, especially in diggings where the population was falling, was hardly a sensible use of money. In 1872 a new Education Act tried to remove this inefficiency. Behind many noteworthy reforms is an adder-up, doing the sums which are usually a part of any appeal to high principles. The religious lessons were the gunpowder in any proposed reform of education. All kinds of compromise could have been made whereby public money was saved but religious teaching could at the same time be given in every school. The election of Charles Gavan Duffy as premier in June 1871 blew the fire closer to the gunpowder. A talented and charming Irishman, once charged with treason

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in his homeland, he was too much seen as the Catholic and Irish firebrand to be a mediator in the education issue. The recent Vatican declaration that the Pope was infallible did not help him, nor did the Australian bishops’ recent ban on mixed marriages. The highest Catholics had by chance so timed their decisions as to make Gavan Duffy an electoral meal for the Orangemen. The newspapers also gobbled him up. When Gavan Duffy was succeeded in 1872 by an Anglican politician, James Francis, the Catholic bishop warned his flock in a statement read in all churches on Sunday 23 June that the new government would abolish Catholic schools and force good Catholics, under pain of fine or imprisonment, to send their children to godless schools. Some heard Gavan Duffy’s eloquent voice behind Bishop Goold’s unwise, exaggerated words. A few days later, Francis easily won the election. He shaped the new Education Act, which prevented, virtually for 90 years, state aid to Catholic and other church schools. From the first day of 1873 all children over the age of six had to attend school, unless they lived more than two miles away, and the law in effect made schooling compulsory until the age of 12 or 13. Instead of two schools competing for children in a small town, there was now likely to be only one, because Catholic and other church schools were to receive no subsidy after a warning period of five years. The local committees and their religious preferences were largely removed and, instead, the minister of public instruction controlled the state schools, their curriculum, and the selection of teachers. Religion was not banned in the schools but it was firmly controlled. The new state schools were free, except for needlework and a few optional subjects. As free and compulsory education quickly added 40 per cent to the school rolls, the reform was far from free for the taxpayers. The most courageous and costly educational reform so far seen in Australia, it was more than a turnaround in education. It was like a Factory Act because it prevented most city children from going to work. It was a venture in women’s liberation because it gave education equally to girls and boys. It was also, in effect, a tax on a large group of the poor. The Catholics were the poorest of the main religious groups, and to them the politicians of 1872 had issued the

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alternative: ‘What do you prefer? Your religion or your shillings?’ Clearly the Catholics wanted their own religion to be taught in their own schools, even at their own expense. Compulsory education was seen by many reformers as another long-term way of tackling lawlessness. The new state schools, we have forgotten, were like reformatories, in which punctuality was the first rule. Children marched neatly into school and sat like ramrods on wooden forms, in rows of regimental neatness. They were often punished with strap and cane for ignorance as well as indiscipline. The schools themselves were known more by their number than by their place-name, as if they were themselves prisoners answering a central roll-call. To some politicians the only justification for the government interfering strongly in education, and thereby in civil liberties, was the belief that ‘ignorance is a prolific source of crime’. Education was a matter of ‘police, pure and simple’, thundered the old Etonian T. H. Fellows during the parliamentary debate on the bill. Appropriately he became a judge of the Supreme Court a few months later. The Education Act of 1872 seemed to exhaust the zeal for educational reform. Primary schools now stood, in brick and stone and canvas or bark, all the way from Fitzroy to the furthest mining camp, but even 30 years later not one state secondary school existed. At last, between 1905 and 1907 the state opened high schools – in Melbourne, Ballarat, Bendigo, Warrnambool and Sale – but they were not free. One is tempted to ask why, after such a bold start, Victoria ceased to be a pacemaker in education. Perhaps the answer is that too many Victorians were ambivalent towards education and the cultivating of too many students who would rise above the ruck. In Australian life there have long been two competing streams, the one favouring achievement and the other suspicious of it. Even in 1872 both streams were running rapidly in their opposite directions. The gold rushes had been a strong source of the levelling tradition, but now gold mining was becoming a big-man’s industry, run by the companies and syndicates. Admittedly, thousands of working miners still speculated in shares, and one of the sights of Ballarat was the ‘corner’ where shares were sold on the pavement, in the open air. The Irishman who in Sydney in 1868 tried to assassinate

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a son of Queen Victoria was an unsuccessful share speculator from Ballarat’s ‘corner’. The symbol of the new company mine was not only the share certificate but the throbbing steam engine. It pumped water from the deep mines, hauled up the men and the broken rock, and drove the noisy mill whose stampers crushed the gold-bearing rock. In 1873 Victoria’s gold mines had 1150 steam engines. Ravenous for fuel, they burned that year more than a million tons of firewood, and whole forests were chopped down to feed them. The output of gold continued to sag and between 1856 and 1865 it almost halved, and it was to halve again by 1878. Amidst the overall decline, deeper mines were largely taking the place of the shallow, flitting diggings. The urgent question – will the gold in the hard quartz rock live down? – was being answered. The gold did live down: not usually as rich but still payable when big companies mined the rock on the large scale. In 1857 a very deep shaft in a hard-rock mine in Victoria went down a mere 200 feet, but by 1874 the bottom of the shaft of the Magdala mine at Stawell was down 1524 feet and four other Stawell shafts were more than 1000 feet deep, as were two shafts at the New North Clunes. The evidence clearly suggested that the prophet Job was wrong. The 1850s is usually called the golden era, and we often read that by the end of that decade gold was no longer vital. But the next decade was also golden. In the 1860s gold still dominated Victoria’s exports, often by a huge margin over wool, and was not to lose its supremacy until about 1874. Gold was still the shining advertisement for Victoria. Every foot of ground had been scoured by the prospectors but rich discoveries were still to be made. In 1860 the most productive mine, the Long Tunnel at Walhalla, had not yet been found; nor had the world’s greatest deep-alluvial field, the Spring Hill, just north of Creswick; nor had that wonderful nugget the Welcome Stranger. If any event should mark the end of the gold era, the finding of the Welcome Stranger near Dunolly on 5 February 1869 is that landmark. It was unearthed on a much-trodden part of a goldfield by the wheel of a puddler’s cart, a few inches below the soil. It weighed nearly 2300 ounces, and was not easily lifted by one man, and in

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shape and colour and smoothness was an exquisite sight. Probably the largest nugget found in the world, its fate symbolised this rich and evanescent era: within a few days it was melted into impersonal ingots and sent on a long journey to the darkness of strong-rooms and vaults on the far side of the world.

4 The Silver Stick

Those who walked along the country roads or waited in the train at the small sidings still heard, more than any other sound, the bleat of sheep. The bleat was becoming more widespread, for the land was now stocked intensively. A series of Land Acts in the 1860s and 1870s threw open the original squatting runs for public sale, and the graziers acquired – often at too dear a price – most of the land which was fit only for livestock and some of the land which was fit for ploughing. Their new bluestone mansions were visible across the plains: the mortgage was less visible. The many big graziers now had an unpopularity which the few rich mine-owners did not share. The most denounced of the ‘squatters’ – the name persisted – was W. J. T. Clarke, a former Somerset drover who first shipped sheep from Tasmania to Port Phillip in 1837. A big, tempestuous man with a pronounced limp, he became the richest person in Australia, owning in the early 1870s an estate worth, today, hundreds of millions of dollars on any conversion table. ‘Long’ Clarke was once limping his way towards the platform at Spencer Street when the train to Sunbury began to move. Instantly he raised his walking-stick and called out, ‘Stop that train!’ The train was stopped. This was the essence of the public complaint against the squatters: their power to stop the train. They were seen as too powerful: too powerful in the legislative council; too powerful because of their ability to borrow from banks on whose boards they sat; and too powerful because they bought, sometimes 64

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trickily, vast areas of land which, in the public eye, should have supported a thousand farmers instead of half a million sheep. This last complaint was based on the mythology that the western plains of Victoria could be a paradise for the small settler with a horse and plough, a couple of cows, and three small paddocks. Not until decades of speech-making, legislating, cartooning and lampooning had passed was it realised that such a paradise could not exist on most parts of the plains. Almost everywhere on the sheep lands, the shepherds were being replaced by fences – tens of thousands of miles of them, crooked and straight, wooden and stone and wire, or neat posts and rails. The shepherd had gone but not the shearer, who was now more than ever in demand to shear heavier fleeces from more sheep; but even the shearer had changed. The old-time shearer had walked everywhere, carrying a small swag with a billy for his hot tea, but the shearer of 1870 often owned a horse. He enjoyed being in a hurry, and liked to talk about racehorses, and cracked his whip when exuberant. The old shearer had dressed scruffily in moleskin trousers and a blue jumper open at the throat, and his wrinkled, tanned face pointed to his long exposure to the weather. In contrast the new shearer, no longer a half-hermit, liked to dress neatly and even flashily on Sunday. ‘He has some preference for town, and takes his trip to Ballarat every year’, noted a journalist in 1867. Whereas a shearer before the gold era stayed in the bush and enjoyed such simple pleasures as drinking brandy neat and singing bush songs and playing euchre, the new shearer was in touch with the world and could even read, his preference being for the sporting news. The young Victorian shearers had a new attitude to life and leisure. They believed in hard work but not grinding work. At a time when the idea of stopping for a few minutes in order to fill and smoke a pipe was intolerable to most employers, young shearers took delight in shouting that it was time for a ‘smoke oh’. Clearly they had an independence, a sense of their bargaining position, and a self-respect which the union organisers skilfully harnessed when, at Creswick and Ballarat in 1886, they formed the Shearers’ Union – the genesis of the Australian Workers’ Union. Many shearers owned their own small farm and worked there in most months. In the early 1860s the small farm was typical,

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and six of every ten bags of wheat were grown on properties of less than 200 acres. Most of the wheat farms lay near the Great Dividing Range or on its south side; Port Fairy and Koroit grew wheat; Gisborne and Lancefield tied tens of thousands of sheaves each December; and the sight of the yellow wheat slowly waving in the wind on the Barrabool Hills and the Bellarine Peninsula – not far from Geelong – filled English travellers with nostalgia. The main region for wheat in the 1860s lay just north of Ballarat, and about a quarter of Victoria’s wheat in some years came from the bald volcanic hills and plainlets around Smeaton, Spring Hill, Ascot, Glendaruel and Bullarook. Here and there in that charming countryside, behind hawthorn hedges, can be seen the bluestone ruins of the old flourmills which once crushed the grain brought by a procession of farmers’ drays. Some summers in this region were really too moist for wheat, and on the small tenant farms the soil was soon exhausted by frequent cropping. Meanwhile, the best wheat lands lay on the dry plains of the interior, remote and unploughed. The railways had to arrive before wheat farmers could make a living on the northern and north-eastern plains and the Wimmera. By 1864 the inland railways had reached Ballarat, Bendigo and the river port of Echuca, and for almost a decade those were the terminuses. After a pause, Victoria’s railways strode further inland, with tent towns following the new earthworks and clustering at the bridge sites. The railway to the north east reached the border at Wodonga in 1873, and that opened up wheat land. From Castlemaine a branch railway passed through Maryborough to Dunolly in 1874, and then went on to St Arnaud, and the wheat was already golden when the first train arrived two days before Christmas, in 1878. From Bendigo the railway went to Bridgewater on the Loddon in 1876, and passengers on the first train could see knee-high wheat on both sides of the track. Meanwhile cross-country lines opened new farmlands: in 1875 Maryborough was linked to Avoca and in 1876 to Ballarat. At the same time the railway was extended west from Ballarat, reaching Beaufort in 1874, Stawell in 1876, Murtoa in 1878 and Horsham in 1879. By then the 120 miles of railway from Ararat through Hamilton to Portland were open. This was the most vigorous burst of railway building so far seen in

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Australia, and it opened up a tract of dry country which could grow wheat profitably in all but the parched years. In some districts the black locomotive raced ahead of the farmers. In other districts the first farmers were already ploughing when the surveyors, the engineers, and the men with picks and shovels arrived to build the railway. The 1870s witnessed perhaps the most remarkable trek of farmers, as distinct from pastoralists, ever seen in this country. From the closely settled patches of farmland near the central goldfields, and from the old farmlands within a day’s walk of Geelong and Melbourne, the drays and covered wagons set out in their thousands: farmers travelling to the new lands. In the past year or two, noted one journal in mid-1874, ‘the highways have been thronged’. Many travelled in a convoy of two or three families, all of whom had been neighbours in the old district. The convoy was perhaps led by a riding horse, a couple of drays and roofed wagons, with a few milking cows following behind. Most of the families on the roads had wheat in mind, and so they did not bring much livestock except a few light draught horses, a working dog, White Leghorn fowls and the Jersey milking cows. Each night the slow convoy found a place to camp where a creek was running and a patch of grass fed the cows and horses. Then came that day when from a hill or undulation the women for the first time could see – with satisfaction or perhaps a sinking feeling – those acres which their men, a month or two ago, had come specially to select. Some women and children would never forget that day. Others, within a few years, would be only too eager to forget. Other processions of wagons and carts approached Victoria from the west. They came from South Australian wheat lands where soil was becoming exhausted through repeated crops. More than half were Germans and they carried Bibles and Lutheran hymn books to guide them to their promised land. Crossing the lower Murray on punts they travelled along the sandy Coorong towards Naracoorte and Penola before crossing to Horsham, Jeparit, Murtoa and a dozen little Wimmera towns. They soon taught the Victorian farmers, arriving from the opposite direction, how to farm dry land and how to bring in the harvest quickly with the simple horse-drawn stripper.

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Nothing in Australian history so resembles the opening of the American west as this trek of farmers to the Victorian plains in the 1870s. Farming was transformed. In a decade the acreage of wheat was trebled, and by the early 1880s nine of every ten bags of wheat in Victoria came from that arc of new farmland stretching from the west Wimmera to the lower Goulburn Valley – hot plains where hardly a wheat bag was to be seen in 1870. In contrast, in those old farmlands on and south of the Divide, wheat-growing was in retreat. County Talbot, which dominated Victoria’s crops in the early 1870s, was planting, a decade later, only one-twentieth as much wheat as the Wimmera. The flourmills followed the farmers. James Fry operated two large flourmills in Ballarat and nearby Mount Blowhard in 1864, and his mills were in the heart of the wheatbelt. By 1880, following the farmers to the plains, he had built another five mills and was shipping flour to foreign ports. In the farmers’ homesteads and huts on the plains, as the years passed, the conversation after mealtime was sometimes close to despair. Most farmers had borrowed money, and most remained in debt. At Clear Lake in the southern Wimmera about a hundred selectors took up farms, but by the year 1895 only fourteen of the original selectors remained. Some had sold out, maybe at a profit or a little loss, but at least sixty-two had simply forfeited their farms to the government or a bank. One cause of failure was common to all districts. Most farmers had taken up 320 acres, the maximum under the Land Act of 1869, and had thought their farm was large enough. It was eventually clear that three or four times that land was needed for survival. Another procession of farmers went to Gippsland where rich soil lay beneath dense forest. Today in springtime those rolling hills seem heaven-made for Friesian herds, but the forest at first had to be felled. This terrain called for heroic settlers. Jane Goldsmith was aged nine when she travelled from the open country near Hamilton to her father’s new selection in the forest at Mirboo. At the railway station nearest her father’s farm she was placed on a quiet horse. ‘All the baggage’, she recalled, ‘was stacked around me so I had no chance of falling off’. Her father and brother walked beside the horse whenever the track was wide enough. She was the only girl in the district and her mother the only woman,

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and she felt ‘a great thrill’ looking at the neighbouring farmers – bachelors with lank hair and long beards. Each month the mail arrived on a packhorse, and her father made billies of hot tea for all those unkempt young men who came to collect their letters and newspapers. Life in the forest was spartan. At first the farmers had no milk except tinned milk and they had little fresh meat: fortunately, black fish and eels could be caught in the river. These pioneers supplied most of their own needs, baking their bread and making their candles and slush lamps. Everything that could be improvised was improvised. The simplest way to make a fence was to select a few tall trees which stood in a straight line, and roughly the correct distance apart, and fell them with such precision that the fallen trees formed a rough fence. To the incoming children, the clearings and forests were eerily dark on moonless nights and silent by day. One of the happiest days of Jane Goldsmith’s childhood was when she heard the first magpie singing on their farm in the forest clearing. Many families lost no time in replacing the vegetation so that it seemed more like home, and eight-year-old Virginia Castle walked with her parents through the mud to Mirboo, carrying in her schoolbag poplar cuttings, which she carefully planted. They were islanders, encircled by a sea of forest. A journey was slow by day and hazardous by night. Robert Bair fractured his left leg while felling timber near Mirboo, and eight days passed before a doctor arrived. When the doctor said the injured axeman must go to hospital, twenty volunteers came forward and carried him the 15 miles to Morwell where they placed him in the guard’s van of the Sale train. During his ride to the distant hospital, wrote the Gippsland Mercury, he received ‘the greatest kindness and attention from the railway officials, who did everything in their power to make him as comfortable as possible’. The strange career of the Kelly gang reveals the pitfalls faced by the smaller selectors. Ned Kelly was the son of a pig-stealer, transported from Ireland to Tasmania in the 1840s. The Kelly parents settled first at Beveridge, not far along the Melbourne–Sydney road, where the father was a bush carpenter and horse dealer. They then moved further up the road to a rented dairy farm of 40 acres at Avenel. When the father died Mrs Kelly moved beyond Benalla to

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Greta West where in 1867 she took up 88 acres beside the road. Part of her property was a narrow fertile flat created by one of those meandering creeks which ceased to flow in the summer. The Kellys, thinking of Ireland or the little market gardens close to Melbourne, thought that they could make a living on less than one hundred acres. Scores of speeches at the top of Bourke Street stressed that hope. But most people who took up a small selection on the plains did so because they could not afford to buy more land. A small farm had some hope of flourishing if it stood beside a busy road, especially to the goldfields. It could sell hay for the passing horse teams, eggs and butter to the travellers, and sell them at far above Melbourne prices. For a couple of years the Kellys had a prime position facing the main road to the Beechworth goldfield. Mrs Kelly was thus able to invite in the passing traffic for a nobbler of sly grog: a more profitable commodity than eggs. Indeed it was the passing traffic which first entangled Ned, then aged fourteen, with the police. A Chinese hawker named Ah Fook called at the Kellys and had words with Ned, who promptly punched him. A crucial event in the frail fortunes of the Kellys must have been the decline of the road traffic after the railway from Melbourne passed through their district in 1873. At least they could fall back on wheat, but after successive crops the yield must have fallen, the soil being deficient in phosphate. As far as can be ascertained, the Kellys had to harvest the wheat with the slow, laborious sweep of the scythe at the very time when the real profit lay in harvesting on the large scale. People more determined and hardworking than the Kellys would have done better, but even they would have ultimately surrendered their farm. Some of the small farmers stole cattle and horses from the bigger graziers. The four members of the Kelly gang had each spent a term in gaol for stealing livestock even before they came together as a gang in 1878. Their first dashing exploit was to ride to the small railway town of Euroa and rob the National Bank. To rob a bank – except from the inside – was difficult because recent inventions, especially the telegraph, which could warn police and the railway (which could convey them to the scene), made bank robbery almost too risky to

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attempt. In December 1878, however, the Kelly gang succeeded with ridiculous ease, even capturing the bank manager and making him drive in a lowly spring cart past a funeral which he had planned to attend. The Kellys thumbed their nose at the new communications by cutting down a pole of the telegraph line which led to Melbourne. In February 1879 the gang rode across the border to Jerilderie and robbed the Bank of New South Wales. They now had more than £4000 in cash and gold with which to buy any local support that did not come naturally. They could also bully and threaten. They eluded all who tried to track them down. The government’s forces were sent to capture them, dead or alive. For nearly two years the Kelly gang outwitted the police. One of their cold-blooded adventures was to kill three policemen. Finally in June 1880, at the village of Glenrowan, they were surrounded. In his last hour of freedom Ned Kelly must have been an eerie sight. A railwayman armed with a new revolver saw him in the light of early morning: ‘I saw what seemed a tremendous big black fellow with something like a blanket on him’. The blanket was his heavy armour, made from part of a plough and weighing about two-thirds of his own weight. From time to time Kelly would strike his own revolver against his helmet, making a sound like a cracked bell, and then jeer at his enemies: ‘You can’t shoot me, you bloody dogs’. The railwayman fired four shots at Kelly and hearing each one bounce off the armour, murmured, ‘This must be the Devil himself’. The other three bushrangers – Steve Hart, Joe Byrne and Dan Kelly – were killed that morning. The Devil himself was captured and escorted in the train to Melbourne. Convicted of murder, he was hanged on the morning of 11 November 1880. These bushrangers caught most people’s imagination more than any other episode in Australian history in the half-century between the death of Burke and Wills in 1861 and the soldiers’ storming of Gallipoli. It is doubtful, however, whether the Kelly gang would have become such a sensation except for the unusual environment in which they fought. The years 1878 to 1880 were marked by an upheaval in Victoria, by severe conflict in parliament between squatters and small farmers and between radicals and conservatives,

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and by a constitutional crisis known as Black Wednesday. Many landholders might not have been so willing to support the Kellys or to withhold help from the police but for that inflamed atmosphere. These were also years of rural recession, falling grain prices and increasing hostility to the banks. So many farmers were in debt that possibly they were tempted to cheer, beneath their breath, the daring raids on rural banks by farm boys who, but for the grace of God, could have been their own sons. That the bushrangers made their last stand not far from the largest city in the continent increased the public’s fascination. Moreover, until the very end they easily foiled the latest technology: the railways and telegraphs. Though in the eyes of many they were like folk heroes astride white horses, they were not yet national heroes. Catholic lads defying the criminal law could be only minor heroes in a Protestant and mainly English society. Religious and racial loyalties and prejudices had to decline – and that decline came slowly – before they could become legends amongst a much larger section of the populace. Victoria became the colony for wine as well as wheat. Towards the end of the century it made half of the continent’s wine. Winefanciers did not have to go more than 10 miles from Melbourne to find vineyards shielded by hedges or tall trees. In the 1870s a vineyard stood in Balwyn, where the Fintona girls’ school now stands. Another vineyard stood in East Ivanhoe near the present Burke Road bridge, and Moonee Ponds and Flemington had their vineyards. On the rolling hills behind Geelong, fine wines were produced by Swiss and German settlers who had planted vines before the gold rushes. Sunbury had vineyards, and bottles of its fine claret of 1872 were discovered with delight 80 years later in a vineyard cellar – their labels legible, their corks crumbling but coping – and sold at high prices to wine-tasting clubs and hosts who preferred to drink their history. The prize-winning hock and claret in many years came from Yering, beyond Lilydale, where the Swiss vignerons, the de Castellas and the de Purys, employed a platoon of labourers whose bare feet were sometimes summoned to trample the grapes for the finer wines. At the 1880 International Exhibition, in the new Exhibition Building in Carlton, the St Hubert’s vineyard of the de Castellas won

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the silver trophy presented by the Emperor of Germany for the best colonial wine, and soon that vineyard became a place of pilgrimage for those who wished to show visitors the land which could grow everything. The intense green of the vineyard was especially refreshing in the summer. To be escorted along the rows of vines, to be shown the wooden hogsheads in the cellars, to go from building to building beneath the shade of umbrellas, and to taste a variety of Hubert de Castella’s wines, was a valued experience for visitors to Victoria. Knowing Englishmen offered cautious praise. On a stifling summer’s day in 1885 the English scholar James Froude went in the governor’s special train with blue satin seats and then in a four-horse coach to see the vineyard, and after much tasting he gave his considered verdict. For the rest of his life, he said, he would be happy to drink nothing better than St Hubert’s wines ‘if I was never to have worse’. On the plains north of the Dividing Range a new wine region was supplanting the southern wine districts, in volume if not in quality. Around the old gold-workings of Rutherglen, close to the Murray River, a green sea of vines was visible amongst the red wheat soils and sheep paddocks. This flurry of vine planting was encouraged by the opening of the railway to Rutherglen in 1879, and by the increasing demand – especially in the bars known as wine saloons – for sweet fortified wines. The government placed a duty on imported wine and gave a bonus for each new acre of local vines, and the industry blossomed as never before. By the mid-1890s the average Victorian drank four times as much wine as in the late 1870s. Wholesale wine sold for as little as one shilling a gallon. A few connoisseurs said that was all the wine was worth. The hundreds of families who each summer slaved away in the vineyards that clustered around Glenrowan, Milawa and Rutherglen also thought the wine was too cheap. Victoria simply did not possess the market for the ocean of wine produced. Meanwhile an aphis began to offer a simple solution. Phylloxera, which attacked the roots of vines, had appeared in French vineyards in the 1860s and now in 1877 suddenly arrived in the old vineyards around Geelong. Despite the uprooting of thousands of vines, the phylloxera did not die. In 1899 it appeared in the heartland of Australian wine growing, the Rutherglen district, and within a decade the

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vine-bearing area had been halved. Victoria lost its ascendancy in wine: half a century of decline and stagnation set in. Wine was one of hundreds of Victorian products which were protected by a special duty. Victoria was the land of the protectionists, just as New South Wales and England were the home of the free traders. As more people took jobs in factories, foundries and workshops, politicians attributed the creation of these jobs to the duties imposed on foreign goods. Most of the jobs, however, were created rather by the fast growth of a population with money to spend, by cheap raw materials such as tallow for candles and wheat for flour, and by the high sea freights which protected Victorian factories from foreign competition. Heavy engineering was especially protected by high freights. Thus Ballarat made steam locomotives as well as mining machinery, and one of the earliest locomotives used in Japan came from Ballarat. Many of the solid fortunes in colonial Melbourne were made by those who manufactured foods and who knew how to sell them. Beer, cordial, biscuits, jams, jellies, self-raising flour and confectionery were some of the pathways to wealth. Symptomatic of the prosperity of the working people was their massive spending on confectionery. Significantly, ‘lolly’ is a Victorian word. The earliest recorded use of the word – a variation of lollypop – was in July 1862 when the Melbourne Illustrated Post observed ‘the gorgeous decorations at the lolly stall’. Confectionery was one industry where a young man with little money and a lot of grit and ingenuity could make a fortune. When Macpherson Robertson set up his own sweets factory in Fitzroy in 1880, he made plain boiled lollies in the shape of dogs, mice, horses and other creatures. His only ingredient, he said, was sugar. He spent Monday to Thursday in making the sweets, using very simple equipment which he had bought for ninepence. His furnace was an old nail-can, standing on short legs, and on top of the furnace he rested a secondhand tin boiler. He himself poured the hot mixture into moulds which he had made from plaster of Paris. His factory was the tiny bathroom of his parents’ house, and on Friday and Saturday the bathroom was free again while this 19-year-old lad went out to sell his sweets to suburban

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shopkeepers. He carried the sweets on his head – on a tray which was rather larger in area than a card table and weighed, when fully loaded, about half his own weight. As the sweets appear to have had no cover, he probably had to seek shelter when rain fell. Sometimes he walked as far as Williamstown or Malvern on his selling day. As his sales improved he bought a tricycle and also enlarged his equipment. The family bathroom was no longer large enough for him: the family must have relished his departure. Macpherson Robertson eventually became a millionaire. His nest of factories in Fitzroy so expanded that it was known as ‘The Great White City’, and even in the depression of the 1930s he was employing 2500 people. A vast area of Antarctica commemorates the maker of the famous ‘Milk Kisses’, for in old age he had generously financed Antarctic exploration – as well as a girls’ high school, a Yarra bridge and an air race from London to Melbourne. In his first decades he catered mainly for the halfpenny and penny purchasers. In 1884 he began to make penny surprise packets. A foot long, they were a kind of thin waste-paper basket: ‘if any confection did not sell in the ordinary course of business these lollies went into prize packets’, so the firm later confided. Robertson began to invent his own sweets, and in the late 1880s he concocted a chewing sweet which he coated thinly with chocolate and wrapped with a small handle of silver paper. He called it the Silver Stick. In the words of a friend of the firm: ‘the combined caramel, coconut flavour caught on. There was quality in this halfpenny line and the public appreciated it.’ At first his factory had to work day and night to meet the demand for silver sticks. In 1893 he went overseas to gather ideas, returning triumphantly with a recipe which he was to christen the ‘Columbine Caramel’, a best-seller of the mid-1890s and a favourite in the dress circle of the cinema half a century later. In 1897 he celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with his own ‘Jubilee’ chocolate mixture. The public demand was so high that his workmen had to dig two deep cellars where the chocolates could be kept cool during Fitzroy’s hot summer days. On that same visit to the United States in 1893 he had seen the quiet beginning of the craze for chewing gum. At first he manufactured the gum from a base of paraffin wax, adding such flavourings as vanilla and

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lemon with a dash of pink for colouring. Ultimately the wax base was banned throughout the world. Robertson’s silver sticks and chewy were protected in Victoria by an import duty. Almost everything entering Victoria was charged duty at a chain of customs houses at the ports and at towns along the Victorian border, and inside them the officials were hawk-eyed. In 1890, passengers travelling on the new railway from Adelaide to Melbourne had to submit their personal luggage to the uniformed official at the small border town of Serviceton. The luggage in the guard’s van was formally inspected by customs officials when the train reached Melbourne. At Albury and Wodonga the passengers not only had to submit to a customs inspection but also had to alter their pocket watches because the two colonies had not yet agreed to adopt the same time. Each colony had its own postage stamps, its own quarantine stations, its own lighthouses, its own immigration officials, and its own army and navy with different uniforms. All they lacked was their own passports, but most European nations did not yet issue passports. Melbourne and Sydney were intense rivals. The economic differences between them are considerable but they were sharper a century ago. In the 1880s, Melbourne was stronger in manufacturing; it had the busiest stock exchanges and was the hub of mining investment; and it was the home of most joint-stock banks in an era when banks were powerful. Melbourne was the capital of the main gold colony, whereas New South Wales held the black coal. Victoria was the heartland of agriculture and the small-sized farms, whereas New South Wales ran three times as many sheep. Victoria generally favoured government intervention more than did New South Wales. The rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney thus rested on strong economic foundations as well as social and political differences. Above all, Melbourne was an upstart. The relative strength of Melbourne and Sydney fluctuated. Melbourne was a mere eighteen or nineteen years old when, spurred by gold, it swept past Sydney and became the big city of the continent. From the 1860s Sydney began to overtake Melbourne, a long, slow chase which was finally successful about the year 1900 when both cities held about half a million people. Sydney was to continue

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to grow faster than Melbourne, for it held a vast hinterland west of the Blue Mountains, access to the fine black coal deposits in an age of steam, and banks which proved less brittle. Meanwhile, Melbourne in the 1880s was the commercial, financial and maybe the cultural capital for the southern parts of Australia and a few places beyond. Melbourne-owned banks were powerful in South Australia and Western Australia, though not in New South Wales. Victorian pastoralists owned large areas of the Riverina and many stations in Queensland. The Riverina was tightly tied to Melbourne even before 1876 when a private company built a railway from Moama northwards to the pastoral town of Deniliquin. Port Phillip Bay remained the main wool port long after New South Wales was the main sheep colony because so much wool from the Darling and Murrumbidgee came in river steamers along the rivers to Echuca and Deniliquin and so by train past Bendigo to Melbourne. The Riverina link had unexpected effects. When rich silver was found at Broken Hill in 1883 the station managers and owners who explored the deposit had commercial connections with Melbourne, and not with Adelaide, which was nearer the mine, nor with Sydney, which ruled the district. In 1885, when the Broken Hill Proprietary Company was floated, Melbourne became the head office, and still is. Melbourne eventually controlled most of the mines of Broken Hill, the copper mines opened at Mount Lyell in the 1890s, and a variety of gold and base-metal mines in many parts of Australia. Melbourne, however, missed out on the great gold prize, Kalgoorlie, which fell mainly to Adelaide investors. Melbourne’s commercial hinterland can be mapped in another way. Those parts of Australia which preferred Australian Rules football to rugby or soccer were primarily in Melbourne’s sphere of influence: in short, everywhere except Queensland and twothirds of New South Wales. Oddly, the city which was tied most tightly to Melbourne was Dunedin, the largest city in New Zealand until the 1890s. Thousands of Victorians had gone to Otago and Dunedin during the gold exodus of the early 1860s. Melbourne was closer than Sydney to Dunedin, and many commercial firms and professional men and a line of passenger ships continued to link the two cities. Julius Vogel, at one time the most powerful

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politician in New Zealand, had gone to Dunedin from Maryborough where he was a shopkeeper and a newspaper editor. Fergus Hume, a young law clerk whose runaway best-seller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab did more than any book to give the outside world a picture of Melbourne of the late 1880s, had not long arrived from Dunedin when he wrote his detective story. If, a decade later, Dunedin had been allowed to vote on whether it should join the imminent federation of Australia, it would probably have voted ‘yes’. Melbourne sucked commerce and people from inside as well as outside Victoria. The very efficiency of the new farms – the ability of each farmer and farm labourer in 1891 to grow three times as much wheat as in 1871 – led to labourers becoming redundant even on those northern plains. Most of the redundant moved to Melbourne. The port of Melbourne was reshaped between 1884 and 1893; and the digging of the Coode Canal – named after the English engineer who designed it – made a shorter, straighter and deeper passage from the mouth of the Yarra to the new Victoria Dock, which was excavated from the marshes. Whereas in the gold rushes the piers at Port Melbourne and Williamstown had been the haven for overseas ships, the Yarra now held the main docks. Large steamships could berth within sight of the Spencer Street railway station, while many of the small coastal steamships continued to berth close to the customs house in Flinders Street. Melbourne now had no rival. It dwarfed every competing city within Victoria. Geelong had held one-third as many people as Melbourne back in 1854 but then it ceased to grow. Geelong called itself ‘The Pivot’ but others now called it ‘Sleepy Hollow’. Ballarat also outgrew Geelong and in the early 1870s was the fourth largest city in Australia and accumulating the elegant buildings and fine facilities and gardens which so impressed the visiting English novelist Anthony Trollope. ‘It struck me with more surprise than any other city in Australia’, he wrote. While Ballarat had 50 000 people, Bendigo had close to 40 000 as well as the Royal Princess opera house, which seated 500 more people than Sydney’s opera house seats today. Visitors who wandered away from the main streets of these provincial cities found more

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mullock than gold, for the houses were small and wooden, mining dumps popped up everywhere, and poky hotels vied for the corner blocks. To enter some of these hotels a customer had to bob his head beneath the low doorway. It was even harder to leave through the doorway. Meanwhile, the statistics of growth in Melbourne delighted every suburban mayor. Holding fewer than 25 000 people in 1851, it held almost half a million in 1891 – only 9000 were needed to reach that miraculous figure. Melbourne now possessed 42 per cent of Victoria’s population, and some economists thought that such a centralising of the people in a capital city was quite without precedent and utterly unhealthy. Melbourne, to English eyes, displayed another puzzling characteristic: it straggled, spreading itself over a much larger area than European cities which were three or four times as populous. Land of course was cheap: the parklands existed in abundance, and most families preferred to live on one-third or one-half of an acre, tend beds of flowers and vegetables, and grow a fruit tree or two and perhaps keep hens. So Melbourne became a forerunner of Los Angeles, which in 1888 was much the smaller of the two. That fine man of letters Alexander Sutherland insisted that a traveller from Europe who sailed up the bay towards Melbourne gained a ‘sense of metropolitan vastness which no similar view of any other city can afford’. Melbourne’s year of years was 1888. Nearly every activity was a record, except perhaps hard work, sobriety and a sense of proportion. The price of land in busy streets and outer suburbs broke all previous peaks. The stock exchange did far more business, and the banks handled far more money, than ever before. Melbourne’s population soared as the largest team of building workers ever assembled in one place in Australia built thousands of villas and terraces, hundreds of mansions, countless shops, and scores of churches, hotels and halls. It was a year for the planning and laying of railways, including the Outer Circle Railway, which was to link Fairfield and Oakleigh with a cross-country sweep through orchards and paddocks. The marquees of the land auctioneers, erected in suburbs of the future, were as far away as Bacchus Marsh, Laverton and Campbellfield. People went there in free trains, some to picnic and some to buy. They paid their deposit on suburban blocks in neat

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subdivisions which, three-quarters of a century later, were covered by nothing larger than a thistle. In the city itself parliament house was receiving its facade of Grampians freestone, and tall offices were rising in the lower part of Queen Street and Elizabeth Street. Melbourne was not far behind New York and Chicago in the height of its tallest buildings, but was to be far behind those cities in its ability to fill those tall buildings with tenants. Melbourne was becoming a silver stick, more impressive in its wrapper than its contents. There was a seamy as well as a stately Melbourne. In the northeastern quarter of the city in the early 1880s about sixty hotels catered for prostitutes and for men in search of them. Some hotels were houses of assignation and others let out beds for terms as short as half an hour to women who swaggered about ‘in silks and satins’ in the lanes. Rows of brothels could be found within five minutes’ stroll of parliament house, from which they were loudly denounced and, perhaps, occasionally patronised. In the lanes and alleyways bounded by Spring, Bourke, Russell and La Trobe streets, about sixty houses were listed as brothels by policemen in 1883–4. Another cluster of about eight brothels stood in Little La Trobe Street, which ran from Elizabeth to Swanston Street. There, many young girls from the tobacco and clothing factories made money by catering for single men who came down from the country. These notorious parts of the city made Melbourne the vice centre of the continent. Even the lawns and shrubberies of the Exhibition Gardens, it was complained, served as a great human bed on warm nights. The Chinese quarter snuggled close to the vice quarter, and both localities embarrassed well-dressed people who passed within whistling distance of them. The squalor and dirt, ‘foul language’ and sleaziness of this lowroofed area was complained about the more because Melbourne was proud of its prosperity. By the standards of the rich cities of the world it was relatively more prosperous in 1880 than today. Moreover the spread of that prosperity was a special source of contentment. If the breadwinners were arranged in order of their income, and the richest one-tenth and the poorest one-tenth were put aside, that middle eight-tenths had an especially high

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standard of living. Comparing the world’s cities of more than a quarter of a million people, it is unlikely that the typical family of any city quite enjoyed the material well-being of the typical Melbourne family. The poor suffered by contrast but even they lived less perilously than the down-and-out of London and Paris. Food was cheaper and was more easily scavenged. An idler often could find a day’s casual work. The climate for half the year was relatively mild, and in the parklands near Melbourne the vagrants could be seen lying in the sun. Ragged and suntanned, generally more than middle-aged, they lived by begging. The first widely read off-beat journalist in Melbourne wrote under the name of ‘The Vagabond’, and in the mid1870s he sampled the life of the poor. He infiltrated Pentridge by working as a dispenser at the prison hospital, waited for the paupers’ funerals to arrive at the mass graves at the cemetery, tasted the meals of the cheap breakfast houses and paid his sixpence to sleep on the clean straw mattress in the dormitory of a lodging house in King Street. He wormed his way into the cold houses of charity and the ‘ragged schools’, sketching the daily life lived by the jetsam and flotsam of the city. His anonymity, readable prose and exploits aroused curiosity. When it was rumoured that he daily caught a certain suburban train, people waited in the hope of seeing him; but there was nothing much to see except a bald head and a beard that looked like a bird’s nest. Through the writings of ‘The Vagabond’ we can see poverty in an era when the government was less inclined to offer charity. In that period it paid no pensions to the old, disabled, sick, widowed and unemployed; and the few charity institutions which it did set up or subsidise were designed almost as much to deter as to help those in need. Life still revolved around the principle of self-help. Even the ‘readers’ which the small children read aloud in school inculcated this lesson that Victoria was a land for Dick Whittington and that every waif could, with energy and the aid of a black cat, become Lord Mayor of Melbourne. For poor and rich the inner suburbs were not healthy. On hot days, streets and lanes stank. Not one house in Melbourne was sewered until 1897, and the night soil was collected in pans from houses and shops several nights a week and carted to tips or

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market gardens and orchards. In many backyards the sewage remained in cesspools or pits. Contaminated water seeped through the soil and into cracks in the water pipes, so that even a drinking tap could carry infection. Typhoid was common in summer, and the infected people travelled to hospital in trams, cabs and horse-drawn furniture vans. Prince Henry’s, standing near a noxious swamp in South Melbourne, was only a small hospital but it annually admitted more than 100 typhoid patients in twelve of the last thirteen years of the century. In 1889 and again in 1890 it admitted more than 400 typhoid patients, and their sewage was carted away and placed in shallow pits at a suburban orchard. Whether the orchardist eventually found his way, as a typhoid patient, to the hospital is not known. It was easy to ignore the cesspits and the gutters. Victorians of that time had a deep sense of what they had achieved. Melbourne especially had civic pride and liked to think of itself as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. Even villages standing at muddy crossroads thought that with more luck and a foreign loan or two, they might grow into large towns, while other villages thought a more dignified name would give them access to progress. How could a woman writing to her Welsh parents express pride in her new home but give her address as Growler’s Creek, and how could a local progress association sing the praises of Hit-or-Miss? New names, often Aboriginal, were sought; and the Victorian post office annually listed villages – ranging from Brandy Creek to Bulldog Flat – which had recently changed their name. Of Melbourne’s inner suburbs Emerald Hill, a charming name, became South Melbourne, Hotham became North Melbourne, and Sandridge became Port Melbourne – as if the names were the choice of an official who had just discovered the compass. For nearly forty years Bendigo had been officially known as Sandhurst, but in 1891 a local referendum voted to restore Bendigo, a name full of the emotional scent of the gold rushes. The preference for Bendigo arose largely from local investors who thought the old name was more likely to attract British capital to the goldfield. Money, and the desire to make it easily, was becoming an obsession. Those pioneers of Port Phillip had come a long way in that exciting and dull, painful and pleasant, impoverishing and enriching

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process of making a new land. Perhaps no British colony had achieved so much so quickly. Pride and complacency became normal at the close of that first half-century of Victoria’s progress. People were therefore not ready for the shock which lay out of sight.

5 One in Ten Thousand

In the last third of the 19th century, spectator sport in Melbourne had an appeal unmatched in perhaps any city of that era. The climate favoured outdoor sport. So did the abundance of cheap land for sports fields, the high proportion of young men in the population, the increasing prosperity, and especially the leisure. The swelling city provided the spectators in large numbers. By the 1880s the day of the Melbourne Cup was a public holiday, and between 80 000 and 100 000 people travelled to the racecourse or the hill overlooking the racing. At the cricket a total of 100 000 people was said to have watched the test match against England in 1895. Outside Melbourne every village seemed to have its racecourse, and some bush racecourses – such as Lal Lal near Ballarat – were given a railway in the spendthrift years so that more people could go to picnic meetings. Sport became a cult and the Irish-born jockey Tommy Corrigan, was one hero. In 1894 he was killed in the Grand National Steeplechase at Caulfield; and Swanston Street was hushed as his funeral procession, two miles long, passed slowly by. Australian football was the most remarkable of these spectator sports. It is sometimes said to have stemmed from Gaelic football in Ireland, but we now know that the Irish game is a later game. Australian football was certainly influenced by the game played at the Rugby School in England; and the Victorian squatter’s son Tom Wills, a Rugby boy, did much to shape the new game. All in all, however, the new game was essentially a series of Victorian inventions. It was not born ready made but changed itself so much, decade after 84

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decade, that the present game is unrecognisable from that which was first played on Melbourne parklands in 1858. The rules just grew, spreading more like a climbing vine than a tree. At first the teams embraced as many as thirty players, and they ran in packs. A goal could be rushed through in a scrimmage or be drop kicked, and the ‘behinds’ or near misses did not count for a point until 1897. At first there was no umpire, and the rival captains – obviously men of grave wisdom – interpreted the rules. The game was therefore full of shouting and appealing. A central umpire was normal from 1872, the flag was first waved (a Tasmanian innovation) to signal a goal in 1886, and the special boundary umpires first threw the ball into play in 1903. For decades a player could actually claim a mark even though the ball had only travelled the length of his boot: this was called the ‘little mark’. All marks in those days were announced by the player shouting the word ‘mark’, rather like the gleeful calling of ‘checkmate’ in a game of chess. The native brand of football gripped Melbourne long before soccer and rugby took a grip on the imagination of the big English cities. And yet, for all the attempts of the entrepreneurs, the game is probably not exportable to other lands because it embodies in its very fabric some of the social conditions of suburban Melbourne of the gold era. From the start it was played on big grounds. It belonged to a society where land was cheap and where the government normally set aside large areas of public land for recreation. Transfer a Melbourne football ground to Hong Kong, Chicago or Manchester, and whole terraces and apartments would have to be demolished to make room for the playing oval and its grandstands. Australian rules was a product of mild winters. It belonged to a climate where the longer growing season allowed the grass to be ripped and scarred by the footballers in the winter and be quickly healed in time for the cricketers in summer. Accordingly the same arena with all its grandstands and amenities was often used for two sports – a marked advantage. The climate affected the early rules: Melbourne’s soil being sometimes hard in winter, the pummelling tactics and the scrimmages of the rugby game were eventually rejected. Compared to London, Melbourne’s climate was incomparably better for the winter watchers. The crowds who came were not often soaked by the rain or chilled by the wind, and the

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game could start in mid-afternoon and still conclude with enough natural light for spectators and players. For a few weeks around the end of June the afternoon daylight was too pale, and so each half – there were no quarters in those days – was reduced from 60 minutes to 50. The game, very early, attracted many spectators. Rivalry between neighbouring suburbs fanned interest. Most spectators probably walked the one, two or three miles to the rival ground when their team played away from home. Fortunately most of the important football grounds lay close together in the inner suburbs: such outlying suburbs as Hawthorn and Footscray did not rank as football suburbs in the 1880s. Outlying Essendon had a champion team by the 1890s, but it played for a long period at the old East Melbourne ground, now covered by new houses and the Jolimont shunting yards. The choice of this ground saved supporters from making the long walk or the train ride to distant Essendon. Collingwood, the magical club in the first half of the 20th century, had one of the more remote grounds but it did not field a senior team until the 1890s. Early teams came also from Geelong and Ballarat. While a train journey to Ballarat was quite beyond most metropolitan spectators, a day trip in the steamer or train to Geelong was not. The game fitted neatly into a metropolitan way of life. There was one catch. It could not be played on Sunday because Melbourne zealously kept the Sabbath holy. The liberating of Saturday afternoon was vital for the game, thereby enabling spectators to attend in large numbers once their Saturday work ended. The civil service, the clerks in the private offices and banks, and the school teachers were already free in 1880, and nearly all factory and building workers in the city received a free Saturday afternoon by the end of the 1880s, leaving only the domestic servants, those who served in shops and the transport workers to remain at their jobs. It is fair to say that the free Saturday afternoon helped to make football exceptionally popular. Moreover the popularity of football encouraged more working people to agitate for the free Saturday afternoon. The strongest teams at one time were South Melbourne and Geelong. From the 1878 season onwards they won twelve of the next thirteen premierships. In their rivalry one match stands out. It was

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to be played on Saturday 4 September 1886, and both teams were undefeated. Two long, special trains brought up the Geelong team and supporters, and near Newport the tension spurred by the match was so high that somebody tried to derail one train by removing part of the line. The rules of football were still rough and ready, and South Melbourne had imported from Adelaide Alf Bushby, said to be the best Australian footballer in ‘the world’, just to play in this special match. It must have been one of the most remarkable scenes in sporting memory because the ground by the lake was jammed with people, and outside the closed gates was a smaller throng craving to go inside, and all the way down Clarendon Street where shops were busy that afternoon the progress scores – or rumours of them – were passed on breathlessly by word of mouth. In all, 34 121 people paid to watch that game. This was possibly the largest crowd in the world to see a game of football up to that time. Even then the game had some of the rules and rituals we would now associate with rugby rather than Australian football. The games began not with a bounce in the centre but with a kick-off, and players of each side lined up on opposite sides of the centre like the start of a rugby game. When the ball was thrown in from the boundary, it had to touch the turf before the packs of ruckmen and rovers could pounce on it. ‘Brawn defied brawn – brawn crashed through brawn’, recalled Peter Burns, a South Melbourne star. Later the players kept more to their set positions, and the game had a chessboard quality, which it has since lost again. All Victorian towns played the native game: soccer and rugby were virtually unknown. The overwhelming victory of the one code of football subtly affected society. Overall it had a cohering more than a divisive effect because the poor and the rich, Protestant and Catholic, educated and uneducated, played the same game, and watched it and talked about it. Today, football is a topic of conversation in houses, pubs, and television to the brink of tedium, and yet it brings together people who otherwise might think they had little in common. Melbourne is probably a more integrated society than Sydney, and one cause of that integration is the unusual popularity of this game. Curiously its ability to leap across so many social barriers

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was visible almost from the start, and a reporter who went to see Melbourne play Carlton in a rugged game in 1876 made a comment that could not have been made of an English sporting occasion of that year. He noticed that the 6000 people represented nearly every segment of society: squatters and farmers, working girls and barmaids, clerks in their neat collars, shop assistants, tradesmen and solicitors, larrikins and members of parliament, and wives and children. Moreover they were scattered around the ground and not separated from each other in special grandstands and reserved sections, so that here he saw society as a whole, howling and shrieking, clapping and barracking. The word ‘barracker’, incidentally, first gained wide usage in Melbourne around 1880, and probably was first used to describe football spectators. As sport attracted more talented players, the desire to shine led to new tricks and tactics. Victorians were especially inventive in cricket. John Blackham was a Fitzroy boy, the son of a newsagent. He took up wicket-keeping in the era when every wicket-keeper relied on a longstop to gather in the balls which he missed. Blackham not only dispensed with the longstop but stood so close to the wickets that he was able to stump batsmen who left their crease when trying to play fast bowling. When he went to England his dexterity and eyesight, and his courage in enduring pain in his hands, impressed critics. Even W. G. Grace was impressed. From Victoria, too, came the first of all the fiery bowlers, the demon bowler, F. R. Spofforth, who lifted his bowling arm to such a height that, compared to previous bowlers, his hand was like a giant wave about to break. The career of these Victorian colleagues shows the subtle professionalism which was sliding into amateur sport. Both worked in Melbourne banks, Blackham at the Colonial and Spofforth at the National, and they were given free time to play in important matches in an era when most employers were wary of such leniency. Blackham kept wickets with lightning reflexes in the first test match against England, played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1877. Oddly, the ‘Demon’ Spofforth, selected to play, refused because he did not yet trust young Blackham’s ability to take his bowling cleanly. Theologians were perturbed that, in this age of mass enthusiasm for sport, the word ‘immortal’ was to be used to describe both players.

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While football and cricket flourished, boxing wilted. It had been the popular spectator sport on the all-men goldfields of the 1850s, and Bendigo itself had been named after an English boxer. Boxers fought with bare fists in the open air for stake money, and loud betting preceded a fight. The police often interfered to prevent a fight, and many of the fights were moved to secluded places – clearings in the scrub near goldfield hotels or in natural amphitheatres where the crowd could stand on slopes and look down upon fighters in the ring. Some prize fights were stopped by darkness and some by the police, and at times a prosecution and even a term in prison ensued. Some fights went on and on, and in 1854 at the goldfield of Beaufort, Mr Kelly and Mr Smith fought the longest prize fight on record: six hours and fifteen minutes. It is difficult to believe but that’s what the record book affirms. The sport declined, and the fight between Larry Foley and Abe Hicken in 1879 was perhaps ‘the last of the great bareknuckle battles’. The battle was to have been held in Melbourne but the police stepped in and the fighters were placed on a bond to keep the peace. They dutifully kept the peace in Victoria by crossing the bridge at Echuca and fighting on New South Wales soil. The boxing glove and the indoor stadium were soon to arrive, and in that new era of boxing it was Sydney rather than Melbourne which initially produced and promoted the prominent fighters. Many of the sporting activities were different from today’s. They were acts of individual endurance, obeying eccentric rules and involving heavy wagers. Thus at Geelong in December 1854, a man named Williams was backed to perform a curious sequence of feats in not more than thirty minutes. He first had to run 100 yards against the fastest man in the town. Then, in front of him, were placed thirty eggs, each a yard apart, and Williams had to pick them up with his mouth. Next, he had to lift a 56-pound weight and throw it over his head twenty times. After running 100 yards backwards he had to hop 100 yards forwards, and he also had to take up a 10-pound hammer and a two-pound quoit and hurl them. Finally he had to roll a coach wheel for half a mile. He won his wager, completing these tasks in 25 minutes. Allen McKean was a marathon pedestrian. From the Victoria Theatre in Ballarat in September 1858 he set out to walk

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1000 miles in 1000 hours. He achieved it. Next February in Sydney he attempted the same feat, and 12 days later he had covered 270 miles, after which, said the report, ‘there was no further news’. You hear of people, in the present-day cliche, running their way into the record books, but McKean walked out of the record books. We are looking backwards to a society which was not quite literate or numerate. For a prize of £100, a long-distance running contest was staged at Northcote in 1866, but a mistake was made in measuring the seven-mile course, and the two champions ran seven and three-quarter miles. Many rural sports were closer to work than to sport. In the country a big crowd would attend a ploughing match. In timber-milling districts the wood chop was often the most popular sport, and on mining fields a hammer-and-tap contest and a shovelling contest attracted many entries. At agricultural shows such games as picking up potatoes or tossing the sheaf aroused intense interest, and as late as the 1960s the world record in sheaf tossing was broken by rural sportsmen from the village of Dunnstown, near Ballarat. The work-like sports, in general, have declined; and sport is now more a branch of leisure than a competitive extension of work. As the hours of work became fewer, and as more Victorians came to live in the cities and towns, the amenities of leisure increased. Of these amenities, perhaps the Melbourne Public Library aroused the most pride. Whereas most public libraries insisted that citizens using the books must first produce testimonials affirming their good character, the Melbourne Public Library since 1856 had admitted all who wished to enter, provided they were fourteen years or older. Whereas many public libraries did not allow visitors to browse, in Melbourne any reader could take any book except the medical books from the shelves; it was thus a self-service library, although the books could not be borrowed. By the early 1870s the Melbourne Public Library held as many as 650 readers, all sitting at the long cedar tables. On many nights, when all seats were taken, the latecomers squatted down on matting on the floor, and read serious books – the library had little else. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Alice in Wonderland and even the entire works of Thackeray were seen as unfit or unnecessary for the library.

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‘Books of injurious tendency are not displayed here’, announced the trustees firmly in the 1870s. The chairman of the trustees and the moral guardian of the bookshelves was Mr Justice Barry, and he expected the gas-lit library to be as hushed as a law court. He proudly told parliament that the library, though it received nearly 200 000 visitors a year, was marked by ‘a becoming state of deferential order’. The hushed and deferential air of this fine library was to fill with awe many of those country folk who, on their first visit to Melbourne, entered it like field mice. The city’s four main libraries – public, parliamentary, supreme court and university – held 120 000 books by 1871. Here was a city, a mere third of a century old, holding a stock of books such as many bigger English and North American cities had not accumulated during several hundred years. The Melbourne Public Library was larger than any library in the western half of the United States and larger than all but two of the public libraries in the eastern half. Victoria was the best colony for the reader. Its public libraries and mechanics’ institutes held twice as many books as those of New South Wales in the late 1880s, a time when the populations of the two colonies were almost equal. Nonetheless, the average Victorian was poorly provided, by our standards, with local libraries, and children were even more neglected than the adults. As a rule the public libraries did not stock children’s books. The Sunday School libraries – and at first they were not numerous – were therefore vital for poorer children. The bookshop was important for those who had money to buy books over the counter. Books were imported on a large scale. One go-ahead bookseller, George Robertson, imported 7000 packages of books and stationery from overseas in the year 1873. Judging by their weight, they would have nearly filled a large mail steamer. Hundreds of those packages contained light fiction, and hundreds more contained volumes of theology and sermons. Books were not as influential as newspapers. Most Victorians craved for fresh news rather than the older, shaped, digested news which comes in books. As the society was mobile – with people rushing here and there to take up land or to find gold – the news of rushes and new opportunities was anxiously sought. As most people still had a loyalty to England and still had relatives and friends

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in the British Isles, the arrival of the overseas mail was an important day. Next-day excerpts from the newly arrived English newspapers would fill the Melbourne dailies or appear in special supplements. Until the overseas telegraph cable was completed in 1872, the news from England was usually several months old, and arrived erratically. Five ships might come in the one fortnight, and then came a quiet fortnight in which no mail arrived. The daily newspapers were quickly sold when there was fresh news from England; and if rumours or reports of a European war arrived, the newsboys were rushed. By 1860 Melbourne and Adelaide were reliably linked by telegraph, and as the mail steamers called at Adelaide first, Adelaide could telegraph the urgent English news to Melbourne newspapers. The large Melbourne dailies realised that it would pay to engage a reporter in Adelaide to collect their news from the ship: perhaps it would even pay to send a reporter to a more distant port of call. And so, when the incoming mail steamers called at the tiny Western Australian port of Albany to take on coal for the last leg of the journey, some Melbourne journalists would board the ship and devour the latest copies of British newspapers which the ship was carrying. As the ship ploughed her way across the Great Australian Bight the pressmen condensed the main news into pithy messages; and as soon as the ship reached Adelaide they hurried ashore to send urgent telegrams to their newspapers in Melbourne. There were rewards for the first Melbourne daily which launched the English news on Melbourne streets; and once, or more than once, the Argus is said to have played a wily trick. When the smoke of the incoming mail steamer was visible from Adelaide, the Argus’s agent tied up the single telegraph line out of Adelaide by requesting that the operators begin to telegraph the Bible, verse by verse, to the office in Melbourne. A little later the Argus reporter came ashore in Adelaide, and handed his news summary to the telegraph operator with the order that it take precedence over the Bible. When the Argus office, in Melbourne, received the telegram containing the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, the typesetters stood by, knowing that the telegraphed summary of English news could not be far behind.

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The daily newspapers were not only reporters of a shrinking world, but were helping to shrink the world. In London the Daily Telegraph sent H. M. Stanley into central Africa in the mid-1870s. In this tradition the Age in 1883 sent its own expedition under George Morrison to explore darkest New Guinea. There he was speared in the face and the abdomen. The ranges behind Port Moresby were so far from a telegraph station that seven weeks elapsed between the spearing and the reporting of the episode in the newspapers. A longer time elapsed before the fragments of wooden spear were removed from Morrison in an Edinburgh hospital. Morrison’s adventures were duly reported in the Age but not the Argus, which sent its own expedition to explore New Guinea. Many of the features which are now commonplace in a daily paper were unknown in 1880. Newspapers gave almost no attention to women’s activities or the interests of children. Social gossip had no place; a bride’s dress and bouquet were not described, though occasionally an elaborate coffin was. Newspapers carried no cartoons, comic strips, crosswords or photographs. They printed no weather forecasts though they did report yesterday’s weather. They devoted no space to recipes or to the reviewing of restaurants, for politics was their daily bread. In Melbourne’s first decades many newspapers temporarily won the circulation race. The Age then seized the lead and, for half a century, kept it. Beginning humbly in October 1854, it had gone insolvent and was bought for a mere £2000 by the Scottish immigrants Ebenezer and David Syme. As a miner on the wind-swept slope of Mount Egerton, east of Ballarat, David Syme had acquired a little of the common touch: he already had an uncommon mind. Under his editorship the Age successfully called on Victorian politicians to impose protective duties on all imports, including those from Tasmania and New South Wales. Syme’s Age was thus a vigorous nationalist – a Victorian nationalist but potentially an Australian nationalist. His main rival, the Argus, showed more sense of the unity of the Australian colonies; and its own weekly journal – aptly named the Australasian – eventually claimed with some truth that it was ‘read on the most remote stations in the newly settled country on the Gulf of Carpentaria, and in the most secluded goldfields of New Zealand’.

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Syme was tallish and long striding, with his grey-bearded head jutting forward rather like a china figurine whose head had been put on crookedly. His face had a frowning strength. He rarely spoke in public, was unrecognised in Collins Street and was slightly shy and cold in his own office. He seemed, however, to possess more power than any single Victorian politician, and gave his views more frequently than any politician – he issued them six days a week in long and sometimes rancorous editorials. Daily he reached a wider audience than could be fitted into the ten largest town halls in Victoria. Syme believed that he was the special teacher of people who had not previously enjoyed the right to vote, who could not always express their arguments with fluency, but who now had an opportunity to create prosperity in a new land. The Age grew larger. In December 1883 the Saturday Age enlarged itself to sixteen pages, and was able to announce with pride that it was the bulkiest penny newspaper in the British Empire. Compulsory education was already rearing a colony of readers, the new steam printing presses and cheap paper were lowering costs, and the web of railways enabled Melbourne’s morning newspapers to reach most towns by nightfall. At the end of the century the circulation of the Age was about 120 000 – or sixty times the circulation when Syme first sat in the editor’s chair. The Age was now at the pinnacle of its influence. Its pinnacle was that brief period when Melbourne was the most populous city in Australia, when politics were not split along rigid party lines, when middle-road policies flavoured Victorian politics, and when a federal parliament was only a dream. These conditions had ended by the time David Syme died in 1908. The influence of the big Australian newspapers in the last decades of the 19th century was often commented upon. Viscount Bryce thought they ‘exercised more power than any newspapers then did in any other country, being at times stronger than the head of the political parties’. Alfred Deakin speculated that the Age was at least as influential in Victoria as The Times was in London ‘in its palmiest days’ or Horace Greeley’s Tribune was in New York. Here, the political parties were still loose groups rather than disciplined parties, and so a newspaper editor could marshal opinion in a way not always open to a party leader. Syme displayed his power in 1897 when, in a Victoria-wide referendum, twenty-nine

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candidates stood for the ten places in the Victorian delegation which was to help devise the Commonwealth constitution. Syme issued a how-to-vote card; and his ten favourites, including the lightweights, were elected. From this distance the Age seems dominant, but it had to compete with daily rivals: the Argus of conservative views, the Daily Telegraph, which the evangelicals read, the evening Herald and many Melbourne weeklies and monthlies. In addition, a brigade of country newspapers boasted that they circulated extensively in countless one-horse towns. ‘No expense is spared to secure the latest news’, proclaimed the frugal Belfast Gazette, which appeared in Port Fairy every Tuesday and Friday in time to catch the upcountry mail coaches. The Seymour Express cheekily claimed a large and influential circulation. The St Arnaud Times and Kara Kara Advertiser, appearing twice a week, brazenly called itself the ‘largest semi-weekly paper in Australia’. For those who had a special interest, hobby or obsession, dozens of papers brought them the latest news. For those who read little English a few foreignlanguage papers were printed in Melbourne, the first being in French in 1858 and in German in 1859. Most wage earners probably did not buy a daily newspaper. As late as 1890 they probably bought, or borrowed, a weekly newspaper which was the by-product of the city dailies and contained a summary of local news and overseas telegrams, along with gardening notes, news of mining finds and rural inventions, the occasional short story and essay, and a review of the latest serious books from England. Running up to thirty-six pages, those Melbourne monthlies and weeklies must have been read less for their opinions than their snippets of news: r ‘A boy named Thomas Armstrong was run over and killed on May 21 by a milk-cart, at the corner of Bell-street, Carlton.’ r ‘A line-repairer, named McMahon, was run over by the 50 minutes past ten train from Melbourne, on May 18, and cut to pieces. The accident occurred near Ravenswood. The deceased leaves a wife and eight children.’ r ‘Two mischievous young boys, named Charles Sims and Albert Fanthorne, have been committed for trial on a charge of putting fire into one of the post-office pillar boxes.’

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r ‘The Queen’s Birthday was celebrated at Steiglitz in rather a novel manner, by the young ladies of the district playing cricket on the township ground.’ r ‘A Chinaman died suddenly at the Chinese camp, at Maryborough, on June 17. The deceased had smoked a shilling’s worth of opium every day for years up to the day of his death.’ At the end of a long day, around the fireside of farmhouses and by the open fires of the railway navvies, these extracts from the world of 1874 were read aloud and marvelled at. Many listeners passed them on the next day by word of mouth to those they met. Word of mouth was the main carrier of news. To stop for a yarn was one of the pleasures of life. Many activities which now are widespread were not common. It is doubtful whether one in every hundred people living in Victoria in 1880 had ever heard a symphony orchestra. Music, generally, was less accessible unless people played their own instruments; and in many districts, musical instruments were scarce. Many country churches had no cabinet organ, no piano and no fiddle. Even the dances in the outer farming districts were not always accompanied by formal music, and my grandfather used to recall how the dancing at Murra Warra near Dimboola in the mid-1890s was led by an Irish ‘diddle-diddle’ woman who made a fiddle-like sound with her voice. The new cinema and gramophone had made faint impact by 1900, and radio and television were unknown. On the other hand many leisure activities were more frequently pursued by the average Victorian in 1900 than today. Dancing, agricultural exhibitions, the reciting of poetry, public meetings, street processions, the brass band, and opera and oratory were popular. Another leisure activity which was more widespread was silence. In certain forms of leisure, young people were starved. The graphic and visual arts were not widely displayed. An exciting moment of Norman Lindsay’s childhood was his first visit to the new Ballarat Art Gallery where, in company with his missionary grandfather, he saw the vast oil painting Ajax and Cassandra. It was the first painted nude he saw, and he was enchanted. An even stronger inspiration was a lithograph in the bar-room of the Phoenix Hotel in Creswick. Often at night he halted in the street and peered

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into the well-lit bar and devoured a simple picture of the death of Nelson. If Norman Lindsay had lived 50 miles further inland, or if his parents had been poorer, he probably would not have seen an art gallery or an art book until he was aged 15 or 20. For thousands of Australians the most imposing strip of visual art which they saw, from year to year, was the painted scroll and religious text which stood in pastel colours above the altar or pulpit of the local church. For others the most impressive display of visual art was the large landscaped garden. Living quietly in Melbourne was a young genius of a landscape gardener, William Guilfoyle, and in 1873 he began to turn the weed-infested but very scientific Botanic Gardens into one of the world’s great gardens. Acquiring more land on the upper slopes and more land in the valley after the Yarra was straightened, he used his imagination and green fingers to transform the enlarged gardens. Visitors from overseas marvelled at the rolling slopes and the surprising vistas through gaps in the foliage; and when he was able to make his first visit to the great gardens of Europe in 1890, in his fiftieth year, he began to realise – without undue pride – why his gardens in Melbourne were almost ‘the Garden of God’. Later, on visits to the country, he laid out landscaped gardens as diverse as squatters’ homesteads, the public gardens in Warrnambool and Nellie Melba’s garden now hidden behind its cypress hedges near Lilydale. Nobody had any particular reason to expect that Victoria would produce famous singers, and yet it became even more famous overseas for its women singers than for its sportsmen. In recent decades Sydney has been more the home of acclaimed singers – Joan Hammond and Joan Sutherland both spent their childhood there – but Sydney for long had hardly a singer who sent ripples across the musical world, whereas the south-east corner of the continent – Hobart, Adelaide, and especially Victoria – produced a surprising number of singers who became famous in Europe. Why Victoria, and Australia, should have produced such singers is not easily explained. A climate like that of Italy possibly helped. A widespread public liking for music was a bonus, and many local organisations harnessed music to their sleigh. Nearly all the famous Victorian singers who emerged between the 1880s and the 1930s had performed when children with musical groups in churches, and

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some first made their name when they won a contest at eisteddfods, especially at the South Street competition in the cavernous wooden hall in Ballarat. Victoria, especially, had thousands of amateur musical groups. It was not only a musical colony but a very competitive one, and music became one of the popular forms of competition. Opera to Australians of that era had some of the appeal of sport, and the critic Roger Covell has noted that opera has the same ‘elements of sheer display and brazen dexterity’. Singing became one of the few well-marked avenues to international fame for Australian girls. The public, by its own generous donations, was willing to send young Victorian singers along that avenue for a period of intensive training in opera in Europe, and they were prepared to marvel at the singers when they returned – a little fame seemed to improve the sound of the voice. To attend a concert given by a famous returning singer was one of the emotional landmarks in the life of thousands of Victorians. In effect an intricate superstructure of private support for promising singers had quietly arisen in Victoria, without any government lifting a finger or providing a penny. So often in Australia our success in producing champions came from an unplanned but hefty marshalling of resources which, in total, gave nearly as much stimulus as a nationalist government might provide today. Most of the young opera stars came from God-fearing homes where opera was often seen as temptation in song, and the stage was seen as a parade ground of vanity. Nellie Melba, as a child in her native Melbourne, knew those ‘strict Presbyterian Sundays of gloom and solemnity, in which no one might smile or hum a tune’. Her father had come from Scotland as a poor stonemason in the second year of the gold rushes and he became wealthy by building many of those churches and halls which still stand in central Melbourne. An amateur musician, he played the violin at his home in Richmond and sang in the choir at the spacious Scots Church in Collins Street. Nobody would willingly have paid a penny to hear him play or sing, but they probably paid more to hear his daughter than to hear any other contemporary singer in the world. Her real name was Helen Mitchell, and she first sang in public when she was six. The song was ‘Coming thro’ the Rye’, and her audience noticed that her drawers were showing. She first sang in a

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serious concert at the age of 22 at a benevolent concert in the town hall where she sang an aria from La Traviata. The influential weekly, the Australasian, was astonished, like so many others, at her voice: ‘She sings like one out of ten thousand’. Ten years later, in Europe and New York, she was singing like one out of a hundred million. Audiences everywhere admired her good looks, her arresting presence, if not her acting on stage, and above all a voice which had an amazing purity and a capacity to thrill even those who came intending to withhold their praises. On the highest notes her crescendo was long and powerful. Few critics of note could remember hearing elsewhere such a distinctive and unforgettable voice. Melba’s pride in her homeland pleased Australians almost as much as her fame as a singer. As a child she had been in love with the tall eucalypt forests and the tree ferns between Yarra Glen and Mount Slide, and she recalled in her autobiography the day-long ride from Melbourne in stagecoach and wagonette to one of her father’s country houses, at Steels Creek, where she would sit in the dining room and face a mirror through which she could see the mountain forest. That she chose, as her stage name, Madame Melba appealed intensely to those who lived in Melbourne. The city never had a more prolific advertisement. Melba became celebrated just when the gramophone was entering the suburban sitting room, and so she was heard by more people than had ever before heard a singer. The most renowned soloist of the first electronic era, her voice floated above the oceans. At the first concert to be broadcast over radio in England, she was the singer. When the federal parliament was opened in Canberra in 1927, Melba’s voice was heard by landline in Melbourne itself. Melbourne was especially her city. When she first returned in 1902, after 16 years abroad, so many thousands were unable to buy a ticket for her concerts that they gathered outside the town hall, and the cable trams could barely edge their way across the intersection. In her public and private behaviour, Melba was often high and mighty but her voice carried an emotion and a magic which was beyond nobody’s reach. So in 1931 an enormous crowd was to gather to see her coffin emerge from the Scots Church which her father had built, 200 paces up the hill from that town hall where she had appeared in her first concert nearly half a century

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earlier. In her lifetime, in concerts and through radio and gramophone, she had sung ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as nobody had ever sung it. Victorians were movingly proud that her home was theirs. In the small towns of Victoria, mothers and daughters with barely a smidgen of music in them watched the rise of Melba with wonder and, sometimes, a little envy. The musical critics, sitting at the amateur concerts, which were then so frequent, were now alert for other little Melbas. Miss Ada Crossley was one. She was born in the tiny Gippsland town of Tarraville in 1871, the daughter of a man variously said to be a small farmer and an ironmonger. If he was an ironmonger he certainly did not face much competition, because when Ada was a toddler the town held only half a dozen shops, three hotels and four churches: it has even fewer buildings today. The Crossleys possessed a piano, and Ada in her auburn pigtail practised diligently, playing hymns at the churches and popular songs at the concerts. She came to Melbourne more as a pianist than a singer but it was her unusual voice which the musicians noticed. She became the principal soprano in the Australian Church of Dr Charles Strong, and many came to that fashionable church in Flinders Street in the early 1890s to worship her. Travelling overseas in the hope of making a name, Ada succeeded in Manchester in 1895. At short notice Dame Clara Butt could not appear, and Ada sang in her place. Some critics thought her glorious voice even more memorable than Dame Clara’s. Ada Crossley had a gift for oratorio, and when she sang ‘He Was Despised’ from the Messiah, she could create an intense silence of wonderment in the concert halls in England. On one of her return visits to Australia as the star of a concert party, she brought back the young Victorian pianist Percy Grainger, and he observed that she was received in bush halls and city halls with a public enthusiasm that was ‘positively frenetic’. Meanwhile, a Bendigo singer, Amy Castles, was attracting a few discerning listeners. The child of amateur singers, she had learned singing and piano at the local Convent of Mercy and won the soprano championship at the South Street eisteddfod at Ballarat in 1898. Through the threepences and shillings subscribed by the people, she went to Europe for more tuition. She was soon appearing in great opera houses. Her voice was said to have a rare beauty, and at times ‘a thrill of astonishment’ ran through her audience. When

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she revisited Australia, still a young girl, she gave a farewell concert in the huge Exhibition Building which Melba’s father had built, and 20 000 people heard her. The ovation they gave could be heard blocks away. In Vienna on the eve of the First World War she was one of the stars of the opera and was reverently pointed out as the youngest singer ever appointed by the Imperial Court. Her husband, an Austrian officer, was to be killed on the eastern front during the war. Her career did not quite reach that pinnacle of which all those sixpenny wellwishers in Bendigo had dreamed. More Victorian singers travelled that path, via South Street or the Sun Aria prize and so by ocean liner to Europe. Florence Austral of Carlton, John Brownlee of Geelong, Marjorie Lawrence of Dean’s Marsh, rose like comets. It was still the era when Australians, perhaps fortunately, were not quite sure whether they were as good as the rest of the world; and so the global success of a singer or sportsman was reassuring. The belief continued that somewhere in Victoria a glorious singer was just waiting to be discovered, and this remained a hope even when radio ushered in a new era of entertainment.

6 ‘My Lord the Workingman’

In the space of barely half a century Melbourne had grown from a patch of grass on the riverbank to a city larger than such ancient cities as Edinburgh and Lisbon. Victoria’s population was approaching one million, and some of its older residents could recall when hardly a house stood on Victorian soil. In transforming the land, titanic energy had played a part. The standard of living of everyone depended on a volume of sweat and energy and on long hours which we would find forbidding. When a shovel had to do the work of a bulldozer, when a hand axe had to do the work of a chainsaw, and when the housewife had to make with her hands what an automated factory now makes, people had no alternative but to work hard. Moreover, social services did not exist: if you did not work hard, how could you save in order to provide for unemployment or sickness? Hard work was also seen as a moulder and a tester of character, just as idleness was the slippery path to crime. That slightly disapproving phrase, ‘the work ethic’ – a phrase unknown in 1890 – is increasingly used to describe the old attitude to work, but hard physical work was much more than an activity enshrined by the pulpit and the nursery rhyme. It was a necessity and, for a large section of the population, a source of contentment. Alan Villiers, who left Melbourne to go to sea at the age of 15, was one of those who saw merit in unremitting work. Life, he said, resembled the voyage of the deep-sea sailing ship in which he had crossed the world. To reach the port was not as satisfying as 102

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overcoming the dangers along the way. At the end of his first book, written as a young man, he wrote an old-man sentence which summed up a traditional view of work: ‘It is not the realization of ambition that is the pleasure, but the fight with the difficulties that held us from it’. Most jobs required strength as well as skill. The farrier and blacksmith, the metalworker and foundryman, had to be strong to hammer forcefully and steadily. In Gippsland the axemen who felled trees and the sawyers who worked in pits in the bush had to be strong and fit: otherwise they would have earned barely enough to buy their bread. A hard-rock miner at Stawell or Bendigo needed physical stamina and strength, because his heavy hammer and sharp-pointed steel were his main tools. Railways and roads were built mostly with picks, shovels, forks, hammers, crowbars, and perspiration. Farms were worked by the physical strength of horses and men. In 1900 the proportion of Victorian men and women who were able to sit down during most of their working hours might not have exceeded one in thirty. At the end of a day’s work most people were grimy, and they went home with their faces, hands and clothes showing the grime. Labour had a visual unity which has since largely vanished; and today a quick glance at the dress of people at Flinders Street station in the late afternoon does not readily disclose the work they have done. The hands – their colour and texture and size and dirtiness – usually denoted the work which people did. A skilled tradesman saw himself as a class above an ordinary workingman, not only because he used more skills in his work but because normally he did not have to be ‘as strong as an ox’. And yet even a carpenter or joiner, a pattern-maker or cooper, a tailor or saddler required more stamina than his present-day successor because he had no mechanical tools which could help in the repetitious work of stitching, planing, sawing, shaping or cutting. Of the various craftsmen, the stonemasons performed one of the hardest jobs. They did hard physical work and also spent most of their working day exposed to the weather. Many jobs called for the lifting of heavy weights. In the Baw Baws, the Otways and the Strzeleckis, heavy loads were carried

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on the backs of men during the pioneering months, before the road-makers arrived. If the hills were too steep for packhorses, or the packhorses were too expensive, the settlers themselves carried supplies, mile after mile. In the timbered hills of Gippsland the wagons and drays carried supplies as far as the roads and the steep gradients would permit. Farmers then carried bags of flour, sides of bacon, farming implements and everything they needed along the bush trails to their huts in the clearing. Around Warragul in the 1870s some farmers carried all their supplies on their back for 15 or 20 miles. When their cows began to yield milk, the wife made the butter at the farm and packed it in baskets or bags, and then he carried the salted butter on his back to the nearest wagon depot or railway siding. If his track had to cross gullies or pass through scrub which was too thick for his shoulder pack, he might spend an hour in covering one mile. Every district relied on men who could carry heavy loads. The wheat harvest from the plains reached Williamstown in heavy bags, and each bag of about 250 pounds had been lifted four or five times in the course of the journey from the paddock to the hold of the cargo vessel. Wool came to the port in square cumbersome bales, which were not easily lifted or stored. When steamships took on coal at Melbourne their bunkers were filled by a crocodile of men carrying the coal in large baskets on their backs. The bulk loading of commodities lay far in the future. The hessian or jute bag, loaded by hand, was the normal way of packaging exports. Men looking for work tramped long distances with all their working tools and possessions on their backs. Even the man who took on casual work as a road-mender or stone-breaker had to supply his own tools or buy them from his employer at a price higher than he would have paid in the nearest town. Naturally he preferred to carry his tools from job to job. ‘Donegal Jim’ was one of these itinerant workers. He had come originally from the town of Hay in the Riverina, and was working on farms around Ballarat in April 1876 when he assaulted a married woman at Lake Burrumbeet, in sight of the present main road from Melbourne to Adelaide. We know what he carried in his swag because the ‘Wanted’ advertisement listed his possessions in vivid detail: ‘a small swag containing two stone-breaker’s hammers, a suit of bluish tweed clothes, a black

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dress cloth coat, and a pair of trousers, a white shirt with studs, and tommy-dodd shoes’. If that was considered to be a small swag, what must the large swags have weighed? In the same month, just to the north, a Welsh farmer in his late fifties was tramping the roads in search of work, calling at farm after farm, only to learn that the ground was still too hard for ploughing. His swag weighed about 80 pounds and in one ‘uncomfortable journey’ he carried it 60 miles in three days. Harvesting was one of the most arduous jobs in Victoria, and a harvest-hand near Ballarat probably worked twice as many hours as an underground miner for the same pay. Moreover, the harvest was now an assembly line in which every man had his task, and any delay by one man thrust delay onto the others. An old man once told me how the men brought in the harvest in the Goulburn Valley about 1890, when harvesting was becoming mechanised; and he insisted that the new inventions at first did little to ease the labours of the men and their horses. Thus, from early morning to dusk a man drove the two horses, which drew the new reaping machine, cutting the stalks of ripe wheat close to the ground. Following the reaping machine came nine farm labourers who, stooping and stooping until their backs were stiff, lifted the sheaves of grain and bound them with twine and arranged them in stooks or self-standing piles where they might stand, drying, for a week. This task was known as ‘gathering in the sheaves’, and was celebrated in a popular hymn of the day. Then along came the horse-drawn wagon, and a man with a pitchfork tossed the dry sheaves onto the wagon, which then carried them to the rising haystacks. To the completed haystacks came bullocks hauling a threshing machine. Along with the machine came a team of men – the contractor with his pencil and pad (or his memory, if he couldn’t write), the driver who regulated the engine and stoked it with firewood, the sixteen men who worked alongside the threshing machine, and the man who carried water all day from the dam to the boiler of the threshing machine. It was an exciting day when the threshing machine arrived. Like an early Rocket locomotive with its iron-rimmed wheels and heavy iron boiler, it stood quite still beside the haystack. Its boiler was lit before sunrise, and its whistle blew as early as 5 a.m. to summon the team from their beds in huts, haystacks and open air. This

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monstrous engine did not halt until the sun had almost gone behind the far horizon. Here was the industrial revolution, standing in the stubble of an Australian paddock. All day, the four men standing on the haystacks threw the sheaves of wheat across to the threshing machine where another three men cut the twine and fed in the sheaves. Inside, the wheat was threshed from the stalk and winnowed, while nearby three men worked with needle and twine, sewing up the bags in which the wheat had been rammed. The waste straw was carried by a hand-operated elevator to a rising stack where men carefully arranged the straw and built the new stack, which would probably last, well thatched, through much of the winter. In short, the summer air was filled with dust, chaff and the noise of the steam engine and threshing machine; and only a shower of rain could halt this rush of activity. As it was pointless to work when the hay was damp, the men would sit around and yarn, looking at the sky for the clearing signs, and lamenting the sixpence an hour they had lost. It was a Sunday in 1880 in the Loddon Valley, and an elderly farm labourer inspected the four stacks of wheat sheaves which he had just built in the past fortnight. He liked the shape of them and noted that tomorrow the bullocks would bring the engine and the threshing machine: ‘How sad to reflect that these fine-looking stacks built yesterday, will not be there tomorrow’. On a small farm all the grain was threshed in two days. On a big farm the threshing machine might be working the whole week. During the threshing, the women of the house worked harder than the men. Every labourer had to be fed three heavy meals a day, and buckets of hot tea were carried to the team in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. No baker’s shop was usually handy, and so in the farm oven the long loaves of bread were baked – probably from grain which had been milled from the previous year’s harvest. Sheep and cattle were butchered regularly, and one farm near Ballarat killed three sheep a day to feed the harvesters. After each meal all those plates, mugs and knives had to be washed, and the next meal prepared. In effect, a farmhouse catering industry stood alongside this assembly line of harvesters, and the long days were dominated by the dogged work of both the women and the men.

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The heyday of the horse-drawn reaping machine, with the neat rows of yellow stooks in the paddocks, probably lay in the 1880s. This method of harvesting was most popular south of the Great Dividing Range or in the northern slopes where the harvest month of December was not always dry and where the large numbers of working horses provided a market for the straw and chaff which this method of harvesting preserved. Already most farmers in the Wimmera had adopted the Adelaide stripper, which simply stripped the grains of wheat and left the stalks standing as waste in the paddock, to be later burned or ploughed in. Moreover, from the 1880s that remarkable Victorian invention, the combine harvester, was beginning to bring in the harvest. The simultaneous invention by James Morrow of Melbourne and Hugh Victor McKay of the village of Raywood, the combine harvester took off the grain and winnowed it in one operation. It used less labour, it dispensed with the steam threshing machine, and it enabled the main worker – the man who sat on the machine and drove the horses – to sit down for most of the day. But his day was long, and he arose at dawn to feed and harness the horses, and he sat in the sun handling the reins all day, and he did not reach the farmhouse for his evening meal until darkness had set in. In Melbourne in many jobs, the long working day was prolonged by slack periods in which the employee halted for two or three unpaid hours and then resumed his work. Tramwaymen worked during the peak traffic and then were idle in the hours when fewer passengers were travelling. In the 1890s, for instance, they worked a strange roster that rotated every 16 weeks. From Monday to Thursday, in a typical week, they began at 12.46 in the afternoon, worked for only two hours and then worked again from 6 o’clock until 11 minutes before midnight. On Friday they worked from 12.40 in the afternoon to 11.15 p.m. with a spell of nearly three hours in the late afternoon. On Saturday, back at work only nine hours after completing their previous shift, they rode the trams from 8.11 a.m. until 8.23 p.m. but there was a break of two and a half hours in the afternoon. The break was useful if they hoped to go to the football but useless if they had no outing in mind and no home near the tram depot. On Sunday their work was almost continuous, extending from 11 minutes past two in the afternoon until 10.23.

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In a typical week the conductors and the gripmen – the drivers – worked 59 hours and waited another 18 hours not far from the tram depot. Their only free day came every second Sunday. Broken hours must have been an irritation on wet days because the tramwayman who sat in the dummy car was exposed to the rain. Not until 1898 did a medical man have the bright idea that each dummy car be provided with a windscreen and also a footwarmer – a small box of straw in which the man could stand during the winter months. If the man in the dummy car lived near the depot he could go home during his afternoon break and dry his clothes but if he lived too far away he presumably sat at the depot in damp clothes. The men who ran the trams had one consolation. While they worked 59 hours a week, the cleaners and oilermen at the depot worked from 64 to 69 hours. On trams in European cities the hours were longer and the pay smaller. The common occupation of women was housework, and it was more arduous than it is today. A housewife carried out some of the services now provided by heavy industry. The wood-burning stove was her power house – the source of heat for cooking, washing and ironing – and she had to light the stove in the morning and stoke it all day and clean out the ashes and kindle the fire the next morning. If she had no gas lamps she had to clean the oil lamps and fill them when they were low. She had to make many of those products – jams, soap, soup, biscuits, candles, clothes, perhaps even bread – which now are made in factories. In the 1880s she had no quick-freeze meals, no take-away food shop nearby, no tinned foods with real taste in them, and no ice chest for preserving food in summer. To help her housework she had very little equipment – probably a wire-walled meat safe, a mincer for the meat, a wringer for squeezing water from the washing and, if she were lucky, a Singer sewing machine. Monday was invariably the washing day, and the process of washing the family’s clothes was impaired not only by the absence of a hot-water service and washing machine but by the fact that most men so dirtied their clothes at work that much scrubbing by hand was called for. Families were larger and that multiplied the washing. The task entailed a slow, dreary assembly line of processes: washing the clothes, boiling them, and then the rinsing, blueing, wringing,

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drying, starching, mangling and ironing. On Monday nights at least half the married women in Victoria must have been exhausted by the day’s washing. In 1860 most children even of the age of 10 had worked for part of the year. Those who lived on farms were certainly busy during the harvest or the fruit picking. Boys who lived on sheep stations were often employed as shepherds. In the towns young boys ran messages, sold newspapers, were offsiders to draymen and apprentices to tradesmen. Many young girls were helpers and child-minders at home, moving a little later into domestic service. John Quick, a father of Australian federation, began full-time work at the Ironbark foundry in gold-rush Bendigo at the age of 10. William Guthrie Spence, the most dynamic trade unionist, was a shepherd in the lonely Wimmera by the time he was 13. For boys of the 1860s this was probably closest to the pattern, though many did not even set foot in a school. The introduction of compulsory education in 1872 removed more and more children from the workforce, but it did not completely ban their full-time employment because it permitted those who worked in the day to attend school at night in the larger towns. Even those children who stayed away from school could not easily be caught: at first the truancy was on too large a scale. At the same time the principle of compulsory attendance at school was possible because the labour of children was no longer so vital in order to provide everyone with food and clothing. On the farms, children were still essential. Indeed, the rapid growth of dairy farming between the 1880s and the First World War increased the proportion of young children who had to do manual work as well as attend school. The butter which was spread each morning at kitchen tables in England was often the product of the daily work performed before breakfast, and after school, by thousands of school children in Victoria. Likewise, in summer an army of farmers’ children was picking fruit or hops, chopping firewood, weeding the vegetable patches or trapping rabbits. Many rural schools were virtually empty if an early fruit such as cherries or a late fruit such as grapes had to be gathered during the school year. In a few schools the holidays were changed to permit the children to work on the land at the busiest time of the year.

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Some factories preferred to employ very young children because they were much cheaper. In 1884 a royal commission found that many tiny children worked in rope works, cigar factories, clothing mills and printing offices. One cigar-maker testified that ‘we have boys now at our firm who do not come higher than this table’. A rope-maker admitted that in hiring children he did not bother to enquire how old they were. ‘No’, he said, ‘we just look at their size’. In tobacco factories in Melbourne many of the boys and girls were only eleven or twelve, and the children who made the pipe tobacco usually outnumbered the grown men by a ratio of about three to one. Many factories were protected against English imports by the tariff of which Victorians were proud, but no less powerful in protecting Victorian industry was the use of child labour. Most of the afternoon newspapers were sold on Melbourne’s street corners by small boys who did not attend school. In printing shops much of the work fell to small boys working a shift of 12 hours. In 1885 the night shift became illegal for boys under the age of fourteen and girls under the age of sixteen, but the practice continued in most other colonies. In 1891 the official census in Victoria counted all breadwinners, and reported that about 800 were not more than eleven years old. Most workingmen did not agree that life should be all work and no play. Indeed Victoria, perhaps more than any other country, was to express this opposite view to work. Victoria was not only an exemplar of persistent work but led the campaign for more leisure. In many parts of the world, Victoria came to be seen as the real pioneer of the eight-hour day. The demand for a shorter week became the major issue leading to the forming of trade unions and the calling of strikes. Workingmen, faced with the choice of seeking shorter hours or a higher daily wage, often chose the shorter hours. Climate influenced their attitude. The summer heat even in Melbourne seemed unbearable, especially to men working in the open air. Likewise Victoria in the 1850s had a high proportion of unmarried young men in its workforce, and they could live comfortably on their wage, and so they preferred more leisure to more money. The preference for short hours was also a sign of a society already prosperous by the standards of the times. Here was the land of the

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fatted calf. Having little fear of starving, workers could afford to sacrifice the prospect of even higher wages in return for abundant leisure. S. Dougan Bird was a London physician who migrated to Melbourne for the sake of his health, and as physician to the Benevolent Asylum and to the Immigrants’ Aid Society he knew that Victoria had its share of poverty. He also saw the prosperity gleaming. He wrote in 1863 that the real wages of craftsmen in Victoria were two or three times those of their English counterparts, and that the ordinary people were ‘surfeited with prosperity’. Many thousands in England would be ‘glad to work night and day for what a carpenter or gasfitter in Melbourne throws away at theatres and music halls on his amusements’. The well-paid stonemasons in Melbourne were the first to win the eight-hour day. At a time when 10 hours a day and 60 a week were normal for a skilled tradesman, the stonemasons believed that they had a case for shorter hours. They also had a bargaining position because the government was building grand buildings of stone, and stonemasons were scarce. Moreover, the building contractors who employed the stonemasons were also capable of making concessions. They had won contracts to build halls and offices at a fixed price, but the price of stone, mortar, building timber and labour was beginning to fall with the ending of the era of gold inflation. Big builders were thus almost certain of making sound profits on jobs for which they had tendered in the belief that the inflation would continue. In Melbourne some of the militant stonemasons had been Chartists back in England. Ardent democrats, some were fine organisers and a few were orators who could make thundering speeches forked with biblical lightning. James Galloway, a young stonemason who had recently landed in Melbourne after a long voyage, was secretary of the union of stonemasons. He insisted with dignity that ‘it is neither right nor just that we should cross the trackless regions of immensity between us and our fatherland, to be rewarded with excessive toil, a bare existence, and premature grave’. James Stephens, president of the stonemasons’ union, had been a Chartist at Newport in Wales in 1840 when the local riots resulted in the transportation of some of the leaders to Tasmania. Later he worked as a stonemason on Windsor Castle and

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the new houses of parliament at Westminster before migrating to Melbourne; and he was building the freestone hall which is now the law library of the University of Melbourne when, in 1856, he led the agitation for the eight-hour day. Leading the procession of protesting stonemasons from building site to building site, he gathered more marchers along the way. ‘It was a burning hot day’, he recalled. As stonemasons worked in the open air they were particularly sensitive to hot weather, and as they worked together in large groups on buildings and bridges, they could easily organise themselves. By the winter of 1856 many stonemasons in Melbourne had won the eight-hour day, even accepting where necessary a fall in wages. Under the new rule they worked from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. with their free hour for breakfast and their traditional hour for lunch, which they called ‘dinner’. The privilege spread slowly, and was granted on some jobs – especially government contracts – but not on others. Carpenters, bricklayers and plasterers won it on many building jobs in the 1860s, and the idea spread to the skilled trades. The government was more likely than a private employer to pioneer this privilege. The big government departments had no competitors and so could afford to raise the costs of their work, because they could quietly pass the cost on to the taxpayer. In 1870 the Victorian government agreed that in all its new contracts it would stipulate a working day of eight hours. And so the big gangs who built the railways and the teams who built schools and government offices now worked only eight hours a day. As the Victorian railways were the largest business venture in Australia, their support for the eight-hour day was revolutionary. The Victorian government went a step further by enforcing the eight-hour day in the mines. From the start of 1874, the underground miners and engine drivers could legally work no more than eight hours a day. This was a radical law, placing Victorian miners far ahead of the British miners, whose working day had just been reduced from 12 hours to 10. Victorians were also far ahead of the coal miners in New South Wales where, even after the reforming law of 1876, lads aged from thirteen to eighteen were legally permitted to work a maximum of 10 hours a day. Inch by inch, employees won shorter working hours but the victory was slow and uneven. In the

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1880s most of the unions which had won the eight-hour day or the 48-hour week were in the skilled trades. For the unskilled labourer, and especially for the rural worker, the shorter working day was still a dream. By the 1880s, perhaps more than ever before or after, there were two distinct paces of work in Victoria. One group was working shorter hours, but another group was working as hard as their grandparents had worked. The declining tempo of work was most visible in the cities though not yet in a majority of occupations there. A farm labourer who thus moved to a town and worked in the railways or a foundry soon found he had more leisure than he had dreamed of. Visitors saw the waning pressure of work. Sir Richard Tangye, owner of a big engineering works in Birmingham, made his fourth visit to Australia in 1886; and in his observant but opinionated diary he expressed his dismay at the casual approach to work in what he called ‘the land for my lord the workingman’. He claimed that in Melbourne’s building trades the men did little work. The word that fell from his lips was ‘scandalous’. In Sydney he was disgusted to find that when the government arranged a free train to convey the unemployed to the country to grub out tree stumps, more than half of the seats were empty. Where were the remainder of ‘these scoundrels’? Tangye said he knew where they could be found: ‘lying on the grass in the public parks, and smoking short pipes’. In contrast, the farms and even the shops worked long hours. Tangye heard with pleasure of an eighteen-year-old Englishman who had come to Melbourne in his ship and was now working for a greengrocer, rising each morning at five o’clock to groom the horses, driving a cart to market to collect supplies, eating no breakfast until he returned to the shop, and finishing his work at eight in the evening. Now there was a worthy young man. Perhaps an English visitor such as Tangye expressed the bias of an older man and, furthermore, a factory owner. In fact he was more likely to see idleness when he was travelling abroad than when he was visiting his own English factory where employees, knowing who he was, worked feverishly in his presence and then slowed down after he had been escorted from the factory floor. And yet Tangye should not be dismissed as an unsympathetic observer of Australian

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workingmen. He was one of the first owners in Birmingham to give his workers a holiday on Saturday afternoon. Workingmen who had lived long in the colonies were prouder of the shorter working day than of any other reform. They believed that by their sturdy independence they had won this victory. In Victoria they first celebrated the eight-hour day, or Labour Day, with a public holiday and grand procession in 1879 and in every year thereafter, and the public holiday for Labour Day was introduced in New South Wales in 1885. For the working people who watched the procession it could be an emotional day. The warriors of the movement who marched behind their banners or, being old, rode on horse-drawn wagons or sat up straight in the horse-drawn coaches, felt that they were popular heroes and benefactors. After the landing at Gallipoli in 1915, however, a new army of fighters challenged the old warriors of Labour in public esteem. The celebrating of the eight-hour day was far in advance of reality. Most spectators who watched the annual commemorative procession in Melbourne in the late 1880s themselves had not yet achieved an eight-hour day or 48-hour week. While the vivid top-heavy banners moved like galleon sails along the streets on Labour Day, even more wage earners were out of sight and quietly working their day of 10 or 12 or 14 hours. They worked in the kitchens of big houses, in hospitals, wharves and sailing ships, gold diggings, the farms and forest clearings, the little shops and stalls, the hotels, and the delivery rounds. In 1885 more than half of the working population in Victoria probably worked at least 60 hours a week. Most shops remained open until the evening and until 10 o’clock or later on Saturday nights. A sufficient number of labourers, skilled workmen and clerks enjoyed the half-holiday on Saturday to ensure that large crowds could attend the football or cricket matches, but for most wage earners in the country and for many in Melbourne the Saturday afternoon in the 1880s was still a normal time of work. A halfholiday on Wednesday became normal for shop assistants in 1896, but the campaign to enforce a half-holiday on Saturday rather than Wednesday was to come in the first decade of the next century. In 1909, Friday replaced Saturday as the late night for shopping, thus permitting the big shops in the big cities to close their doors on Saturday at 1 p.m. instead of 10 p.m.

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The victory of leisure was perhaps the most distinctive fact in Victorian history in the second half of the 19th century. Many Victorians counted this as the most exciting achievement of their adopted land, but the achievement is glimpsed only mistily in the history books we write. It was untidy; and it could not be assigned to a particular year, to a single crusade or to one reforming parliament or statesman. It spread slowly and erratically, and a young stonemason who happened to begin his trade in the 1850s and who worked only the eight-hour day could live long enough to see his granddaughter begin work in an occupation which still followed the 10-hour day.

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When the village of Melbourne was eight months old, the Reverend John Orton came from Tasmania and conducted divine service in the hut of John Batman, close to the present railway station at Spencer Street. The hut stood on a green hill, overlooking the marshes of west Melbourne, and there the preacher asked the biblical question: ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ News of this unusual gathering must have spread, and in the afternoon Orton preached again. More settlers came to hear him, and even more Aboriginal people – perhaps fifty of them – sat quietly, watching intently and listening to the singing. Orton had never seen a more fascinating sight. As a Wesleyan he resolved to convert the Aboriginal people as well as those inheriting the earth, but the obstacles were mountainous. People poured into Victoria to make money, and scattered themselves over such a wide area that rarely did a minister visit them. Victoria was dominated at first by men, by young men, and such a society was often more receptive to brandy than the Bible. Ministers and priests came; churches and church schools were erected; and Aboriginal missions were opened. Little in 1850, however, suggested that Victoria would become an enlightened society with a sense of compassion and some willingness to see wealth as a means as well as an end. The first gold rushes did even more to postpone the coming of such a society. With the rush for gold weakening a little, many people became more earnest. The dominance of men declined: the mania for gold waned; people ceased to rush along the country roads, and families 116

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settled down a little; and from all these changes the churches gained. The churches offered more than a spiritual message: they were social centres in a land where other social institutions were weak. Moreover, a desire for respectability seemed to well up, and perhaps it was understandable because so many who migrated to Victoria as free people were determined that convictism – branded on the older colonies – should not taint Victoria. If respectability was to be a goal, the churches were as wanted as they had been unwanted in the convict days. There was a stronger reason for the rising interest in religion. Victorians were overwhelmingly the immigrants of the 1850s, and they came from islands where the interest in religion had increased with the Oxford movement, the rise of the Primitive Methodists, the split in the churches of Scotland and the spiritual quickening in Ireland. As the gold immigrants mainly paid their own fare, they probably came from those sectors of British society which, not being so poor, had closer ties to the churches. These people, and their children and grandchildren, were to rule Victoria for at least another half a century. In the 1860s Victoria went through a religious awakening. This wild, rush-about, brawling society of the 1850s almost knelt in the aisles in the 1860s. The most effective evangelist ever to preach in Australia, a man who made Billy Graham seem like a mere usher in the temple, won converts for the Wesleyans by the hundred. His name was ‘California’ Taylor. An American street preacher, he reached Victoria in 1863 and ‘went through the land like a flaming torch-bearer’. In the same decade Bishop Goold brought from France the Good Shepherd Nuns to found their convent by the river at Abbotsford and brought from Ireland the Jesuits and then the Christian Brothers to teach in the schools. Meanwhile the four main Presbyterian sects in Victoria had agreed in 1859 to unite – with only eleven ministers refusing to join in – and that gave the oncesplintered Scottish church more thrust in entering new districts. In the 1860s and 1870s there was almost a craze for building churches, and soon spires and steeples occupied most of the highest points on the skyline of Melbourne. The noble cathedrals of St Paul and St Patrick represent, in their completed form, a later phase of building, but in the earlier phase many visitors to the young city were just as admiring of the first big churches: the Independent and

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the Scots Churches standing at the same city corner; the forgotten church of St Enoch, built by the forgotten United Presbyterian sect, just down the Collins Street hill; the bluestone Wesley church in Lonsdale Street, said to be the first Gothic church built anywhere by Methodists; the fine Baptist churches in Collins Street and Albert Street; the large church of St Ignatius crowning the hill at Richmond; and the original Anglican cathedral, St James, which stood in William Street. Those who left the railway stations at the provincial towns were surprised, too, by the churches, several of which were more impressive than the town hall. From the late 1850s to perhaps 1890 the churches in Victoria increased their influence to a remarkable degree. This was the age of the pulpit. Only in South Australia was its influence comparable to that in Victoria. The evidence is strong that Christianity in Victoria was now more influential than in the British Isles. Perhaps two of every three Victorians over the age of 15 went to church with some regularity. If the children who went to Sunday School are added, the churches probably had close contact with at least four of every five Victorians old enough to sit still. In Victoria the mix of the religions was different to that of New South Wales. Here the Presbyterians and Wesleyans and minor Methodists were unusually strong; and according to the censuses these various nonconformist sects had as many adherents as the Church of England (in New South Wales in contrast they were only half as many as the Anglicans). In actual church attendance the nonconformists in Victoria were far ahead of the Anglicans. In 1881 they possessed, together, about three times as many clergymen as the Anglicans and more than three times as many seats in their churches. The Catholics had a quarter of the population and a chain of schools, and in influence they would have come behind the nonconformists but well ahead of the Anglicans. Part of the fervour and divisiveness of religion in Victoria came from this unusual blend of sects. Here was the only colony where both the nonconformists and the Catholics were very strong. Hence the importance of the issue of who should control the state schools and what they should teach. Christianity flavoured the views of those who rarely attended a church. Most Victorians in 1870 believed the story which was told

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in the Book of Genesis: that God had created all living things, creating them with care and quickness. The wonderful prose of the authorised version of the Bible was imitated in countless speeches in parliament, and in editorials, tombstones and illuminated addresses. The more devout squatters borrowed from the pastoral verse of the Old Testament when they described how they led their sheep into new lands. Bush children making their own short walks into unknown scrub imagined they were entering a land of Canaan in an Australian wilderness. Our imagination, wrote one Gippsland girl, ‘always took a Spiritual colour in those days of family Bible reading’. Many businessmen thought similarly, and the name of the famous Sunshine harvester – and eventually the Melbourne suburb where that harvester was built – came from the text of a sermon preached in a Presbyterian church in Ballarat. Hymns were reservoirs of imagery, to be tapped when a new experience called for phrases. A popular reservoir was the vivid hymn written by Reginald Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta, at a time when Australia was an unvisited part of his diocese: From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand. Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand.

One of the first workmen to reach the goldfield of Bendigo instantly thought of that verse when he saw the gold gleaming in the sand. When Ernest Giles set out to explore the centre of Australia, in a small expedition organised by Dr von Mueller of Melbourne, his vision of what he might find was almost certainly culled from Heber’s vivid words; and Giles in his imagination saw ‘many an ancient river and many a palmy plain’. The verses of several dozen hymns were then as well known, and remembered longer, than the verses of today’s leading pop songs. When in 1902 the news of the ending of the Boer War reached the members of the Melbourne Stock Exchange they stood in sight of the latest quotations of their mining shares and, singing that hymn known as ‘The Old Hundredth’, affirmed that they would dwell in Paradise with God. For a few minutes their paradise was not a golden hole in the ground.

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In the 1870s in many homes, a grace was said before each meal. The baptism of children was a widespread custom. When couples married, they were married in a church: civil marriages performed in a registry office were uncommon. Most people married somebody of their own religious sect, and the Catholics especially did after 1869 when the Catholic bishops abandoned their tolerance of mixed marriages. Almost everybody was buried with a religious ceremony. A secular funeral even in the 1880s was something of a scandal and also an act of courage. In nearly all the larger cemeteries Catholics were buried alongside Catholics, Baptists alongside Baptists. Sectarian segregation was even more common in death than in life. There was a deep belief in an all-seeing God who determined what happened in each life and each town. He could bring rain to a parched land. Or he could bring too much rain. Thus a Presbyterian clergyman interpreted a violent storm which pummelled Melbourne as a sign that God was punishing the citizens’ drunkenness. The minister was not yet accustomed to Melbourne’s inscrutable weather. In the depths of the depression in May 1893 the Anglican bishop of Melbourne, Dr Goe, called for a day of prayer and humiliation. He called also for a confession that suffering is the consequence of past sins. The Presbyterian Assembly went further and invited the governor to proclaim a day of penitence. Christianity shaped the attitude to dying. Death came more unexpectedly, or earlier in life, to most people. Who can say with certainty whether death meant more or less in that era; but the evidence suggests that it was believed to be an event of deeper significance than now. In shipwrecks or in mining disasters the faith in ultimate reunion consoled many who were about to die. In January 1866 the iron steamship London left Plymouth with some 263 passengers and crew. A fast ship, she was believed to be safer than the elegant sailing clippers which were now losing supremacy on the run to Melbourne. Amongst her passengers were the celebrated actor G. V. Brooke and Daniel Draper, who was perhaps the best-known Wesleyan clergyman in Victoria and had recently founded Wesley College. In the Bay of Biscay the ship was caught in a gale and was thumped by mountainous seas. The sea

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flooded the engine room and silenced the pumps. The ship slowly began to sink. The Reverend Daniel Draper held a series of services and prayer meetings from midnight until two in the following afternoon, and passengers of all classes, and members of the crew not on duty, crowded into the saloon to hear his plea that they all prepare to appear that day before ‘The Great Judge’. Only one small lifeboat was successfully lowered and those aboard heard the passengers singing ‘Rock of Ages’ as their boat drew away. A shipwreck on the route between Australia and England made a deep impact in those decades when ships were the only link, and when most Victorian adults had actually sailed that route. When nine weeks later the news reached Melbourne that the London had sunk, the sensation was deep, and Draper was proclaimed a hero. He was widely believed to have ascended swiftly to his place on high ‘in a chariot of flame’. Most people had faith that heaven existed. The faith might falter but was one of the facts of late-19th-century life. The churches strengthened society in many ways. They encouraged a sense of individual responsibility. Perhaps they placed too much weight on the individual and expected too little from the state. Whether we demand too much of the government is open to debate but probably we ask too little of the individuals who make up the state. To advance their goal of individual responsibility and good conduct the churches led the way in providing day-schools and teachers, often with government aid. From Scotland the Presbyterians arrived with a tenacious faith in education, and founded Scotch College in 1851 and the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in 1875 – the oldest boys’ and girls’ schools in Victoria. Likewise the main benefactor of education in Melbourne’s first half-century was a Scottish-born Presbyterian, Francis Ormond, who made his fortune from wool and spent part of it on Ormond College in the University of Melbourne and in founding a working men’s college that is now the RMIT University. Churches gave some of the other services now provided by the welfare state. The priests and parsons were the busiest social workers; they visited the sick and lonely, and soothed the dying. Many churches provided relief to the poor, to the bewildered immigrant

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who had just landed, and to the sailor. Churches were the backbone of the temperance movement. In the countryside the church standing alone in a paddock was the main meeting place. Many social movements which at first sight seem to lie outside the churches gained impetus from versions of Christianity. The dynamic trade unionist William Guthrie Spence was partly an evangelist, and in his heyday as Australia’s union leader he denounced card games and racecourses, the bloated cities, and the evils inside them. A Scot, he conducted the Presbyterian Sunday School at Creswick while on weekdays he led the national miners’ and shearers’ unions. The churches were influential not only because of their message, but because they rivalled other places of entertainment and instruction. They virtually held a monopoly on Sunday entertainment because there was no radio, television or cinema to compete with them, and the theatres and sports grounds were closed. The church was the centre of music in many towns, it often provided impressive oratory and pleasing architecture and, more than most institutions, it allowed the audience to participate. The churches helped new settlers to feel at home. The Presbyterian churches served as Scottish settler societies. Catholic churches were the societies for Irish settlers and custodians of Irish nationalism. Many Methodist congregations in mining regions were virtually Cornish societies; Welsh-language congregations flourished at Sebastopol and Mt Egerton and a few other goldfields; and the Lutheran churches kept alive the German language and religion. The Church of England was also an ethnic organisation, but the English were the dominant migrants and needed less aid in adapting themselves to Victorian life. Every asset has its matching liability: every advantage has its disadvantage. Churches preached bigotry as well as friendship. They kept alive the rivalries and feuds of the British Isles. Catholic versus Protestant was one of the disruptive issues in Victoria, first flaring up at an election in 1843. In part it was Ireland versus The Rest: in part it was Ireland versus Ireland, because the Presbyterians from northern Ireland were the vigorous opponents of Catholics, while the Anglicans from Dublin were often amongst the lenient.

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Antagonism between Catholics and Protestants was also, at times, a class issue. The Irish tended to be poor not only when they arrived but long after they arrived. Whereas Catholics were numerous amongst the poor, the Protestant churches gained more of their support from the lower middle classes and the middle classes. Fewer of the Protestant poor – with the notable exception of Cornish, Welsh, and the Gaelic-speaking Scots – attended church. The competing regiments of Christian soldiers watched each other’s manoeuvres and war chests. Strategy and money were amongst the ingredients of success. Until 1876 the government subsidised the main churches – the Congregationalists refusing the subsidy – but most of the necessary funds had to come from the churches themselves. As the Church of England had been the state church at home, its transition to the competitive arena of Victoria was not easy. In the 1850s Bishop Perry led a democratic reform which became common amongst Anglican churches far from home: he persuaded the Victorian and English governments to legislate for a synod or assembly of both clergymen and laymen to govern the Anglican church in Victoria. That eased the problem of selfgovernment, but it did not solve the problem of money. On the other hand the Presbyterians, soon stronger in Victoria than in any other colony, mastered the new conditions. They had two decisive advantages: their members on average were wealthier than the members of any other major church, and their attachment to their kirk was nationalist as well as spiritual. The Wesleyans likewise adapted themselves to Victoria. Using unordained preachers, they moved with ease and skill to the goldfields where they became the most active denomination. The slow decline of the goldfields, the exodus of Victorians to Western Australia and other mining rushes in the 1890s, and the arrival of the Salvation Army on one flank, ended the heyday of the Wesleyans in Victoria. The Catholics by the 1890s had become possibly the most active church, though their support came from just under a quarter of the population. They were essentially an Irish church, and most of the priests and most of their congregation were Irish, and their graveyards were dotted with references to ‘late of County Clare’ and late of Cork, Kerry, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, Waterford, and especially Tipperary. The church was especially strong in inner

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Melbourne suburbs such as North Melbourne and Richmond; and in 1861 some inner suburbs had more females of Irish than of English birth. The Irish also came together in small farms on the rich soil of Kilmore, Koroit, Kyneton, Bungaree, Cororooke and other small localities, and built fine churches. As the Irish immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s tended to be less educated, less skilled and therefore poorer than the English and Scottish immigrants, they must have found it a burden to support their church and its schools so generously. Overall they paid more of their income to promoting Christianity than did any other church. They also donated young women as well as tithes; and one small Catholic parish near Ballarat sent fifty-five women to be Sisters of St Joseph and Sisters of Mercy and a dozen other teaching, nursing and missionary orders in its first century. While Brigid and Mary went away to take the vows, Patrick and Michael sometimes appeared in the government records as drunkenness statistics: a Catholic was far more likely to appear in such lists than a Protestant. Religion was divisive partly because it was felt intensely. The taunts and sometimes the stones which flew between Catholics and Protestants were matched by the rifts within each religious group. The Anglicans were divided into high church and low church; and disputes about candles and vestments, rituals and the geography of the altar were intense. The Methodists until 1901 were divided into three main sects, and in many mining towns the Wesleyans and Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians had a chapel in the same neighbourhood. The Wimmera had two competing Lutheran sects. The Presbyterians brought out their disputes from Scotland, and added to them. After a theological eruption at the Scots Church in Collins Street in 1883, the learned minister Dr Charles Strong left with the allegation ringing in his ears that he was virtually a Unitarian or even an unbeliever. Anybody who read a newspaper from the 1860s onwards could have imagined that a mounting wave of doubt and incredulity was about to swamp the churches. The wave remained a ripple, except in circles where intellectual argument was relished. The censuses which were held about once in every decade were anxiously read by bishops, pastors and rabbis for signs that the doubters were multiplying. Many of the signs were easily misread.

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The Aboriginal people, much more than gold-rush immigrants, swelled the numbers of Victorians who could not be assigned to any religion. Of the 1694 Aboriginal people counted in the census of 1861 only twelve said they were Christians. In 1871 a clergyman would have been relieved to discover that, amongst those of European stock who disowned Christianity, only 179 called themselves free thinkers, atheists, secularists, rationalists or reasonists. In addition five were pantheists, five followed what they called natural religion, two were fatalists, one was an ‘original thinker’, one worshipped free socialism, and an honest fellow said his God was money. Another 2100 said that they had ‘no religion’ but that was probably more a statement of apathy than hostility. Of the 10 000 who refused from ‘conscientious scruples’ to state their religion most were probably Christians who thought the official who collected their census paper was a busybody, to be kept away at all costs. Some were quiet doubters who saw no point in publicly expressing their doubts. Jews formed a tiny minority in Victoria, but their synagogues were prominent in central Melbourne, Ballarat, Geelong, and Bendigo, whose red Egyptian-style temple closed in 1922. Busy in commerce, the professions and politics, the Melbourne Jews were influential out of all proportion to their numbers, and were to form one of the most impressive minorities in any city in the British Empire. In the following century they produced two of the nation’s governors-general, Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir Zelman Cowen, and its most famous soldier, Sir John Monash. In contrast the first Jewish boy from Melbourne to have wide influence is now almost forgotten. While living with his widowed mother in St Kilda he had walked each day to the new Wesley College in St Kilda Road and then to Melbourne University, his brilliance easily visible, before departing in the 1870s for Oxford University. Settling finally in Manchester, Professor ‘Sammy’ Alexander was that city’s favourite intellectual, the author of a magisterial work on philosophy, Space, Time and Deity, and a crucial link in the chain of events creating the nation of Israel, though he did not live to see it emerge. By 1900 a host of people believed in the certainty of progress. The hope of progress in this world was becoming, for many, a substitute for progress in the next. In certain middle-class congregations the

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new liberal theology, and the trust in science as a problem solver, were whittling away the faith of the young. Whereas every church had once preached that man was sinful and could be saved only by the divine message, some city pulpits now preached that man was good and that the Bible was not really the exact word of God. These doctrines, however, remained virtually unknown in Catholic and rare in most Protestant rural congregations. The churches, from the gold rushes onwards, made Victoria rather a distinctive society compared to England and most of the other Australian colonies. The nonconformists and other evangelicals were especially strong here, and their views flavoured social life, politics, work and business. Their attitude to alcohol, gambling, to Sunday, to the human body, to music and the arts, to frivolity and leisure, and to work, was often stern or wary. Many Anglicans shared certain of these puritanical views, and said ‘amen’ when in 1867 their bishop, Charles Perry, wrote a stately letter to the press warning of the hazards of a fondness for the dancing floor, racecourse and theatre. That such moral crusades were launched in a society where the Catholics, with a different mix of preferences, were so numerous meant that the victories would be sporadic for the evangelicals and puritans. On one battlefront would come success. On another would be stalemate or retreat. Until the last years of the 19th century the consumption of alcohol in Australia had been high: not higher than in every land in Europe, but still high. As so many Australians were single men, and as they had ample leisure, they spent freely on alcohol in prosperous years. In the outback, alcohol was drunk in sustained bouts, followed by sobriety: the sober period began when the money ended. The cost of transport from the coastal cities to remote pubs was so dear that only spirits were drunk in the outback. There was no point in paying a drayman to cart beer to those faraway places, because beer consisted mainly of water, the freight on which was exorbitant. To send alcohol in bottles rather than in barrels increased the freight. Victorians were the main drinkers of beer but not spirits in the 1880s. They drank much more beer than the average citizen of South Australia and New South Wales. Beer was cheaper than other forms of alcohol in Victoria where a network of railways provided cheap cartage for barrels and bottles. The beer tended to be warm

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by present standards, and much of it was even warmer on summer evenings because it was collected at the hotel by children and women in black billies or jugs and carried home to the menfolk. Much beer was dispensed by barmaids, and any barmaid worth her pay had a huddle of followers. Most barmaids wore a black-lustre dress and flashy earrings: in that era a respectable woman did not adorn her ears. The hairstyle of barmaids ranged from the top-heavy to the cropped boyish look with maybe a curl or two to add a touch of femininity. The barmaid was as suspect as her beer, in the eyes of moral reformers. The ratio of pubs to people was far higher in that era. Hotels then were about as numerous as milk bars today. The comparison to the milk bar is appropriate, for the typical hotel held few customers, and many wayside hotels were run as a sideline by a farmer and his wife, and hardly a customer appeared in the hours of daylight. We now say, when we wish to show how important and busy a town once was, that its main street in its heyday held a pub on every corner. Many streets in fact had more pubs and bottle shops than that. Thus in a walk along Swanston Street in 1868, a thirsty traveller would notice, as he went along the west side, the Prince’s Bridge Hotel (popularly called Young and Jackson), the Freemason’s Hotel, the shops of four wine and spirit merchants, and the vacant Foresters’ Hotel before he even reached Flinders Lane. In the next block he passed another wine merchant and the Queens Arms. If he walked along the opposite side of Swanston Street, past St Paul’s, which was then a smaller church and not a cathedral, he saw the Crystal Tavern and then the town hall. Reaching the half-block beyond Little Collins Street he passed in quick succession the Rainbow Hotel, the Cricketers’ Hotel, Carlton’s and the Royal Mail. This was not a street of dissipation. Rather, it was a respectable street which housed such tight-lipped organisations as the Religious Tract Society, the Victoria Auxiliary Bible Society and the Order of Rechabites. A few years later Ballarat held 477 hotels. That was a hotel to every 100 people. As more than sixty in every 100 of the people were women and small children, the hotels were either struggling for business or their few male customers were struggling to remain sober. Hotels had to remain open for long hours, and the Act of 1885 permitted them to open from six in the morning until half an hour

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before midnight. Hotels were like our ‘corner stores’, a treadmill for their owners. Occasionally reformers deplored the ocean of strong drink which seemed to lap the doorstep of every hut and house. The reformers’ message was simple: ‘abstain’. On the early Victorian goldfields the selling of alcohol was prohibited. The task of maintaining public order was difficult enough without alcohol. Significantly, after the selling of alcohol became legal, the events at an unsavoury Ballarat hotel led indirectly to the rebellion of miners in December 1854. In Melbourne there was no ban on alcohol, and in the gold-mad years of 1852 and 1853 one-third of the deaths which were the subject of an inquest were attributed to intemperance. The adulterating of alcohol probably contributed to some deaths. Unscrupulous publicans strengthened their spirits by dissolving a few ounces of lowgrade tobacco in the barrel. From the 1860s society became more orderly, and family life became stronger and respectability became the watchword. By the 1880s the hostility towards alcohol was mounting, and was further fanned by changes in medical opinion within Europe. Doctors for long had prescribed alcohol as a stimulant, a bodybuilder, a cure and an anaesthetic. Alcohol was used freely to treat fevers, pneumonia, septic disease and patients recovering from serious operations. Then medical opinion turned a somersault. Hospitals ceased to be havens for those who liked their medicine. Spirits were prescribed more cautiously. The Melbourne Hospital in 1878 decided to use brandy less as a medicine, and a patient whose paralysed legs had defied all treatment suddenly rose from his bed, walked from the hospital, and was not seen there again. The change in medical opinion was accompanied by a change in religious doctrine. Methodist sects had served alcohol at Sunday School picnics as recently as 1850 but a generation later they even ceased to serve fermented wine at holy communion. The temperance crusade, like many sweeping movements for change, seems to have been caused not by simple, easily identifiable factors, but by a mix of weaker factors which so strengthened each other that, in the end, each individual factor appeared to be strong in its own right. Thus the swing against alcohol by the more evangelical churches was political and social as well as religious. Many of

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these churches were giving less emphasis to the after-life, and more emphasis to social reform. These churches were strongest amongst people owning property, and their congregations perhaps tended to see more merit in strong social reforms which would enhance the quality of life, but would not entail higher taxes or endanger the rights of private property. A crusade against alcohol would certainly reduce poverty and enhance the happiness of women and children. Socialists and other radicals tended to support the war against strong drink. The Utopias which they envisaged were usually sober Utopias. A sectarian streak probably increased the evangelical-Protestant hostility to alcohol. The Irish and the Catholics tended to be the stronger drinkers. For many people the campaign against the drinking of alcohol was a continuation in the 1880s and 1890s of the earlier war against the state subsidy to Catholic education. Catholic bars had replaced Catholic schoolrooms as the target of reformers. While most Catholic bishops saw the virtues of subduing drunkenness, they were rarely the leaders of the movement, nor were their followers the banner-carriers of temperance. The temperance movement gained from the revival of puritanism in the English-speaking world. Alcohol, swearing, nakedness and gambling were seen as partners in evil. The upsurge of puritanism was in part the result of a change in emotional and moral fashion – a change about which we still know little, though all long-lived and observant people see such changes slowly at work in ideas and fashions during the course of their life. The temperance movement was reinforced by the increasing influence of women in public affairs. In the winter of 1886 more than 45 000 Victorian women signed a temperance petition, which formed a roll of paper one-third of a mile long when carried into parliament house. Their petition denounced the liquor traffic ‘as the most prolific source of broken hearts, ruined homes, and blighted lives’. They complained that sons and daughters, ‘in whom their hopes were centred, yield to the temptation of the drinking bar, and become victims of the shame and rum which inevitably result from continued excessive indulgence in intoxicating liquors’. Votes were first given to women, in South Australia in 1894, partly in the hope that the women’s vote would tame the liquor traffic. The enfranchised women ultimately repaid their debt.

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The crusade against alcohol gained momentum in the late 1880s. In Melbourne a new category of hotel, as revolutionary as the motels of the 1950s, was built on prized street corners. Known as the coffee palace it offered fine accommodation and no alcohol. Some of Melbourne’s palatial hotels of the 1880s, including the Federal and the Windsor, were coffee palaces. Many of the rising businessmen, the land-boomers, were advocates of temperance, though their advocacy of temperance did not always extend to their own financial practices. By 1890 the four main colonies followed the principle of local option whereby a district, by popular vote, could ban new hotels and close old hotels. Ocean Grove, near Geelong, was founded in the 1880s as a temperance holiday town, and no hotels were permitted. At the irrigation settlement of Mildura no hotels were permitted. That helps to explain why in 1895 a few Mildura citizens sidestepped the prohibition by founding the licensed club known as the Working Man’s Club, which eventually employed thirty-two beer taps to serve members standing by the longest hotel bar in the world. As more polls were held, the temperance movement won victory after victory. In 1906 Victoria had 3448 hotels but by 1919 nearly 1300 of them were closed, and others were in danger. During the First World War, Victoria also closed all hotels at six in the evening, and for the following halfcentury only a restricted circle of diners and bona fide travellers could drink alcohol in hotels after 6 p.m. The liquor industry was now hobbling under the reformers’ blows. In 1919 at a state-wide poll, the people in those eastern Melbourne electorates covering the prosperous suburbs of Camberwell, Canterbury, Surrey Hills, Mont Albert, North Balwyn, Box Hill and Nunawading voted to close all hotels. Wherever the Methodists and Presbyterian and other nonconformists were strong, the vote for the closing of all hotels was high. The drinking of alcohol declined. Under the influence of the depression of the 1890s, and the crusade against intemperance, Victorians had become relatively sober. As a drinker of beer, the average Australian could no longer be compared with the average Belgian, Briton, German or Dane who drank two, three or four times as much. By the decade 1901–10 the quantity of spirits consumed by the average Australian man, woman and child was less than that

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consumed in at least eight European nations, and Canada and New Zealand as well. Not even in wine were Australians conspicuous. Western Australia was now the outpost of that old hard-drinking, cheque-busting and spendthrift way of life. South Australia and Victoria were the homes of that new sober Australia. There lived the wowsers – a word which the Sydney Truth, from 1899 onwards, shaped into one of the popular arrow words in our vocabulary. The crusade against alcohol was, perhaps, the most powerful venture in women’s liberation so far attempted in Victoria’s history. Here was indisputable evidence that Victoria was no longer so stridently a man’s land.

8 Who Am I?

The new land pleased naturalists even more than the farmers. We can still glimpse the astonishment of those naturalists who first saw Gippsland’s giant earthworm burrowing in the soft soil of the slopes of the Bass Valley, or the mountain-ash trees growing in the gullies of the Dividing Range – one standing as high as a 45-storey building before it was split into palings and shingles. Some settlers marvelled at the waterfalls which spilled over basalt cliffs, the craters on the plains, the Murray billabongs at daybreak, the nest of the Mallee hen, and the platypus. The typical settler, however, was often uneasy in the typical landscape. A love of the landscape grew slowly and unevenly. Those who lived on the land had to make money to survive, and many drastically altered the landscape in order to earn a living and many changed it because they wanted to recreate Yorkshire in the Ovens Valley or County Clare on the slopes of Kilmore. To anglicise the landscape was not necessarily to dislike it: that was often a first step towards accepting what was still unfamiliar. Sheep and cattle and horses altered the countryside, by their grazing. So too did the wheat and barley and imported grasses. Many farmers planted hedges alongside their fences, hoping that the English hawthorn or South African boxthorn would overgrow the fence and take its place. Many of these ‘live fences’ ran wild, and homesick travellers marvelled as they walked the roads at the golden flower of the gorse, but the farmer did not marvel because some of his land was now useless. Weeds arrived, and in October 132

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many of the hills were yellow with Cape Weed or they turned purple with Patterson’s Curse. Hunters nostalgic for foxes imported them; they spread, and in 1893 the shires of Benalla, Euroa and Shepparton paid a reward for dead foxes. Red deer and fallow deer arrived in ships and were carefully driven ashore and placed in the hands of a gamekeeper. Rabbits arrived and some flourished and some did not, but the consignment of twenty-four English rabbits imported for squatter Austin at Winchelsea in 1859 made itself at home, and quickly multiplied into millions on the grassy plains. Birds of many kinds were imported, and some became pests in the orchards. In the 1860s Victoria’s Acclimatization Society was a busy importer of thrushes, blackbirds and skylarks, and was probably responsible for most of the sparrows, starlings and Indian mynas now in Victoria. Settlers ringbarked the huge gum trees, and for decades the white cemeteries of trees stood, to be blackened by passing bushfires or blown down limb by limb. In the hill country of Gippsland, by herculean labour, the settlers chopped down tree after tree until some valleys were covered with green English grasses, and not a tall tree could be seen. In the Mallee late in the century, they flattened the scrub with iron rollers or chopped it down. They grubbed the stumps, burning what they could in bonfires that made the horizon glow at night. Pioneers of a new way of farming, they went too far, and did not even leave windbreaks to shield their soil. Dust storms rose in the dry years of the late 1890s, and on cloudless days the sun vanished. In many inland towns the mid-afternoon could be as black as a moonless night, and women had to light a lamp to do the sewing or peel the potatoes. The weather bureau in Melbourne reported that on 14 February 1903 the clouds were the colour of copper and the rain was loaded with dirt. Far from the inland plains the streets of many Victorian towns changed their colour as brownish dust coated the ground. The man-made structures, more often than not, were ugly. Most country roads were lined by an untidy structure which is becoming rare: the post-and-rail fence. This simple rough-cut timber formed a strong fence but it was too crudely made and too unsymmetrical and too common to please most travellers who remained nostalgic for the roadside hedges of the British Isles. Most of the early

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farmhouses, huts and outbuildings were also rough, being usually of wood, with roofs of wooden shingles. Most buildings were unpainted, unless with whitewash. The typical goldfields’ cottage of the 1870s and even the 1880s was often unfenced, and stood close to the waste heaps of the deep mines or the abandoned potholes of the diggers. Travellers visiting Bendigo and Ballarat and Clunes praised the tree-lined streets and the vistas of fine buildings and gardens but tut-tutted at the untidiness of mullock heaps, mine chimneys, and the jumble of cottages – a scene which might have come from England’s industrial revolution and was an eyesore in the strong Australian sunlight. The rivers and creeks also marked the diggers’ coming, and when the gold-bearing clay was first washed in the nearby creeks, people 40 or 60 miles away could sometimes guess that the rush had begun because the water in their river quickly changed its colour. The Barwon at Geelong is said to have changed its colour when Ballarat was rushed for gold. Soon after the rush set in to Blackwood, the Werribee River was polluted with slurry and the railway locomotives on the new Geelong–Melbourne railway ceased to stop there. In the late 1850s some 1500 puddling machines were engaged in separating the grains of gold from the clay at Bendigo, and they filled the creek with slime and sludge so that it virtually ceased to be a creek. Quickly in the settled districts the landscape changed. We might call it devastation: they called it pioneering. We gained, all in all, far more than we lost by their labour, and so we cannot be too outspoken about the flora and fauna they endangered or extinguished. They had to win a living in an economic climate which was harsh. Their knowledge was meagre, and their heart was often elsewhere. Most Victorians in the 1850s and 1860s thought the climate was too hot. They thought the terror of Melbourne was not the cold wind of winter but the hot northerly of summer. In the 1880s many wealthy citizens sent their wife and younger children to Hobart or to Dunedin to escape the height of summer. Others were content to send their family to the cool slopes of Mount Macedon where the governor also had a summer residence. In the 1870s the Melbourne author Marcus Clarke was typical in his attitude to Australia’s

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climate. To him Melbourne had a finer climate than Sydney, but Tasmania was the cream of the colonies. In his flowing description at the start of Book Two of his novel For the Term of His Natural Life, he contrasts the glories of Tasmania – ‘fertile, fair, and rich, and rained upon by the genial showers from the clouds’ – with the hot mainland. He rejoiced that no tormenting wind shrivelled Tasmania’s pastures and crops: ‘The hot wind, born amid the burning sand of the interior of the vast Australian continent, sweeps over the scorched and cracking plains to lick up their streams and wither the herbage in its path, until it meets the waters of the great south bay’, and there it loses its heat as it passes across Bass Strait. In commanding prose Marcus Clarke simply said that he did not love a sunburnt country. The first geography books written for Victorian children expressed these likes and dislikes. When in 1883 the headmaster of the Alma Road Grammar School in St Kilda produced his Manual of geography, his biases were crystal clear. The dry plains he dismissed as ‘wearisomely monotonous’, but the lakes were glorious, and none more so than the Blue Lake at Mount Gambier. The prettiest hills were those which, in their winter greenness and symmetry, resembled Ireland, and he enthusiastically counted eighty-three of these volcanic hills arising from the plains between Melbourne and Mount Gambier, and reported that travellers were struck by their beauty. Today these hills, their beauty undiminished, are not seen as symbols by most nationalists because they are so Irish and English in their tidy grassiness. Thousands of Victorians returned ‘home’ each year. They made the long voyage because they were successful or they went because they were unsuccessful, and had saved just enough to afford the sailing ship that went past Cape Horn or the steamship which glided through the Suez Canal. Thousands more would have set out for ‘home’ if they had been able to afford the fares. On reaching London many of these migrants found themselves floating emotionally between the two lands. The England to which they returned was not the same as the England they had left. Perhaps they too had changed. Many became homesick for Victoria, and were overjoyed when they met fellow colonists in out-of-the-way hotels or railway

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stations in Europe. One sheep owner came across six fellow colonists in his hotel in Pisa in the early 1880s. Sitting by the fire in his hotel in Inverary in Scotland he was delighted to recognise another Victorian who was escorting his sons on a grand tour, and soon yet another colonist entered the room. Likewise in north Italy in 1881 a Ballarat tourist searched one Sunday for a Protestant church, and was astonished to learn that a woman he chanced to meet had lived in Daylesford for 11 years. That evening at the same church he was approached by an Italian who had lived in Bendigo for seven years. ‘I wish I was in Victoria again’, said the Italian. ‘I’ve had no luck since I left.’ In the 1880s, Victorians who had lived long in the colony were not sure where their loyalties lay until they went abroad. Thomas Shaw junior left England with his father in 1843 at the age of 16 and worked at Duntroon sheep station near the present Canberra before becoming a breeder of fine sheep in western Victoria. In the early 1880s, curious to see the old world he had left behind, he reached Liverpool ‘after 70 days of wild, raging, surging, monotonous sea’. While he gloried in Britain and still called it ‘home’, he realised that he himself had changed. The skies of England and Scotland were too gloomy: he did not like the biting rain. In London he could still admire crisp snow in the parks but the dim light of midday in deep winter took by surprise this man whose boyhood had been spent in even dimmer light in Yorkshire. Henry Lawson was to be struck by this same ‘terrible gloom’ when he first saw London: ‘Fancy writing by lamp-light in the middle of the day’, he wrote. Shaw also toured France and Switzerland and Italy, Egypt and Syria and the Holy Land. Looking around him like a squatter in search of sheep pastures, he loyally held a map of eastern Australia before his eyes as his chart of comparison. The plains with their black sheep near Rome reminded him of parts of Victoria, and he felt that around Rome ‘was a land worth selecting’, while the lava of Mount Vesuvius seemed like the volcanic rock of his own Mortlake and the Stony Rises. Riding from Jordan to Jericho he almost imagined he was crossing the saltbush plains near Deniliquin, part of Victoria’s hinterland. Travelling in a steamship towards Constantinople he wished he had three or four additional eyes so that he could absorb fully the hills, domes and minarets standing in all their

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beauty before him. But where previously had he seen this scene? Now it came back to him. The approaches to Constantinople, he wrote, have ‘somewhat the appearance of Geelong from the sea’. Sleepy Geelong had never possessed such an ardent promoter. In Paris in the new opera house Mr Shaw saw Faust and marvelled at the lavish sets and the fine orchestra, but there was one disappointment: ‘I have heard better singing in Melbourne’, he announced firmly. When finally he returned to his home in western Victoria, he realised that he himself, without quite knowing it, lived in the biblical land of Goshen, for the grasslands west of Geelong and the blue sky above were unequalled in his eyes: ‘what lovely sunshine, what bright days – how cheerful!’ Thomas Shaw was grappling in his own way with that question which was thoughtfully asked by old Victorians, ‘Who am I?’ A visit to their homeland was usually enough to persuade them that they were no longer British to the bootstraps. They felt that Victoria was tugging at their affections and yet taunting them and unsettling them. Its summer was hotter than England’s, the midday light was harsher, the colours of the leaves and grass were not so pleasing and the seasons, above all, were unpredictable. The novelist Rolf Boldrewood, returning to an England which he had left at the age of four, decided that the landscape of Hampshire was too tender and succulent and intense: ‘The greenness of the pastures was at first sight almost oppressive’. He was becoming a nationalist. It was not easy to feel fully at home in Victoria when they still had such affection for another home. Their dual citizenship was more entangled than any passports could certify. Not that they required a passport: to belong to the British Empire was to carry an invisible and almost unchallengeable passport, and that privilege was another source of most Victorians’ loyalty to Britain. Puzzled by what was new, missing what was familiar at home, their bearings were confusing for the first generation and even longer. Gradually they found symbols which proclaimed that Victoria was their home but was not the same as the British Isles. When the first Australian warship was built on the Thames near London, on orders from the new Victorian government, a symbol was needed; and sailors coming aboard in 1856 to take over the ship Victoria saw, carved on the noble mahogany wheelstand where

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the helmsman would stand and take the wheel, a crown above and a long-tailed kangaroo below. Wood carvers, painters and poets found other symbols and emblems. The first powerful symbol and forget-me-not of Australia was the wattle. The poet Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote often of wattles: ‘In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles’. In capturing the wattle in his verse, he distilled a little of the essence of an unfamiliar land; and long after he committed suicide in 1870, in the tea tree by the beach at Brighton, several of his verses could be recited by probably every second Victorian. The Victorian artists told of these emotional conflicts in the landscapes they painted for themselves or for the patron who might buy the picture. They painted the green grass of winter more than the white, bone-dry grass of summer. They preferred the thick foliage of the leafy gums to those with gaunt white branches and spare foliage. They liked water: the ponds, creeks, lakes, waterfalls, rivers and bays. The first master painter, Louis Buvelot, showed these preferences in his paintings. Waterpool at Coleraine, fittingly, is the title of his best-known landscape. Oscar Wilde once quipped that London had no fogs until the painter Whistler arrived. It might well be true that Australia had no summer until a few young men came together to paint in the hills and beaches on the outskirts of Melbourne in the late 1880s. Painting together in artists’ camps at Box Hill and Beaumaris, they later spent two successive summers in an unfurnished eight-roomed house high on the Eaglemont hill at Heidelberg, overlooking the Yarra Valley. They not only captured the light and the sunlit landscape with new eyes – eyes which we have all inherited – but they mirrored a new attitude to the summer. Like a growing minority of young Australians they reversed the old preferences and actually preferred summer to winter. Many of their oil paintings have summer titles – Golden Summer by Arthur Streeton or A Summer Morning Tiff by Tom Roberts – and even more of their paintings celebrate the strong light and parched grasslands of summer. Streeton, Victorian-born, was most in love with the summer, and in letters written on the hilltop at Heidelberg he relished the fiery wind running through his beard and the view of the Great Dividing Range to the north – ‘beautiful, warm, blue, far, far away, all dreaming and

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remote’. It became his hope to tackle big paintings full of the ‘hot trying winds and slow immense summer’. It seems surprising that Melbourne was the hearth of these nationalist expressions before 1890. Of all the mainland capital cities, it was the most un-Australian in its climate and was the furthest from those arid plains which came to epitomise the heart of Australia to our own more nationalist generation. And yet coastal Victoria, in climate, was a convenient transitional zone between the coolness of England and the intense heat of the interior of Australia. In the Yarra Valley a more palatable version of the outback – the dry grasses, the blue ranges and the brassy sky – could be tasted. Moreover, this tamed and kindly outback could be painted within sound of the whistle of the suburban steam train, only half an hour’s journey from the heart of the biggest city in the continent.∗ Even to paint those dry landscapes on the edge of the suburbs was to make a great leap in the emotions. Such art, as much because of its themes as its techniques, was almost too revolutionary for most buyers of paintings as well as for the trustees of the National Gallery in Melbourne. In 1900, a decade after the main artists had left Heidelberg, the gallery possessed works by only two of the best known of these artists, and did not even own one painting by Tom Roberts until 1920. A quiet nationalism was also seen in architecture. In 1882 the Melbourne architect Nahum Barnet predicted that, just as a distinctive European architecture had arisen out of the dark skies of northern Europe, so a distinctive style ‘will surely arise in the sunny Victoria of ours’. That style would perhaps be less frightened of the sun and bolder in its colours. By the late 1880s the style was visible in new houses in a few Melbourne suburbs. Known variously as Queen Anne and Federation, it was marked by walls of largish red bricks, orange tiles of terracotta first imported from Marseilles in about 1886, a hipped roof with gables and occasionally a squat spire. In more expensive houses, a kangaroo or emu, griffin or dragon, all of red clay, perched on the ends of the gables. ∗ In the painting of landscape the next leap, an imaginative and emotional leap, was to come in the early 1940s when Sidney Nolan, stationed as a soldier at Dimboola and Nhill and Horsham, was to look down on the dry Wimmera plains.

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The dragons outnumbered the kangaroos, but other native symbols appeared in quieter recesses – native flora carved in wood decorating the verandahs, and native ferns and waratah petals appearing in the white plaster in the interior walls or ceiling. These Federation villas multiplied in Melbourne from the 1890s until the First World War. They flowered even more in Perth where architects and builders driven from Melbourne by the depression continued with the new style, thus bringing a touch of the flamboyant Mediterranean to many sandy Perth streets. This sense of place grew slowly. It grew with time. It tended to advance more quickly in the native-born than in the migrant, unless the migrant arrived as a child, and it was fostered by the eyes, emotions and the imagination of certain creative writers and landscape painters and historians and journalists. This new way of seeing the land, this new sense of belonging, was at the heart of nationalism. I call it, for want of a better phrase, positive nationalism. It was the positive though quiet side of nationalism, but we historians have usually neglected it for the sake of the more verbal, noisy nationalism which expressed itself more as a dislike of England than as a love of Australia. That other nationalism was a negative nationalism. It was often brought to Australia ready-made by new immigrants. In contrast, the home-grown, positive nationalism had to grow on native soil. Victoria was the strongest voice of the negative nationalism. David Syme, the intellectual who edited the Melbourne Age, partly expressed this nationalism in the slogan ‘protect our native industries’. Irish settlers also expressed, sometimes eloquently, this negative nationalism. Many arrived with a distaste for England in their mouth, and in recoiling from England they were quick to voice appreciation of Australia. Their anti-Englandism was too often mistaken for deep affection for Australia; instead Australia, to the first generation Irish, was rather the launching pad for the verbal missiles they threw towards England. Even the miners at Eureka, or most of them, were negative nationalists. In opposing the English government, which ruled through its representatives in Australia, they hoisted a republican flag, the Southern Cross, but they were not yet Victorians or Australians in their loyalties and affections. How could they be? Most had lived in Australia for less than three

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years, were still undecided where they wished to live, and probably would have returned to their homeland if they had found rich gold. The common brand of nationalism in Victoria in the first years of the 20th century saw Australian-born youngsters as brave and independent, the superior sons of the British Empire. Proud of the Empire and proud to be Australian, the two prides did not usually conflict. Influential exponents of this dual patriotism were the writers of books for children: Ethel Turner of Sydney, whose Seven Little Australians appeared in 1894, and Mary Grant Bruce, whose first book A Little Bush Maid appeared in 1910. Bruce became a special favourite of Victorians, for she was reared in the Gippsland town of Sale. Hardly a Christmas passed without a new book by Mary Grant Bruce appearing in the bookshops. Hardly a Sunday School anniversary passed, hardly a speech night, without one of her books being presented, and in the secondhand bookshops one still sees these books with the prize sticker enclosing the name of the lucky winners and the forgotten Sunday School they attended. Her books were Billabong books, set on the north Victorian cattle station called Billabong, a place with which most Australian children, now living in towns, could happily identify. The two boys of Billabong, Jim and Wally, were tanned, lean, determined and eager, and as young men their eyes had ‘the deep glint that comes to those who have habitually looked across great spaces’. When the war began in 1914 they crossed those great spaces to England and enlisted in famous British regiments. A stumbling but assertive nationalism had appeared in many Victorian institutions. The Australian Natives’ Association, a society with 4000 Australian-born members by 1886, flourished in Melbourne and on the goldfields: in years to come the Australia Day holiday was to be known in Victoria as the ANA Weekend. At the University of Melbourne in the early 1880s five Victorians were appointed to chairs which had not been advertised abroad: such nationalist favouritism would have been shunned in the 1860s and is shunned today. At the same time Victorian politicians, editors and the representatives of almost everybody from the trade unions to the ANA were loud in clamouring that the French be kept out of New Hebrides and the Germans out of New Guinea. They knew

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that Victoria’s strategic interests were not necessarily the same as England’s. The colonies were now conscious that at times they should speak with one navy and one voice. This was one of the spurs towards the movement which was to culminate in the creation of the Commonwealth in 1901. The republican was uncommon in Melbourne, even more uncommon than in the 1850s. It was easy to buy journals which expressed republican arguments but they were more likely to come from New South Wales and Queensland. The Bulletin of Sydney often roared out its republican views, and it was one of the few journals which expressed both a negative nationalism and a positive nationalism: the positive nationalism was seen more in its short stories and poetry and was quieter and less conspicuous. From Wagga Wagga to Victorian homes came the snappy journal the Hummer, first published by the Shearers’ Union in 1891 and peppered with such republican prayers as: ‘let Young Australia snap the chain that binds her fair young form to the dying leper of Imperialism’. Few Victorians in the 1890s thought the ‘leper’ was dying: even fewer thought it was a leper. When Queen Victoria celebrated her 60th year on the throne, and London shops were crowded with new books extolling the Empire, the most popular of all was ‘a wholesome, manly’ book – according to the Annual Register’s review of 1897’s notable books – ‘in which the human and heroic side of our history is described in vigorous, picturesque English, and is calculated to stir the patriotism of every reader’. The book was called Deeds That Won the Empire, and was written in Melbourne by the president of the Methodist Ladies’ College, the Reverend W. H. Fitchett. A few of the Victorians visiting London in that Diamond Jubilee Year might also have noticed, tucked away in the top shelves, a maroon-coloured book published four years previously and predicting that the day would come when the great European nations would no longer rule most of the world, and that the navies of new Asian and African nations would be seen in European waters and their wealthier citizens would frequent the English racecourses. That remarkable book, National Life and Character, had been written in Melbourne by Charles Henry Pearson, a former principal

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of the Presbyterian Ladies’ College. His book reached, in England and Australia, only a fragment of the audience which Fitchett’s had reached. It seemed inconceivable then that the sun would ever set on the British Empire. This intense loyalty to England, to its civilisation and literature and landscape, impeded the painful process of adjusting to a new and very different land. Even in Victoria – the most English corner of the continent – people did not yet realise how different their land was and how strong were its moods and extremes. The great drought was to reveal how little they knew their land.

part two Whirlwind and Calm – from the bank crashes of the 1890s to the 21st century

9 When the Bubble Burst

The boom of the 1880s was exhilarating but could it last? There was a limit to the railways that could be sensibly built to outer suburbs or the houses and shops that could be rented, and that limit had been reached. In Melbourne in 1891 new skyscrapers began to advertise for tenants. Some warehouses in Flinders Lane were filled with unbought goods. New cottages and villas standing in paddocks in the suburbs called out for buyers. It seemed, to those who read the signboards, that half the city was ‘To Let’. There had been too much British capital entering Victoria, too many costly public works, too many people living in Melbourne compared to the country, too many imports, too few exports, and too much borrowing and speculating. Much of the standard of living depended on heavy borrowing but somebody would, some day, have to pay for it. The common belief was that Tomorrow would pay the debts, but suddenly Tomorrow became Today. Victoria now had a serious slump but not a depression. As the inflow of British capital became slower, and as prices of wool and other exports continued to fall, the pressure on the economy became tighter. In 1892 the small land banks and building societies, which in the boom had speculated heavily in land and buildings, began to fail. Thousands of building labourers and tradesmen in Melbourne were now out of work. Many able-bodied people were often hungry: hunger was a fact of life in London and Vienna but rare in Victoria. Society, here, lacked the institutions to cope with largescale poverty, and charity was meagre and makeshift. In Mansfield, 147

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Ararat and other country towns in the winter of 1892, rabbit hunts were organised – shopkeepers even closing their shops to take part – and thousands of pairs of rabbits were sent by train to Melbourne to feed the needy. The depression entered a more serious phase in 1893. The main banks faced a crisis, and the danger was acute in Melbourne because it was the main banking city. A bank’s customers in those days were entitled to insist that their deposits be repaid in gold sovereigns rather than cheques or banknotes, and increasingly the nervous customers demanded gold. The banks could not easily meet the demand but the law compelled them to meet it. One solution was to suspend the law. England, the United States and every other advanced country suspended their normal banking laws in times of financial panic. Victoria, however, had enjoyed such remarkable freedom from banking disaster that neither the bankers nor the politicians realised the gravity of the crisis until the crisis was irreversible. At Easter 1893 some banks were overwhelmed by the crush of depositors demanding their money in gold. Most of the besieged banks had no alternative but to lock the doors, reconstruct their entire business, and then reopen under new conditions. In the space of about six weeks, thirteen Australian banking companies closed their doors. Six of those banks which closed, including the strong National Bank and the strong Commercial Bank of Australia, had their head office and much of their business in Victoria. Another two banks, the London Chartered Bank and the English, Scottish & Australian Bank, were owned in London but had their main Australian office and much of their business in Victoria. The event was calamitous. Two-thirds of all the deposits in the trading banks in Victoria were now locked up. They could not be touched for periods ranging from a month to four months, during a winter of economic distress. Meanwhile the banks had to rearrange their assets and liabilities and gain the approval of shareholders, customers and the law courts for these new arrangements before they could reopen their doors. The irony of the banking disaster of 1893 was that it could so easily have been averted by rushing through one minor act of parliament. The tragedy was that it deepened the depression. Its effect

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was less the loss of money, because most customers were eventually repaid, but the loss of confidence. That had been a quality almost too abundant in Victoria since the gold rushes. Melbourne was for long known as the ‘Yankee city’ because of its energy and its self-confidence but now the city was chastened. For three successive years Victoria’s bankruptcies exceeded a thousand a year, a figure to be reached only once in the next half-century – in 1931. The official inquiries into why institutions had become bankrupt revealed enough evidence of corruption to erode confidence even further. Too many directors and managers of financial institutions had been quietly robbing the till or cooking the balance sheets. Melbourne’s suburbs suffered more than the country towns and the farmlands. Though no reliable statistics of unemployment exist, it could well be that for a short time one in five of the breadwinners of Melbourne had no work. Between June 1893 and the end of 1894 the membership of the unions linked to the Trades Hall Council more than halved: the big union, the Typographical Society, fell from 1000 to 800 members; the Bootmakers’ Union from 600 to 200; the Felt Hatters, but not the unruffled Silk Hatters, from 124 to sixty; and the Cigarmakers from 115 to sixty. Many members resigned because they could not afford the union fee, and others thought unions were useless, which they almost were, in such a dead labour market. People poured from Melbourne – in steamships and on foot and in trains – to find work elsewhere. Many walked with their swags to the country. At least 60 000 went across the Bight to Albany and so to the new Western Australian goldfields, for Kalgoorlie was discovered just when Melbourne’s banks were toppling. On mining fields in faraway places, in Johannesburg in South Africa, in New Zealand, and even in the Klondike, arose large colonies of Victorians; 10 000 went to South Africa alone, and that excluded the 3600 Victorians who enlisted to fight the Boers. When an earthquake shook California in 1906, hundreds of Victorian builders who had only found intermittent work at home in the past decade crossed the Pacific to rebuild San Francisco. The emigration from Victoria divided thousands of families: most people left thinking they would return, but few did.

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In the 15 years after 1891 Victoria lost through emigration even more people than it had gained through immigration during the long period from 1860 to 1890. They were mostly young people who sailed through Port Phillip Heads on their voyage to Australian and foreign ports, and the loss of the young of marriageable age was visible in the Victorian birthrate, which henceforth was, decade after decade, the lowest in Australia. The scarcity of men in Victoria led to a sharp increase in the number of spinsters, and the census of 1921 disclosed that one in every five Victorian women in their late forties had never married. Frugality entered public life. Old politicians and lobbyists who hardly knew what frugality meant found themselves calling for retrenchment, though at first they did not envisage that their names would appear on the list of those to be retrenched. The railways’ payroll was sliced, and the Victorian Cavalry and a variety of other public institutions were disbanded. The palatial new teachers’ college in Swanston Street was closed. In five years, 347 state schools were closed and many of the remaining country schools were opened for only two and a half days of each week, allowing young teachers to allot their time equally between two schools. Melbourne University, the largest in Australia, bought only eighty-five books for its library in the space of two years. The widespread drive for economies persisted as late as 1902 when, under the impetus of a reform movement launched at the northern town of Kyabram, the members of the legislative assembly were reduced from ninety-five to sixty-eight, and the council from forty-eight to thirty-five. To cut down a parliament could almost be called an un-Australian activity. Victoria depended heavily on the seasons. When people talked about the weather, they were doing more than making conversation: they were talking about their livelihood. We now know that the climate in Victoria was favourable from the 1840s to the mid1890s, and that then it deteriorated, just when favourable seasons were urgently wanted. A run of six good years ended in 1895, and only the far south west had the normal rain. Beyond Bairnsdale the ground became hard and the little dams, scooped out by horses, dried up. East Gippsland, after two dry years, was saturated by rain in 1896 but on the northern plains and the Wimmera the wheat harvest was so poor that wheat was imported from California. The

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drought continued in 1897: it was not a miserable year but coming on top of poor years the deficiency of rain was much felt in certain districts, and especially the Mallee. The year 1898 was dry again, with fierce bushfires in Gippsland increasing the damage. After four poor years in a row, 1899 and 1900 were average. The drought was said by many to have passed, but it came again. At the start of 1902, thousands of wheat farmers were desperate for rain: they could hardly afford to buy the seed for planting; their horses were lean; their children had no boots; and the year 1902 proved to be the driest on record. The sheep population was one index of the drought, and the 13 million sheep grazing in June 1895 declined by 3 million in the space of a decade. The Victorian drought is usually said to have ended with big rains in mid-December 1902, but three of the next six years in most districts were very dry. When does a big drought end? We usually know only with hindsight and a bit of guesswork and intuition. Certainly the so-called Federation Drought was long and disastrous. One answer to the drought was to irrigate, but that required money, time and rain. Victoria in the 1880s had built two large reservoirs to dam the Goulburn and the Loddon, hoping that in drought years they could irrigate the riverside pastures and so create oases which would feed sheep and cattle from far and near. It was not easy, however, to create an oasis. The cost of building dams was high in the era of pick and shovel, horse and dray, and the stonemason. Even at Mildura, where water was simply pumped from the Murray, all was not well. Irrigated lands needed fertilisers and superior species of grass in order to make the best use of the water. Today the same amount of irrigated water can produce eight times as much stock-feed as was produced in 1900. For a time Victoria’s irrigation schemes, simple as they were, had glamour. On the first series of Commonwealth banknotes appeared a coloured picture of the Goulburn Weir, and one of Victoria’s early federal electorates was given the name of the other great weir – Laanecoorie – even though the town of the name was hardly worth a glance from passing travellers. The setting up in 1906 of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission, which took over nearly all the irrigation works in the country towns and virtually nationalised the rivers and riverbanks, brought far more skill to the providing

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of irrigation. Later, the first Eildon Weir on the upper Goulburn, and the great Hume Weir upstream from Wodonga, multiplied by ten the storage of Victoria’s irrigation water in the years 1902 to 1934. Even the drought did not halt the movement to the land in the Otways, the Mallee and the hills of Gippsland. Dairy farms could be hacked from forest, wheat farms could roll back the Mallee scrub, farms combining sheep and wheat could be created on the plains where the Victorian government was buying squatters’ estates and cutting them into farmlets. It was better to be struggling on the parched land than to be half-starved in the city. During the drought the Mallee inspired most pride, because in 1906 it grew about onesixth of Victoria’s wheat on plains which barely a quarter of a century earlier were a wilderness. To travel from the Murray to the southern Mallee was, in the words of a royal commission of 1879, to see nothing but ‘sand, scrub, and mallee below, the scorching sun and bright blue sky above, and not a sound of life to break the solemn silence’. Now the solemn silence was broken by the neighing of draught horses and the noise of steam trains. Butter was the other rural success of the depression. Farmers had found no outlet for their surplus butter until the late 1880s when the cool store and the refrigerated ship enabled them to supply fresh butter to London. By the mid-1890s in Gippsland, the Shorthorns and Ayreshires and Jerseys standing in the slush of the dairy yards and the horses pulling cream wagons to the new butter factory were common sights. On many older farms, however, the butter was still made in the hand churn on the farm, the farmer’s own brand – ‘Mountain’ or ‘Golden’ or some such name – was imprinted on each half-pound of butter in a hand mould, and once a week the cart would be loaded with butter as well as boxes of eggs, potatoes, and any other produce that could be sold in the nearest town. This old-time way of life was fading, and the dairy farmer was becoming a specialist. More than a hundred butter and cheese factories were built in the 1890s, making Victoria the centre of dairying. The depression was deeper in Victoria than elsewhere. To Victorians one remedy became obvious in the 1890s. A common market embracing the six Australian colonies, and possibly New Zealand,

Map 4 Rural Victoria, 1909–10

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might end the depression. In that common market, Victoria, as the hub of manufacturing and finance, could snatch business from New South Wales and every other colony. We can easily glimpse the hopes of the Victorians because 70 years later the same hopes were held, with less justification, by Britain when it entered the European common market. The hope of achieving an economic miracle was not the only hope of Victorians. They also believed that a federated Australia would tighten links with England, and would strengthen defences. Any political decision with many ramifications is based on a variety of hopes and fears; but the interesting thing about Victoria was its surprisingly united front. There would have been no Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 but for the overwhelming support of Victorian voters as well as the enthusiasm of Alfred Deakin, John Quick and many of Victoria’s major and minor politicians. The depression of the 1890s promoted a federation in a more subtle way. Hitherto, Victoria had been the leading colony and Melbourne had been the premier city, but they were now so humbled that they were not likely to dominate a new Commonwealth of Australia. Without the financial crash of 1893, most New South Wales politicians would have been reluctant to work for the creation of one Australia for the simple reason that Victoria – or the main ideas it espoused – would probably have tended to control that Australia. The financial disaster of 1893 was mud on the face of Victoria. New South Wales was not unhappy in consequence, but not so happy that it instinctively cheered for a federation. Much persuasion, and crucial gifts, would be needed before the electors of New South Wales would accept a federation. The new federal constitution was presented to the electors in the winter of 1898, and in New South Wales the opposition was powerful. At a referendum on 3 June 1898, most voters in Sydney opposed the idea. Around the Canberra district they were even more opposed. In New South Wales as a whole the margin in favour of federating was narrow, and if two train loads of voters had changed their minds, the verdict would have been against federation. In Victoria, by contrast, every electorate in June 1898 voted in favour of a federation. Only one electorate had a close result – the rural seat of Numurkah-Nathalia close to the New South Wales border –

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and even there the victory was clear. In Collingwood, Fitzroy and the industrial electorates of Melbourne, the suspicion towards federation was far stronger than in the middle-class suburban seats, but even in the industrial seats the vote in favour of a federation averaged about two to one, despite the doubts expressed by the new Labor Party. In the typical electorate outside Melbourne, the federal sympathies were overwhelming. Thus, in the eighteen electorates around the old goldfields of western and central Victoria, the vote in favour of federation was more than ten to one. In Ballarat and Bendigo, the elector who publicly opposed federation was an oddity. In a second federation referendum held in July 1899, the Victorian votes were even more overwhelming than in 1898, with 153 000 in favour and fewer than 10 000 against. In contrast, in New South Wales the margin was not large, being 107 000 to 83 000. And New South Wales would not probably have voted for federation without last-minute concessions, including the promise that the permanent federal capital would be built in New South Wales. When the Commonwealth was inaugurated on 1 January 1901, Melbourne was the federal capital, until such time as the new capital city was ready. The new Commonwealth quickly took over several grand buildings of the city. The government house with its square tower became the house of the new governor-general, and the state governor retreated to Glenferrie Road, to the house known as Stonnington. For those who followed the social calendar it was a double delight to live in a city which possessed two governors and two retinues. For the state governor it was not always pleasant to be playing second fiddle, and the long letters written in 1914 by his wife, Lady Stanley, deplored the ‘nasty little villa’ to which her husband and family had been confined in Malvern. Even the gabled house on Mount Macedon, which they also used as a government house in summer, did not seem appropriate for Lady Stanley. Standing amidst a forest of English trees and carefully raked flowerbeds, it could house a small army of servants and guests but in her eyes it was ‘just a little cottage’ with pitch-pine walls and hardly room for a guest. The Commonwealth’s politicians occupied the grand Victorian parliament house, and the wealthier ones stayed in the Windsor

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and the hotels nearby, and a few stayed in the Melbourne Club, and poorer politicians stayed in inner-city boarding houses, when parliament was in session. The state parliament retreated along the street to the Exhibition Building where two new parliamentary chambers were fitted out. For those federal politicians who lived in Melbourne the arrangement was pleasing, and Alfred Deakin – three times prime minister in the first decade – could walk or cycle from his own house on the South Yarra hill to the parliament in Spring Street. There was then no prime minister’s lodge for those interstate politicians who held the office of prime minister. Andrew Fisher decided to live in Albert Park and, later, in Hughenden Road, East St Kilda, and Billy Hughes, prime minister from 1915 to 1923, bought a house in Cotham Road, Kew, and also a retreat in the Dandenongs – a wooden house at Sassafras where, looking into the smoky blue distances, he could compose his speeches about the ‘dangers of Asian immigration’. What would he say if he learned that an Englishman and his charming Indian wife would one day live in his mountain retreat? The public service of the new Commonwealth was small. Its main departments were housed in Spring Street, close to parliament and to the offices of the state government, which clustered around the Treasury Gardens. By 1910 the department of home affairs could be found in Russell Street and at the top end of Collins Street, the public service commissioner in the old customs house in Flinders Street, and the defence department in the Victoria barracks in St Kilda Road. The patents offices and the federal land tax office rented part of the ornate headquarters of the Victorian railways in Spencer Street, the statisticians moved to the Rialto building in Collins Street and the judges of the High Court, appointed in 1904, sat in the noble buildings of the Supreme Court of Victoria. In those lean years Melbourne was only too happy to provide the space. Melbourne, even more than Canberra today, fulfilled visitors’ impressions of how a capital city should feel. Melbourne in another sense was unlike a nation’s capital. Not one embassy was here, unless the ornate house of the governor-general was seen as a kind of British embassy. As Australia sent diplomatic representatives to no other nation, except the high commissioner first sent to London

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in 1910, no ambassadors were in return appointed to Australia during the quarter-century in which Melbourne was the federal capital. Instead, a cluster of consuls lived in Melbourne. Some were honorary consuls – local citizens who carried out duties for Guatemala or Denmark – and a few were full-time consuls. But they did not turn Toorak into a little Yarralumla, they flew no flags, and they built no grand residences with a guarded gate and spacious grounds. Indeed, some of the major nations – France, Japan and the Argentine – continued to maintain their consul-general in Sydney rather than in the capital city. Nor did a procession of overseas dignitaries, a Chinese premier or an Italian prime minister, visit Melbourne. The city was too isolated and insignificant for such visits of state, and it is doubtful whether even one member of the British cabinet visited Melbourne when it was the federal capital. But Admiral Sperry of America’s great white fleet ceremonially called in 1908 and 300 of his navy’s sailors unceremoniously deserted ship. And Lord Kitchener, the famous soldier depicted on countless cigarette cards, came to Melbourne in 1910. The federation was a sign of a new unity within Australia. Other signs, however, pointed to a new disunity. Just as the depression of the 1890s had helped to promote the Commonwealth, so the depression had helped to widen the rift between rich and poor. The Labor Party emerged in those chastened years at the turn of the century. It gained support from the adversity of the times, from the effect of the financial depression and the drought on people’s lives. In 1899 Labor actually gained power for a few days in Queensland, and in 1904 it held power for four months in the federal parliament. By 1910 it was the dominant party in Australia, and seemed to hold the future in its hands. The curious fact in this political revolution was that the Labor Party made slow headway in Victoria. Until 1890 Victoria was probably the most radical of the colonies and thereafter, being the most depressed, seemed likely in theory to become even more radical: it seemed fertile ground for a Labor Party.1 1

Victoria was a colony until the start of 1901 and thereafter a state. In politics, the spelling ‘Labour’ was commonly used for the Labor Party in the early federal era but throughout I have used the present name of ‘Labor’. I have also used the word ‘Liberal’ throughout to denote the main non-Labor party but that party was often

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Victoria had experienced, long before England, that democratic upset, the election of a workingman to a seat in parliament. The elected man was Charles Jardine Don, a Scottish stonemason who was as happy with a book in his hands as a chisel. He won the seat of Collingwood in 1859 and held it for five years: he also worked as a publican to keep himself, because a member of parliament was not yet paid. Don’s name is not widely honoured. He was not a member of the Labor Party – the party was not yet born – nor were his political views sufficiently radical to appeal to 20th-century socialists. A quarter of a century after Don’s day, the time was riper for a reforming party, drawing much of its support from workers and expressing its view of the world largely through their voices. At the election of 1889 the Trades Hall Council nominated candidates, and two won seats in the inner suburbs of Melbourne: the bootmaker William Trenwith won Richmond, and Dr William Maloney won Melbourne West. At the election of 1892, ten Labor candidates won seats. The party was still an experiment, and Victoria made four different attempts to found a Labor Party in the 1890s. In the legislative assembly the Labor members did not work together as a caucus until 1899, and even then they lacked the numbers to be influential. Labor in Victoria was like a deep hole in the footpath. Many conservatives were worried about the hole, thinking it dangerous, but most people simply stepped over it. Radicals wondered why Labor was strong in Sydney – it often held the balance of power in the parliament – but weak in Melbourne. It was true that Victoria did seem to be a promising place for a strong Labor Party, being the birthplace of the nation’s two most powerful unions, the miners’ and the shearers’. Likewise Victoria had more workshops and factories than any other city, but these industries gave rise to insular craft unions which saw the welfare of the tinsmiths or the blacksmiths as more important than the welfare of labour as a whole. It was also true that Victoria in the 1890s was miserably depressed, but misery is not a necessary spur to radicalism. Battles are not won when a huddle of unemployed called protectionist or liberal protectionist before 1909, Liberal or Fusionist from 1909 to 1917, Nationalist from 1917 to 1931, and United Australia Party from 1932 to 1944–5.

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men are waiting at the street corner to snatch any vacant job. On paper Victoria might seem to be the ideal launching pad for a radical Labor Party but its potential advantages were hollow. Even the fact that it already possessed a strong reforming Liberal party, a party which usually held office, turned out to be a disadvantage for the promoters of a Labor Party. An avenue for reform already existed in Victoria, narrow as that avenue might sometimes seem. In New South Wales, in contrast, it proved easy to form a vigorous Labor Party because, in the absence of a reformist Liberal party, a Labor Party was widely wanted. Why Labor struggled in Victoria was one of the riddles of Australian politics. Clearly one distinctive factor was vital. Victoria was deeply influenced by the individualist migrants of the 1850s, many of whose political ideas were well formed before they boarded the clipper in Liverpool. These migrants eventually ruled Victoria. On the other hand the new Labor politicians in the parliaments in Sydney and Brisbane mostly arrived in the era of the steamship: they had come from a different England where social tensions were more acute and radical solutions were debated. Australia, they sensed, was ripe for the reforming scythe. Here the scythe could cut down in a day what might take decades of scything and agitating in the more rigid English society. The dearth of political radicals in Victoria was often noticed. Victoria had relatively fewer socialists and, later, fewer communists than New South Wales. Likewise the supporters of Henry George, the American radical, and his policy of a single tax on land, were few in Victoria compared to New South Wales where they helped shape the first platform of the Labor Party. George, incidentally, was a free trader through and through, and so his disciples in protectionist Victoria were likely to be few. Even the large group of Australian radicals who in 1893 set sail to found Utopia in the South American state of Paraguay had hardly a Victorian in their syndicate. Melbourne possessed its radicals, but they were fewer than in Sydney. In the first years of the federal parliament, Victorians supported their own Liberals rather than the rising Labor Party. When the first Labor ministry under J. C. Watson took office in the federal parliament in 1904, the party could not find a Victorian member suitable

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for the cabinet. In the end it selected Henry Bournes Higgins, the representative of the industrial seat of North Melbourne, though he was not even a member of the Labor Party. Watson needed an experienced lawyer as his attorney-general – Higgins was a fine barrister – and he also wanted a Victorian in his cabinet. In the first decade of the Commonwealth the Liberals were the most successful of the three parties, and their stronghold was in Victoria, and their leader from 1903 was the Victorian Alfred Deakin. He had entered Victorian politics when he was in his early twenties, a boy prodigy on the hustings. He read intensively and thoughtfully, wrote clear and persuasive sentences, and on the platform his tongue was silver. People travelled long distances just to hear him speak, for this was an era when a fine orator had as much appeal as a television entertainer today. Deakin was also a wheeler-dealer, and in his three terms as prime minister he carried through, usually with Labor’s support, many valuable reforms without dividing the nation. Deakin’s party was a mirror of the peculiarities of politics in Victoria. Deakin himself sat for Ballarat, a seat which would eventually fall to Labor, but more remarkable was the ability of his party to hold some of the strongest working-class seats in Australia. Until 1910 one of Deakin’s colleagues, Samuel Mauger, successively held the industrial seats of Melbourne Ports and Maribyrnong. Mauger was not only a Liberal but also a manufacturer, a maker of hats. He displayed Melbourne’s blurring of class lines and was celebrated for his advocacy of workers’ causes, though essentially moderate causes. He was the founder of the Anti-Sweating League, which opposed low wages for sweated work; he was chairman of several boards which tried to fix a fair wage; and he was president of the Workers’ Educational Association. By 1910 the class division in federal politics was more distinct. The Liberals under Deakin had ceased to exist, having merged with the conservatives to form the main anti-Labor party. For the next two decades, when Victorians went to the polls in a federal election, they were as likely as New South Wales voters to support Labor. A Liberal party ruled the state politics, and initiated enough reforms to retain the kind of voter who, in other states, was voting Labor. Back in 1895 the Liberals of Victoria had imposed an income

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tax on the wealthy and not on the poor. In 1896 Victoria created wages boards, which set a minimum wage in a variety of occupations. In January 1901 it paid the old-age pension, a radical step even though stringent rules prevented many Victorians from claiming the pension. Between 1902 and 1909, a period of strong economic recovery, the successive ministries of William ‘Iceberg’ Irvine and Thomas Bent involved the state in a variety of business enterprises, the regulation of more and more economic activities, and a reshaping of secondary and tertiary education. Under their rule the role of government was at least as powerful as if Labor had won power in Victoria’s parliament. So within the Victorian state parliament, Labor remained surprisingly weak. It had no commanding leaders; it won seats in the city but made no strong appeal to country voters except in Bendigo and several of the other old goldfields. In December 1913, in a political crisis, Labor’s chance came at last, and it was called to office. Its leader, George Elmslie, was typical of the early generation of Labor stalwarts. Born near the Geelong to Ballarat railway, the son of a stonemason who was helping to build its bluestone viaducts and stations, Elmslie also became a stonemason, that favoured occupation of early Victorian radicals. He married the daughter of a stonecutter, he worked for a dozen years on the bluestone walls of St Patrick’s Cathedral, and even the speeches he made had a heavy, doorstop quality. His reign as premier was short, lasting exactly 13 days. Two other brief Labor ministries – G. M. Prendergast’s and Hogan’s – were seen in the 1920s. It was not until 1929 that a Labor ministry – led by ‘Ned’ Hogan – was elected for the normal threeyear term, and even then Labor managed to win less than 40 per cent of the votes. Hogan’s own career suggests that Labor in Victoria had suffered through the emigration of radical talent during the long depression. Reared amongst the struggling farmers east of Ballarat, Hogan had gone to the Western Australian goldfields where he led the union which organised the army of men who cut firewood for the steam boilers at Kalgoorlie. Unlike those who stayed in the west, Hogan eventually returned home and in 1913 won the Victorian rural seat of Warrenheip with its strong Catholic vote. Like the typical Labor leader in Victoria he had trouble in holding his party

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together in a time of economic and political tension, and was ultimately expelled. I remember, when he was old and when active politics were behind him, having afternoon tea at his house. He thumped the table with such force that the tea swayed in the cups. While he denounced much which he saw in the world around him, his fiery spirit commanded respect; in him breathed that determination of so many Victorians who in different ways overcame the 1890s depression. By 1914 the economy had recovered, though a new drought was causing concern. The interstate rivalries had lessened, and manufacturing was gaining from the common market, and the federation was working. The relations between rich and poor and between unions and employers had become more suspicious but were not chaotic. The rivalry between farmers and the city was more acute, though not formalised yet in politics, and the sectarian rivalries were perhaps less acute than 20 years previously. Every free society has these tensions. Maybe it thrives on them. Moreover, most tensions are partly the result of change, of a freedom to make changes. A society without tensions is probably asleep. In August 1914 all these tensions were submerged by a new tension. War with Germany broke out. It came so suddenly that six German ships were captured in Sydney Harbour alone. In the first month after the outbreak of war, five German ships, not knowing that there was a war, entered Port Phillip Heads and were promptly captured. One German steamship, the Pfalz, leaving her river berth on the very eve of the war was being piloted slowly through the Heads at the very time that news of the war reached Melbourne. A signal from Fort Nepean failed to halt her but a shell fired across the stern made her turn around. This is now emphatically said to have been the first shot fired by the British forces in the war but the claim seems to be based on the mistaken idea that the shot was fired almost as soon as the war was declared. In fact, the war had been declared, on the other side of the world, more than three hours before the news reached Australia. In the first months the enlistments were high – the fear was strong that the war might be over before the Australians could reach the front. The severe drought and the heavy unemployment in the last quarter of 1914 are said to have aided the enlistments. The first

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Victorian volunteers, after training at Broadmeadows, sailed away in a convoy of thirty-eight ships which left Albany in November 1914 and crossed the Indian Ocean to Egypt. Ultimately about fifteen of every 100 Victorian men enlisted. Some actually sailed from Port Phillip Heads in the captured Pfalz, which now served as an Australian troop ship and horse carrier. In the wave of indignation against Germany, many Victorians of German descent became targets. In 1915, as the Australian casualties increased, the hostility descended on people of German descent, irrespective of how many of their kinsmen had enlisted in the Australian forces. At the small Wimmera settlement of Netherby, the Lutheran church and Schmidt’s hotel were burned, deliberately. In nearby Nhill, the town council even requested the government to ban the speaking of the German language in Australian streets. South Australia went to extremes, wiping German names from the map and closing all German schools. Victoria was more restrained, allowing German schools to remain open so long as they taught all lessons in English and employed only Australian-born or naturalised teachers. Leaders, in the emotional atmosphere, called for sacrifices. War loans were raised from the public, hotels were closed at six o’clock, and daylight saving was introduced in summer. But the main sacrifice demanded was a massive contribution of fighting men. The Labor prime minister, W. M. Hughes, believed that all fit men of military age should, if necessary, be conscripted to fight, especially now that the heavy casualties in France called for replacements. The controversial issue of conscription was taken to the people in a nationwide plebiscite in October 1916. Western Australia and Tasmania voted decisively, and Victoria voted narrowly, in favour of conscription, and the other three states opposed it. The issue, not yet settled, became more divisive. It split the Labor Party, pushing it from federal office in November 1916. In Victoria the animosity over conscription was intensified because most Protestant leaders supported conscription and the new Catholic archbishop, Daniel Mannix, opposed it. Many churchgoers on both sides simply ignored their pulpits, and that also increased the tension. Women and farmers and recent immigrants from the British Isles were probably the strongest supporters of

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conscription, but would they exist in sufficient numbers to carry the next plebiscite planned for December 1917? Again the votes were closely divided. In every other state the old verdict was repeated, but Victoria changed its mind and rejected conscription by a margin of fewer than 3000 votes. In many circles Daniel Mannix was henceforth seen as a traitor, but to many others he became a hero. For another four decades, at the annual St Patrick’s Day procession, he was to arrange himself at the top of Bourke Street and take the salute as if he was the Pope. To a quarter of Victoria he was. ‘His framed, coloured portrait’, recalled Vincent Buckley of his smalltown home, ‘hung on the parlour wall, next to those of my grandparents. We had no need of a Pope.’ The war had begun by submerging old tensions but in the end it aggravated them. It also reallocated power. It diminished the role of the states and increased the role of the Commonwealth, and the change was permanent. The war compelled the Commonwealth to raise in loans almost as much money as the states together had raised in their previous history. The Commonwealth imposed its own income tax, and those earning higher salaries and wages paid two income taxes a year. The Commonwealth became more active in social services, caring for wounded soldiers, the permanently disabled, and the war widows. It could be argued that in the first 10 years of the new Commonwealth the premiers of New South Wales and Victoria were each more influential than the prime minister, but by the end of 1914 such an argument could no longer be accepted. The heavy casualties of the First World War made a scar on the minds of most Victorians. The sheer enormity of the death rate affected so many families and friends. Every war has its heroes; and sixteen Victorians won the Victoria Cross and Sir John Monash, a Melbourne engineer before the war, emerged as one of the few gifted generals on the Allied side; but in this war the devastation was so great, the losses so heavy, and the warfare so mechanical that a hero almost seemed out of place. After the war, Melbourne was to plan the most grandiose of the hundreds of war memorials built in Australia: the Shrine of Remembrance, commemorating 18 000 Victorian dead. Amongst the emotions which lay behind the building of the shrine one unexpressed

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emotion was probably powerful. To many Victorians one of the glories of the landing at Gallipoli was that, in the eyes of the world, it displaced the memory of that other landing, at Botany Bay in 1788. On the battlefields of Gallipoli and France all prior convictions had been expunged from the international record. A new nation had heroically justified itself, and the Shrine of Remembrance proclaimed that fact.

10 The Horse and Its Conquerors

The railways were the arteries and veins of Victoria. The official timetable at stations was as valuable as the weather forecast today. The railway platforms breathed an air of importance with the stationmasters dressed like captains of ocean liners, the throbbing of the huge locomotive at the end of the platform, the smell of burning coal and the hissing sound of the steam and, above all, that palpitating fear of many children and adults that they might be left behind by a train departing seemingly on a whim. Nearly every town of a thousand people had its own railway station in 1900. The only places which still depended on the coach drawn by horses were a few gold towns high in the mountains, new farming villages in the forest country, and towns at the remote extremities of Victoria. Orbost was one of the remotest. It clamoured for a railway, signing petitions, lobbying in parliament, and sending deputations to the few ministers who visited the town. Those travelling to Orbost went by train from Melbourne to Bairnsdale, boarded a little steamer and travelled across the Gippsland lakes to Lakes Entrance, which was then called Cunninghame, and sat in the jolting coach for the last stage of the journey. A seat in the mail coach was dear, and a labourer paid two days’ wages for that part of the journey. When at last the coach passengers crossed the river flats of the Snowy, passed through the crops of maize, saw the kerosene lamps of Orbost coming closer, and at last reached the huddle of townspeople waiting for the latest Melbourne newspaper or an anxiously expected letter, 166

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their sense of relief must have been intense. Few people travelled further east than Orbost. The track which was to become the Princes Highway was a chain of bogs in those winter months when tall forest obscured the sun. At the other end of Victoria, the new ‘irrigation colony’ of Mildura was also inaccessible. Those travelling from Melbourne went in the train through Bendigo to Swan Hill and were careful to select the right day, because the horse coach set out for Mildura only three times a week. Mildura was perhaps the largest Victorian town without a railway, and its first train was to arrive in 1903 – a passenger train which, three times a week, left Melbourne at a quarter to seven in the morning and reached Mildura just before six on the following morning. No event could quite match the excitement of the arrival of the first train. Not even the coming, to provincial towns, of radio and electricity and television was so effective in easing the sense of isolation. But part of the impact of the railway came simply from the massive and loud presence of the train itself and the rituals of the officials who revelled in the train’s importance. A few motor cars appeared on the roads before 1900. They were noisy curiosities. Herbert Thomson, an automobile inventor who lived in suburban Armadale, gave his own car the supreme test of endurance in 1900 by trying to drive it from Bathurst to Melbourne, and his slow pioneering journey suggested that the car could not equal the railway in its ability to reshape work and leisure. Designed like a buggy, his Thomson car had back wheels which were taller than the front wheels. As the car had no hood, he and his friends held up an umbrella when it rained. Fortunately the car could not travel rapidly and so the rush of wind was in no danger of tugging the umbrella from their hands. Nor could they travel safely at night because their carbide headlamps gave off a dazzling rather than a focused light. The excitement of the journey was unforgettable. Coasting down the Pretty Sally Hill with the engine turned off, they reached a speed of 40 miles an hour. ‘One cannot imagine’, they said, ‘the tremendous excitement and pleasure of going at this terrific pace over the roads, with the car seemingly alive under us’. The experience of racing downhill, they said, was ‘sublime’. The sublime turned to

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the ridiculous, indeed the dangerous, when suddenly a back tyre punctured. In all, they spent three and a half days travelling between Albury and Melbourne. The main roads in the country had deteriorated since the horse cart and the bullock dray had ceased to be long-distance carriers. Most of the highways of the 1850s were now used only by local horse-drawn traffic and Sunday cyclists, and roads had ceased to be a direct responsibility of the Victorian government. Many of the trunk roads built during the gold rushes looked as if nobody were responsible for their upkeep. Parts of the road from Melbourne to Geelong were so rough that civil engineers came to the conclusion that the stretch near Little River had never been made. The northeastern highway, now called the Hume, was so potholed and muddy in winter that between Seymour and Longwood the horse vehicles and the few motorists made their own rough road parallel to the railway line. Further inland, towards Glenrowan, the famous Gluepot was a mile of sticky mud in a wet winter, and motorists had to use the shovels they carried in their car. The old highways to Ballarat and Bendigo had been built at such expense, with noble bluestone bridges and culverts, and a road foundation of heavy Telford stone pitchers, that they were at least negotiable; but the gravel had long been eroded, and the rough stones on the surface of the road made a journey uncomfortable. The Victorian government decided, when a mere 8000 motor vehicles were on the roads, that a central authority should rebuild the highways. The Country Roads Board, soon to become the most efficient road-maker in Australia, was formed at the end of 1912. Even to inspect the existing country roads was a slow task. The Board’s members had to make many of their winter journeys on horseback in Gippsland, and there the local farmers had abandoned their drays and buggies and were harnessing their horses to sledges in order to cross the mud. In the Otway Ranges, many of the local road-makers had used timber instead of road metal, laying saplings side by side to form a corduroy road, and one such road near Beech Forest in 1914 was 14 miles long. These were the roads which the Board set out to repair. The combination of railway and horses – the railway for rural and suburban travel and the horse vehicle for shorter journeys –

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had provided an efficient system of transport. Moreover, the vested interests in favour of railways and horses were powerful. Should the government, then, spend heavily on a network of roads running alongside its own railways and competing with them for traffic, and thereby increasing the losses of the railways? The government at first spent frugally on roads, and indeed the first chairman of the Country Roads Board, the engineer William Calder, gave the careful opinion in 1913 that in the rural areas ‘it is unlikely that horses will ever be wholly replaced by mechanical transport’. At the time his prediction seemed sensible. In steep country how could the horse be conquered and discarded? As late as 1919, Calder argued that the future of the light motor car and the motorcycle were far more assured than the future of the motor truck. When eventually trucks proved to be efficient, Victoria tried to protect its railways by banning, in 1934, the heavy truck from most of the long country routes. In the first burst of enthusiasm for the internal combustion engine, motorcycles were as numerous as cars, but by the mid-1920s the motorcycle provided only one in four of the motor vehicles in Victoria, and by the start of the Second World War a mere one in ten. The cars improved in performance, and multiplied. Whereas in 1914 Victoria had fewer than 10 000 motor vehicles, there were 100 000 by the mid-1920s. Motor vehicles were replacing horses in delivering goods in the cities. Doctors and commercial travellers going on their daily rounds took to the car. Wealthier farmers replaced their jinkers and buggies and drove their car slowly to town on market day, their left hand on the steering wheel, the right hand stretching outside the window and clutching the rim of the roof. At railway stations in the country the ‘service car’ with three or four long seats replaced the horse coach and carried passengers to outlying towns. These contraptions which in the 1920s were transforming Victoria were, in appearance, halfway between a horse buggy and the present car. They were square and high, with a hood of leathercloth which was probably made in the new factory near the explosives works at Deer Park. The windscreen was vertical, and the windows on the side were usually of a clouded cellophane material and were taken off unless the weather was cold or wet. The headlights of the car protruded more like ears than eyes, and new cars of the late

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1920s, including the Morris, had a dipswitch, a long lever which a driver pulled and thereby tilted the headlights downwards, thus dimming the light. To start the car the driver stood by the bonnet and firmly turned the crank handle: if the engine backfired he could break his arm. A car had no speedometer, no traffic indicators except the driver’s right arm, no brake lights, no heating, and of course no radio and no seat belts. The noise of the engine and tyres caused conversation to be in a loudish voice, but the slower speed of the car meant that scenery could be seen easily, and the sights along the road were prominent as topics of conversation. Motorists ceased to buy petrol by the tin and halted at a pump or bowser to buy petrol, which, in real terms, was more expensive than in the far-ahead days of the ‘energy crisis’ and the Iraq war. The concept of a drive-in, whether a drive-in petrol station or cinema or bank, was still in the future. It was also easy, on most days, to find a parking space even in the heart of Bourke Street, but at night people did not park their car on the street. It was too valuable, was not fully weatherproof, and on cold mornings the engine did not easily start if the car had been standing outside. So the normal name for a service station was ‘a garage’, and one of its vital functions was to shelter the cars of travellers. In celebrated events the car was now as vital as the horse had once been. Whereas Ned Kelly rode a horse when he raided a bank, the notorious Victorian criminal of the 1920s Squizzy Taylor drove through the underworld in a car. In his first notable appearance, Squizzy was charged with murdering a chauffeur; and when he was fatally wounded in a revolver duel in Barkly Street in Carlton in October 1927, he travelled in a taxi on his very last journey, to St Vincent’s Hospital. The important car drawing up at the parliament, a hospital or hotel or meeting place was now the cue for journalists to step forward. The car itself was seen by some as a lethal weapon. The massacre on the roads began before the cars were capable of driving at high speeds, and began even before many cars were on the roads. In the year 1925 alone, 301 people were killed in street accidents in Victoria. That meant that, for every 10 000 motor vehicles on the road, the deaths were maybe ten times more numerous than they are today. The early motorists were inexperienced, the traffic laws

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belonged more to the horse era, the mix of horse and motor traffic was confusing, and pedestrians had not yet learned to look before they crossed busy roads. Children had to be educated to sing the little ditty, ‘look to the left and look to the right and you never will be run over’. A journey in the country was sufficiently hazardous to be the topic of conversation. Steep hills were difficult on hot days, and the cars would come to a halt, the steam jetting from the radiator. Anthony’s Cutting on the road to Bacchus Marsh was one of the feared hills. A motorist ascending in a T-model Ford could face trouble because the petrol did not flow upwards from the petrol tank at the back of the car to the engine in the front. The car would stutter and stop and be steered backwards to the side of the cutting where on more level ground the petrol would begin to flow again. By the early 1930s the latest cars had more power as well as a streamlined look with their sloping windscreen, a flowing rather than a square body, and hardly a running board worthy of the name. They ran up Anthony’s Cutting and Pretty Sally like a greyhound, panting only towards the summit. For the motorist the new Great Ocean Road was the spectacular adventure. Planned as a war memorial, it was largely built by returned soldiers, and initially financed by the people rather than the government. By the end of 1921 the road extended from Airey’s Inlet to Lorne, but was just a narrow unsealed track scaling the heights. Motorists had to pay a fee at the toll gate, and they often had to wait for an hour or two until the slow procession of cars coming from the other direction was safely through, after which it was their turn: in most places the road was too narrow to allow cars to pass one another. The citizen who did the most to create the road was a mayor of Geelong, Howard Hitchcock; and when it was completed in 1932 his own car – he himself was dead – was driven in a place of honour behind the governor’s car in the triumphant opening procession. Those who went interstate usually travelled by train and they often cursed the break of gauge, which made them change from one train to another at Albury. But the politicians who drew up the traffic laws were no more willing to act in unison than those who built the railways. In each state the motoring laws quickly differed. In

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Victoria and New South Wales a motorist had to alight from his car to switch on the tail light – to ensure that the faint light was actually working – but in South Australia a motorist was allowed to use a switch on his panel. J. C. Watson, a former prime minister who had become the motorists’ spokesman, complained in 1933 that a motorist crossing an interstate border ‘has to unlearn much of what he has learned’. But few of Victoria’s motorists were venturing outside the state’s borders. When in 1927 the federal capital was moved from Melbourne to Canberra, most of the Victorian members who went there for each sitting went by overnight train rather than by car. The Victorian railways were feeling the challenge from motor vehicles but still employed about 29 000 people, a huge enterprise. The annual distance run by their trains was still growing and reached 19 million in 1928, after which stagnation set in. Mileage did not reach the 20 million mark until a third of a century later. There was no point in building new country railways, for the existing lines already served nearly every town of any size. Railways were more successful than the horses in resisting the motor vehicle. Victoria’s population of horses had probably reached its peak at about the start of the First World War. In 1914 Victoria had 562 000 horses – almost as many horses as dairy cattle. A horse was expensive, and an ‘extra heavy draught horse’ cost as much at the saleyards as, say, forty prime fat lambs, and a sturdy horse fit for ploughing cost twice as much as a fair riding horse. The common draught horse was the Clydesdale, and many wheat farmers bred their own teams. The foaling season in October or November was fortunately the slack time for the farmers, and by the harvest time in December the mares which had just given birth to their foals were fit enough to rejoin the teams that pulled the harvesters. They were a majestic sight, these teams of seven or eight horses, and on the larger farms several teams might be working in the same big paddock, plodding away day after day, but covering, for all their grace and strength, only a fraction of the ground harvested in a day by the present tractors. In 1914 in the very heyday of the horse, Victoria’s director of agriculture expressed to foreign visitors his pride in the teams of draught horses of the Wimmera and Goulburn as they pulled the six-furrow plough:

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every team a matched one, a blaze-faced white legged team of bays following a whole brown team, and, behind, a team of blacks, with bays again following; all well-conditioned and powerful, doing the work without any straining effort, and well within themselves. With heads and ears cocked, their measured tread in unison with the ‘jinglety-jink’ of the chains, they appear the embodiment, within their sphere, of the joy of life.

Nearly every activity made use of the strength of horses. They could be seen in the city and the small towns as well as the farm; they could be seen on the country road, hauling the heavy wagon; they could be seen in front of the hearse with its black plumes, and by the hansom cab outside the railway station. In state schools, children learned to recite that sad poem about the old horse which walked around and around a large flat drum, thus winding or unwinding the rope which hauled the bucket of rock from the gold mine below: He’s an old grey horse, with his head bowed sadly, And with dim old eyes and a queer roll aft . . .

The mine had closed, and the men and boys had gone, and the buildings were rotting. In summer the lizards darted and the quick snakes moved over the grass, and the single stalks of wheat grew high in the cracks in the blacksmith’s forge, and the swallow made her clay nest in the shaft. All was silent but the old grey horse was faithful, and each day he took his place beside the drum, and he lifted ‘his head from the grass to wonder’ why nobody came to harness him. Edward Dyson was the author of ‘The Old Whim Horse’, and his poem of the 1890s continued to remind thousands of young Victorians of the faithfulness of the horse in an era when the well-being of every Victorian depended on horsepower. The decline of the horse in the 1920s was not dramatic. Most farriers and blacksmiths were still busy. ‘The political centre of the village is the blacksmith’s bench’, noted one Victorian journalist. ‘If there is a chance idler, he comes here to pore over the newspaper that by noonday is always black with the smoke and cinders from the forge, and marked with the thumb-prints of many readers.’ While the idlers and customers yarned, the blacksmith with his heavy leather apron shod the horses, repaired the ploughshares and chains and other farming equipment, sometimes made iron tyres for

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wooden wheels, or made a new wrought-iron part to replace something that had snapped or broken. A blacksmith was in some ways the forerunner of the motor mechanic who was to supersede him. Above all, the blacksmith was also a bit of a veterinarian in an era when most districts lacked a specialist horse doctor. A lame horse was a useless horse, and so the horseshoe was as important as the car tyre. Victorian farmers of the 1920s were warned by the Weekly Times Farmers’ Handbook that a horse could become permanently lame on hard roads if it drew a wagon wearing worn-out horseshoes or no shoes at all. ‘Bad shoeing is the most frequent cause of lameness, and the loss of about half the working life of horses is due to this cause. Have the horse re-shod once a month.’ Even when farmers followed that advice they could no longer keep most of the blacksmiths in business. The population of horses declined by nearly half between 1914 and the 1940s, as the tractor and truck continued their conquest. Bacchus Marsh was a town with many blacksmiths, and its surviving smith’s forge was to glow for the last time in January 1961. It is now a small wayside museum. On sea as on land, ancient ways were dying. The sailing ship was waning even more quickly than the horse. At Williamstown early in the 1900s, when the trains arrived with the new season’s wheat, the sailing ships were at anchor and waiting to take the cargo of wheat to Europe; but slowly they were jostled aside from their last refuge by the steamships. By the 1920s very few deep-sea sailing ships entered Port Phillip Bay. A few Swedish and Finnish sailing ships arrived with timber from New Zealand or with pulp or other bulk cargoes from the Baltic, but they rarely found a cargo to take away. In 1927 two of these noble Baltic ships, the four-masted barques Beatrice and Herzogin Cecilie, were idle in Melbourne when they received orders to sail to Port Lincoln in South Australia to load wheat for Europe. The sea writer Alan Villiers was aboard one of the ships, and as they passed Cape Otway on the morning of 17 December 1927, he knew that this was one of the most stirring sights he could ever see: ‘relics of an age that has passed for ever’, racing away in a stiff southerly and only a mile or two apart, ‘high out of the water and heeling over to what looked like a dangerous degree, both carrying every stitch of canvas they had bent, with white sail bellied out above white sail’.

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Coal smoke was now the sign of the arriving ship. Tourists standing near the lighthouse at Port Phillip Heads occasionally saw schooners and ketches sail slowly by, but their first sight of an approaching ocean liner or large cargo vessel was the wisp of black smoke on the far edge of the ocean’s horizon. Even before the smoke was visible, the wireless in the larger ships had given warning of the ships’ position. In the 1930s the telephone was normal in a shop, business and office, but it merely supplemented rather than displaced the letter. ‘Hello’ was still challenged by ‘Dear Sirs’ as a way of greeting. The telephone had first been used in 1880 when Australia’s first telephone exchange was opened in Collins Street, Melbourne, and the early telephone wires covered only the streets of the central city, reaching the fire brigade, banks, newspaper offices, stock exchange, merchants and solicitors. A girl at the telephone exchange usually connected the wires which brought subscribers together. At first the two telephone girls could carry in their head all the telephone numbers in Victoria, ranging from number one (Robinson Bros., engineers and brass-founders) and number two (the new Exhibition Building) to the highest number, which was phone 128 at the Tar Paving Company. The telephone company was nationalised by the Victorian government in September 1887, when the subscribers numbered nearly 900. At first the phone was local. Long-distance lines were unknown. In 1912 at Geelong the first automatic telephone exchange was opened, but a trunk call was a scarcity and had to be booked. A Geelong or Melbourne subscriber, with the help of the switchboard girls, could first phone Sydney in 1907, Adelaide in 1914, Brisbane in 1923, Perth in 1930 and Hobart in 1936. It was not always easy to hear the voice at the other end of the phone, and many people shouted into the fixed mouthpiece. ‘Can you hear me?’ were the words most frequently bellowed. ‘Not quite’, came a close second. Telegrams were preferred by most people, and the telegram boy with red armband and bicycle was a familiar sight from Bairnsdale to Casterton. As late as 1930 most of the small farms and most houses of labouring people did not yet own a phone. It was now possible to make a telephone call to London, by what was called wireless telephone, and the few who made such calls were objects of curiosity. In December 1931 the Ballarat Courier

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announced that a local physician, Dr Victor Stone, had rung his parents in London, being careful to book the call well in advance. Readers were informed that the reception was perfect, which means that by our standards the voices must have been audible for those whose ears were in perfect condition. Already adventurers were flying to Australia, making the long journey in a series of hops. When Victoria celebrated the centenary of British settlement, nothing could be more appropriate than a centenary air race from London to Melbourne. It attracted twentyseven flying machines and more excitement than a test match. The winning pilots, Scott and Black, flew the distance in three days, minus one hour, and when their speck of a plane came into sight of the Flemington racecourse on the afternoon of 23 October 1934, the people in the packed grandstands burst into tumultuous cheering. After circling the course the plane flew in drizzling rain to Laverton to make its landing, and reporters and radio announcers were almost at a loss for phrases to describe its speed. A few said wonderingly that the plane flew at ‘breakneck speed’, not quite realising that those who crashed in those machines were likely to break more than their neck. This new wave of communications engrossed a few Victorian inventors. Henry Sutton, working in isolation in Ballarat in the 1870s and 1880s, invented but rarely patented scores of devices ranging from telephones to radio and a version of television. He might have become a world figure at the age of 25 if he had possessed an able manager, a publicity consultant and maybe a science library more up to date than the high-shelved library of the brave mechanics’ institute in Ballarat. When the first motor cars appeared Thomson and Tarrant were early Melbourne manufacturers and inventors, while Herbert Austin, a lad who became an apprentice in a Melbourne foundry in the 1880s, returned to England to make the first of his millions of Austin cars. A few years later John R. Duigan, son of a bank manager at Terang, went to London to study electrical engineering and then returned to the family farm near Lancefield where in 1910 he designed, built and flew – in short flutters – a pioneering Australian aircraft. In the infant movie industry Victoria was perhaps even more a pioneer. In 1896 the Melbourne Cup was filmed by a visiting

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Frenchman, just one year after the first public showing of a film of any kind in Paris. Only the spectators were shown because the horses were running too fast for his camera. In 1900 the Salvation Army in Melbourne commissioned one of the first three or four feature films in the world, Soldiers of the Cross, and screened it along with lantern slides in the Melbourne Town Hall on 13 September. A year later Professor Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne photographed Aboriginal people in their traditional activities in central Australia – the first serious anthropological film in the world – and in 1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang was screened for a whole hour, perhaps the longest feature film so far shown anywhere. A quarter-century later nearly every Melbourne suburb had its picture palace but Hollywood and the cowboy had largely supplanted Australian scenes and voices in the new talking films. The new communications were slow to affect the life of the average Victorian. The pace of technical change was relatively slow, because prosperity was not sufficient to force the pace of the change. The bicycle was a more common vehicle than the car, and a champion racing cyclist was more popular than a racing-car driver. Most people had lean faces and lightish stomachs and strong leg muscles, and children walked more miles each day than their own children would walk. And yet it was now possible to glimpse how the new petrol-driven engine might some day change daily life as well as the destiny of nations.

11 Hope, Depression, Fire and War

Most Victorians still believed that progress came mainly from the minerals in the rocks, the richness of the soil, and the sun and rain. But now these omens of progress were sober. The economic boundaries of Victoria were closing in. The future of gold seemed dubious, the farming seasons were proving to be drier than in the pioneering years, and the prices of wool and wheat were low. And yet most years of the 1920s and 1930s were permeated by an optimism stemming from new technology and new products. Bendigo was the hope of gold mining. Its mine-managers took pride in the depths at which they were winning gold from the hard rock. One shaft, Victoria Quartz, went down vertically almost a mile, and another fifty-three shafts each went down more than 2000 feet, making Bendigo one of the deepest fields in the world in 1914. Deep workings were expensive, and to ventilate them was difficult, and hundreds of Bendigo miners had their life cut short, breathing in the particles of sharp white dust which were churned up by their mechanical rock drills. The temperature of the rock increased as the shaft descended, and so the temperature in the deep shafts even in the heart of winter was too hot for comfort. Fortunately, few miners worked at such depths. Here was a strange underground city, each mine a skyscraper in reverse. The shafts down which the miners went each morning were the equivalent of the lift wells in a skyscraper, and the miners’ cage was like the passengers’ lift but much faster. To go down the shaft of the Victoria Quartz, in the little cage, with the air becoming warmer 178

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and the smell of dank earth pervading everything, was to make a journey four times as long as the lift ride to the top floor of the Empire State Building in New York. It was no wonder that children at Bendigo were proud of their mines, the wheels and cables in the engine houses, the tall poppet heads above the shafts, and the distinctive whistle which each mine blew to announce the beginning and ending of each eight-hour shift. The gold output between 1901 and 1910 exceeded that of the two earlier decades, and aroused hopes that the industry, by mining at greater depths, might continue to flourish. Gold was vital to many towns. In 1912 the main towns outside Melbourne were Ballarat (42 000), Bendigo (39 000), Geelong (31 000), Castlemaine (7000), Warrnambool (7000) and Maryborough (5600); and four of these six had been founded on gold. In the next range of towns, five of the eleven had been built on gold – Stawell, Ararat, Daylesford, St Arnaud and Beechworth. A rapid decline in gold mining would therefore dislocate tens of thousands of lives. It was not that the men actually working in gold mines were numerous: even in 1901 Victoria had only 27 000 gold miners, and golden Western Australia employed even fewer. Each thousand gold miners, however, gave work indirectly to an army of woodcutters who fed the steam engines, to the farmers and shopkeepers and professional people who supplied the gold towns, and to the factories that made explosives, mining boots, candles and mining machinery. Most of the gold mines lay in districts where no alternative jobs were offering. Take away the gold miners, and an elaborate edifice of jobs would crumble. The edifice crumbled during the war. Soldiers returning from France in 1919 found Bendigo’s gold mines in steep decline. The price of gold was fixed at about £4 an ounce but wages were lower, and timber, explosives and everything else were now costlier. The precious metal was not precious enough. By 1925 only one of the six mining districts was paying dividends. By 1929 fewer than a thousand gold miners were working, and people already had flocked from the gold towns. The personal upheavals caused by gold’s decline in the years 1910–30, when mining seemed more permanent, were probably sharper than during the earlier decline of mining in the tent era of the late 1850s.

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Many of the little gold towns slowly vanished. Hundreds of cottages near the more isolated mines were not worth the price of removing them, and blackberries poked through their broken windows and open doors. Mining machinery could be bought at auction for bargain prices. Everything worth salvaging – even the chimney bricks – was removed. A few buried bulbs escaped the scavengers, and some of the abandoned homesteads can still be located, once a year, by the irises and jonquils which a miner’s wife had once tended in the belief that her house and garden offered security. Victoria pinned its hopes on factories. It was still the most industrialised state and employed, in proportion to population, four factory workers for every three in New South Wales. But factories needed cheap coal, and Victoria lacked it. Almost every day, colliers steamed from New South Wales ports with black coal for Melbourne, but occasionally the strikes in coal mines, wharves and ships cut the supply. Victoria, said politicians and editors, was ‘being held to ransom’ by New South Wales. Vigorous attempts had been made to mine cheap fuel in Victoria. The inferior black coal at Wonthaggi had been worked from 1909 in the state-owned mine, and a town of canvas and timber spread along that beautiful coast where the green slopes ran down to the surf. Wonthaggi supplied coal to the locomotives of the Victorian railways for almost 60 years but it suffered from the same industrial unrest which had led originally to the opening of its mines. The danger of working underground possibly increased the industrial tensions. In February 1931 a terrible explosion blew the miners’ cage up the shaft, killing four men. Six years later another explosion killed thirteen miners. Wonthaggi had its militants and for a time it seemed like a little Moscow on the flanks of those cow-dotted Gippsland hills. On the other side of the South Gippsland ranges lay the massive deposits of brown coal in the Latrobe Valley. In theory they could supply cheap fuel, either in brown-coal briquettes railed to Melbourne or electricity transmitted along a power line. The State Electricity Commission was formed in 1919, and with the returned soldier General John Monash as leader, and with the aid of technology from that Germany which he had helped to defeat, he developed the open cut at Yallourn and built the neat township and the first power house. Electricity made from brown coal was first

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transmitted to Melbourne in 1924. Steadily the SEC became the main power supplier in Victoria, and its lines stretched to the country towns and eventually the farms. By the 1950s the farmhouses were putting away their kerosene lamps, in 100 country halls the oldest residents were turning on the magic light switch for the first time, and Victoria’s energy problem seemed almost solved. English immigrants from factory towns found in the 1920s that their skills were likely to be used, and the signboards at factory gates listed an increasing variety of occupations. Between 1918 and 1939 Victoria built factories to make a wide range of products. Motor vehicles were now assembled by the Ford Motor Company of Canada in its North Geelong plant and by General Motors-Holden at Port Melbourne. Spare parts for cars were made at dozens of little factories, many of which were close to the old haymarket and horse-market at the top end of Elizabeth Street where cars were vanquishing the world of horses. The older Dunlop company and the new Olympic company – founded by the champion Melbourne swimmer Frank Beaurepaire – led the rubber industry, which thrived on the vehicle boom. International Harvester came to Geelong to make farm machinery, competing with the old McKay harvester plant at Sunshine. Imperial Chemical Industries, the English giant formed in 1926, expanded its factories at Deer Park and made explosives, ammunition, the leathercloth used in cars, and a variety of other products. Pilkingtons came from England to Geelong to make glass; the boot and shoe factories around Collingwood employed more and more hands; Maryborough Knitting Mills was one of the many growing textile firms; the new plastics industry flourished; and paper was made at Fairfield and Maryvale in Gippsland. Even by 1927, more than 160 000 Victorians worked in factories, more than double the number who were factory workers in the first years of that new federation from which Victoria had expected much. Some time in the 1920s the factories surpassed the rural industries as the main generators of wealth in Victoria. The event was probably not noticed in the newspapers or in parliament, and most people would not have been pleased had they noticed it. The farmer was said to be the backbone of Victoria. What would happen if the backbone were replaced by something more brittle?

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Melbourne gained the most from the expansion of manufacturing. It held only a quarter of Victoria’s population in 1861 and by the 1920s it held about 55 per cent. Melbourne probably passed the million mark in 1929. Such a straggling city needed faster transport, and the government was imaginative in providing it. The suburban railways were electrified, and the electric train replaced the steam locomotive on the Essendon and Sandringham lines in 1919, and by 1923 nearly all the lines were electrified. Three years later, only a remnant of the scrapped Outer Circle Railway – the branch line from East Camberwell to Deepdene – used a steam locomotive. The rows of clocks marking the departure time at Flinders Street station became one of the proud sights of Melbourne, and more and more workers glanced at those clocks each evening to see when their train was leaving for the suburbs. Others caught the cable trams but even they were now giving way to electric trams and motor buses. The last cable tram ran on 26 October 1941, and for years the steel rails and the central cable slot, partly covered with a hit-or-miss coating of tar, was a hazard to cyclists. By then, in the swelling sea of motor traffic, the cyclists were a hazard to themselves. The inner suburbs of Melbourne were more populous than they are today. In the mid-1920s the city held more than 100 000 people. Of the other inner municipalities, Prahran, Richmond, Brunswick, St Kilda and South Melbourne each held more than 40 000 people though some were losing population. The middleradius suburbs were becoming prominent and Caulfield, Malvern, Footscray and Essendon each held more than 40 000 people. Caulfield in fact was second to Melbourne itself, and beyond the racecourse the hammers, trowels and saws made an almost constant noise. Some suburbs which would become populous cities after the Second World War held only a small population: Carrum and Box Hill were boroughs, and Oakleigh was called a town, not a city. Beyond the paling fences, out amongst the orchards and thistles, Ringwood borough held only 3000 people and the shire of Doncaster and Templestowe also had 3000, and many of them were farmers. Blackburn and Braybrook shires held fewer than 6000, Broadmeadows and Eltham each 4000, and Keilor a mere 1400. The dogs slept in the main street of Keilor: Melton was no bigger and the main street had

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many vacant lots, and the dust from the ploughed paddocks blew across the town in dry summers. Even Toorak Road, near The Village, had a few paddocks in which grazed horses and the occasional cow. People who liked to walk on the weekend could take the train to Heidelberg, Albion, Blackburn and, from 1930, the new Glen Waverley station and soon enter roads fringed with paddocks and orchards. Hikers could walk all Saturday afternoon through paddocks and along clay roads where now the suburban houses stretch in an almost unbroken line. The writer of a guidebook on weekend walks in 1928 told readers that after the train passed Glen Huntly, a sea of market gardens appeared: neat acres of onions, the green of young cabbages and cauliflowers, and ‘the deep red tones’ of beetroot. One of the short autumn walks which he recommended went from the Box Hill station through Doncaster – no shopping town then – to Heidelberg. The walk was almost entirely rural, and the goldfinches were singing in the hedges, mushrooms might be spotted amongst cape weed and onion grass on the edge of the road, skylarks could be heard, and the leaves on the fruit trees were crimson and gold. From the high ridges the hiker could see the You Yangs, Arthur’s Seat, Mount Macedon and even the bay. Near the river at Heidelberg, orchards gave way to grain paddocks. ‘The newly ploughed soil here’, wrote the hiker, ‘is exactly the tone you see in the hills of a well-ripened mushroom – chocolate with a hint of pink’. In the city a new breed of businessmen was making a name for themselves. If any businessman typified the 1920s it was Sidney Myer. At first he gave no hint that he would become one of the most successful retailers in the world. Arriving from Russia in 1898, he hawked goods in a horse and cart around Maldon and Castlemaine and the old goldfields. If a farmer’s wife wanted a cheap dress he collected her measurements and had the dress made up in Bendigo. My grandmother, a dressmaker who made many of the dresses, liked the cheerful man. ‘He was very good-looking’, she said, ‘and always paid’. He set up a shop in Bendigo and put on more bargain sales, monster sales, and never-to-be-repeated sales than Bendigo had ever seen. A superb judge of the market, he could mentally price his goods to the nearest farthing.

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In 1911 he came to Melbourne, like successful country retailers before him, and set up his sign in Bourke Street. At this time, Smith Street in Collingwood and Chapel Street in Prahran were the favoured shopping streets, and their pavements were jammed on Friday nights. Myer jolted those streets by making Bourke Street the place where everything happened. Quite early he raided the numberone fashion shop for women – Stirling’s at Richmond where Nellie Melba had sometimes shopped – and recruited their two main assistants, women who knew how to clasp their hands expressively when greeting the best customers. Quick to sense the power of women shoppers, he launched a regular sale on Monday morning, a novel idea which some observers said was so successful that it almost changed the washing day of Melbourne’s housewives from Monday to Tuesday. He advertised vividly, and in 1922 he created something of a stir by buying the whole front page of the Argus to advertise a sale. Like G. J. Coles who had opened in 1914 in Smith Street, Myer deviated from the usual practice of keeping all the goods on the safe side of the counter: he let the customers finger and handle the clothes. While shoplifting increased, his sales also increased. He ignored credit and hire purchase at first: the only money was cash. A remarkable seller and buyer, Myer was now on his way to making his emporium the fifth biggest in the world. Big newspapers and big retailers worked in harness. When shops were advertising more vigorously, the way was open for new ventures and talents in journalism. Keith Murdoch was to Flinders Street what Myer was to Bourke Street in the 1920s. The son of a Scottish minister at Camberwell, Keith Murdoch began working as a reporter for the Age by covering the Malvern district and sending in snippets of local news. He stammered when speaking but was fluent when writing: he had a scent for news, a feeling for the words he tapped out with two fingers, and an alert sense of what made society tick and people respond. He had two periods of work on London newspapers, learned much about Australian politics and especially its leaders by reporting from the press gallery of the federal parliament, and was narrowly defeated by C. E. W. Bean of Sydney for the privilege of being Australia’s only war correspondent when the first soldiers went to the First World War. He actually visited Gallipoli in 1915 and wrote an influential report on what was

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wrong. Appointed editor of the Herald in 1920, he began in his mid-thirties to revive that old evening paper which had first opened its eyes 80 years earlier with the tantalising motto, ‘impartial – not neutral’. Murdoch was in tune with the kind of people who could be persuaded to buy an evening paper. He restricted reports of murder to one issue. He thought that stories about betting should receive more space if the bet was a failure rather than a success. What he thought of Melbourne is clear from his private comment on a Herald edition of 1924: ‘The paper has Melbourne’s character tonight, not brilliant, not intensely pointed, but kindly, efficient and very sound’. The Labor politician Arthur Calwell, who became a bitter opponent of Murdoch, thought the paper was far from kindly, and used to claim – a little wildly – that the newspaper’s big office in Flinders Street had been built from the profits generated by reporting a sensational murder. When a Sydney group led by Sir Hugh Denison launched new newspapers in Melbourne, Murdoch read closely the first issues of their prize newspaper, the Sun News-Pictorial. Initially it was a tabloid of twenty pages with large headlines and the unheard idea of four pages of photographs. Murdoch’s Herald bought the Sun in 1925 and eventually made it the most popular newspaper in Australia. Murdoch became prominent in syndicates which between 1926 and 1933, bought important dailies in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, and he took control of those newspapers. He was probably the first newspaper promoter to move into radio, and his Herald joined with the city drapers Buckley & Nunn and the theatrical promoters Tait and Williamson to control station 3LO, probably the nation’s most influential radio station before it passed to the new Australian Broadcasting Commission. His company also bought the commercial station 3DB in 1929, with its motto of ‘bright radio’. Within 10 years of returning to Melbourne to become editor of the Herald, he was the most influential newspaperman Australia had known. Whereas David Syme had stood on stilts within Victoria, here was a press magnate for the whole continent. Whereas Syme was said to have been a king-maker in Victorian politics, Murdoch is said to have done more than anyone to woo Joseph

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Lyons from the federal Labor Party and make him prime minister in 1932. His son Rupert was to have some of the same ability to seize opportunities, becoming one of the first of the international press magnates. In many industries the big were growing very big, though this trend was contradicted in other industries. Little breweries were swallowed: 100 breweries late in the past century were down to ten by the late 1920s, and Carlton & United Breweries in the 1960s would be the only brewing company in Victoria. Similarly, smaller banks now wondered about their future. In 1918 the Colonial Bank, popular in the Irish districts, was absorbed by the National. In 1927 the ES&A Bank absorbed the Royal Bank, which inhabited an ornate head office at the south-east corner of Elizabeth and Collins streets. In the same year, the Bank of Victoria, founded in the gold rushes, was taken over by the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. The days of the small bank seemed numbered, though that banking oddity the Ballarat Banking Company lived until 1955. The process of merger was to go on and on, and today only two banking companies, the National Australia Bank and the Australia and New Zealand Bank, have their head office in Melbourne; and these huge banks themselves are the offspring of many mergers. Even the trade unions, whose membership had soared in the 1920s, saw advantages in a larger grouping and for the first time a loose federation, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was formed in 1927 with a head office in Melbourne. Victoria had fought back after the disasters of the 1890s. Its selfrespect had returned and its vitality had revived, though the vitality was more visible in commerce than in the arts. Judah Waten’s novel Scenes of Revolutionary Life begins in Melbourne in the late 1920s, and its hero Tom often heard criticism of the city he admired. His mother jeered at Melbourne, calling it the city of the ‘hypocritical bourgeoisie’. And when Tom reached Sydney as a stowaway he heard the same jibe: ‘Melbourne can’t produce poets, Tom. Only stockbrokers and estate agents.’ In the years between the wars there was truth in the jibes. Melbourne at that time was not very sympathetic to originality in poetry, painting, the novel, theatre, philosophy, and perhaps even in

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theology. It was as if, after the debacle of 1893, everyone was forced to be the auditor and the accountant, the careful counter of farthings. That period was slowly passing, and perhaps Melbourne never had so many imaginative businessmen and bureaucrats as in the 1920s and 1930s: men like Keith Murdoch and Sidney Myer and W. L. Baillieu; Harold Darling and Essington Lewis of BHP; ‘Larry’ Hartnett at General Motors-Holden, and Sir David Rivett at CSIRO. The state government had exceptionally able managers, including William Calder of the Country Roads Board, Harold Clapp of the railways, John Monash of the SEC, and Frank Tate in education; and they held the public’s esteem to a degree not exceeded today by any similar group in any capital city. The talent which went into business and commerce was still disproportionately large, but that was where the opportunities lay. The same utilitarian spirit favoured science and technology, and Melbourne was almost certainly the nation’s leader in applied research, though in medical research it was not as famous internationally as it is today, with its Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and its Howard Florey Institute, and other vigorous institutes. There was still room for lone inventors, and one of the most successful quietly walked each morning with his leather suitcase from his house in Prospect Hill Road to the Camberwell railway station to catch the city train. His name was A. G. M. Michell, and he was absorbed in improving his crankless engine and other bold ideas. His greatest invention could already be seen in the depths of every ship: the Michell thrust-bearing, without which the largest warships and passenger liners would have been impossible. His name is virtually forgotten in his own city. If he had invented the hot dog he would be better known. To own a farm rather than a business in town remained the goal of maybe most Victorians. When the soldiers returned from the war, the cry had been loud: ‘Give them land’. As the Commonwealth promised to pay most of the costs of settling soldiers on the land, the Victorian government acquired scores of pastoral estates and fertile farms and subdivided them for returned soldiers. More than 11 000 farms were allocated to returned soldiers by 1927, mostly on re-purchased land. Nearly every rural shire now had its soldier settlers. On dairy farms in Gippsland, in market gardens on the sand

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belt to the east of Melbourne, and on the windy plains to the west, men in their old slouch hats and khaki overcoats could be seen clearing, ploughing, harvesting, fencing and carting. In the far north west, returned soldiers took up virgin land for the growing of wheat and the planting of citrus and vines. Mildura and Red Cliffs attracted 800 soldier settlers, and John Edey was one of them. Like many of his neighbours he hardly knew how to milk a cow or mend a fence before he enlisted in the First AIF. After the war he quickly learned, and when he was allotted a soldier’s block upstream from Mildura he showed his spirit by building his hessian hut, carting his drinking water from an irrigation channel a mile and a half away, and clearing the mallee scrub and the Murray pine largely with his own axe and bonfires. When at night he walked about his farm in order to keep alight the scattered fires of stumps and brushwood, his mind sometimes flashed back to the battles near Ypres in 1917, and he saw again the Australian soldiers waiting in darkness for the order to attack, with ‘hundreds of cupped hands holding matches to the cigarettes between their lips’. John Edey won his struggle against the wilderness of interest rates and market prices but many other soldiers deserted their farms. Perhaps 3000 forfeited their land in Victoria by mid-1927, and the retreat grew when the world depression set in. Many had received farms which were too small: the typical soldier’s farm was merely half a square mile. Many soldiers had stocked their farms in the early 1920s when sheep, cows and horses were dear, and they were hit later by the falling prices of rural produce. Some suffered from their own failings. Some had been shattered permanently by their experiences in the war or were ruined by unwise political policies or inept bureaucrats. It was hardly helpful to settle men in undrained swamps. It was unwise to persuade them to buy milking cows for land which was only suited to wheat. The soldier settlements were ultimately remembered for their failure. Victoria probably had the lowest rate of failure: maybe one of every four settlers had failed by 1927. It is far from certain, however, that the soldier settlers had a higher rate of failure than their grandparents who had settled on the land.

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Life on the land was still seen as healthier and more capable of producing soldiers who could defend the nation. One justification for keeping out Asians was that the land was being used productively by Australians. Few political phrases carried such undertones of indignation in the 1920s as ‘the drift to the cities’; and many speeches in parliament, even by city members, matched the editorials outlining the pernicious causes of the growth of Melbourne. Nearly every Victorian ministry in that decade gave priority to rural portfolios. The three of the longer-serving premiers – Harry Lawson, Allan and Hogan – each personally claimed portfolios embracing agriculture or irrigation or rural exports. The farms produced more and more. Between the two world wars the sheep numbers increased by about half. Wheat had its ups and downs but the ups were more typical; and for 11 years the harvest yielded more than 40 million bushels a year: only two such bumper harvests had been experienced in all the years before 1920. Farmers almost flooded the butter factories with cheap milk, and the output of butter was more than doubled, and cheese was trebled. In the northern irrigation farms the production of oranges was five or six times more than in 1918, and at Mildura the increase in dried fruits was even higher. Amidst these cheerful statistics, one was sobering. The output of farms increased but the number of farms did not. About 80 000 rural holdings existed in Victoria in 1923–5 and then came the slow decline. The future lay not with farms but with the factories. The future was not always worth thinking about in the late 1920s. Unemployment was common, even in manufacturing. The official statistics are not reliable but the proportion of the workforce which was unemployed in a typical year of the 1920s was perhaps 6 or 7 per cent. The crash on Wall Street in October 1929, the slump in export prices, and the decline in overseas loans increased the unemployed. By 1931 perhaps one-quarter of the workforce in Victoria had no work. Bricklayers, carpenters and building workers were probably the most vulnerable, and it is doubtful whether more than one in ten who normally followed these occupations had continuous work in the early 1930s. Many customers had virtually no money to spend. Others saved their money. By saving they safeguarded their own future but

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accelerated the depression. Smith Street, Chapel Street, Puckle Street, Clarendon Street and other long shopping streets were full of window-shoppers rather than customers. Big department stores sent many staff away on unpaid holidays, dismissed older staff and hired few school-leavers. As business became slacker, many of their staff came to work every second week or fourth week. The sale of luxuries and even of necessities fell away. In Collingwood, in that era when every well-dressed woman wore a hat, one emporium employed forty-five people in its millinery workroom in 1929, but two years later the millinery room was virtually empty: only one helper was needed to garnish and repair the hats. The cheaper shops, however, jumped ahead. G. J. Coles now became a national byword in the depression with its catchy slogan, ‘Nothing over two and six’. Two shillings and sixpence, for many people, was too much. ‘Catch a taxi cab’ had become one of the catchphrases of the 1920s, and the streets were patrolled by yellow cabs, white cabs and black cabs, all seeking fares. One taxi-driver in 1932 used to sit in his cab, morning after morning, outside Clifton Hill railway station, and on at least six days he waited outside that busy station for the whole day without receiving one job. Occasionally he varied his routine, and on the eve of a race meeting he would drive to the Richmond or Moonee Valley racecourses and take first place in the rank, sleep in his cab, and wait until the following afternoon for the first punters to leave the course. A few successful punters left after the first race and sometimes tipped extravagantly. The depression was like a willy-willy and blew an erratic course through the cities and towns, flattening many lives, bruising or brushing aside others, but leaving many unscathed. Civil servants largely escaped the depression and, without realising it, often were slightly more prosperous than before. Few farmers were driven off their land by the depression and few farmers were unemployed. They worked harder than usual and worried more than usual – with good cause because for four years in succession the prices were so low that about half of their wheat was grown at a loss. There lingered in the cities the hope that somehow people could cope if they went back to the country. Thousands left Melbourne by train, foot and bicycle. The Victorian government encouraged

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the exodus, offering grants to those who searched for gold, and granting an iron hut and water tank to a few hundred families willing to live in half-cleared bushland. Unmarried men who had no home were sent to the forests, housed in huts, and given two days of work a week. After 400 had been sent to Kinglake, Mirboo South and two other camps the cost proved excessive, and the camps were closed. The Victorian government in 1931 set up a board to provide unemployment relief, and it met regularly from January to July, dispensing funds to labour projects, but the money ran out and the board did not meet again that year. Meanwhile those who had no work were given a small weekly sum called ‘sustenance’. It was said to sustain body and soul, but it did not always sustain the body. For hundreds of thousands of Victorians who were over the age of 40, this was the second depression they had experienced. One hazard, however, was missing from this depression: no big bank crashed in Victoria. Whereas the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales suffered from a mad public rush to withdraw deposits in April 1931 and had to close its doors, no bank in Victoria tottered. In Sydney, with J. T. Lang as premier, politics had an intensity not felt in Victoria. The public’s withdrawing of savings reflected a suspicion towards Lang and a mood charged with fear. Another hazard faced Victoria in the years between the wars: bushfires. Fierce fires tend to burn in drought years, especially after a dry spring and a dry start to summer. The days are most dangerous when the shade temperature reaches 38 degrees Celsius, or a century in Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity falls to 10 per cent or less. Then the heat seems to dance on the plains, the forests are like tinder, the eucalypt itself is inflammable, and when a fire is fanned by the north wind the forest virtually explodes. Victoria had devastating bushfires in 1919, 1926, 1932 and 1939. They came every sixth or seventh summer. No period in the recorded history of Victoria had such a run of serious bushfires. In a few hot days of February 1926 more than fifty lives were lost in bushfires. At the sawmilling village of Gilderoy, in the forest to the south of Warburton, only two of fourteen men survived. Another bushfire swept into the new open-cut coal mine at Yallourn where plenty

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of fuel kept the fire alight. Early in 1932, in forest fires, another eighteen people were burned to death, and the sawmilling villages of Powelltown, Erica and Noojee were again the victims. January 1939 was a dry month and many fires were already burning in bushlands when Friday the 13th dawned. A day of sizzling heat, Melbourne’s suburbs could smell the smoke early in the morning. By nine o’clock the temperature in Melbourne was close to 36 degrees Celsius. Not in living memory, and not in the records of the weather bureau, had such heat descended so early. As the day went on, a gloomy haze filled the sky. By noon the temperature in the shade was 45 degrees Celsius. A gusty wind blew like giant bellows from the north, carrying with it the sweet-sour smell of bushfire smoke. From time to time the gusts of wind accelerated, and to go out of doors was like walking into the wind of the Sahara, except that the wind carried smoke instead of sand. The grasslands were largely spared – they were too bare in this summer of unusual dryness – but the mountain forests offered millions of tons of dry fuel. The fires pounced, destroying about one-third of all the state forests. Even the trees of mountain ash which grew to towering heights on the moister soil on south-sloping mountains were swallowed up by the huge mouth of flame. The gold-mining and sawmilling town of Woods Point was engulfed, and in less than an hour 143 houses were burned. People who took refuge in the iron water tanks that stood behind the weatherboard houses were virtually cooked to death. The fire burned close to Melbourne, and about a hundred houses were destroyed at Warrandyte, which was then a country village. Seaside resorts, packed with holiday-makers, were invaded by fires. Dromana lost forty-three houses and Lorne lost twenty houses. Perhaps 700 houses were burned to the ground, dozens of scenic spots were blackened, scores of bridges and thousands of miles of fences and a host of animals were all destroyed. In isolated clearings the sawmills and their scatter of unpainted huts, houses, stores and halls lay like sacrifices in the path of the fire. Nobody could save them: many who tried were burned to death. In all, seventy-one people died in that week’s bushfires in central Victoria. The worst day was called Black Friday and was perhaps the most frightening day in the memory of most Victorians. We have no record of a Pearl Harbor,

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a Black Death or a Pompeii. The bushfires of 1939 created one of our few days of terror. The lessons were not fully learned. The idea of declaring ‘a day of acute fire danger’ had not yet been adopted. Most of the fires had been lit deliberately, whether to burn off scrub or to improve grazing land or simply to boil a billy. Bushfires were the work of men rather than lightning and so in theory were more easily controlled. The theory was not yet applied systematically. The summer of 1943–4 was another dangerous season, especially for grass fires. A spring of breathtaking fertility nourished lanky grass which, in the face of the hot summer and the searing winds, dried out until the grassy plains of the west and the north east became a luxurious expanse of straw, as dry as gunpowder. In that wartime summer, fifty-one people died in bushfires.1 The town of Derrinallum in western Victoria was the main ruin, and the Country Fire Authority, founded in 1944, was one permanent result of that disaster. The bushfires were a small conflagration compared to the war now raging. And yet when the Second World War began against Germany in September 1939 there was no sure sign that it would be perilous for Australia. There were street marches with drums and even cavalry. Thousands of light horsemen were soon camped by the sea at Torquay but there would be no charge of the cavalry in Malaya or New Guinea when the war widened. In 1940 life went on much as it had before: the football grand final in the rain, the Melbourne Cup, and all the glitter of Christmas shopping in Bourke Street on Friday night. Looking back, one has to conclude that Australia as a nation was less prepared for this war than for the First World War. In 1914 Australia had been united by its own infant nationalism and by its loyalty to the British Empire, but in 1939 the loyalty to Britain was not so total and the knowledge of what a war was like was less romantic. Moreover, the interstate tensions were temporarily more powerful 1

Since the Second World War there have been two days of terrible bushfires. On 8 January 1969, twenty-two lives were lost, and motorists actually died in bushfires on the Geelong–Melbourne highway. In February 1983, forty-eight people including thirteen volunteer firefighters died in bushfires. The Dandenong and Macedon ranges suffered the heaviest casualties.

Map 5 Victoria in January 1939

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partly because the sense of crisis, the flights of heroic imagining, were weaker. There were still six Australias, including a Western Australia which not long ago had voted by a big majority to secede. Each state government still imposed its own income tax, carried out social services which have since become national, and breathed an importance which the war – and the uniform taxation of 1942 – did much to weaken. Australia in 1939, though consisting of six mini-nations, was dominated by Melbourne. The new prime minister, R. G. Menzies, the new commander of the AIF, Sir Thomas Blamey, and the new head of the munitions drive, Essington Lewis, were Victorians who for the most part ran the nation from Melbourne. Canberra dozed when the parliament adjourned, and federal ministers stayed away from it as much as possible because it was inaccessible and still housed few government departments. A few Victorian ministers in a hurry would occasionally fly to Canberra. On 13 August 1940 the pilot of a plane landing there lost control, and three of the federal cabinet’s thirteen ministers – Street, Gullett and Fairbairn – were killed, along with the chief of the general staff, Sir Brudenell White. The crisis of a nation at war was aggravated by the precarious balance of the major parties. It was vital that the federal election of September 1940 should produce a government with a clear majority and mandate. And yet when the voting was counted there was a slight but general swing towards Menzies in five states – except in the wheatlands – but a powerful rebuff to him in New South Wales. The result emphasised the differences between Sydney and Melbourne, their press and radio, their political climate, and their state loyalties. In the opinion of a New South Wales politician, Sir Earle Page, the result in his state was less a vote for Labor than ‘a vote against domination of national affairs by Victoria’. Menzies fell a year later, and the new Labor prime minister was John Curtin, the son of a policeman from the Victorian gold town of Creswick; Curtin had lost any Victorian taint, having emigrated to Perth when in his thirties. In the war he was to show his powers of leadership. He also spoke for a nation which, in ‘the gravest hour of our history’, was to be united by the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore.

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Japan entered the war on Monday 8 December 1941, and her attack on Malaya and Singapore instantly involved Australia. On the following Friday late-night shopping was banned in Victoria, the neon lights were turned off, and the street lights were dimmed a little, making the red and green of the traffic lights at city corners seem twice as vivid. Early in 1942, as the Japanese moved into the Indonesian archipelago and New Guinea, air-raid trenches were dug in hundreds of parks and gardens, from the Treasury Gardens to small brown-grass allotments in the country towns. In March 1942, at Spencer Street station, General Douglas MacArthur stepped from the Adelaide express, his long journey of retreat from the Philippines through Darwin and Alice Springs now over, and rode the two blocks to Menzies Hotel where he lived while presiding as supreme commander of the war zone in the south-west Pacific. American troop ships entered Port Phillip Bay, and for a few days American soldiers were billeted in private houses in Melbourne, Ballarat and many other towns, and later they camped in large numbers in Royal Park. For most Victorians, life was not dislocated, merely altered and slowly made more frugal. Petrol was already rationed, many imported goods vanished from the shops, and the shelves of tobacconists and milk bars at times were almost bare. Butter was rationed in June 1943: half-a-pound a week was the ration, compared to oneeighth of a pound in England. The list of rationed goods increased, and people needed ration coupons to buy goods at the clothing shop and, in 1944, at the local butcher. Sausages and meat pies, of course, were exempt. All around Victoria were signs of an intensifying war effort. It was impossible to approach the back beach at Point Lonsdale because of the barbed wire. The Melbourne Cricket Ground was closed: American servicemen and later Australian airmen were sleeping beneath the grandstands. The country roads were almost deserted except for cars towing their little trailer with its gas-producer. When the peaches had to be picked in the Goulburn Valley, women students came from Melbourne. A few of the big secondary schools including Melbourne High and Wesley had to vacate their buildings and armed services occupied them as offices. To travel on an interstate train was to be somebody.

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The Second World War was not like the Great War, with its massive enlistments, incessant casualties in Turkey and France, and the air of burning patriotism. Victoria’s deaths in the 1939–45 war were about half of those in the 1914–18 war; and with the rise in Victoria’s population the loss of young men was less devastating. The 1939–45 war was different because so much of the energy was on the home front. The theatre of war in 1941 came close to Australia and so industrial activity was intense. Whereas in 1914 the war had been too far away – and shipping too scarce – to justify the building of many munitions and other factories, Victoria now became an arsenal and supply base. Women and men in their tens of thousands were recruited to make munitions at Footscray, military aircraft at Fishermen’s Bend, ordnance at Bendigo and Echuca, marine engines at Port Melbourne, guns and explosives at Maribyrnong, and chemicals and arms and machine tools and war equipment in endless variety. The trams and trains in Melbourne had never been so busy as the shifts of workers made their way across the suburbs. For many people the war years were tragic, and for many they were a triumph or at least a rehabilitation. Full employment, of a kind virtually unknown in Victoria since perhaps the 1880s, had come back. The only grievance was that many people were told where they had to work. Moreover, the full employment was largely created by the departure of so many Australians to the war and by the needs they created. The freckled Preston girl nursing in the hospital ship, the Colac rabbiter fighting in the Sixth Division – they helped to launch an era of full employment which they had not known in peacetime.

12 The Rise and Fall of Albert the Great

At the height of the war, in September 1943, Victoria went through one of those minor crises which punctuated its political history. An experienced government was defeated on the floor of the house, and the Cain Labor government replaced it for five days. The oddity of that crisis was that it highlighted the stability, being the only break in the most stable era in Victoria’s history. Even more curious, the long-serving government, which, after five days, resumed office, was ruling primarily on behalf of the farmlands and the smaller country towns. Here was a paradox, that the most urbanised of states was governed for nearly four thousand days by a ministry of farmers. For eight successive years Melbourne and its suburbs were not even represented in the cabinet. The soil for a Country Party was fertile in Victoria, where ploughable land was extensive and where the typical farmer struggled in many years. Since the 1890s the growth of dairying in Gippsland and the orchards of the Goulburn Valley, and the extension of wheat to the Mallee, had placed thousands more on the land. As smallish farmers tended to dominate these districts they might, with organising skill and determination, elect their own representatives to parliament. In addition the typical Victorian farmer, unlike his father, sold most of his wheat and butter on the world markets, and so he depended on prices which lay outside his control. Indeed by 1914, the political environment was turning against nearly all Australian farmers except the cane growers who sold their sugar on the home 198

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market and were protected against foreign sugar by import duties. Here was an incentive to enter politics. Australian history is often viewed from the vantage point of the workers who filled the jobs and the manufacturers who offered the jobs; but some of the events which are seen as the high points for factory owners and workers were low points for farmers. Thus the Harvester Judgment of Mr Justice Higgins, which in 1907 set up the basic wage for factory workers and protected the Australian market for H. V. McKay’s and other makers of harvesting machinery, is hailed as the triumph of ‘Protection All Around’. But the protection did not stretch all around society. The farmers, like the gold miners and many others, were not protected: indeed, they were made defenceless. As wages increased, the farmers paid more for their harvesting machinery, they also paid more for groceries, and they paid more freight on the produce they sent away by railway. In the ‘New Protection’ they were unprotected. In an era when political debate increasingly centred on the view that the capitalists were exploiting the workers, those same workers – perhaps unknowingly – were exploiting the farmers and especially the children who milked the cows. Tens of thousands of Victorian farmers, their wives and children, were working longer hours than those who worked in offices, schools, railways and factories; farmers were also earning a low hourly income. The bread and butter, mutton and beef, cheese and jam eaten in most houses in Preston and Kew were subsidised by the muscles of farmers. In compensation, the farmers did have the hope that they might eventually own their land and win an independence and security which a factory worker could rarely win. Even that hope could be a mocking hope, for in Victoria the droughts were becoming longer and more frequent. In 1914, in the country towns, farmers sat on the wooden fences of the saleyards on market day and regretted the state of agriculture. In Boort a few farmers met at the blacksmith’s shop and talked of political action. At East Trentham the farmer Isaac Hart wrote to the local newspaper with the question, ‘Why do not the farmers unite?’ A meeting was called at Woodend, and it suggested that farmers could overcome their social and religious divisions. One group of farmers was Liberal in politics, Protestant in religion and ‘largely Rechabite in habit’: they shunned alcohol. The other group

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was keen on Labor, Catholic in religion, and happy to hold a glass of alcohol. ‘I realised’, recalled one farmer, ‘how far apart were these two groups in everything but the overriding conviction that the farmers would never get a fair deal until they had a Farmers’ Party’. The First World War was to provide the final spur to the forming of a new country party. With shipping scarce and the English markets dislocated by war, the Australian government began to buy and sell rural produce. Wheat farmers sensed the dangers in this policy. They feared that their wheat might be marketed less in their own interest than that of the grain merchants, the flour millers, and everyone who ate the bread. In the harsh Mallee country, already punished by severe drought, many farmers became militant. In 1916 they formed the Victorian Farmers’ Union to press their case that farmers’ representatives should sit on the wartime wheat pools. In Victoria the price of butter had been fixed in order to help wage-earners hurt by wartime inflation. This angered the dairy farmers. Why should they receive, they argued, a fixed price for their butter when their costs of producing that butter were rising? So the Victorian Farmers’ Union spread quickly to the paddocks of Gippsland and the irrigation channels of the Goulburn Valley. By 1917 it had 8000 members and by 1920 it had 15 000. Here was one of the largest unions in Australia, a union of people who wished to sell not their labour but the farm produce that came from their labour. Similar movements were being formed across the borders, and in Western Australia a moderate farmers’ party had won seats at the 1914 election. The party of farmers in Victoria was different. It did not see itself as normally the ally of the conservative parties in parliament but as independent. If necessary it would fight city politicians, irrespective of their party. The system of preferential voting, introduced in Victoria at the state election in 1911, gave an additional opportunity to a farmers’ party, a centre party. Farmers now seized it. In 1917 the Victorian Farmers’ Union won five of the sixty-five seats at the state election, and they increased that to thirteen at the election of 1920. During the next third of a century the members of this new Country Party held the balance of power in Victoria’s

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legislative assembly in every year, and in most years they held all or some of the seats in cabinet. They displayed their skill at jockeying for power when in 1924, though only a minor party, they became leader of a coalition government. John Allan, a Kyabram farmer of lumbering walk and sonorous voice, was premier of Victoria from 1924 to 1927, and one of his achievements for his party was to steer through parliament a redistribution of seats which made concessions to the city voter but still weighted the scales very much in favour of the rural voter. It is common now to attribute an unfair electoral system to the power of the Country Party in Victoria, but the defect long preceded the rise of that party. The defect was more extreme in Queensland where the electorates of few people tended to return Labor members. So long as the electoral boundaries in Victoria were altered infrequently, an inequity between the rural and city electorate was bound to exist. Melbourne was growing rapidly, most gold and farming districts were losing people, and so a country seat held fewer electors than a suburban seat. In 1910, and in that year the disproportion was not extreme, three votes in many of the booming suburbs had no more worth than one vote in the dying gold towns. The seats of Boroondara and Hawthorn held more than 14 000 electors, and that meant that the strip of suburbia stretching from the Yarra at Hawthorn all the way to Box Hill was grossly under-represented compared to eight particular rural seats, each of which held fewer than 5000 electors. A vote in the decaying goldfield of Walhalla was worth three times as much as a vote in the leafy eastern suburbs or Essendon. As the people continued to leave the old gold towns and as the farmers’ sons and daughters grew up and left the cramped farms, the disparity became more noticeable. At the general election in Victoria in 1914 the premier, the loud-laughing Sir Alexander Peacock, won a seat which held only one-fifth as many electors as were enrolled in the middle-class Melbourne seat of Boroondara. Peacock’s seat was Allendale, and it was becoming almost a Victorian version of the old English ‘rotten borough’. Today the town of Allendale is barely on the map. No football team plays on the sloping ground with its windbreak of tall pines and not even a cigarette can be bought in the township, and every shop, church and school is closed. But it had its place in political

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history, because on Sir Alexander’s death in 1933, his widow, Lady Peacock, won the seat and so became the first woman to sit in parliament in Victoria.1 Whether the vote was for her, or for her dead husband, was not quite clear. In 1926 the Allan government, facing a clamour for electoral change, instructed the electoral commissioners to redraw the map so that each Melbourne electorate held about 22 000 voters, each provincial city and large town about 15 000 voters, and each country electorate about 10 000 voters. Arguments might well be used to justify unequal electorates in a state as huge as Western Australia in an era of slow travel, but those arguments could hardly be used to justify such inequities in Victoria, where electorates were small and every town was within a day’s journey of the houses of parliament. The only consolation for those who believed in the equal value of each vote was that the gerrymander devised in 1926 was less unjust than the succession of gerrymanders which had been allowed to arise through the drift of population to the city in previous years. The rapid decline in the value of a city vote compared to a country vote was arrested a little in the 1926 redistribution. Whereas 100 city votes had the same weight as seventy-three country votes in 1903, and thirty-seven country votes in 1924, the weighting was restored to fourty-seven under the Allan redistribution of electoral boundaries in 1926. As there was no further alteration of boundaries until 1944, and no drastic alteration until 1952, the continuing drift of people to the cities slowly increased again the value of a rural vote. Here was an electoral system well suited to a Country Party, or to a Labor Party were it willing to woo the rural voter. Meanwhile, in the federal parliament the Hughes non-Labor government, hoping to avert the losses arising from the divisions amongst conservative voters, introduced preferential voting. At the federal by-election for the Victorian seat of Corangamite in December 1918, the new voting was used for the first time. William G. Gibson, a storekeeper, had taken up land on the subdivided estate of the squatter Manifold, recently the Liberal member for Corangamite. Gibson stood as a farmers’ candidate against a field 1

From December 1908 women could vote in state elections in Victoria and from 1923 they could stand for parliament.

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of five which included James H. Scullin, who later was to be a Labor prime minister. Gibson polled less than 30 per cent of the primary votes, but drawing the preferences from the other candidates he won the seat from Scullin by a huge margin. In the federal parliament Gibson took his place as the first of the real Country Party members. More country members from other states were elected to the federal parliament, and in 1923 the Country Party became the junior partner in a coalition government with S. M. Bruce’s Liberals, or Nationalists as they were then called. Gibson himself was postmaster-general, initiating the Country Party’s policy of giving better postal, telephone and radio services to those people living in isolation. A new force had entrenched itself in politics. We have long since forgotten that the early Country Party had a radical wing which did not look on the Liberals with any more sympathy than on Labor. The home of that radicalism was Victoria, and within Victoria most of the rural radicals came from the wheatbelt in the north west. The first leader of this group was Percy G. Stewart, a city boy who went to school in Yarraville during the depression of the 1890s, sold papers in the streets, worked in a bottle factory and went to sea. Becoming a wheat farmer in the dry Mallee near Red Cliffs he was an early organiser of the Country Party and the pugnacious member for Swan Hill in the state parliament. Though a member of that first Country Party group he often sat with Labor members. When he stood for federal parliament in 1919 and won the Wimmera seat he continued to be independent and very competent. Becoming a minister in the Bruce–Page government in 1923 he eventually fell out with the leaders, resigned from cabinet, but retained his seat in parliament as an independent Country Party member. One of his strong views – and most of his views were strong – was that the small Country Party should be independent and not readily be seduced into coalitions. He equally disapproved of the Country Party–Liberal coalition led by farmer Allan in Victoria, and with his wheatbelt supporters he called on Allan to step down as premier and lead the Country Party from the backbenches. In this belief in uncontaminated independence Stewart found a resolute ally, Albert Dunstan. At least Dunstan shared that belief

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in the 1920s, though later he was to become famous by reversing it. Albert Dunstan himself belonged to that generation of middling and small farmers for whom the normal year was a yo-yo of hope and despair. His father, a gold-rush immigrant from Cornwall, grew wheat at Donald East when that was Victoria’s north-western outback. Albert was the 13th child and so his hope of inheriting land was small. In 1907, when he was a stocky young man of about 25, he was attracted to Queensland by the promise of acres on easy terms. For about two years he lived in a tent and pioneered a farm near Jondaryan before returning to take up wheatland in the Mallee. Like John Allan, John McEwen, John McDonald, Gibson, Wilson and so many of the Country Party leaders in Victoria, he had Presbyterian or Scottish connections. Once he gave a sermon entitled ‘the gospel of hard work’, for the suspicion within his party was that people in the city were shirkers. When Dunstan spoke – through what was called ‘a curiously frog-like mouth’ – he could give a variety of messages, for he had to hold a seat which embraced the old gold borough of Eaglehawk and the dry wheat country running out to Mount Korong. A superb politician, he was to be the most successful in the Country Party’s history until the heyday of BjelkePetersen in Queensland. Early in 1926, as a protest against the Country Party’s role in both the state and the federal coalition governments, Stewart and Dunstan decided to form their own party. Sometimes called the Stewart–Dunstan Progressive Country Party, it gathered a hundred branches – mostly in the north-western wheatlands – in the space of a few weeks. Dunstan promptly withdrew support from his leader Allan in the Victorian legislative assembly, and in 1927 he ran candidates against the official Country Party candidates. Allan’s party won ten seats and Dunstan’s Progressives won four, and from 1927 to 1928 it was Dunstan who kept in power the Labor ministry led by E. J. Hogan, and for the next year he supported the McPherson Liberal government, and then after the election of December 1929 he switched his support to the Hogan Labor government. As no government in Victoria, in the three-party system, was capable of winning a majority, the support of Dunstan’s small Country Progressive Party was vital. Without him Labor could not have held office in 1927–8 and 1929–32.

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Labor now seemed the party of the future in Victoria. Its long era of faltering seemed over. In 1931, however, the party split over the thorny question of what economic policies should be pursued during the depression. Hogan, the premier, was outnumbered, and in the end was expelled from his own party. Labor’s defeat at the state election of 1932 was sweeping in the suburbs and devastating outside Melbourne, where most of the electorates lay. Labor managed to retain only three seats outside the large cities. One was on the struggling goldfields where the mining vote was strong, one was Wonthaggi where the coal miners commanded the poll, and the other was a rural electorate in which the pastoral workers around Hamilton and small-scale Catholic farmers were numerous. Whereas only one rural electorate was won by Labor that year, fourteen rural seats fell to the Country Party. Meanwhile the two country parties had come together in September 1930, largely on Dunstan’s own terms, and the remarriage was celebrated at a great rally in the Melbourne town hall. After Labor’s defeat at the 1932 state election, the Country Party supported the Liberals in a coalition government with Dunstan as minister. Early in 1935 Dunstan became leader of the Country Party and carefully set his high explosives under Sir Stanley Argyle, the Liberal premier with whom he had worked in coalition. Signing a pact with the Labor Party and moving a vote of no confidence in the Liberal premier, he prepared to take office in his own right with all portfolios coming to the Country Party. The governor, Lord Huntingfield, was so surprised at what had happened that he delayed for a few days his request to Dunstan to form a ministry. He did not think Dunstan would last but he lasted for 10 years, exceeding the reign of all previous premiers. In a narrow geographical sense it was virtually an alliance between two sets of moderate radicals: those from the dry wheat farms and those from the inner Melbourne suburbs. From this distance the alliance seems odd and even at the time it seemed a little odd. Arthur Calwell, later to be Labor leader of the federal opposition, said the idea was his: ‘It was my idea, and mine alone’. Calwell was a state civil servant, a former president of the state Labor Party, but not then a member of any parliament. He also, he claimed, sold his idea to another backroom man who did not sit in parliament,

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John Wren. In the previous four decades, ever since establishing an illegal betting shop in Collingwood, Wren had made a fortune out of gambling and the shadowy side of sport, and his influence on the Labor Party and many of its politicians was said to be powerful. Whatever were the exact links of gratitude he was certainly very friendly with the leader of the Labor Party and member for Collingwood, Tom Tunnecliffe, and it may even be that he was friendly with Dunstan. With this in mind Calwell went to John Wren, set out his idea, and observed Wren’s enthusiasm. Dunstan possibly had the same idea before Wren approached him but Wren’s offer of help in enlisting Labor’s parliamentary support was vital. Once the alliance was sealed, Victorian and federal politics became completely different. In Canberra, Labor was the fierce enemy of the Country Party; in Melbourne it was the loyal friend.2 For his first eight years as premier Albert Dunstan held power with the strong support of the Labor Party. This curious alliance passed laws governing working conditions in factories, laws on hire purchase and on workers’ compensation, and set up a housing commission to build cheap-rent houses. This alliance also gave the farmers a variety of boards through which to sell their produce, and cheaper railway freights on that produce. There was aid too for the country towns. Dunstan also promised to reform the mighty legislative council but the mighty one refused to be reformed. Dunstan firmly placed his hands on the wrists of the state employees. When the railwaymen went on strike in 1903 and the policemen went on strike in 1923 they had demonstrated a power extreme in the democratic world of those times, but Dunstan probably went too far in trying to curb those pressure groups; and that was to be one reason for his final defeat. Dunstan was a remarkably able administrator – almost a licker of every second stamp in his attention to detail – and he pruned any sign of extravagance. He set a very low income tax for Victorians but he thereby lost the income 2

The Victorian Country Party, radical and freewheeling, now clashed even more with the federal Country Party. The Victorian party in 1937 actually expelled its own Jack McEwen when he was a rising Country Party minister in Canberra. Another of the wheatbelt radicals, Alexander Wilson, was elected in 1937 to federal parliament as a Victorian Country Party member but in 1941 crossed the floor to bring to power Curtin’s Labor government.

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with which to spend adequately on education and social services. In his last years his friends called him Albert the Great but his greatness lay more in his frugality. Admittedly his frugality and his low taxes encouraged businesses to build factories and create jobs in Victoria, and so lift it from the depression. But Victoria suffered when in 1942 the Commonwealth, to his disgust, abolished state income taxes and thereafter treated shabbily those states such as Victoria which had previously been frugal, and rewarded those states which – in Mallee eyes – had been prodigal. The city’s neglect of the countryside had tugged the farmers reluctantly into politics. In one sense the Country Party was the hidden side of that famous monument of which many Victorians were so proud: the monument outside the trades hall, commemorating the victory of the eight-hour day. There was no way in which the man in the paddocks in 1920 or 1940 could yet win the leisurely day. A sharp contrast had often marked the working life of the family in the city from the family on the small farm. The Country Party had emerged to smooth that contrast. Dunstan’s government was more than a well-armed group which had hijacked the state. It was the largest single party in the parliament between 1937 and 1945, and was endorsed at three successive elections. Dunstan himself was a fox, adept at making deals, and after he lost the support of Labor in 1943 he wooed the United Australia Party, the predecessor of the Liberals, and formed a coalition with it. Dunstan’s success, however, depended heavily on a loaded electoral system, and that was modified in 1944 with the transfer of six seats from the countryside to the city and drastically reformed in 1952. By then the heyday of the Country Party in the state parliament had passed. The increasing prosperity of farmers plucked the sting out of the party; the Labor Party temporarily offered palatable policies; the skills of Henry Bolte, himself a farmer, attracted more and more rural votes to the Liberal Party; and the depopulation of the countryside further weakened a rural party. But there is little need to explain the fall of Albert the Great. That he stayed on top for so long is the cause for wonder. At the end of the Second World War it seemed that Labor might at last have its share of victories in Victorian politics. John Cain, a farmer’s boy from the Pentland Hills, had become influential in the

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Clothing Trades Union in Melbourne and then in Labor politics. He led a Labor government in 1943 for five days, in 1945 he won power for two years, and after the Liberals and the Country Party each had their turn he held power again from 1952 to 1955. Nearly half of the decade since the war had been Labor years: the tide had turned but the tide-gauges were deceptive. Labor again slipped into the wilderness. Henry Bolte, a farmer from the plains of Meredith, halfway between Geelong and Ballarat, gained office for the Liberals in 1955 and held it. The most successful politician in Victoria’s history, with a deep personal reserve of common sense, shrewdness, practicality and cunning, he began a Liberal reign of 17 years which, continued by Rupert Hamer and Lindsay Thompson, extended beyond a quarter of a century. At a time when Australia was being painted almost the same colour by television, tourism and fast travel, Victoria and its politics remained different.

13 The Jolting Merry-Go-Round

Between 1950 and 1983 the population of Victoria was almost doubled to four million. In that third of a century, change had a speed and an unpredictability not seen since the early pastoral years and the first gold years. Melbourne’s own population approached three million. The city spread out further and further, with a few spearheads of housing stretching beyond Mornington and out to Berwick, and swathes of housing running into the Dandenongs and beyond Eltham. The extension of the suburbs was shorter to the north and west, where the volcanic rock lay on the surface and much of the landscape was flat. Curiously Werribee, Keilor and the outer suburbs of the west lay first in the path of the prevailing winds and so were less prone to pollution, but that was not usually enough to redeem them in the eyes of developers. The whole metropolis was now nearly as widespread as Greater London, by one definition, and even experienced taxi-drivers rarely saw some suburbs. Three municipalities each held more than 100 000 people by 1977: they were Waverley, Moorabbin and Broadmeadows. Another five municipalities each had more than 80 000 people: Camberwell, Doncaster & Templestowe, and Nunawading in the east, and Preston and Sunshine in the north and west. Of these eight largest cities within the metropolis, only two were of any size 50 years earlier. The inner suburbs which once dominated the population ladder had fallen. In half a century the population of the inner municipality of Melbourne had fallen from 104 000 to 68 000, 209

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Collingwood and South Melbourne had halved, and Richmond and Fitzroy had almost halved. Older houses in inner suburbs quietly returned to favour in the 1960s but the prejudice against them was at first strong. Old Sir Samuel Wadham, admired for his Sunday morning broadcasts to farmers, used to say that he lived in Brunswicko. He explained that whenever he told well-dressed acquaintances the suburb where he lived, they instinctively replied ‘oh!’ By the 1970s many streets in Brunswicko, Kensingtono and other inner suburbs were being gentrified. The skyline of inner Melbourne in 1900 had been dominated by the spires of churches and by the dome of the Exhibition Building, which had a visibility now hard to imagine. Here and there were baby skyscrapers but most stood on low ground, around Queen Street and Flinders Street. For 60 years Melbourne imposed a limit on the height of city buildings, and not until 1956 were buildings permitted to rise above 132 feet, or about twelve or thirteen storeys. In the first upsurge of tall buildings the ICI House on Eastern Hill, with its curtain walls of light metal and sweeping glass, delighted many bystanders but not all. Taller skyscrapers appeared, and the tallest by 1980 were about four times as high as those of 1945. Seen from afar, they resembled grey-and-white tombstones standing side by side in an unplanned symmetry. People driving from Adelaide to Melbourne could see them clearly from the top of the Pentland Hills, nearly 40 miles away. When you stood at the entrance of the tall buildings they were impersonal, like giants, but at nights they twinkled and emitted charm. They were the city’s ‘turban of feathers’. Other clusters of tall buildings arose within a few miles of the centre of Melbourne. Built by the Housing Commission from concrete blocks made in the eastern suburb of Holmesglen, the first block of apartments rose to 16 storeys in South Melbourne in 1962 and the largest, in 1969, reached 30 storeys. The Housing Commission had been set up by Dunstan’s Country Party government in 1938, and its first venture was to build 412 homes at Fishermen’s Bend, close to the bay. In the 1950s, in inner suburbs, it built walk-up flats and in the 1960s it built the high-rise flats. One in every ten Victorians now lived in a house or flat built by the Housing Commission, but its

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aims and its competence were increasingly challenged. After a study of public housing in cities comparable to Melbourne, Hugh Stretton concluded that only two or three other cities had such inappropriate public housing. Melbourne’s children were the main sufferers. The playing space at the foot of the high-rise giants was windswept and often crowded with parked cars. ‘They can’t keep pets, or dig, or build’, he wrote, ‘and they must always be either shut indoors, or out beyond touch or sight of their parents altogether’. Stretton gave high blame to the poor recruiting standards and the suspicion of talent within the Victorian public service. The reform of the public service and the Housing Commission were welcome events of the 1970s. In the spreadeagling of the metropolis, the motor vehicle was vital. Since the Second World War, the network of trams and trains had altered little, and nearly all the big transport projects served the motor car: the Tullamarine, eastern, south-eastern and other freeways, and the new or improved Yarra bridges stretching downstream from Templestowe to the long West Gate Bridge, completed eight years after the collapse of 1970 had killed thirty-five men. Half a century ago, most journeys of more than a mile or two were made in trains and trams between the suburbs and the inner city, but now cars made cross-country travel the main traffic. The reliance on motor vehicles created nuisances and dangers, including the roar of dense traffic, days of smog, heavy casualties on the roads, and heart attacks for passengers who had forgotten how to walk. Road deaths soared towards a thousand a year. Whereas in 1945 they were a mere 1 per cent of all deaths, by the late 1970s they were 3 per cent. And then they declined, largely as a result of legislative experiments: the wearing of seat belts in cars and the compulsory breath testing of motorists who were suspected of drinking too much alcohol. Melbourne had become even more dominant in Victoria: it virtually was Victoria, with 65 per cent of the population at the end of the war and 71 per cent by 1970, but thereafter its share dwindled just a little. Geelong was growing quickly but could not challenge Melbourne. It did not even pass Ballarat and Bendigo until the inter-war years when it was boosted by new factories including Ford’s, textile mills, the whisky distillery, the glass works, the superphosphate

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factory and the big wheat silos. That Geelong won three football premierships in the years between 1925 and 1937 was probably one sign that it could offer jobs as well as money to promising country lads. Geelong’s population eventually passed 100 000 in the 1960s, doubling that of Bendigo and almost doubling that of Ballarat. The fine old gold cities were increasingly prized as museum cities, holding two of the least-chipped mirrors of 19th-century civilisation to be found anywhere in the world. The other gold towns had also dwindled in importance. In 1910 six of the ten largest towns outside Melbourne had been built on gold, but in the following halfcentury Castlemaine, Maryborough, Stawell and Ararat had slipped far below the top ten. The countryside produced more wheat, wool, butter and meat than ever before. The climate in the first quarter-century after the Second World War was kinder than at any time since the last century, and myxomatosis defeated the rabbits in the early 1950s, and the pastures and crops flourished with the aid of more fertiliser, precious trace elements and the incredible success of the subterranean clover in adding nitrogen to the soil. In many years the graziers and farmers were startlingly more prosperous than in the period 1890– 1945. More and more was produced with fewer hands, and the rural population declined, and the little farming towns wilted as farmers drove past them to shop in the big regional towns. In provincial Victoria a swing of population from west to east was quietly taking place after the Second World War. The important towns had for long been in the western half but the new sources of energy lay in the east. By the 1970s the brown coal of Gippsland generated six-sevenths of Victoria’s electricity, and offshore the first large deposits of oil and natural gas to be found in the continent were being tapped. Moreover, in the north east the importance of the Hume Highway and standard-gauge rail links to Sydney boosted other towns. By 1980 half of the largest provincial towns were in the eastern half: Moe-Yallourn, Morwell and Traralgon, all lying near the brown coal, and Shepparton and Wangaratta lying across the Dividing Range. Wodonga and Sale were not far behind. It was only a century ago that the eastern half of Victoria was mainly forest and cattle land, and its largest town, Beechworth, was not even ranked in Victoria’s top twelve.

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Since the gold rushes Port Phillip Bay had dominated Victorian shipping, and the decentralisers and all those country lobbyists who wondered about their own town’s future saw merit in opening a major port far from Melbourne. Portland, a busy little port until the 1890s, was deepened and revived, and its total annual shipments of grain, oil and all other commodities increased twelvefold in tonnage between 1950 and 1970. As a town it did not boom until the completion in the 1980s of the huge aluminium smelter standing on a headland by the sea. It was easier to convert Westernport, being close to Melbourne, into an expanding port; and in the 1960s it was deepened to admit tankers that were too large to enter Port Phillip Bay. Boosted by the oil refinery at Crib Point it became a busy harbour though not yet a serious competitor to Melbourne. Mornington Peninsula, wedged between these two harbours, attracted more and more people. Victoria was not only revived but was also repeopled. At the end of the war, Australian politicians of all parties had realised that the nation had to multiply its population if it was to defend itself. Arthur Augustus Calwell, member for Melbourne and a resolute minister in the Labor governments in Canberra in the 1940s, sold the merits of a new immigration scheme to the Australian trade unions and people. His own ancestry was mixed. His grandfather, a Protestant who emigrated from Pennsylvania during the gold rushes, set up a sawmill in the Bullarook forest near Ballarat. His other grandfather, a policeman, was Irish and Catholic. By old-time Australian standards, Arthur Calwell’s ancestry was ecumenical. He himself with his rich wit and intense feelings could not always be called tolerant, but in 1947 he had the vision and courage to commence bringing out immigrants by the hundreds of thousands. The three small Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia supplied the first noticeable group from continental Europe. They were popularly called Balts, and for a time the name loosely described a variety of European immigrants. The phrase ‘a Balt sheila’ was one of the first approving descriptions of a foreigner to gain currency in the Australian language. Many European emigrants found Victoria a disappointment; some were shocked. Thousands returned home within a year of arriving, though each year there were always scores of families

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who, after quietly returning to Glasgow or Athens or Sicily at their own expense, changed their mind and re-migrated to Victoria. A scarcity of housing was an obstacle. While thousands who arrived at the pier at Port Melbourne moved into the homes of relatives or a house which had been rented for them in advance by employers, a total of 320 000 had to go by train to a large migrant camp at Bonegilla, close to Wodonga. In the army huts of this temporary camp they were amply fed and taught the rudiments of English, but many were bored and others impatient and disgruntled. There were minor riots in 1952 and again in the recession of 1961. Those who had just arrived from war-tossed northern Europe had less reason to complain. Most children rejoiced in this new land and in the freedom and food. Jan Senbergs, who was born in Latvia where he saw his own father shot by the enemy, arrived as a 10-yearold in Port Melbourne, and Bonegilla on the same day, in 1950 along with mother, grandmother and sister. At rural Bonegilla he heard for the first time the laugh of a kookaburra and felt what he now calls his ‘awakening to the warm light’. When in the 1970s as a rising artist he produced his huge mural for the new High Court in Canberra, he was to depict as one of his symbols of the Australian federation the unified railway linking Melbourne and Sydney. He had come along that train route, to and from Bonegilla, almost 30 years previously. Calwell was succeeded as federal minister of immigration by Harold Holt, a Melbourne liberal, and their policies were similar. At first they welcomed from continental Europe the Balts, Poles, Dutch and Yugoslavs. The Italians and later the Greeks came in even larger numbers, so that by 1970 they were the largest groups of non-British peoples in Victoria. Amidst all the attention to the new waves of immigrants those from the British Isles, being familiar, gained less publicity. They were still the dominant migrants; they supplied perhaps half of the migrants who arrived and stayed during the first quarter-century of post-war immigration. It was almost unimaginable that some suburbs of Melbourne would become largely Italian, that President Fanfani of Italy would drive along Lygon Street in Carlton in 1967 and see the green and red and white flag of Italy on scores of balconies, and that Italian

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immigrants would be vital in reviving the competitiveness of that city which, more than any other, seemed to be a place so perceptively British. Melbourne had prided itself on its shuttered British Sunday. In the late 1940s, amongst those who felt that Melbourne had a way of life worth preserving, no phrase was such an irritant as ‘the continental Sunday’. When Sir Raymond Connelly in the late 1940s was lord mayor of Melbourne and suggested that Melbourne would be brighter and happier if it imitated the continental Sunday, with cafes open in the city, wine and beer drunk at tables on the pavement, and perhaps a fast game of football, Melbourne said it did not want to be brighter and happier on Sunday. Connelly was dismissed as someone who had travelled too much and had dipped his little finger in fleshpots which were neither Protestant nor British. The Sunday Utopia he was thought to have in mind was France, but Italy was to do more to realise his dream. Italians had been quietly living in Victoria for almost a century before the post-war flood arrived. A few Italians even in the 19th century were well known: Melba was first taught by an Italian singing teacher, the most articulate eyewitness at Eureka was an Italian, and the government astronomer was an Italian. Many of the names familiar to the post-war football fans – Barassi, Pianto, Gervasoni – belonged to very old Italian families from the goldfields. Around Daylesford and Yandoit the early Italians built in a distinctive way, using the local sandstone for walls and dwellings, and the walls are still a fine sight, though some are so eroded that they resemble the stumps of teeth. In Melbourne at the end of the Second World War the Italians were more numerous than the Greeks. In the inner suburbs – Carlton, Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Brunswick – lived some 3000 people born in Italy, about 1000 born in Greece and a few hundred South Slavs and Maltese. About half of the southern Europeans in Australia were caterers who kept fish shops, oyster bars, wine saloons and restaurants, or sold ice-cream, fruit, sweets or flowers. Perhaps the strongest Italian settlement was Werribee, where the black-garbed, black-stockinged women were observed with some suspicion by motorists halting for petrol or for fish and chips.

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The Italians did not at first lead the non-British migration, and were outnumbered by the Poles in the years 1947 to 1951. Thereafter they came in much larger numbers and, unlike the British, normally paid their own fares. One in every nine immigrants to Australia between 1947 and 1974 was Italian, and an even higher proportion came to Victoria. Public opinion ultimately classed them as fine immigrants, and a survey of the Italians who had returned home – and so were more likely to be unenthusiastic – concluded that most of the old Australians were not unfriendly. One family returning to Italy in 1970 recalled that in their street in Collingwood two English women would hardly say ‘Good morning’ to them, whereas in Preston the people were cheerful: ‘Everyone was terrific there. It was just at Collingwood that they gave themselves airs. Not the men though, just the wives.’ Melbourne also became a little Greece and was said – on the basis of sweeping calculations – to be the third largest Greek city in the world. In 1896 it had opened its first Greek Orthodox church, now the oldest in Australia; and Greek families had, for long, run many of the fish-and-chip shops and the greengroceries. The prewar Greeks tended to come from islands rather than the mainland, and each island favoured a particular Australian city. Perth tended to attract the Greeks from Kastellorizo, off the south coast of Turkey; Sydney attracted those from the island of Kythera; while Melbourne attracted them from Ithaca, an island to the west of Greece. The Greek immigrants multiplied during the 1950s, and Melbourne became the popular place, eventually housing half of all the Greek migrants living in the nation. The Spartans tended to favour Brunswick, Macedonians favoured Fitzroy and Collingwood, and the Pontians tended to go to Yarraville. Pockets of suburbia arose in which several hundred people came from the same small Greek village. Thus, in 1980 South Oakleigh held about 200 people from the one village in Macedonia, and from that same village another hundred people lived in other Melbourne suburbs; but curiously not one villager – so far as it was known – lived in Sydney. One change was more and more obvious, and was seen with the eye and felt in the limbs. Work for most people was becoming less exhausting. A teenager who had become an apprentice to an iron works or a delivery boy in the post office, and who retired in the

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1950s, must have been intensely conscious of the decline in the tempo and demands of daily work. More and more of the post-war jobs were clean, and in the 1950s, for the first time in our history, more than half of the men in the workforce did not have dirty hands at the end of the day. Salesmen, clerks, teachers, technicians and a score of other white-collar occupations were multiplying. The day’s work was now shorter. In 1927, Commonwealth employees had received the 44-hour week, and it spread slowly to other occupations in the next 15 years. In 1948 the 40-hour week became normal for most wage earners in Victoria, but it was soon followed by an unofficial and quiet demand for longer working hours. The provision of time and a half for Saturday work and double time for Sunday work made employees in some industries eager to work 60 rather than 44 hours a week. The pioneers of the eight-hour day would have been dismayed, for their case rested on a carefully argued ideology. In the first decade after the war the typical Victorian had more leisure but spent more of that leisure in ‘work’. In the early 1950s one in every three new houses in Victoria were being built by their owners, at weekends and holidays and evenings. People painted their own house and those who once might have hired a gardener weeded their own garden and pruned their own roses. The tendency to do one’s own tasks ate into leisure and yet perhaps increased satisfaction. Some of the odium traditionally expressed by white-collar workers towards manual work was vanishing, so long as that manual work was performed in their own house and garden, at their own pace. Many jobs and services slowly disappeared in the ‘do it yourself’ era. People now owned their own car and carried home the bread, milk, meat and groceries which they had bought. The ice-cart of summer vanished, the baker’s cart disappeared, and the delivery of firewood was largely replaced by the electric heater or natural gas or oil. Shopkeepers not only ceased to deliver in the suburbs but ceased to deliver in their own shop. The supermarket appeared, and the self-service petrol station and laundry, and the self-service bank and its silent automatic teller. Much of the increase in Victoria’s standard of living came from these simple changes which, reducing the cost of labour, made so many goods and services cheaper than

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they could otherwise have been. The private car was the essence of the do-it-yourself movement. Inside the house, in suburbs and in country towns, a domestic revolution was taking place. The machine was taking over and transforming the kitchens. Between 1945 and 1970, in a typical Victorian house, the ice chest or Coolgardie safe and the meat safe were replaced by a refrigerator, and later the automatic defroster appeared. The heavy Monday chore of washing the clothes was replaced by the automatic washing machine and spin dryer, and the ironing board was replaced by drip-dry shirts and new textiles which required no ironing; and the outdoor clothesline and all those clothes pegs and the cane clothes basket were supplanted. The task of darning socks and pullovers was eased by the new textiles. The broom and the hand-pushed carpet sweeper gave way to the vacuum cleaner, and the sink and the tea towel began to give way to the dishwashing machine. The frozen foods, cheap tinned foods and take-away foods fostered the same labour-saving process. The lawn mower ceased to be pushed by hand, and the great change in the streetscape was the neatness of the grass in a lush spring and early summer. By the early 1980s more than four of every ten married women in Victoria had a paid job outside the home. Their entry into the paid workforce was aided by the mechanisation of housework and that innovation of 1961, the oral contraceptive. In the workplace and in the governing of society women were not yet equals though they were becoming less unequal. In Victoria in 1966 women became eligible for service on a jury, and the movement claiming equal pay for women made headway. In 1975 Dame Margaret Guilfoyle became the first Victorian woman to serve as a federal cabinet minister, her portfolio being social security in the Fraser government. Already prominent as an international advocate of female rights was Germaine Greer, who was educated at a convent school at Gardenvale and at Melbourne University. The typical marriage was caught up in these changes. Desertion and separation increased strongly in the 1960s, and under new laws the rate of divorce leaped. The deserted wives and deserted de facto wives were so numerous in 1968 that the Commonwealth set up a scheme to aid them. A lone mother who was supporting children

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became eligible for Commonwealth help in 1973, and a lone father in 1977. There had always been spheres where the entitlements or rights of women were recognised more quickly than those of men. People were living longer, and the popularity of the game of lawn bowls was one sign that the retired people were multiplying, and the rise of dozens of retirement villages and homes for the aged – subsidised generously by the Menzies government from 1954 – was another. Teenagers were now more visible, more audible. They had more money and independence, and they stayed longer at school. Of the students entering high schools in Victoria in 1950 only one in eleven remained until the final form, but the ratio quickly improved. Dozens of high schools sprang up, especially in Melbourne where as recently as 1945 the high schools could be counted on the fingers of two hands. The bulge in the high schools was followed by a bulge in the universities, and between 1956 and 1970 the students attending university in Victoria were multiplied by three: Monash University was opened in 1961, La Trobe in 1967 and Deakin in 1977 to meet a demand which Melbourne University could no longer supply. Technical studies shared in the boom, and in 1970 the Victorian Institute of Colleges became the structure embracing sixteen senior technical colleges. The schoolroom events that caught the public imagination were not in the cities but in tiny places. Every Victorian parent of 1972 would long remember the little one-teacher school at Faraday near Castlemaine where the children and their teacher were kidnapped. The minister for education, Lindsay Thompson, formerly a teacher, bravely offered himself as a hostage in order to initiate negotiations for the payment of the ransom demanded by the two kidnappers. The young teacher, Miss Gibbs, no less brave, eventually was honoured with the George Medal. No lives were lost, and the kidnappers were convicted. In 1977 one of the same criminals, after escaping from jail, kidnapped the teacher and children of a small school at Wooreen in Gippsland. Again he was thwarted. New ways of carrying ideas, people and goods were amongst the fastest changers of daily life. Ten years after the end of the Second World War the media was dominated by radio, the newspapers, books, the cinema, the pulpit and the classroom, but their hold on

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their audiences was quickly loosened by television. The Olympic Games in November 1956 were televised, and soon football replays began to drive out other programs on Saturday night. Toddlers played all day in view of the TV set, parents ate their evening meal in front of it. People crowded into neighbours’ houses in the evenings to watch Graham Kennedy and a cuddly girl named Panda on blackand-white television. In Elizabeth and Bourke streets – still magnetic as a centre of retail trade – people crowded the pavements to watch programs on the TV sets in shop windows. Television was an instant addiction in a way which the newspaper and radio had never been. Suburban cinemas were one of television’s first casualties. Mostly built in the 1920s and 1930s with tizzy opulence, many of these temples soon held ‘For Sale’ signs on their grand doorways. In contrast the daily newspapers did not at first seem to suffer from the television partly because any television newsreel from overseas had to come by propeller-driven aircraft: in 1967 the overseas satellite was to make the TV screen more serious as a competitor to the front page. It so happened that the Argus newspaper lasted only a few months after the coming of television. It had long been losing money but not circulation. Its last spectacular victory was to print occasional advertisements and photographs in vivid colour. The process was still experimental and on the back page the readers noticed that the black and white stripes on the Collingwood jumper occasionally extended onto the green-grass background. The Argus closed in January 1957, leaving Melbourne with only two morning papers and an evening paper. The newspaper empire created by Sir Keith Murdoch in the early 1920s and based on Flinders Street was more pervasive than ever, and when he died in 1952 his Sun News-Pictorial had the largest morning circulation of any Australian paper and his Herald was said by some observers to be the most impressive evening paper in the English-speaking world. At one time, people used to marvel at the readership of David Syme’s Age compared to that of his Melbourne competitors, but by the 1950s the Murdoch papers had a wider margin of superiority than Syme ever possessed. The churches remained influential. The commercial radio stations on Sunday broadcast a procession of church services and sacred songs, and the newspapers on Monday summarised the sermons

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of the best-known preachers. During the week nearly every child in a government school received what was called ‘religious instruction’ from a visiting clergyman. The Sunday Schools flourished, most Protestant churches ran tennis and cricket clubs and scout troops, and most Victorians married someone belonging to their own religion. A politician in Victoria normally had a connection with a church, and that connection was widely known, by word of mouth if not in writing. In 1955 the Labor Party was split apart in Victoria, when many Catholics broke away to form the Democratic Labor Party. This was a clear sign that religion was still a vital force: a split of similar asperity and influence would not have occurred in the calmer religious climate of 1970. The nonconformist Protestant lobby in Victoria was powerful, not least in Spring Street, and stared unblinkingly at those who desecrated the Sabbath, gambled down the lane, or drank too much. After 1945 that Protestant lobby suffered defeats. It was vulnerable because its political influence lay essentially in the Liberal and the Country parties and not in Labor where Catholics were strong. In 1954 Labor set up a lottery by luring Tattersall’s from Hobart. This was seen as a backward step in many Victorian sitting rooms, and it was no consolation to hear that Tasmania had permitted such a lottery since 1896 and Queensland since 1920. What is the world coming to? they exclaimed. Even more was to come, and the ‘wowsers’ or puritans suffered defeat after defeat in the 1960s. The Liberal government allowed off-course betting on the totalisator in 1961, opened the cinema on a Sunday night in 1965, and extended hotel hours from six o’clock to ten o’clock in 1966. It permitted spectator sport on a Sunday in 1968, and the Queen actually saw football at the MCG on a Sunday two years later. Sunday was still a day without newspapers, until 1971. It was still difficult to go shopping on a Sunday until 1972, when the government permitted chemists, bakeries and petrol stations to be open seven days of the week. Victoria’s wave of social reform – or laxity – was temporarily over. Victoria, unlike New South Wales, did not yet allow licensed clubs and hotels to operate gambling machines, and did not yet imitate Hobart and erect a grand casino. Victoria did not allow hotels to open on Sunday until 1983. Protestant churches had lost the battle

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against drinking, but physicians began to join the battle. Alcohol, so long out of fashion, was to become too fashionable. For the first time, laws were directed against drunken drivers. The ebbing of the puritan policies which had so characterised Victoria and South Australia was largely a reflection of the decline of the nonconformist churches. Their decline was rapid throughout Australia, and the forming of the Uniting Church in 1977 was in part an attempt to halt that decline: the attempt failed. A lesser decline was visible in the Church of England, while the Catholic church passed through convulsions as priests resigned, Latin was ushered out, and half-taught guitarists strolled in. And yet the Catholic church initially weathered the troubles more effectively than the main nonconformist churches, and it also gained government aid for its schools for the first time in some 90 years. The centre of the suspicion against the Catholics now belonged less to Protestantism than to the multiplying numbers who were atheists and agnostics. In 1947, about 8000 Victorians had said that they had ‘no religion’ but they numbered a quarter of a million at the census of 1971 and were still rising. Twenty years later, one in four Victorians professed no religion. The funeral marked by no religious ceremony had once been rare and was whispered about, but was now common. A marriage performed by a civil official was uncommon in the early post-war years, but by the early 1980s one in every three marriages was performed outside a church. Rituals, attitudes and values were all riding the jolting merry-go-round. One sign was that homosexual groups openly proclaimed their presence, and in the late 1970s there was a gay teachers’ group and, in St Kilda, an all-gay disco. In the oscillations of public opinion, ethical topics aroused the fiercest debate. No debate was more fierce than that on the death penalty. In 1961, a year when murders in Victoria reached a new record, an old widow was brutally murdered in a Hawthorn vicarage. The suspected killer, Robert Peter Tait, who had recently been released from a prison farm, fled to South Australia where he was eventually arrested. That he was the murderer was beyond doubt, that he was insane was a possibility. He was sentenced to death, and appeals to two higher courts were rejected. The Victorian cabinet resolved that the death penalty, for the first time in many years, should be carried out. The outcry led by churches and the

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press was loud and persistent. Victoria’s premier, Sir Henry Bolte, did not yield. As a last resort, the opponents of the death penalty appealed to the High Court, which, meeting in Melbourne on 31 October 1962, ordered that no hanging take place until all legal proceedings had been exhausted. Five days later the Bolte government relented. Tait instead was sentenced to imprisonment for life. His papers were marked ‘never to be released’, and eventually he died in prison, an oldish man. At the 1964 state election Labor tried to make the death penalty an issue. So far as can be judged, it gained few votes through its insistence. Public opinion was evenly divided, and maybe more women than men favoured the death penalty for coldly calculated and brutal murders. Two years later a Victorian criminal, Ronald Ryan, while escaping from Pentridge prison, shot dead a warder. He was sentenced to death. Bolte decided that the death sentence should be carried out and that Ryan should be hanged. The public debate was intense. Crowds demonstrated outside Pentridge, a mob led by waterside workers tried to batter down the big doors of parliament house, and even a few friends turned on Bolte or distanced themselves from him. He was widely vilified: he was tenacious and unmoved. Several members of his own cabinet were against the death penalty but they were clearly outnumbered. Being an able politician Bolte thought that it was time to demand unanimity in his inner ranks. Before confirming the final decision that Ryan should be hanged, the members of the executive council were summoned to a formal meeting, with the governor Sir Rohan Delacombe in the chair. One by one, every member of cabinet was asked personally whether he supported the decision. Decades later, the tense meeting was described in Minister of the Crown by Vernon Wilcox, who was present. He made it clear that, contrary to later rumours and reports, ‘there was no dissenter’. Ryan was hanged on the morning of Tuesday 3 February 1967, the last person to be executed in Australia. Two years later Britain abolished the death penalty. Victoria ceased to enforce the death penalty but did not formally abolish it until 1975, when the legislative assembly voted in favour of abolition by thirty-seven votes to thirty-one. The emotional and emphatic opinions voiced during

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the Tait and the Ryan controversies were, in time, almost forgotten. They were to be echoed again, in 2005, when a young Melbourne man, convicted of carrying heroin, was hanged in Singapore. In the space of half a century, Saturday and sport had supplanted Sunday and religion as the main occasion for public controversy. Much of the increased leisure time was taken up by sport or the watching of games. Melbourne had become, without quite realising it, one of the great sporting cities of the world. The process had been long drawn out. Thus Melbourne had first staged the final of the Davis Cup at the Albert Ground in St Kilda Road in November 1908, when in scorching weather Norman Brookes of Melbourne and Tony Wilding of New Zealand successfully represented Australasia at tennis. On the first Tuesday in November, the Melbourne Cup drew outstanding racehorses and huge crowds: and no victor was more enthroned than Phar Lap, which won the race in 1930. When the Melbourne Cricket Club completed its concrete southern stand the arena was encircled by grandstands, enabling 96 000 people to crowd inside to see Carlton defeat Collingwood in the football grand final of 1938; three decades later the peak football crowd was to exceed 121 000. And in Melbourne lived Walter Lindrum whose skill at billiards as a young man was so freakish that on his three visits to England between 1929 and 1933 he almost devalued billiards as a contest. He lies in the Carlton cemetery, beneath a tombstone shaped as a billiards table. The Olympic Games of November 1956 – staged in the tenseness created by the invasion of Hungary – were a triumph for Melbourne. To hear the applause given to so many foreign champions, to the Russian distance-runner or to the small Ethiopian road cyclist, was to witness a generosity which has ebbed a little in the era of growing nationalism. The 1956 Olympics were seen by many observers as almost the best, and even the raggle-taggle closing ceremony – which bored those in the high grandstands – is now seen as a stirring innovation. But in the years of preparation which preceded the Games, many people doubted whether Melbourne could mount such a many-sided spectacle. We have traditionally been a little uncertain of our abilities. Visiting journalists decade after decade were surprised to be asked, often and anxiously, what they thought of Victoria and its way of life: as if what they gleaned on a

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fleeting visit was necessarily more observant than what alert residents thought of their country. The arts suffered at times from that lack of self-confidence or from an inflated belief that they were singing to the deaf. When the rising painter Albert Tucker left Melbourne on his first overseas visit in 1947 he announced, ‘I am a refugee from Australian culture’. A more confident era was visible by the mid-1970s. Live theatre revived, and the Melbourne Theatre Company alone attracted about half a million people a year. The Australian Ballet – the national dance company based in Melbourne – was flourishing; the infant Victoria State Opera quickly attracted large crowds; and the live theatre was pepped up by a new generation of Victorian playwrights of whom Ray Lawler was perhaps the first. Victoria’s talented painters included Fred Williams, John Brack, Leonard French, Albert Tucker and the portraitist Sir William Dargie: it was rare for Victoria to produce so many leading painters and to retain so many of them. In fact it was a hallmark of the arts in Victoria that so much of the talent emigrated. Barry Humphries, a social historian disguised as an actor, was living in London, though spiritually tethered to Moonee Ponds and Camberwell Junction. Alan Moorehead, one of the ablest and most gracious writers of non-fiction, had long been in London, and this lad from Swan Hill was known in many lands for his books on White Nile and Blue Nile. The painters Sid Nolan and Arthur Boyd, the writers Peter Carey and Bruce Dawe, the playwright David Williamson, and the jazz leader Graeme Bell, were amongst the permanent Victorian emigrants, and Sydney was usually the magnet. Federal money under prime ministers John Gorton and Gough Whitlam was useful in assisting the performing arts. Less noticed and soon forgotten was the support given by the government of Henry Bolte for the new national gallery opened in 1968 and by his successor Rupert Hamer for the building of the concert centre, of which the first hall was opened in 1982. Hamer himself was minister for the arts as well as premier, and it is doubtful whether any other Australian premier had been more sympathetic to a wide range of the performing and visual arts. It was he who encouraged such artists as Clifton Pugh and Mirka Mora to paint the street trams, thus giving them almost a toyland appearance.

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In the post-war decades many of the old pastimes and celebrations faded, especially from the mid-1950s. The Eight Hours Day, a special day of the year because Victorians believed they led the world in this reform, ceased even to have its procession and was replaced by Moomba, an Americanised street parade. Anzac Day, nearly a Sunday of Sundays in its quietness in the 1950s, almost ceased to be a national day except on the calendar, and by the 1970s there was no hint that later in the century the day would revive by attracting a new generation. Meanwhile St Patrick’s Day abandoned its long Saturday procession through the green-ribboned crowds; Empire Day dissolved as the Empire itself dissolved, and the bonfires no longer blazed on the high ground on 24 May. Guy Fawkes Day, which fell on 5 November, slipped from the school children’s calendar, driven out as much by the danger of fireworks-casualties as by the decline of Protestantism. The two-minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, 11 November, was drowned by the rumble of traffic. Christmas did not retreat – it reached new peaks of eating and drinking in the 1950s – but as a religious celebration it slowly declined. The annual Carols by Candlelight, founded by the radio announcer Norman Banks in the 1930s and staged in the open air each Christmas Eve, maintained its mass appeal by allowing television stars to capture the devotion once directed to the child in the manger. Show business did as much as the decline of the old values and memories to diminish or re-invent these special occasions. The car affected every facet of leisure and especially the holiday. Back in 1900, the income of the average family did not permit them to go away for more than a day’s holiday, unless they could stay with relatives. In Melbourne the bayside was the favourite excursion, and paddle steamers carried passengers to Sorrento, Geelong and Queenscliff – ‘the most fashionable watering-place in Victoria’. On public holidays the excursion trains offered cheap fares, and those were the only days on which the average child ever travelled in a train. Victoria had only a handful of holiday resorts, and perhaps as many lay in the high forests as on the coast. Mount Macedon, Daylesford, Marysville, Healesville and the Dandenong Ranges attracted people for long stays. The Victorian railways were the early hub of tourism. They had virtually started the government tourist bureau in 1888, appointing

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a clerk to answer the queries of country people reaching Spencer Street station on their way to see the great International Centennial Exhibition. ‘Ask Mr Boyce’ became a popular phrase in the railways. Mr Boyce stayed on and on, telling people how to find their way to Ballarat or reassuring those who had lost their way to Melbourne. More than 60 years later a parliamentary committee reaffirmed ‘that the most apt and efficient tourist officers are railwaymen’. They were skilled, it was said, in dealing with the public, and had the railway timetables and fares at their fingertips. Even as the politicians wrote this credo of faith in the railways, the tourist industry was about to be transformed by motor cars, longer holidays and higher prosperity. Thousands of people could afford a second house and built it in the Dandenongs, the coast or countryside, or at Eildon and those inland waterways where motor-boating flourished. By the 1960s a line of holiday houses straggled along Port Phillip Bay, all the way from Frankston to Portsea, and another ribbon of roofs followed the Ocean Road, opened in 1932. Other holiday resorts appeared on the snowfields which, in 1945, were virtually unvisited except for Mount Hotham and the railway-owned chalet at Mount Buffalo. The national parks, their total area multiplied decade after decade, had a wider appeal because private cars made them accessible. Leisure as an industry was booming. It employed far more people than agriculture if we add in the motels and hotels; the performing arts; sports grounds; ski and beach resorts; the building of holiday houses; and the sale of speed boats, trail bikes, holiday wear and fast food. In the 1960s came a remarkable quickening of interest in what was old: an interest in natural history, in the landscape, in native plants, in grand houses like Como in South Yarra, in folk museums and in historical parks such as Swan Hill and Sovereign Hill, and in Australia’s whole history. A quickening of Australian nationalism almost coincided with the revival in the western world of a respect for Nature, and the two movements coalesced. Aboriginal people gained from this swing in opinion. Almost unnoticed in Victoria for generations, they had often found it easier to conceal or forget their Aboriginal ancestry and culture. Others had lived on government reserves and received official rations of

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flour, sugar, clothes and tobacco, but between 1887 and 1902 half of the land in those reserves was withdrawn. The census in 1911 counted only 643 Aboriginal people in Victoria, and two of every three were said to be part Aboriginal, prompting the Victorian statistician to announce in 1914: ‘The race appears to be gradually but surely dying out’. They refused to die. In 1917 the Victorian government began to gather as many as possible onto a reserve of 4000 acres at Lake Tyers, near the Gippsland lakes, but many Aboriginal people stayed away, preferring to be independent. Most Melbourne people rarely saw an Aboriginal person except in sporting matches. Doug Nicholls, a fast wingman, played for Northcote and Fitzroy in the 1930s before becoming a pastor of the Church of Christ and ultimately the first Aboriginal person to hold high office in Australia: he became governor of South Australia in 1976. The boxer Lionel Rose from Gippsland became the most famous of the Aboriginal sportsmen, winning the world bantamweight championship in 1968. Between the era when Doug Nicholls ran along the wing and the triumph of Lionel Rose some 30 years later, a slow and belated recognition came to Aboriginal people. In 1958 they were given a few places in relevant government committees. Ten years later a state ministry of Aboriginal affairs – the first such ministry in any state – was created, though the main responsibility for Aboriginal affairs in Victoria was soon to pass to the Commonwealth. The two remaining Aboriginal reserves, at Framlingham in the Western District, and at Lake Tyers, were formally returned to local Aboriginal groups in 1971. Meanwhile, the recorded population of Aboriginal people in Victoria was quickly increasing, less through a favourable birthrate than because many people of Aboriginal descent were becoming proud of that part of their ancestry. More than 5000 Victorians called themselves Aboriginal in the early 1970s, and by the 1980s, when their numbers had trebled, they possibly exceeded the Aboriginal people living in Victoria when the British first arrived. They continue to increase. Today those who claim to have Aboriginal ancestry form 0.7 per cent of Victoria’s population, and more than half live in provincial cities and small towns. The prestige of Aboriginal people was rising, even though they might deny that fact. Now they were less likely to be victimised

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because of their ancestry: in a few fields such as higher education, where an Aboriginal undergraduate had once been a rarity, a person of Aboriginal descent was eligible for favoured treatment. A subtle sign of their increasing influence was that they won acceptance for their chosen name. In Victoria the name they gave themselves was Koori – a name heard by some European settlers as long ago as 1834. Often the Aboriginal flag, designed in 1971, was seen on flagpoles; Aboriginal people’s achievements were recognised in museums and art galleries; and an archaeological survey was created in 1972 to investigate their history. They had less success, however, in winning their claims to land. In 1994 the Yorta Yorta people of northern Victoria were to initiate a major claim to land and water that was finally rejected in 2002 by the High Court. Two years later the Victorian government agreed that the Yorta Yorta people should share management of the national parks that held the largest forest of river red gum in Australia. Aboriginal people were returning from their long exile in their own land.

14 A Long Race: Melbourne and Sydney

Rarely in the modern world have two big cities competed so strenuously, so evenly and for so long as Melbourne and Sydney. While other cities in other nations have engaged in strenuous competition for the leadership, it is difficult to find another pair of cities which for more than a century have sought supremacy and not been far apart. Perhaps the steadiest rivals have been the Indian cities of Calcutta and Bombay and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal, but even their rivalry has not persisted so long as that of the two big Australian cities. Early in the gold rushes Victoria gained a large lead over New South Wales, and Melbourne leaped ahead of Sydney too. Every census held in that long period from 1861 to 1947, however, showed New South Wales growing at a faster rate than Victoria. The swing towards New South Wales, with its coal and other natural resources, seemed permanent. Melbourne, while holding its own more successfully than did Victoria, eventually was passed by Sydney. In the late 1940s, however, both Melbourne and Victoria began to revive. The swift growth of Melbourne after the Second World War owed much to the growth of factories. The elegant oil refinery and chemical plants built amongst the thistles and rocks of Altona, the nylon-spinning plant at Bayswater and other such factories quickly made Melbourne throb in a way in which it had not throbbed for a century. The unveiling of the first Holden car at Fishermen’s Bend in November 1948 was another landmark in Melbourne’s 230

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challenge. It continued to outpace its northern rival. In the 1970s some statisticians, assuming the trend would continue, began to predict that Melbourne would overtake Sydney by about the year 2000. Another windfall came in the first post-war years. The longtime lament of Victoria had been its lack of deposits of first-class black coal. In contrast the New South Wales coast held magnificent deposits, and even the suburb of Balmain on the shores of Sydney Harbour once had its coal mine. Every month – unless there was a strike – a procession of little colliers moved along the coast between Newcastle and Melbourne, carrying the coal which so many Victorian industries and power houses required. In the 1950s, however, the growing output of electricity from the brown coal of Yallourn and of town gas from the brown coal at Morwell gave cheap power to Victoria at a time when the underground coal of New South Wales was becoming more expensive. The Latrobe Valley and its chain of growing towns became the pride of Victoria. At first its industrial relations were smooth and even the chimney smoke which cloaked the valley on windless days was seen as a kind of triumphant white banner. The valley enhanced Victoria’s ability to compete with New South Wales. Meanwhile, on the world market, oil became relatively cheap, and many Melbourne factories were quicker than those of Sydney to turn to imported oil for their fuel. The basis of Sydney’s supremacy, black coal, had begun to crumble. Industrial disputes also clouded the reputation of New South Wales, and many overseas companies eager to set up factories saw Victoria as the more stable site. Victoria’s attractions to overseas investors were also increased by its stable Liberal governments, especially Henry Bolte’s, which governed for a record period of 17 years. All in all, a cluster of influences favoured Melbourne as the place in which to manufacture. The pace of immigration from Europe quickened, and more of the migrants settled in Melbourne. It had plentiful jobs, especially in factories, and it was the first major port of call for ships which came through Suez. Immigrants went in the train from Port Melbourne to the large camp at Bonegilla, near Wodonga, from which they eventually set out to find jobs, and they found them more easily on the Victorian than the New South Wales

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side of the river. Melbourne was the great gainer from the first phase of post-war immigration. Sydney was often depicted as a city of all the nations, but post-war Melbourne at first was the more cosmopolitan. When the overseasborn residents were counted at the census of 1976, Melbourne and Sydney each gained from the British Isles similar proportions: Sydney attracted seven for every six attracted by Melbourne. But in the eyes of people from continental Europe, Melbourne was clearly the desirable city. Of those born in Italy, 103 000 lived in Melbourne and only 64 000 in Sydney. Of those born in Greece, 73 000 lived in Melbourne and only 45 000 in Sydney. If we also add the Australian-born children of those Mediterranean settlers, the gain to Melbourne was large. Likewise the Yugoslavs and the Germans favoured Melbourne more than Sydney. So too did the Maltese, the Dutch and, by a large margin, the Poles. In each of the seven main nationalities coming from continental Europe, Melbourne attracted the larger number. While Melbourne was the main goal for immigrants from western and southern Europe, Sydney attracted more immigrants from the Middle East: from Turkey and Lebanon and Egypt, but not from Cyprus. Sydney also was more attractive to the immigrants from Hungary, Russia and Czechoslovakia, though the Eastern Europeans did not come to Australia in large numbers. Sydney also was more attractive, doubly so, to those who came from New Zealand, and by 1980 the surfside city of Bondi probably held more New Zealanders than did all the suburbs of Melbourne added together. Sydney also attracted – much more than did Melbourne – those who came from North America, the Pacific Islands, and by a smaller margin those who had come from Asia. Ease of access and a warmer climate enhanced Sydney’s appeal to these people. Some time in the mid-1960s most of the immigrants no longer arrived in ships – the sea transport had long favoured Melbourne – but came instead in aircraft, which usually landed in Sydney. The change from sea to air transport was probably crucial in halting the rapid revival of Melbourne. Its momentum was also slowing because manufacturing was no longer driving the nation’s economy. So Melbourne quickly lost its twin advantages: as the place of

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expanding jobs and as the first point of entry. It lost another advantage, because after 1975 an increasing proportion of the immigrants came from Asia and the south-west Pacific, and they naturally chose Sydney for its climate and its closeness. As the air became more important than the sea for passenger traffic, Sydney’s possession of the main international airport was proving to be a crucial advantage. In Melbourne a handful of politicians and a few lord mayors realised in the 1960s that Melbourne was suffering because passengers from overseas had to spend their first hours in Sydney, waiting for a domestic aircraft to take them to Melbourne. Few overseas aircraft landed in Melbourne. Its airport at suburban Essendon, opened in 1922 in the first flutter of aviation, was hemmed in by a deep gully at one end of the east–west runway, and by the late 1960s the airport had reached saturation. When Qantas ordered its big Boeing 707s, it could not land them at Essendon. In contrast they could land safely in Sydney after one runway had been extended into a strip of land reclaimed from the edge of Botany Bay. At last, in 1970, Melbourne’s new airport was opened in that quietly pretty countryside at Tullamarine. It could accommodate large aircraft. Moreover, Tullamarine’s main buildings were as grand as the Taj Mahal – in the eyes of one minister from New South Wales – and could house a vast regiment of passengers. Between 1969 and 1971 the number of Melbourne passengers travelling to or from overseas lands was trebled, but most of these passengers still came or went through Sydney. Qantas found it sensible to concentrate its activities in Sydney, and few overseas airlines were initially permitted to service Melbourne. When flying overseas many Melbourne passengers spent two, three or four hours waiting in Sydney for a connecting aircraft. The waiting rooms at Sydney airport indirectly proved to be one of Sydney’s finest competitive assets. Time was replacing distance as the measuring rod, and by the measurement of travelling time Melbourne was much more isolated than Sydney from cities in the northern hemisphere. The airport also helped Sydney to rival Melbourne as the financial capital of the continent. Since the gold rushes of the 1850s Melbourne had been the financial hub. It was a southern base for British capital, and most of the big British banks and

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financial houses chose Melbourne as their main Australian office. Melbourne’s stock exchange also became the hub of Australianowned investment at a time when gold mining dominated the share market, and Melbourne ultimately became the head office of BHP, CRA, Mt Lyell, North Broken Hill, Broken Hill South, Electrolytic Zinc, Western Mining, and most of the big base-metal mines and smelters controlled by Australians. Nobody disputed in 1945 that Melbourne was the financial capital but by 1980 Sydney had almost caught up. While Melbourne was more the home of the big, old Australian companies, Sydney was the centre for the short-term money market, was increasingly vigorous in mining shares, was the base for the scores of overseas banks which opened an Australian office, and the home for nearly all Japanese companies and most of the North American companies which had recently come to Australia. Sydney became the city of the yen and the American dollar. In contrast, Melbourne had been the city of the pound sterling, and so it suffered from the financial decline of Britain. In 1980 Melbourne still possessed rather more of the important boardrooms where the crucial decisions were made, but more than half of the small and large public companies in the nation operated their head office in Sydney. The rise of Sydney as the money city was aided not only by its accessibility to New York, Tokyo and London but by an earlier decision which seemed to be of faint consequence at the time. In 1912, when Melbourne was more the centre of banking, the little Commonwealth Bank opened its doors in King Street, Sydney. The first governor of the bank was Denison Miller and he had spent 30 of his 36 years as banker in Sydney, and he lived there and perhaps for that reason he selected it as the head office of the new bank. He did not bother to explain why he originally sited the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney. All he uttered were the grave but unrevealing words: ‘after very careful and mature consideration it has been decided to establish the head office in Sydney’. This proved one of the moulding decisions in our business history, because the Commonwealth Bank in its various forms not only became the biggest trading bank in Australia but also gave birth to the Reserve Bank, which supervises the whole banking system. The presence of the Reserve Bank .

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in Martin Place, Sydney, became a drawcard for those overseas banks that resolved to open a branch in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the Second World War, Sydney has become the cultural as well as the money capital. The decisions of just a few citizens – not politicians – were again crucial for Sydney. When the Australian Broadcasting Commission was formed in 1932, two members of the board came from Melbourne and three from Sydney. They were busy people, and train travel was slow and tiring, and so for a time they met as two separate boards. Understandably the chairman, Charles Lloyd Jones of the Sydney emporium, thought the head office should conveniently be in Sydney; and it was. In time the ABC allowed itself to become too much a Sydney broadcasting commission. In a land of long distances, and of disguised but strong regionalism, it is not easy to be an impartial, national institution. The Australia Council, the federal government’s main agency for promoting the arts, was also placed in Sydney. Dr H. C. Coombs was the first chairman; he lived in Sydney, being governor of the Reserve Bank, and he apparently decided in 1968 that the new organisation should be based in Sydney, though at that time the other arts agencies of the Commonwealth met in Canberra. Federal agencies in film, dramatic art and other arts are now in Sydney. Moreover, Sydney is the home of most newspapers and journals of influence which have a national rather than a one-state audience. In some fields Melbourne’s leadership was not challenged. It was the home of the main scientific body, CSIRO, and also the institutes that were the hub of medical research. The first Australian-trained scientists to win a Nobel Prize for medicine – Sir Macfarlane Burnet and Sir John Eccles – were both Victorian country boys who studied at the University of Melbourne. On several frontiers of medical research the city was a leader. The world’s first donor-egg baby was born in Melbourne, and likewise the world’s first frozen-embryo baby and first test-tube quadruplets. In philanthropy Melbourne was seen as the leader: and the Sidney Myer, Ian Potter, Pratt, Menzies, Williamson, Helen Macpherson Smith and many other foundations and trusts were vital financiers of medical research, social

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welfare, the arts and other activities. Scottish and Jewish fortunes underwrote many of these gifts. As tourism became bigger, Sydney was the gainer. In contrast, one century ago, Melbourne had easily competed with Sydney for the few tourists. In those years foreigners still visited Melbourne primarily by sea. Their ship passed through The Rip, whose shores seemed excitingly close, and an hour later the noble blue ranges of Mount Macedon and the You Yangs and Arthur’s Seat formed the horizon. Moreover, Melbourne in 1900 was more famous than Sydney, and was widely viewed as one of the wonders of the 19th century: no city in Europe had grown so rapidly as Melbourne. Many visitors arrived, eager to see for themselves what the 19th century could achieve in a strange land during a mere 60 years. While Melbourne was seen as a hustling display-case of western civilisation, Sydney was still burdened with its legacy of convictism. Melbourne was reassuring because it had the noblest street and some of the finest buildings in Australia, because it could grow English trees even more quickly than could England, and because – more than Sydney – it had carved out racecourses and ovals which, in their cultivated greenness, were nostalgically pleasing to those from the British Isles. The wide streets in which Melbourne rejoiced were rarities in the big cities of Europe and eastern America. Around 1901 those British travellers equipped with the big guidebook issued by the Orient-Pacific Line could read this sensible summary of the cities of Australia and New Zealand: ‘Striking features and good points are found in nearly all the cities, distributed amongst them in an amusingly impartial way’. For its part Melbourne was said to have the best cricket ground in the world, Australia’s noblest cathedral – the uncompleted St Patrick’s, the country’s largest library, the smartest tramways, magnificent houses of parliament, and the most imposing street. The wideness of a typical Melbourne street especially impressed Europeans. In contrast, ‘Sydney comes first for beauty’. Today, Sydney’s fascination for overseas tourists is one of its prime assets. To the seven-day tourist from Los Angeles or Tokyo, it rides head and shoulders above Melbourne. On a dark still night

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Sydney is one of the magical sights of the world: on a clear spring day the blue water glitters, and on a Saturday afternoon in summer the sails of the yachts, puffed out by the wind, confer elegance. Sydney is an unexpected blend of vast but intimate harbour, rocky headlands and promontories, and patches of hungry-looking bushland, all thrust up against a new city. This blend makes Sydney remarkable, and architects and engineers gain from this natural setting. If the Sydney Harbour Bridge, however, was to be built across the lower Yarra it would seem like a stranded sea-monster. Sydney could more easily afford to make mistakes in its visual environment and still flourish: Melbourne could not. Port Phillip Bay is pleasing, nothing more. The Yarra valley upstream is beautiful for much of the way, but it is a quieter beauty. A valley is also more easily scarred than a harbour. We have damaged the lower reaches of the Yarra valley by filling too many of the billabongs, by building an eastern freeway which is obtrusively wide, by erecting huge electricity transmission-towers, and by laying a cycling footpath which scars the grassy landscape where the artists of the Heidelberg School had painted. The political differences between Victoria and New South Wales were also tantalising. Victoria in the colonial and protectionist era had been more the home of political innovation and of quiet radicalism. After the birth of the Commonwealth, Victorians slowly became more the supporters of the Labor Party, especially in the federal elections held from 1910. During the following half-century Victoria was conspicuously the Liberal fortress in Commonwealth politics. Today it is no longer the fortress. Australia’s prime minister tended to be a Victorian. Following the split in the Labor Party in 1917, the Liberals – under several names – became the dominant party in federal politics, and were usually led by Victorians. Between 1917 and 1983 a Victorian politician was prime minister for 44 of the 66 years, to be exact. Most of those national leaders were Liberals from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, especially from its more evangelical or puritan areas. Of those 44 years in which a Victorian was prime minister, only three were years when Labor, under J. H. Scullin, held power. Even when Liberals were in opposition their leader was usually a Victorian. The Victorian dominance in Canberra was to continue a little longer.

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Bob Hawke of the Labor Party was prime minister from 1983 to 1991. Those Victorian Liberals who had served as prime minister, sometimes for very long periods, had similarities. Their family background was usually in business, commerce or the pastoral industry. Each of the six had attended Victorian church schools: Deakin, Bruce and Fraser at Melbourne Grammar School, Menzies and Holt at Wesley College, and Gorton at Geelong Grammar School. Three of the six had gone overseas to study at Cambridge or Oxford, while the other three had studied law at Melbourne University. All except Bruce and Gorton – and they were returned servicemen – had entered politics when very young. Of the six, two came from humbler backgrounds; the father of Deakin was an accountant with the coaching firm of Cobb and Co. and the father of Menzies was a small-town storekeeper who later won a rural seat in Victoria’s legislative assembly. In contrast New South Wales supplied few of the nation’s Liberal leaders. After the defeat of Billy Hughes1 in 1923 – and he was a Labor man who turned Liberal – the only NSW Liberal to become prime minister in the following 60 years was William McMahon, and his term was brief. In state politics the contrasts persisted. Labor has far more success in state elections in New South Wales than in Victoria. Whereas in Sydney a Labor government has been normal, in Melbourne it has been abnormal. Until the victory by John Cain junior in the election of 1982, Labor had held office in Victoria for less than nine years. Unfair electoral boundaries did not help, but they do not really explain the inadequate support for Labor in state elections. Between 1937 and 1973, fourteen state elections were held, and in eight of those elections Labor won no more than 40 per cent of the vote. It is puzzling that two states, and the two cities which dominate them, were surprisingly alike in social composition, in average income, and in most of the views which were tested in Gallup polls; and yet they each experienced such a different political history for most of the 20th century. 1

Billy Hughes, who moved from Labor to Liberal while prime minister, was essentially a New South Wales politician, but for five of his eight years as prime minister he sat as a Liberal for the Victorian seat of Bendigo.

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How do we explain such a divergent political history? An answer is not easily found. Strong personalities and astute leaders played a part: so too did weak leaders or, maybe, strong leaders who sometimes placed principles above power. A variety of small differences in the respective populations of Victoria and New South Wales could have been decisive. A different attitude in only 2 or 3 per cent of a population is enough, in a normal election, to produce clear electoral effects, and so we do not necessarily have to search for dramatic, big-factor explanations of why Victorians have tended to be more conservative in state and federal elections. Part of the explanation may well be that political labels are sometimes misleading. In Victoria the Liberals have often been more leftist than in New South Wales – this was especially true before 1910 – and in New South Wales the Labor politicians have often stood more to the right than in Victoria. Moreover, interstate rivalry possibly helped to polarise interstate differences. In those years when the Victorian newspapers blamed the New South Wales coal miners and Labor government for the scarcity of coal and power in Victoria, they were indirectly saying to Victorians, ‘vote Liberal’. When a minority of Sydney voters pointed to the Victorians’ dominance in a Liberal government in Canberra, they were indirectly suggesting a vote for Labor. One difference was highly relevant. The tradition of self-help, of individual responsibility, was probably higher in Victoria. There the small farmers owning their own land were politically more influential. Likewise, even in the 1970s a Melbourne family was more likely than a Sydney family to own its own home, and was more wary of borrowing money on hire-purchase or on credit cards. The proportion of people who carried their own life assurance was higher in Melbourne than in Sydney, and the private schools, too, were more important in Victoria. This tradition of self-help was encouraged by the succession of Liberal governments and by the strength of the nonconformist religions. Undoubtedly, women were more prominent in the backrooms of political power in Victoria than in New South Wales, and their main link was with the Liberal party. For a long period the two most powerful of the women’s lobbies were the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Australian Women’s National League.

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Both were powerful in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, which were the heart of the Liberal party. The Australian Women’s National League was formed in Victoria in 1904 to fight for the vote for women, and it continued to flourish. When in 1944 and 1945 R. G. Menzies largely founded the present Liberal Party he made a valuable concession to the League. The Liberal Party’s rules in Victoria decreed that women and men had equal power within the state council, the committees and the pre-selection panels. Although few Victorian women were elected to the parliaments, women had a prominence within the party which was probably unprecedented in a major party in a western democracy. The party, in effect, was more attentive than Labor to women’s voices and issues until perhaps the late 1970s. Finally, in the mosaic of factors which made Victoria and New South Wales so different, the successive waves of migration might well have been important. Victoria was long dominated by the migrants who came in search of gold in the 1850s. They and their children ruled Victoria for the next 60 years, and perhaps their descendants still rule. In contrast Sydney was dominated by the pregold settlers and their descendants, and then much later the massive British emigration of the 1870s and 1880s produced many of its first generation of Labor politicians. Thus the successful politician in Sydney and Melbourne tended to have a different background and ancestry. In the early federal parliaments a typical Liberal cabinet was strong in those Victorian politicians whose parents – people of independence – had arrived during the gold rushes. In contrast the first Labor cabinets represented the more recent wave of British migrants who settled in New South Wales and Queensland rather than in Victoria. When the large wave of migrants came soon after the Second World War, the continental Europeans favoured Victoria. Those migrants from central and eastern Europe tended to be more individualist and more anti-communist than those migrants arriving at the same time from Britain. Moreover, most Italians and Greeks – and they preferred Victoria – paid their own fare, and that in itself served as a sieving process. Interestingly, the most influential political product of the non-British immigrants of this century was a Victorian right-winger, of southern Italian parents. Bob Santamaria

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did not stand for parliament but he launched that Catholic political movement which did much to help the Liberals in Victorian seats, both state and federal, in the 20 years after 1955. So the social and political differences between Melbourne and Sydney persisted but in new forms. Between 1945 and 1975 Melbourne grew at a faster pace than Sydney. At the same time Melbourne became the cosmopolitan city though it began to lose to Sydney its traditional position as the strongest Asian city. While Melbourne increased its influence in national politics, Sydney enhanced its importance in finance, official culture and tourism. The cities remained rivals but perhaps the rivalry was less intense than at any time in the previous hundred years. Canberra had been selected as the federal capital specifically to allay the rivalry between the two great cities, but its slow growth served to prolong that rivalry. Politicians of all sides, however, were reluctant to advance Canberra too quickly for fear they would have to spend too much time there, and the first civil servants went there, we are told, ‘with loathing’. When Menzies went to Canberra as a young politician in 1934 he expressed the much-heard lament: ‘it was to me a place of exile’. Two world wars and a world depression did much to retard the growth of Canberra, and in 1947 its population had just reached 17 000, almost the smallest capital city in the world. It was like a country town but so spread out, so tucked away amidst those charming hills, that it seemed more country than town. Then in the 1950s, Robert Menzies as prime minister began to make Canberra into a city, and by the end of that decade it was supplanting Melbourne as the bureaucratic capital, and was challenging Ballarat as Australia’s largest inland city. By the time Menzies died, in 1978, Canberra was visibly a capital city. Canberra softened the competition between Sydney and Melbourne because it was sometimes seen as the opponent of both. Moreover, the old rivalry between Victoria and New South Wales was possibly being supplanted by a stronger rivalry which in some ways was drawing the states of the south-east corner together. It could well be that since the 1960s the main rivalry and conflict of interests emerging in the Commonwealth have been between the south-eastern states on the one hand and the large, mineral-rich

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states of Queensland and Western Australia on the other. A federal system of government encourages such rivalries: indeed, it exists because in a vast land the interstate rivalries and differences are such that a centralised system of government is impractical. Late in the 20th century the persisting rivalry between the two states and cities was to take an unexpected turn. With the successive victories of the Sydney-born politicians, Paul Keating and above all John Howard, there followed 16 years of Sydney rule. For the longest period in federal history, a Victorian did not hold the top position. Perhaps this turn of fortunes should not have aroused surprise. What was surprising was that Victoria had experienced such success for so long.

15 Whirlwind in Spring Street

When John Cain won the state election of April 1982 and led the Labor Party into office for the first time since his father’s defeat in 1955, he had a prospect of inaugurating Labor’s first long period of success in Victoria. He won the following two elections, each by a narrow margin. Ruling for as long as the combined reign of all the previous Labor premiers of Victoria, he did not take his success for granted. He seemed the picture of caution. For years there were few signs that his fortunes would change dramatically or that Victoria would be deluged by a tidal wave consisting of political folly, folly in big business, and a certain amount of sheer misfortune. John Cain’s term of office began with natural disasters. Nearly four decades of rural progress was reversed. Wheat, the most important crop, had first touched three million tons in the harvest of 1979–80. But so severe was the drought during Cain’s first summer in office that Victoria harvested a mere 400 000 tons. It was the worst drought since the Second World War and the worst harvest for decades. Drought increased the prospect of bushfires. The year 1983 experienced the second driest February on record. Forests exploded into fire. Fires raced across the Wyperfeld National Park in the west and Cann River in the east. On 16 February 1983 – Ash Wednesday – hot northerlies were blowing and the humidity was low. As the day went on, bushfires ran wild in Mount Macedon, the Dandenongs, Warburton, the Otways and country to the east of Warrnambool. Late that afternoon and in the evening, several fires changed course sharply after the arrival of a south-westerly wind 243

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blowing at speeds as high as 75 miles an hour. So huge were the freshly fanned fires that Melbourne itself, though a safe distance from the closest fire, was filled at nightfall with smoke and the scent of burning eucalypt. In the space of a few days these fires killed forty-eight people and destroyed 1761 houses. For several weeks the danger of other forests and grasslands catching fire was high. At last, on 21 March, heavy rain began to soak most parts of Victoria, thus ending the driest 11 months ever recorded in most districts. John Cain’s years had their own flavour and preferences. His government, more than any other, was dedicated to preserving the environment. National parks in Victoria were multiplied; impressive numbers of old buildings were saved from destruction; and mining was more and more frowned upon. The arts at first were funded generously; and the people’s sports were promoted – Cain did more than any politician to preserve the Melbourne Cricket Ground as the hub of spectator sport. The aesthetic appearance of the city was another enthusiasm. The clustering of the skyscrapers on the two opposite hills of the central city, the revitalising of the forlorn south bank of the Yarra, and the building of walking paths and bicycle tracks along the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers enhanced the metropolis. Cain’s ministry embraced various factions; and to mollify the left, Victoria virtually implemented its own foreign policy by refusing to allow nuclear vessels from the United States to dock in Melbourne. At the same time Cain boldly tackled the trade union that had almost hijacked the big-building industry. Almost every major building site soon displayed placards denouncing him. He remained cool and determined. While the Hamer government had overthrown several traditions, Cain overthrew even more. He introduced the four-year term for the lower house; Victoria in the previous century had been one of the world’s pioneers of the three-year parliament. He tackled the tradition that restricted the role of clergymen and women. After forcing the capable governor Sir Brian Murray to resign on the trivial charge that he had received a ‘gift’ of airline tickets, Cain nominated as the new governor a distinguished Ulster-born theologian, the Reverend Dr Davis McCaughey. An appointment which at one time would have been howled down as sectarian and divisive – ministers of religion were not even allowed to stand for the Victorian

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parliament in the 19th century – was widely accepted with respect in 1985. And when five years later Cain resigned as premier, he was succeeded by a woman. His government’s sympathies had made it easier for women to achieve high office. His election victory in 1982 had increased the female members of parliament to a high of twelve, of whom nine were Labor members. It was then that he appointed Victoria’s first woman minister, Pauline Toner, the member for Greensborough. Likewise his parliamentary party reflected more visibly the first postwar wave of immigration, and initially it held three members of Dutch birth, several post-war British migrants, and an Italian and a Greek migrant. It was sometimes said, in accusatory tones, that hitherto too many of the cabinet positions in the Victorian government had been the preserve of people whose ancestry lay in the British Isles, but this was an exaggeration. Victoria’s longest-serving premier, Henry Bolte, had a German surname, his grandfather having migrated to the Victorian goldfields. For several years the government seemed like a newly opened window in a stuffy room. Through the window climbed a variety of specialist lobbies: greens, nurses, nude bathers, people whose native language was not English, school teachers, opponents of smoking, opponents of duck-shooting, single parents, and miscellaneous crusaders. They found a welcoming ear and a willingness to draft special laws or earmark special subsidies. The economic background was becoming less favourable for Victoria even before Cain won his first election. After leading New South Wales in its rate of growth for 30 years, Victoria in the 1970s began to lag. Lower federal tariffs hurt its factories. Victoria’s other disadvantage was that it was less favoured by the new wave of immigrants who came from Asia, the Middle East, Central America, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Melbourne gained its share of Vietnamese and Malays and Indians but not its fair share of most other new migrants. Indeed Melbourne, though still the second largest city in Australia, was being outpaced on most sides. Perth and Brisbane in the typical year were growing three times as fast as Melbourne. While Victoria remained the second most populous state, its longterm future was less promising. The Bolte years, full of go, were

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followed by setbacks. Between 1976 and 1986 the population grew at a slower pace than that of almost every other state, and even Tasmania crawled neck and neck with Victoria. This crucial fact was rarely discussed in parliament and the media, neither in the last years of Hamer nor the first years of Cain. It was disguised partly because Victoria remained relatively prosperous. Soon after gaining power the Cain government tackled unemployment. It busied itself creating jobs. Victoria’s rate of spending increased faster than the spending by all but two other states. The heavy spending, accompanied by low taxation, could not be sustained but in the late 1980s it had its reward: Victoria was again growing rapidly in population. John Cain himself was frugal and meticulous in his personal call on government funds, and he was unusually conscientious in his own handling of the public purse. Most of his colleagues in the ministry gave to the public the impression of managerial responsibility. An early streamlining of the public sector and the merging of hosts of petty agencies and bureaucracies increased that favourable impression. Cain gained acclaim too by publicising the fact that for seven years Victoria had a lower rate of unemployment than any other state, though he shrewdly gave less publicity to the fact that many of the new jobs were in the bureaucracy. The Victorian government began to suffer from some of its own financial ventures. The Work Care scheme, launched in 1985, imposed heavy burdens on employers and taxpayers, and provided such generous compensation to injured employees that there was a rush of people seeking to be classified as ‘injured’. Certain high schools were found to be especially hazardous workplaces; and the compensation to teachers absorbed large sums. For a time, Work Care seemed to be a financial disaster. The state superannuation schemes – the pampered progeny of the Liberals much more than of Labor – were also so extravagant that by 1990 they had imposed on future taxpayers, many of them unborn, a liability reaching the colossal sum of $15 billion. The Victorian Economic Development Corporation, set up to finance worthy but risky new ventures, quickly lost more than $100 million. The State Bank of Victoria initially provoked a few mumbles of dismay as the first of its financial secrets were disclosed. Born in

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1842 as the Port Phillip Savings Bank it remained a minor bank for virtually a century, and its customers felt comforted by the Dickensian atmosphere of its banking chambers and the grave courtesy shown to them as they handed over their hand-written passbook. Under the title of the State Savings Bank it found its way into the era of fountain pens just when the outside world entered the age of television. Discarding the word ‘savings’ – the word seemed so old-fashioned and so redolent of thrift – the rechristened and very independent State Bank of Victoria cut a dashing figure in the 1980s. The bank not only catered for small savings but pursued the accounts of big businesses. Its own skyscraper, dwarfing the clock tower of the Melbourne post office, suited its soaring image. With a couple of swift sprints it advanced into the position of fifth largest bank in the nation, and employed 12 000 people, nearly all in Victoria. As Victoria boomed in the late 1980s, the bank boomed too. After purchasing full ownership in 1985 of Tricontinental, a merchant bank of dubious merit, it somehow allowed this adopted puppy to lend money on an awesome scale. As it grew bigger, Tricontinental seemed to become a kind of lost dogs’ home, accommodating a pack of strays: the firms and promoters who had been turned out of their own financial kennels. By the winter of 1990 the State Bank of Victoria’s losses, estimated at $2.7 billion, far exceeded the entire capital of the bank. Whereas in the disaster year of 1893 most of the old banks which temporarily closed their doors in Melbourne had been short of ready cash rather than long-term assets, the State Bank of Victoria was virtually insolvent. Like a shipwreck, it was auctioned quickly. The Commonwealth Bank was the buyer, and a royal commission was set up in September 1990 to investigate how a once-sound bank could lose so much so quickly. Lack of close supervision, lack of careful auditing, and a surfeit of confidence were amongst the answers. Folly in the public sector was matched by folly in the private sector. Foreign money poured into Australia, seeking a comfortable home. From lush offices and luxurious cars the young moneymakers stepped forward to entice these funds. In Victoria and almost everywhere else, finance became the growth industry, though much of the growth was of scant value to the nation. The promise

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of a very high rate of interest attracted to some institutions the savings of people who could not afford the risk that often goes with such high rates. In 1990 the Farrow group of companies, clustering around the Pyramid Building Society in Geelong, was seen as hazardous. In the space of a fortnight, depositors withdrew about $92 million and gave notice that within 30 days they would withdraw another $800 million. Several Victorian ministers acted impulsively, propping up Pyramid and its depositors with a statement of confidence and then removing the prop. In July the closing of the doors of the numerous Pyramid offices inflicted prolonged distress on western Victorian towns, including Colac and Warrnambool, and acute distress on Geelong. Probably no other Australian city was so hurt by the collapse of a savings institution. These events were to lead indirectly to the resignation of Cain as premier. As more financial losses were uncovered, the 1980s were likened to the spendthrift boom of exactly a century previously. There was the same rush to build high office blocks, the same boom in shares and real estate followed by a slide, the same heavy borrowings by the government of Victoria, and the sight once again of banks accepting with open arms the shoddiest of entrepreneurs. There was also the parallel that in both eras Victoria experienced the slump most severely. But those far-apart periods of Victorian history also had their differences. The Cain years experienced no frenzy of suburban buildings to match that of a century previously, and no frenzy of public works to rival the railway-laying of the 1880s. Nor were the bank crashes on the scale of those of 1893. Both decades, however, shared a belief that they were almost unique in their achievements, only to see many of those achievements crumble. The Cain government, in its election-eve promises, had pledged more presents than its sack of toys could contain. In the end it tried to cope by breaking some promises, especially promises about taxation. Secondly it sold many public assets, and quietly sold other assets and then rented them back. Thirdly it borrowed heavily to meet salaries and other commitments which it should have met by raising taxes. In the end it was spending 22 per cent of state revenue simply to pay interest on the debt. In most years it ignored one obvious but unpopular source of revenue: the imposing of higher taxes, as well as higher charges on those using services such as water,

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electricity, gas and transport. These financial burdens were aggravated by the world’s economic downturn in 1990 and Australia’s high interest rates. The Cain government was the victim of these federal economic policies as well as its own mismanagement. In August 1990, John Cain gave way to his colleague Joan Kirner, only the second woman to head a government in Australia. The mother of three, her early path in suburban politics had been through the mothers’ clubs and parents’ clubs, so valuable to the government schools. Winning her first seat in the big swing of opinion that carried Cain to power, Mrs Kirner was in her early fifties when she became premier. She commenced her public duties with a dignity and courtesy that commanded respect. There was little she could do. In her first months in office the rate of unemployment in Victoria was increasing at almost twice the national average. Then came another lump of bad news. The official approvals to build new houses were falling at almost twice the national rate. For a time the bankruptcies were frequent, and many people emigrated to other states. Victoria slowly began to recover but the Labor government was doomed long before the state election was held in 1992. As expected, the Liberals under Jeff Kennett won a sweeping victory. Their long-awaited coalition with the Nationals gave them command of both houses. Kennett had been only 34 when first elected to lead his party, and during his long apprenticeship as leader of the opposition he advanced his skills. Like John Cain he had studied at Scotch College but in so many ways they were not alike. Cain was trained in the law, whereas Kennett was trained in the advertising industry where he learned to handle ideas imaginatively and emphatically. He liked new concepts. He was not afraid of initial failure. If one of his ideas exploded in his hands he quickly picked up another, cheerfully brandishing it with his bandaged fingers. He said, surprisingly often, exactly what he thought about a hundred topics, and his frankness was hailed as refreshing even though it enlarged the list of quotations which someday might be used against him. He was cheerfully direct as a public speaker, sometimes aggressive towards those opponents of whom he strongly disapproved, and singleminded in his belief that Victoria required deep change if it was to regain the economic competitiveness it had once held.

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At times he marched far in front of the accompanying drums. In the view of the newspaper editor Les Carlyon, Kennett was even ‘prepared to be heroically wrong’. In the eyes of the public he was a one-man band, but Alan Stockdale as treasurer and Pat McNamara as the Nationals’ leader were also vital for his success. Speedily he set about his tasks. Slowly and then quickly Victoria revived. The most impressive measure of his success was that finally he halted and then reversed the long-term exodus of people from Victoria to other states. In 1997–8, for the first time in a quarter of a century, Victoria gained more people than it lost through interstate migration. In the previous half-century no government, state or federal, had surfed so successfully through dangerous breakers. Where some leaders would have tinkered and mended, he tore up or pulled down and began afresh. He drastically redrew the boundaries of the map of Victoria’s municipalities. He changed the way the councils operated. He financed city and rural highways that would ease congestion. He began to privatise many of the traditional governmental activities, including trams, trains and several suburban freeways. He decided to privatise Melbourne’s water supply but then relented. The Pentridge prison, standing like a stern, darkwalled castle, was amongst the ancient institutions demolished. Sir John Monash’s peacetime monument, the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, disappeared. The Gas and Fuel Corporation, also based on brown coal, was dismantled. The prices received for these state enterprises were not always adequate, or so the auditor-general reported. Kennett’s government was like a whirlwind. The bureaucracy was pruned. The role of trade unions was weakened partly because their strongholds had been in the state departments and instrumentalities. Public debts were reduced. The vast, unfunded commitments of the generous state superannuation schemes were curbed. Even the numbers of cabinet ministers and departments were reduced, after his second election victory. Kennett initiated many major projects in the city of Melbourne, including Docklands, the new state museum in the Carlton Gardens, and expensive Federation Square with its jigsaw walls concealing an unprecedented display of Australian art in the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria. The older national

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gallery in St Kilda Road, designed by Roy Grounds in the 1960s, was being restored at high expense. To the surprise of many, Kennett did what more-bookish premiers had half-promised or hinted at: he set about revitalising the state library and the stately reading room beneath the high dome. He worked hard to consolidate Melbourne’s position as the sporting capital of the nation, at a time when the Olympic Games were about to enhance Sydney’s sporting prestige. The popular Grand Prix, a festival of noise, was poached from Adelaide, and a new stadium with a closable roof was built at Docklands. In the inner city no previous premier had commenced so many grand projects. In the countryside, however, he was viewed as the premier of Melbourne rather than of all Victoria. In the eyes of teachers’ and nurses’ unions, ethnic Macedonians, numerous citizens of the Latrobe Valley, and several other groups he was seen as the friend of the devil. Their nightmare, after watching him win the 1996 election so easily, was that he would remain in power for 20 years. Labor, if it were to win power, had to surmount one mountain: the high suspicions and doubts of the voters living outside Melbourne. Even in Cain’s major victory in 1982 the rural seats eluded him. He won forty-nine seats in the lower house, and of these forty-six were inner and outer metropolitan. Likewise, with the importance of the rural vote, he was unable to control the upper house, the legislative council. For just three weeks in 1985 he controlled it, and only because of a drawn and disputed election at Nunawading. That seat was recontested, and Cain lost. Kennett could therefore feel confident that he was electorally in command of Victoria, short of a mishap or catastrophe. It was a mishap, a mental one, that undermined him. Slowly he began to alienate rural Victoria and a small segment of voters in the provincial cities. The signs of the alienation were not yet apparent. When he began to contest the election of November 1999, the opinion polls seemed to support him strongly. Unexpectedly he lost the election – by the narrowest of majorities. Three rural independents held the balance of power. Two came from remote corners of the state – Mildura and East Gippsland – that had long supported the National Party, but they now resolved to support the forming of a Labor government. After seven years Labor seemed

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likely to be returned tentatively to office. The remarkable fact was that on the day of the general election a majority of electorates had definitely not voted for a Labor government. Extraordinary opportunities now fell into Labor’s waiting hands. The death at election time of the independent Liberal member for Frankston North called for a special election. Labor won it. Kennett resigned his own seat of Burwood, which was quickly converted into a Labor seat at the ensuing by-election. Labor no longer depended on the support of each independent. Steve Bracks, quieter and more patient than Kennett, was the new premier. He represented the suburban seat of Williamstown but had spent much of his life at Ballarat. Educated at St Patrick’s College and at the teaching institute which later became the University of Ballarat, he was alert to the discontent and restlessness in those rural regions and large towns where unemployment was high and many of the young saw no future for themselves. Bracks’ sympathies for their way of life proved to be an advantage in the election campaign of 1999. Moreover, Labor’s preceding leader, John Brumby, had held the Bendigo seat in the federal parliament and had already canvassed the countryside for votes. The new voters Bracks enticed were primarily outside Melbourne, as were the independent members whose support he won. He had climbed the rural mountain. He was the first premier since Henry Bolte to be viewed initially as a man from the country. Bracks was also unusual in that he represented a new species of Labor politician. Before winning his own seat, he had served an apprenticeship as adviser and consultant to senior politicians. Whereas Jeff Kennett began each month with novel and even unique ideas, to which he added weekly, Bracks was patient. When people complained he smiled, disagreeing with them rather than castigating them. Whereas Kennett was decisive, Bracks acted cautiously. The rival factions in his party and the power of the trade unions encouraged long discussions and deferred decisions. His reliance on the vote of at least one independent member pinned his elbows. Money, however, did not pin him down, for he inherited a treasury that was bulging. Fortunately he did not dissipate the surplus funds in immediate grants to clamouring supporters in the public service, schools and hospitals.

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Bracks carried through and largely financed some of those grand projects which Kennett had not completed. He was reluctant to initiate his own big projects. He could not match – he had no cause to match – Kennett’s remarkable performance in reinvigorating Victoria’s economic life. But under the new premier Victoria ran reasonably well in the population stakes. In 2004 its population was growing at a faster pace than that of New South Wales, though lagging the big outer states. Bracks, like Sir Henry Bolte nearly half a century earlier, was initially underrated by the public and perhaps the media, but eventually he and his cabinet colleagues were seen to possess vital political skills and instincts. His ears were near the ground: he heard nearly every tiny tremor in electorates stretching from the Murray and Snowy to Port Phillip Heads. Of Lebanese descent on his mother’s side, he had an easy affinity with most ethnic groups. He seized opportunities to promote women to high offices which they had not previously held. In 2002, fighting his second general election, he won the most notable victory in Labor’s history. He won sixty-two of the eightyeight seats in the lower house and narrowly won the legislative council too. Reshaping the council, he created a system of proportional representation in time for the 2006 election. This may prove, in the very long term, to be one of the momentous changes in the history of Victorian politics, for it boosts the power of small parties. It seemed possible that Steve Bracks – until his sudden retirement in July 2007 – would eventually exceed John Cain’s years in office and so earn a place amongst the life-size statues that stood outside the premier’s office. It had been a happy idea for Kennett, towards the end of his reign, to invite the sculptor Peter Corlett to depict in bronze the four longest-serving premiers, Dunstan and Bolte, Hamer and John Cain junior, though it was strange that a fifth premier, Sir James McCulloch, was forgotten.1 The statues, along with the one absentee, indirectly proclaimed the dominance of nonLabor in Victorian politics. Of the five, only the most recent one, 1

That busy election winner of the 1860s and 1870s, Sir James McCulloch held office for more years and months than either Hamer or Cain. McCulloch’s years as premier were all the more remarkable, because they consisted of alternating victories and defeats. Some day he too must have his statue.

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John Cain, represented the Labor Party. But since his election in 1982, Labor has become the most successful party in Victoria. The statues proclaim another fact. A premier was more likely to command a long innings in the later half than in the first half of Victoria’s political history. The state premiers, like the prime ministers, were becoming more presidential in style and prestige. In the age of television their face was the party’s face. They announced new policies not so much to the parliament as to the television camera positioned each morning in Spring Street or in the shadow of the bronze statues. So long as they remained premier, and thereby had access to the state’s paraphernalia and publicity and some of its funds, they held another distinct advantage over the leader of the opposition. In addition, the maximum life of a parliament in Victoria was recently lifted from three years to four years. For such reasons the premier’s average term of office tends to become longer. While the premiers, more than ever before, were household names and faces, the heads of the big departments were less visible. At one time they had had their own share of celebrities. Indeed, a few of the heads of the premier’s department, of the railways, education, state rivers and water supply, and other public agencies tended to hold their high office for longer terms than any premier. Administrators such as Sir Harold Clapp, Sir Ronald East, Frank Tate, Sir John Jungwirth and Sir John Dillon stood high in their heyday. Several were too powerful: junior ministers initially quaked when in their overpowering presence. But the names of their successors, even when dedicated and influential, were known less widely and in the public service their tenure was shorter. Many of these public servants set high standards which most of their subordinates tried to follow. Sir Ernest Coates, who had been Bolte’s right-hand man in the treasury, acknowledged in his farewell speech the lessons he had learned when young, especially from the older public servants. While they lacked the advantage of a university degree, Coates insisted that they gloried in a much rarer qualification: ‘they knew how to distinguish the honest from the dishonest and the true from the false’. Their advice was impartial, irrespective of the politics of the minister whom they now advised. Amidst these changes there was an unnoticed continuity about political life in Victoria. For about a century it had always elected

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one of its own as premier. Someone reared and raised outside Victoria had little chance of becoming premier. Perhaps the last premier to be born outside the state was John Bowser, a Londoner, who emigrated to Bacchus Marsh as a three year old in the gold rushes and eventually became editor of a newspaper in Wangaratta. Reluctantly, Bowser became the wartime premier in November 1917, and served only four months. Even he had lived in no other state than Victoria. In contrast, outsiders migrating across the interstate borders were able to win the highest political office in the five other states during the same long period. Many of these outsiders were from Victoria. Especially from the 1890s, a variety of Victorians left home and began highly successful political careers in other colonies or New Zealand. Victorians were influential in Western Australian politics, providing some of the significant premiers, including Henry Daglish, Jack Scaddan and Phillip Collier. Likewise, John Curtin, prominent in Victoria’s labour movement, emigrated to Western Australia where he won the seat of Fremantle, losing it and winning it again, and becoming prime minister in 1941, on the eve of Japan’s entry into the Second World War. Curtin was thus in a long tradition. Several Victorians became premiers of Queensland, including T. J. Ryan and Rob Borbidge. Such Victorians as Robert Cosgrove and Jim Bacon became premiers of Tasmania. Alex Mair, a Carlton ironmonger, emigrated to New South Wales and became premier in 1939. And several Victorians became national leaders on the other side of the Tasman Sea, the first being the mighty Richard Seddon, after whom a Melbourne suburb is named, and the last being Michael Savage, a gold miner and rural labourer who left north-eastern Victoria to try his luck in New Zealand. There, Seddon was prime minister (then called premier) for 13 years, and Savage became, in 1935, the first Labor prime minister. Most of these men came from rural Victoria, especially the gold towns, and most entered politics on the Labor side. That Victoria for a long period was more an exporter than importer of political talent was to be expected, because the depression and the long decline beginning in the 1890s led to large-scale emigration. From the 1960s, with a vigorous economy, Victoria attracted more political talent. When that talent succeeded, it was in federal

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rather than state politics. Every Victorian politician to become prime minister since R. G. Menzies has had an interstate background. Harold Holt as a child lived his first years in Sydney and Adelaide; John Gorton, though born in Melbourne, lived some of his first years in Sydney; Malcolm Fraser, though born in Melbourne, spent his first 13 years in New South Wales, for his father owned a sheep station north of Deniliquin; Bob Hawke, born in the South Australian town of Bordertown, within a short walk of the Victorian border, migrated when a young man from Perth to Melbourne to become a union leader; and Julia Gillard, born in Wales, migrated from Adelaide to become a student activist, lawyer, federal politician representing Melbourne’s western suburbs, and then prime minister in 2010.

16 The New Victorians: Life, Work and Play

The start of the 20th century was marked in Victoria by the multiplying of factories and smokestacks. The end of the century was marked by their decline. While Victoria still produced half of the nation’s output of textiles, clothing and footwear, the foreign imports were soaring. Maybe 100 000 jobs in factories were transferred indirectly from Victoria to China and Malaysia and other Asian countries. Even more jobs in factories were obliterated by new labour-saving machines. A taxi-driver who knew his Melbourne could point, in the year 2000, to dozens of empty workshops and empty warehouses: the acres of factories at Montague where Dunlop had manufactured tyres and other rubber goods for nearly all of the century; the idle boot and shoe factories of Collingwood, past which walked people now wearing their cheap foreign shoes; Ruwolt’s big engineering works pulled down to make way for a shopping and entertainment centre on the riverbank at North Richmond; the idle rope works at Footscray; the malthouse in South Melbourne which was turned into a theatre; the jam factory in Chapel Street which became a place of cinemas and other entertainments; and the old Carlton and United brewery that resembled a bombed-out site after the wreckers completed their task. While many old factories of the inner suburbs were squeezed out by foreign competition, others were enticed away to outer Melbourne suburbs where land for spacious factories was easily found. 257

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In Melbourne and Geelong most of the big wool stores were empty because the latest methods of sampling and selling wool no longer required vast spaces where each bale of wool offered for sale could be inspected. Likewise the rambling saleyards and abattoirs in suburban Flemington, with tall wooden fences and yarded cattle, were finally closed in 1985. No longer did many streets of the inner city smell of the countryside – of hides, greasy wool, tallow, chaff and grain, blood and bone, and the horse manure dropped by passing traffic. Melbourne was once known as The Big Smoke, but the aroma of coal smoke had gone. From the top of West Gate Bridge on a clear day, few smoking chimneys could now be seen. Whereas the area within one mile of the Melbourne town hall had traditionally been dotted with factories and workshops, cottages and horse stables, it became primarily the home of shopping, finance and banking, the public service, and law and accounting. The main workplaces of this new regiment of employees were two clusters of skyscrapers standing on the western and eastern hills of the inner city. When BHP House and its 40 storeys were completed in 1972 at the corner of Bourke and William streets – on the old site of Menzies Hotel – it was the tallest building in the city. On the eastern hill, the Nauru House, when completed in 1977, was briefly the tallest building in Melbourne and its blue nightlight became a spectacle of the city. By 1986 the tallest building was the Rialto, and its handsome glass tower could often be seen from 50 kilometres away in clear weather. It was built and largely owned by the Grollo brothers from the northern suburb of Thornbury. With one of its towers rising to 66 storeys it was believed at that time to be the tallest building in the southern hemisphere. By 1991 it was no longer the tallest. At 101 Collins Street a latticework tower capped the tallest office structure in Australia. Never before had Melbourne experienced such a building boom. For half a dozen years the skyline was dominated not by buildings but by cranes and their trailing Eureka flags. Then, like all booms, this one ended with a glut of vacant floors. There was a willingness to return to the inner city where the resident population, decade by decade, had declined as terrace houses and cottages gave way to factories, repair shops and warehouses. The Docklands was one area of decline. John Morrison described

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it in his well-known short story ‘The Night Shift’, set in the 1940s. Two wharfies, on the way to begin their 8 p.m. shift, caught the tram from Swanston Street and soon left behind the ‘pleasure seeking crowd on the wide pavement under the clocks’. At Spencer Street they entered the very different world of viaducts, railway yards, dark and deserted streets, docks, masts, derricks and winches and mechanical coal-grabs, with mist almost floating on the water, and workmen wearing heavy clothes to keep away the cold. Half a century later, in this area rechristened formally as ‘Docklands’, arose residential skyscrapers and office blocks and a sprinkling of restaurants. It was also noticeable because it possessed not one church. The urban revival also embraced North Melbourne, Fitzroy Carlton, South Melbourne, East Melbourne, Richmond and half a dozen inner localities. In the 1990s Carlton’s population grew for the first time since the Second World War. Once the home of Italian, Greek and Jewish newcomers it was now too expensive for the latest migrants, except those who won a flat in the public, high-rise estate. It was becoming difficult to find traces of the old Italian Carlton with its garish walls, terrazzo pavements, and grape vines and olive trees in poky backyards, let alone to hear the sound of an Italian accordion or an old Greek folk tune down a lane at night. But it possessed a strip of restaurants, mostly Italian and Asian, that was longer than any such dining boulevard in Naples or Milan. Melbourne, traditionally wary of the seductive powers of restaurants, gambling and alcohol, embraced these pursuits. Amongst the casualties were the poorer families snared by the poker machines that sat in the corners of traditional pubs, the Chinese and other Asian families attracted to the high-rise casino on Southbank, and the young who succumbed to imported heroin. But not everything was on the debit side of the ledger. Tobacco smoking was less popular. Road deaths caused by alcohol fell drastically, as measured by the total distances driven. The heart of the city became a hub of spectator sport and other entertainments. Sport, it had once been expected, would increasingly relocate itself in the outer suburbs where land was plentiful and the population was growing daily, and at one time the signs of this flight of sport towards the outer suburbs were strong. Before the Second World War the Royal Melbourne had for long played

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golf in East Malvern near Burke Road and the Riversdale club had played near Camberwell, but both moved to outer suburbs. The Williamstown and Richmond racecourses ceased to exist. The south east was the spearhead of Melbourne’s growth, and it was confidently expected to attract big sporting arenas. In 1965 a new racecourse was established at Sandown, then a faraway suburb. Not far away, a big football ground was soon to follow. To the north west of Melbourne, near the road to Bendigo, a raceway for cars, now known as the Calder Thunderdome, was opened. Australian Rules football was traditionally a game of suburban loyalties. Accordingly the rulers of the VFL (now the AFL) began to wonder whether their future lay partly in the new suburbs. At Waverley in 1970, they opened a big stadium, far from public transport. Waverley was one of Melbourne’s wettest suburbs and one of the furthest from the city – the foothills of the Dandenongs could be seen nearby – but it eventually attracted crowds, 93 000 being the largest. Several of the League clubs thought they too should move to newer suburbs. St Kilda moved out to Moorabbin, and North Melbourne experimented with Coburg. It was also envisaged that as Melbourne’s population spread ever outwards, new teams that joined the League would come from newer suburbs, especially the booming south east. It did not happen that way. When a new club was called for, the governors of Victorian football preferred a distant city. In 1982 the old South Melbourne club was deported to the Sydney Cricket Ground where it became the Sydney Swans. In 1987 the West Coast Eagles of Perth and the Brisbane Bears joined the Victorian football competition, and the Adelaide Crows joined in 1991, by which time it was called the Australian Football League. Later, Fremantle and Port Adelaide joined, and Fitzroy departed to merge with Brisbane: thousands of barrackers mourned the day in 1996 when Fitzroy played its last game. Victorians mourned even more when the new interstate clubs won most of the premierships. The senior football teams of Melbourne still represented the suburbs and localities which were flourishing before 1900 but nearly all ceased to play on their traditional suburban grounds. When the last senior match was played at Carlton’s ground in the year 2005, Melbourne and Geelong remained the only Victorian clubs in the

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AFL to play on their old grounds, and Melbourne itself had long been sharing its MCG with others. In the move back to the heart of the city, even the once-favoured stadium at Waverley was endangered. It was predicted that eventually the finals matches, including the grand final, would be played there. In 1984, however, John Cain, the premier, wisely stepped in and anointed the Melbourne Cricket Ground as the home for finals matches. Waverley experienced one grand final, while the Southern Stand at the MCG was being rebuilt, and hosted its very last game in August 1999 when Hawthorn played Sydney. Only part of the grandstand remains, like a well-preserved Roman coliseum. The winter winds, as in the football era, howl around its corners. In sporting arenas Melbourne already outshone other Australian cities. The facilities, in the 21 years after 1985, were transformed again. It began humbly. The MCG was lit by lights arranged on seven giant stanchions, and on 17 February 1985 a crowd of 80 000 watched the night cricket played there for the first time. In the following 20 years every grandstand in the arena was replaced, the last costly rebuilding taking place in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2006. Contrary to the public’s impression, the multitude of members of the Melbourne Cricket Club rather than the government provided the bulk of the money needed. The scope for mass entertainment was enlarged when, within sound of the crowd baying at the cricket ground, the stadium of the National Tennis Centre enabled 15 000 to watch the champions volleying or hear Kylie Minogue sing. Alongside, another tennis stadium was added. The main soccer ground, Olympic Park, was modernised, eventually to be replaced by a round-ball stadium near the Punt Road bridge. An aquatic centre was added at Albert Park, close to the course of the Grand Prix, which was enticed to Victoria in time for the 1996 race. The Docklands stadium with seats for 52 000 spectators was opened one year after the last football match was played at Waverley. So the MCG and Docklands, in becoming the main football grounds in Victoria, converted senior football into a night and day game. A compact area of the central city, close to the river and the old docks and the Albert Park lake, now held a more concentrated cluster of sporting venues than could be found in any large city in

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Europe. Sport was becoming one of the city’s main industries and tourist attractions. Even the ancient Melbourne Cup, run on the first Tuesday in November, shared in the growing obsession with spectator sport. Sport more than ever flavoured the culture of these new Victorians. On a winter Friday evening, families could be seen walking through the elm archways of the brightly lit Fitzroy Gardens, escorting starry-eyed young children on perhaps their first nighttime visit to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. On a morning of Cup Week it was nostalgic to see elegantly dressed women of all ages, wearing wide-brimmed hats, and waiting at the tram stops to begin their journey to Flemington where the crowds were almost too large for comfort. Improvements in transport favoured the central sporting venues. The final station of the underground railway was opened in 1985. The free city-loop tram, opened in 1994, pleased tourists. Meanwhile the freeways were extended. The opening of the high West Gate Bridge across the mouth of the Yarra had speeded the flow of cars and trucks to the west of Melbourne, and the building of more freeways and highways opened a fast though roundabout route running, with a few breaks, all the way from Frankston or Dandenong to Geelong. In the 1990s a tunnel beneath the Botanic Gardens, and the long Bolte Bridge across the lower Yarra, expedited traffic to Tullamarine airport. The opening of the long Western Ring Road at the start of the new century boosted the suburbs stretching from the west to the north east and spurred housing estates far from the heart of the city. A toll road called East Link joined the eastern and south-eastern suburbs. Almost 40 kilometres long, it was completed in June 2008. As the cheap land of outlying suburbs was preferred, the middle ring of suburbs lost residents. Even Essendon, Preston, Heidelberg, Oakleigh and Waverley were declining a little. The highest suburban populations were once near the centre but were now far out. In 1990 the municipalities of Knox, Waverley and DoncasterTemplestowe to the east, and Keilor and Broadmeadows to the west, each held more than 100 000 people. Soon to overtake these leaders were the outer municipalities: Cranbourne and Berwick far to the east, Werribee far to the west, and Whittlesea far to the north.

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In 2005 several of the outer municipalities each held more than 200 000 people. Amenities which once were found only in the city of Melbourne – the big restaurants and banquet houses, convention centres, supermarkets, private schools and tertiary institutes, major government departments, large legal firms, concert halls, public gardens, sporting stadiums – were springing up in the outer suburbs. With one particular amenity many of the new suburbs were not well blessed. A new suburb was as likely to build an ethnic Christian church or mosque as a mainstream Protestant church. By 2004 Melbourne and its metropolis held about forty mosques. Even more numerous, in both inner and outer suburbs, were the Greek and other Orthodox churches. A map of religions in 2001 pointed to powerful concentrations in the one area. In Caulfield 42 per cent of the population supported Judaism. In Springvale 28 per cent of the people were Buddhists. In the northern suburbs 28 per cent of the residents of Thomastown and Lalor were of the Greek and other Orthodox faiths. The suburb of Coolaroo, close to the Ford motorworks and the Sydney road, was 32 per cent Islamic, and the nearby Broadmeadows was almost as Islamic. On the other hand, almost 60 per cent of the people of nearby Greenvale were Catholic. The highest concentrations of adherents of those Protestant sects that had been long influencing Victorians were in small towns far from Melbourne. As a percentage of the total town population, the Uniting Church was strongest in Beulah, Lutherans in Jeparit, Baptists in Boort, and Salvationists in Elmhurst, all being small towns in the western wheatbelt or close to it. The Presbyterians were stronger in Lismore, in the Western District, than in any other Victorian area, while the Anglicans reigned in lonely Bemm River in east Gippsland. This is not to say that Bemm River has a congregation to match that of St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of Melbourne, or that Lismore could be even compared with Scots Church in Collins Street. The religions that were relatively new to Victoria were conspicuous but not typical. The Church of England, in nominal adherents, was far larger than the combined Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish adherents. Far ahead of all were the Catholics, whose numbers continued to grow in this era of ethnic diversity.

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Before the Second World War the three main Protestant churches – Anglican and Presbyterian and Methodist – together had the support of close to 70 per cent of the population, but by the start of the new century they had fallen to about 25 per cent. In the same period the Catholics had grown from 20 per cent to 28 per cent and their archbishop, George Pell, was the best-known clergyman in the nation. One fact has not changed. Melbourne remains dominant – with three quarters of Victoria’s population. Melbourne’s typical resident, however, now lives far from the hub of the city. They live in an outer ring of Melbourne suburbs which have barely been touched upon in this book. Shaped roughly like a horseshoe this belt of suburbs, until recently, held few people. Their present residents wonder what was in their own neighbourhood before the builders of houses and streets arrived. A segment of the crowded horseshoe is therefore worth inspecting. Back in 1905, Melbourne travellers setting out for Dandenong were venturing into the countryside. Before they caught their country train, bound for Gippsland, they had to inspect the timetable well in advance, for if they missed the train they might wait half the day for the next. After Caulfield they glimpsed stretches of open country – the suburbs were ending – and the almost continuous paddocks began at Rosstown. That name is nearly forgotten because its citizens, tempted in 1908 by the offer of the American millionaire Andrew Carnegie to provide a free library for an eligible Australian town, eagerly altered their suburb’s name from Rosstown to Carnegie. To their justified dismay the library was awarded to the Northern Territory, where it helped to enlighten the few dozen readers in the tiny port of Borroloola. Leaving Rosstown the steam train of 1905 passed the paddocks where now the Chadstone shopping centre spreads itself, and finally reached Oakleigh. A country town, its street lights lit by gas, it was surrounded by tiny farmlets and market gardens. Its rural needs were reflected in the duties of one official of the borough. He was the official registrar of dogs, and the inspector of thistles and noxious weeds, the ranger who collected stray horses and cattle, and the inspector of the dairies and milking sheds. Sometimes this important official called at the big kennels in North Road, for here lived the

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hounds who ran with the ornately dressed riders of the Melbourne Hunt Club. After Oakleigh the Gippsland trains collected or set down few passengers, until Dandenong was reached. Of the intervening villages, Clayton – now the home of Monash University – possessed only about fifty residents in its main settlement. It boasted a tennis court: that sport, not yet popular, was soon to flourish in towns and suburbs. The next stop was at Spring Vale (now Springvale) where, amidst the paddocks, stood the new cemetery which was soon to house Victoria’s first crematorium. Further down the line was Noble Park, which did not even merit its own station. Then came Dandenong, holding maybe 1200 people, a market town of such seeming importance that there was a decided rustle and eagerness inside the carriages just before the train arrived. It may well be that Dandenong in 1905 was the largest town in that wide arc or horseshoe within a radius of 10 to 30 miles from Melbourne, an area now so transformed that it embraces about half of Victoria’s people. Dandenong then had its weekly routine. Sunday was church day, and silence prevailed out of doors, and all shops were closed. Monday was washing day, and on hundreds of outdoor clotheslines of wire or rope the sheets and towels, shirts and dresses, bibs and aprons flapped in the breeze: a rainy Monday was a miserable day in the era before drying machines. Tuesday was market day and the streets were lined with parked horse-drawn vehicles, and much produce from farms and dairies was sold along with live poultry, pigs and cattle. Wednesday afternoon was a half-holiday – it meant that Saturday afternoon was not. On Wednesday, too, the copies of one of the town’s weekly newspapers were delivered to subscribers, while on Thursday the rival paper appeared. Friday was almost a blank day, a prelude to the busy Saturday when shops were open throughout the day. Indeed, on every alternate Saturday, the horse market was open for business. A centre of local government, Dandenong drew its shire councillors from as far away as Aspendale, which possessed a racecourse, and from Carrum and Chelsea, which hoped some day to become thriving seaside resorts. And one councillor even came along the gravel road from distant Scoresby, now the heart of Knox City. Half a century would pass before Dandenong became a home of factories

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and assembly lines, of which Holden and Volkswagen and International Harvester were amongst the earliest. By then the British and Dutch and other European migrants were conspicuous in Dandenong’s factories. By 2005 the suburbs that now filled the once empty spaces between Springvale and Dandenong were amongst the most cosmopolitan in Australia with numerous streets where nearly every household was either Vietnamese or Sri Lankan or Sudanese or Indian, or other nationalities which had been a rarity in Australia at the end of the Second World War. Clayton and Noble Park between them have eight Indian grocery shops. Springvale has numerous shops where not one English word can be seen in the window; Greater Dandenong is unusually ethnic, and about 55 per cent of its people were born outside Australia. Back in 1905, the remote village of Berwick had no prospect of rivalling its neighbour, Dandenong, though its climate and hilly setting were considered ideal for schools, of which it had more than its share. But today Berwick is the heart of the city of Casey, which holds as many people as Ballarat, Bendigo and Shepparton combined. As for Cranbourne, now the centre of a huge suburb, it then held only 250 people – enough to fill a small marquee – just a century ago. At least it held two banks, one newspaper and a shire office serving a vast district that ran all the way to Langwarrin, the site of an army camp and therefore optimistically known as ‘the Aldershot of Victoria’. On the other side of Melbourne, at rural Broadmeadows, was erected another ‘Aldershot’ camp where young men were trained briefly before sailing away to fight in the First World War. Where now the suburbs run almost continuously along the edge of the horseshoe, there stood, a century previously, a scatter of isolated towns. Some, like Croydon and Keilor, Sunbury and Melton and Cranbourne, were dozing villages where the farmers bought their supplies. These outer areas were each governed by a shire council consisting of local orchardists, farmers or village storekeepers who deliberated whether dray-loads of gravel should be spread over this or that muddy road. Now these areas have been merged into large suburban ‘cities’. As post-war Melbourne spread and sprawled, there were demands – far from unanimous – that the smaller municipal councils should be abolished. The initial case presented by John Cain’s

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local government commission was disputed. When it was argued that Victoria had too many municipalities for a state so small in area, it was pointed out that in proportion to population Victoria already had fewer municipalities than any other state except New South Wales. It was also claimed that Victoria’s councils operated on antiquated boundaries, but even in Melbourne many alterations had been made as recently as the 1960s and 1970s to the boundaries of councils as far apart as Essendon and Diamond Valley, Heidelberg and Frankston, Waverley City and Springvale. The countryside nursed its own suspicion towards the planned mergers. Some old towns were proud to be small and self-governing. None was prouder than the little borough of Eaglehawk, which saw neighbouring Bendigo as an ogre. The reforms were shelved, to be revived on a sweeping scale by the Kennett government in the following decade. The National Party, by giving its support, made it harder for rural shires to condemn the reforms as imposed on them by city interests. Moreover, the compulsory mergers seemed sensible for the provincial cities, each of which had long been divided up between three or four competing councils, but even there the change was resented by many residents in such proud pocket boroughs as Geelong West, Eaglehawk and Sebastopol. In 1994 the boundaries in Victoria were redrawn and larger municipalities were created. On the new map stood several municipalities each holding close to a quarter of a million people. Most of the old municipal names, however, were wiped from the map. Never in the history of Victoria had there been such a torrent of new names, many of which, a decade later, still conveyed only the vaguest meaning to people living only 30 miles away. The little seaside borough of Queenscliff was one of the few to retain both its existing boundaries and old name. In Melbourne, except for the municipality of that name, nearly every name vanished. It is fair to suggest that today the name-changes and logo-changes are given more respect than is merited. Footscray especially was robbed. In the space of relatively few years its name was plucked from its own municipality, football club, hospital and emerging university. Even 10 years after this revolution in local government, it was difficult to agree on an assessment. In the view of neutral observers, one

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effect was unexpected. The main political parties competed to control the new suburban councils, and it was difficult for a genuine independent to gain support but easy for a party-endorsed nonentity, especially one with ethnic backing, to win a seat. The outward spread of Melbourne is one of the dominating facts of Victorian history. It raised a new version of a question that long aroused Victorian political debate: how to use land in the most effective and people-pleasing way. In the gold era the parallel question was whether a large area of gold-bearing land should be divided amongst thousands of diggers or be the possession of one large company. A variation of that question dominated politics in the 1860s: how much land should be taken up in huge parcels by the squatters, and how much should be parcelled into small lots for the family farmer? Later the fervent rural slogan was ‘closer settlement’. There was even a minister for closer settlement, whose task was to slice big sheep runs into small farms, often applying compulsion to the task. In the end the policy failed, and farms grew larger again. They had to grow, in order to survive. In Melbourne in the era of the motor car, the concept of closer settlement entered urban politics. As a far-spreading city called for more freeways and train lines, longer and costlier sewerage mains and other expensive amenities, there was a case for halting or curtailing the suburban sprawl. This in turn called for a higher population in the inner suburbs. So the Bolte government in the 1960s built its high, Moscow-like apartments for the clients of the housing commission but this experiment in urban regeneration was widely viewed as a failure. A generation later the Bracks government, under its ‘Melbourne 2030’ plan, resolved to squeeze more people into the inner suburbs. The high price of land already was squeezing the typical block of land in outer suburbs. Buyers inspecting stylish building estates such as Caroline Springs on the Ballarat road were astonished to see how close together were the houses and quick to realise that the old pastime of cricket in the backyard was now almost impossible. Just as their great-grandparents had wanted their own farm, now they themselves wanted their own suburban lot. They were content to live 30 kilometres from Melbourne, and spend hours weekly at traffic intersections on their drive to work, if this sacrifice in time

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and serenity gave their children the freedom of a detached house, a larger backyard, and the privilege of tending their own garden. Land on the remote outskirts was far cheaper than in the middle suburbs. So the pressures persisted for the further expansion of the city. In the outer suburbs, too, people felt more secure, for they believed or imagined that life in the inner city was more violent. This unease was heightened by the exploding of a bomb and the fatal wounding of a policewoman outside police headquarters in Russell Street in 1986, and by two episodes a year later when innocent people were killed by one armed man who ran amok in the heart of the city and another who fired his shots near the Clifton Hill railway station. In 1998, mostly in the old suburbs, there began a chain of gangland murders, in which post-war migrant groups were prominent. A variety of the participants followed an occupation described as ‘career criminal’. Their capacity to succeed and survive in the drug and allied trades was becoming a humiliation to the state government and the police force. A few of the leading criminals did not survive: they were killed by rival criminals. Their dignified funerals, adorned with long black limousines and commemorated on the evening news, were becoming like state funerals. Some intellectuals tended to deride Melbourne’s secure and comfortable suburbia, especially after they returned from their first visit overseas, but most Australians, if given the choice, liked the newer suburbs. Mrs Nellie Sutherland had been born in a labour camp in Germany near the end of the Second World War, and was in her early thirties when she went with her husband and children to a new estate of sixteen houses at Vermont South. The neighbourhood had few amenities: the newcomers made their own, with the help of working bees. ‘All the neighbours got to know one another very well’, she recalled. The children played in the backyards or hit a cricket ball in the street. ‘We were all new to gardening and often helped one another with tools and equipment.’ It was a bonus that even the small children could walk to school in safety. For more than a century the average suburb had displayed a passion for gardening which Sydney, because of its different topography and climate, could rarely equal. In their back garden, out of sight of the passers-by in the street, most Melbourne householders

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planted potatoes and onions, broad beans and peas, tomatoes and lettuce, pumpkins and marrows and carrots. A permanent patch of rhubarb was at hand, and mint too. An apple and apricot tree – perhaps a loquat and mulberry – were planted and annually pruned: and the surplus fruit was made into jam or chutney in the kitchen. Near the back fence was a ‘chook house’ where five or ten hens lived, partly on wheat, a mixture of bran and pollard, weeds from the garden and household scraps. A garden added to the wealth of the family, but eventually the home-grown vegetables became less important. The lawn occupied more space, for it was easily trimmed by the small motor mower that became popular in the 1950s. Ornamental trees replaced the fruit trees, and two decades later the newcomers in newer suburbs were eucalypts, wattles and other natives: they flourished during the dry years when domestic water was rationed. Thus in the suburb of Hoppers Crossing, on the basalt plains towards Werribee, grew rows of yellow gums, red ironbarks, fuchsia gums and other natives. Birds such as the native honeyeaters now flourished in suburban gardens which they would have shunned when European plants prevailed. By 1977, when the number plates began to carry the slogan ‘Victoria – Garden State’, a garden was ceasing to have its old importance. A Saturday afternoon devoted mainly to working in the garden, with a house window ajar and the big radio-set broadcasting football and racing, was no longer so typical. Suburban Melbourne, temporarily, was no longer so dominant. Five or more miles from Geelong and Ballarat and Bendigo there now extended a halo of hobby farms with perhaps a colonial-style house, a backyard swimming pool and several acres that fed a horse or pony. Likewise many of the larger country towns were growing at a faster percentage than Melbourne. In most years of the 1980s metropolitan Melbourne’s rate of growth was exceeded by six urban pockets in the eastern half of Victoria: Shepparton, Benalla, Traralgon, Sale, Bairnsdale and Warragul. Similarly in the western half of Victoria, Mildura, Warrnambool, Portland, Swan Hill, Ocean Grove-Barwon Heads and Bacchus Marsh were growing faster than Melbourne. In addition such satellite towns as Cranbourne and Melton were booming. Not since the 1890s had so many

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sizeable country cities and towns outpaced Melbourne in their rate of growth. A more realistic way of defining ‘an urban area’ served to magnify several cities on the inland side of the Great Dividing Range. Thus, Wodonga (Victoria) and Albury (New South Wales), separated only by the Murray River, had traditionally been counted as two distinct towns. Indeed, they were proud of their differences. In each new town, until the coming of federation in 1901, a customs house collected the import duties on a variety of goods and livestock crossing the river from one colony to the other, and the two towns marked a break in the railway gauges. Together they became important when E. G. Whitlam, after winning the federal election of 1972, announced tentative plans to convert Albury–Wodonga into the one urban centre and boost its growth. Its very situation destined it to be great, he added: ‘It was situated where Australia’s principal highway and railway, linking the largest cities, crossed the largest river’. Nicknamed Whitlamabad, it soon attracted federal funds and government offices as well as factories. Though the defeat of the Whitlam government removed Father Christmas from the banks of the Murray, the combined city was revitalised. Since the gold rushes of the 1850s the three main provincial cities had been Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo, and they were much larger than any rivals. Then in the 1980s Bendigo was overtaken by Albury–Wodonga, whose combined population moved close to 60 000. Even Ballarat was challenged by this new rival. Likewise Shepparton and Mooroopna, divided by the Goulburn River’s flood plain, had traditionally been counted as separate towns. Certainly they saw themselves as such, and for years Mooroopna was governed from the distant Tatura shire hall and not from the nearer and larger Shepparton. Early in the 1900s Shepparton held about 3000 people but it grew quickly after a cannery was built during the First World War to produce peaches, pears and apricots for Australian and British markets. At last, in 1986, the Commonwealth Statistician sensibly classed Shepparton–Mooroopna as one urban centre, and it instantly became the sixth largest of Victoria’s towns and cities. One unexpected change in the world economy – a rise in the price of gold – could have boosted the bigger inland cities in Victoria but

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had faint effect, mainly because of red tape and what could also be called green tape. By 1990 the nation was producing more gold than in any previous year, but the Victorian government did not want a strong gold-mining industry. Nearly all the companies that tried to explore for gold were thwarted or held back by bureaucratic delay. Today, Stawell and Fosterville possess the only Victorian gold mines of importance. Recent attempts to revive the old Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields and work them on the large scale have so far disappointed the adventurers. Wonderful nuggets of gold are still found with the aid of metal detectors in shallow ground in central Victoria, but the year 1856 remains Victoria’s peak in annual output of gold. Early in the new century, at the national census of 2011, Geelong remained the leader amongst Victoria’s provincial cities. With 175 000 people: it was the 12th largest city in the nation. Albury– Wodonga came next with 107 000 people, followed by Ballarat with 98 000 and Bendigo with 93 000. Next on the ladder of population came the brown-coal towns of the Latrobe Valley, now classed as one urban area, with 82 000, while Mildura and Shepparton, each with about 50 000, had continued to grow even though the long drought hurt the Murray-Darling Basin in which they lay. Melbourne and its metropolis remained far ahead, passing four million and now holding 75 per cent of the state’s population. The disparity between Melbourne and any rival is as startling as it was in the 19th century, when it was discussed with amazement by statisticians in their yearbooks. A few rural districts lost population. In the wool districts of the south west and the wheatlands of the Wimmera and Mallee, nearly all the small towns were in decline. At one time a car journey of 120 miles would have passed by many little townships with their general stores and hotels, butchers and bakers, along with their churches and primary school, tennis court and football ground, and mechanics’ institutes. In 2012, however, most of these places were in decay, with only a slow-down sign on the side of the road to remind newcomers that here was once a flourishing town. In the preceding quarter-century the Wimmera and Mallee combined had declined in population. In one decade alone the West Mallee lost one-tenth of its people.

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Rural Victoria ceased to be so influential in politics, though its Country Party survived with the aid of the votes of the larger rural towns. The share of Victoria’s population in farmlands and small towns had fallen from 37 per cent in 1921 to less than 10 per cent in 2012. The dairy farmers were fewer though they milked more cows and produced six-tenths of the nation’s milk, the grain farmers were fewer but in the average year grew more wheat and barley and that new crop, canola. Rural prices tended to fall, and none fell more drastically than wool. For much of Victoria’s history the wool kings or squatters were the distinctive people with their social prestige, abundance of land, a mansion in the country and perhaps another in the city, and strong influence in the parliament, especially the upper house. In running perhaps the most efficient pastoral industry in the world, they had contributed to the economic well-being of most Victorians. Few farmers now made a high income from wool. Many of the mansions built by wool – including Como in South Yarra, Barwon Park beyond Geelong and Werribee Park – were vacated and reopened, partly as stops on the tourist trail. Wool, which since the 1870s had almost continually topped the list of Australia’s valuable exports, ceased to head the list exactly one century later. It then slipped far down the ladder, and in Victoria it is now far behind education and tourism and dairy products as a source of export income.

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Most Aboriginal people were expert observers of nature, especially those vegetables, nuts and fruits, and animals, birds and reptiles that gave them food. The Europeans followed in their shadows and at first they mainly collected, described and named. From Victoria, bags and boxes of stuffed and fossilised specimens were sent to museums in the British Isles, and living creatures made the voyage too. Melbourne built its own museum of natural history, at first in the grounds of its new university, for natural science had been one of its four inaugural chairs in 1854. Melbourne became an enthusiastic hub of natural science with its own large botanical gardens, while smaller gardens were being fenced and planted in Geelong and a dozen other towns, where imported shade trees were blended with natives. The Zoological gardens were created in Royal Park in Carlton; their aim was to bring to Victoria animals and birds which might become acclimatised as well as to keep native and foreign creatures for the public to see. Geology was high in the government’s priority, for more gold had to be discovered to stem the outflow of diggers for New Zealand and Queensland in the 1860s. Rarely in the birth of a new colony had natural history received such priority. The exploring expedition which Burke and Wills led in 1860 to the Gulf of Carpentaria was organised by a scientific society, the Royal Society of Victoria. Increasingly derided as a chaotic failure, recent research has shown that the journey enhanced the knowledge of natural history and the public collections of Melbourne. 274

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The travels of colonial botanist Baron Ferdinand von Mueller in a mere 15 years added the astonishing tally of 350 000 plant specimens to the National Herbarium in Melbourne. Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, first elaborated in 1859, provided a new framework into which flora and fauna could be fitted, and when his theory gained converts in Australia the collecting was even more exciting for natural scientists. The bush and seaside journeys by amateur members of the new Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, founded in 1880, provided a volume of new specimens. Baldwin Spencer, coming to Melbourne in 1887 from Manchester as a very young professor of biology, marvelled at ‘the excitement of those times’ for his students. Applauded by small sections of the public, Victoria created a few small national parks. The first, the volcanic crater at Tower Hill, was officially preserved in 1873, and later was given to the borough of Koroit to manage. By 1904 other national parks were created at Ferntree Gully, Wilsons Promontory, Mt Buffalo and at Bulga – a small Gippsland park prized for its mountain ash, tree ferns and lyrebirds. Together these parks occupied a tiny fraction of the area of the present parks. How to protect them and open them to tourists was almost insoluble, for money was not allocated for these purposes. Eager people collected the wonders of nature, and accumulated too many. The collecting of bird eggs was such an exiting hobby for tree-climbing schoolboys that certain species of native birds were believed to be in danger of extinction. The danger was reduced by the Gould League of Bird Lovers, formed in 1909 in Victoria with Alfred Deakin as the patron. Young members of the Gould League each had to pledge: ‘I hereby promise that I will protect native birds and will not collect their eggs’. In the next half-century tens of thousands of Gould membership certificates were displayed in kitchens and bedrooms by their young recipients. School teachers, then as now, preached the blessings of nature, and in thousands of Victorian classrooms the day began with the teacher asking the students – eagerly answered with a ‘Please Miss’ – what tidbit of nature they had seen on their way to school that morning. Melbourne was a city of little clubs and societies, much more than Sydney. In the first half of the 20th century a variety of those

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clubs worshipped or felt on familiar terms with nature. Amongst them were Save the Forests, the Ramblers, the Field Naturalists Club (founded in 1880) and even the Wallaby Club whose members, leading Melbournian men, walked in the bush at weekends in their business suits and hats. The affection for nature was nourished by journalists such as Crosbie Morrison. Born in Hawthorn in 1900, and fascinated at the age of six by grasshoppers, Morrison became by the time he was 40 the public spokesman for nature. Writing for Melbourne’s morning Argus he was enticed by Sir Keith Murdoch to write for the evening Herald and to inaugurate a program on radio station 3DB. It soon became the most influential half-hour on nature hitherto broadcast in Australia. Promptly at six on Sunday evening the recorded laugh of a kookaburra was heard, Crosbie’s pleasant voice came on air, and four of every five Melbourne radio sets tuned in at that hour were waiting to hear him talk about worms, grasshoppers and soldier beetles. Two decades later, at the invitation of the Bolte government, he took charge of the thirteen national parks, and probably would have made his mark on them but for his sudden death in 1958. Endangered flora and fauna had to be saved. This was a goal of the infant nature movement in Victoria long before there was a political green movement. The koala – a marsupial which kept her young in a pouch for the first half year but was mistakenly called a koala bear – was vulnerable because its furry skin was valuable. It slept in eucalyptus trees through the day and stirred itself for only three or four hours after darkness. It was easily hunted, caught and killed. About eight million were hunted and killed in Australia as a whole in the first half dozen years after the First World War, the death toll in Queensland being massive. In response, the Victorian government in the early 1920s began to reintroduce koalas to districts where they once had flourished. During the following half-century, the grand total of 23 000 koalas were transferred. Said to be the most thorough campaign so far conducted in any country to preserve an endangered animal, it was almost too successful. Today Victoria has the nation’s largest population of koalas, but in some districts they multiplied too rapidly and almost exhausted their food supply of

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eucalyptus leaves. On Raymond Island and French Island in eastern Victoria and in the Mt Eccles National Park in western Victoria they faced mass starvation. In the hope of curbing their birthrate, a hormone implant between the shoulder blades was devised as a contraceptive. So in Victoria there flourished a curiosity and activism towards native plants and animals long before the rise of the green crusade in the western world. Originally part of the counter culture of the late 1960s, this political crusade enlisted a fresh core of ‘dark green’ converts who injected a new intensity and marched in the streets or forest clearings if necessary. Whereas the traditional and less radical ‘light greens’ believed in economic development as well as a respect for nature, the new ‘dark greens’ usually preferred nature to economic development. By the 1970s the ‘dark greens’ predicted a succession of ecological crises: worldwide famine, a grave scarcity of energy and a barren ‘nuclear winter’ that would assuredly follow a nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union, a war which was widely feared during that decade. In Victoria the green enthusiasts fought their own wars against proposals to build new dams and to clear native bushland. They fought the logging and woodchip industries. They sat down in front of bulldozers or chained themselves to huge trees about to be sawn down. After 1990 Greens candidates were increasingly standing for parliament. In Victoria they were most numerous in the prosperous inner suburbs, and three times in the early 2000s they almost won the legislative assembly seat of Melbourne. Victoria traditionally was a haven for minority parties, and the Greens learned from the Country or National Party. Victoria’s long campaign to save the koala – imagined to be ‘cuddly’ because it was furry – was a prelude to Greens’ campaigns to save other creatures. Thus in 2007 two rope bridges were built across the Hume Highway near Longwood and Violet Town so that squirrel gliders and possums could safely visit their old breeding grounds at night, rather than cross dangerous roads busy with traffic. Possums were now protected even in Melbourne where they were already a pest. The grey-headed flying foxes were allowed to breed in the Botanical Gardens in football-crowd numbers, thus

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endangering rare or ancient trees, before an attempt was made in 2003 to evict them to strips of bushland on the riverbanks in Kew. ‘Dark greens’ opposed the decision to evict them. The common dingo was declared to be a threatened species in October 2010. Even venomous snakes were singled out for protection. Those seen sometimes in the wild in suburban Melbourne are tiger, brown and copperhead snakes, and occasionally the redbellied black snake. When the Yarra was more prone to flooding than it is today, many snakes were swept downstream, finally going ashore at Bulleen, North Balwyn and Ivanhoe, where they hid in such numbers that in the succeeding summer the local veterinary clinics had to treat numerous pet cats and dogs for snake-bite. Much later, after the snakes in suburban Melbourne became less plentiful, the Australian Greens persuaded the government to protect them. Now it was illegal to kill a snake unless the citizen possessed an entitling licence. A law preventing people from killing a snake would have been dismissed as nonsensical or even criminally negligent in 1900 when so many rural children lived and played close to swamps or fallen logs where snakes might be concealed. Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ summed up that deep-seated, traditional fear of Australians towards snakes. The wife was in her lonely bush cottage, with her four ‘ragged, dried-up-looking children’, when suddenly one of the boys yelled that he had just seen a snake. From that instant the fear and tension of the mother dominates Lawson’s story. Debates on these environmental topics, and the intense emotions they aroused, were like the old religious disputes. In the early 2000s these debates ranged from the private car versus public transport, to wind farms versus brown-coal power stations. There were disputes on whether water should be released from the Snowy hydroelectric scheme in order to flush out the lower reaches of the Snowy River – a crucial seat in parliament hinged on this decision. For more than a year, the Bracks government pondered whether a deep channel should be dredged in Port Phillip Bay to allow larger cargo and container ships to reach Melbourne, the largest container port in the continent. To the dredging, the more ardent greens said ‘no’. In the end, after a long investigation into the

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marine life that might be disturbed or harmed, the channel was dredged. A sign of the spreading influence of the green ideology in the last two decades of the 20th century was the reluctance to build new dams or enlarge old ones. In contrast the years 1945–80 had been marked by the building at high expense of the Eildon, Thomson, Mokoan, Rocklands, Eppalock, Dartmouth and other large dams, in which all political parties felt pride. The tallest and the last of the high dam walls, Dartmouth on the Mitta Mitta River, was completed by Victoria on behalf of three states in 1979. Thereafter Victoria turned more to rationing rather than damming water. The fact was that the rural interests, and they were the main consumers of Victorian water, had ceased to be so influential. The urban-based green movement, which often opposed rural development and new dams, had never been so influential. The grazing of cattle in the Victorian alps provoked one of the fiercest controversies. Whereas in Switzerland each year, just after the snow melted, many residents saw the cattle, their bells clanking, being driven up to the green mountain pastures, in Victoria the same trek of the cattle and the horsemen was observed by few people. Dale Collins, a London journalist revisiting Victoria, saw the outcome of such a journey in 1951. Sitting in the shade of the white-trunked snow gums he marvelled at the soaring ranges and mountains, ‘misty and blue in the heat haze’, and he was surprised to find here and there small mobs of white-faced Hereford cattle, eating the snow grass, which was still green at the height of summer. The cattle, he said, ‘stared at us in mild surprise’. Three decades later, the attempt was made to ban cattle from the alps. Instead, an alpine national park was created, and cattle temporarily were allowed to graze there in the summer. In 2005 the Bracks government resolved to evict the cattle. It pointed out that the alps were the source of many of Victoria’s and Australia’s great rivers. Here were twenty-five species of endangered plants and seven species of endangered native animals. Especially prized were the alpine moss beds and other plants that flourished in the snow patches. In the words of John Thwaites, minister for the environment: ‘Cattle trample stream banks and fragile moss beds

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and springs, they threaten the survival of rare plants and animals, and they spread weeds. They reduce what should be magnificent wildflower displays and spoil the amenity of the park for visitors through their cow droppings.’ The conclusion of Thwaites was simple: ‘this is not what a national park should be’. The government hoped that the income lost through the expulsion of the mountain cattle would be recouped by a surge of mountain tourism. Money was promised for a smoother road over the Bogong High Plains, thus encouraging tourists to see the summer wildflowers, which, it was argued, would be rejuvenated by the absence of cattle hooves. This argument the cattlemen did not accept for one moment. They knew that samba deer and wild horses, feral pigs and other exotic animals were in the national park, the year around, and probably outnumbered the cattle, which were there only for the summer. The mountain cattlemen believed that they were being victimised. Cattlemen had been using the high country since the 1830s; they had been the guides for early gold prospectors and for the later surveyors who planned the first hydroelectric schemes. They had helped the early skiers before snow resorts existed. Proud of their pioneering tradition, they pointed out that their forebears had inspired ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s celebrated ballad ‘The Man from Snowy River’. They claimed that their traditions went even deeper and that they employed fire much as the Aboriginal people had constructively used it. Graeme Stoney, a member of the legislative council, explained in a moving speech on 16 June 2005 that he had been in the alps on horseback when he was ‘just a whippersnapper’ and that he had noticed, at the end of the season, an old cattleman ‘flicking matches backwards off his horse’ so that the dry grass would burn. A year later he noticed that the fire had made the new grasses more edible for the cattle. In addition the wildflowers in the burnt area were ‘unbelievable’. The debate rushed to and fro, like a bushfire, singeing the opponents’ home ground and then igniting the government’s. In the end the cattle were expelled, but the debate did not end. As most environmental debates are fought by groups or political parties whose values and goals are totally different, they do not end easily. In 2010 Baillieu’s new Liberal government set to work to abolish

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the ban on grazing cattle, but the Labor government in Canberra disagreed. Water spurred the most intense debate. Since 1835, Victoria has experienced severe fluctuations in climate. From the late 1840s to about 1894 the typical year received adequate rain. Then came the Federation Drought, which ushered in a relatively dry period that continued for about half a century – until the end of the Second World War. The rise and reign of the radical Country Party in Victoria was partly an effect of those dry rural conditions. How arid Victoria had become during that half-century was emphasised in a report by the brilliant but now forgotten Committee on Climate Change, chaired by Dr C. H. B. Priestley for the Australian Academy of Science, and published in 1976. The same committee reported on the next somersault in Victoria’s climate. In the late 1940s began a decidedly wetter period, punctuated by only a few short and severe dry phases. The transition can be read in the rainfall records of the town of Seymour, which sits near the Goulburn River on the railway and highway between Melbourne and Sydney. It had experienced, by one definition, 21 very dry years between 1895 and 1945. In the next half-century the climate reversed. Seymour had only six very dry years and numerous years of abundant rainfall. Scores of other Victorian towns shared that experience. By 1996, though almost nobody in Victoria could realise the sad truth, a new dry period was about to begin. It was to continue for a dozen years. Whether it soon will resume is a question widely debated. This latest drought hurt farmers and drove many from the land. It devastated some of the small country towns and led to rising rural debts. The scarcity of water – and the way it was rationed – was damaging to social as well as economic life. In cities and suburbs the restrictions on watering private gardens became severe. Ballarat suffered from the shrinking of its picturesque lake, surrounded by deciduous trees – the most English of sights. The rowing races in the Olympic Games had been held here in November 1956 but in 2004 and thereafter it was so shallow that the local schools’ Head of the Lake race had to be moved to distant waterways. Larger nearby lakes, Burrumbeet and Learmonth, could be walked across. Lake Bolac, near Ararat, had so shrunk that dead eels were

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rotting on the receding shore. On the Murray River, the huge Hume Weir, enlarged in 1961, held so little water that the enlargement seemed a waste. The Eildon reservoir, its waters vital for irrigation and its deep inlets favoured for holiday homes, receded far from the boat ramps, caravan parks and houses. In many districts the farmers planted an annual crop, and many did not reap enough grain to replace the seed they had planted. But the death of Victorian sheep and cattle was far below the losses counted during the Federation Drought. In the early 2000s there was mounting gloom as the drought persisted in most regions of the continent. A climate ‘summit’ in Canberra late in 2006 heard from one expert that it was the kind of drought that came once in a thousand years. Such guesswork should have been disputed or demolished by experts: nearly all preferred to be silent. The Labor government, just when Steve Bracks was about to give way to John Brumby as premier, had already decided to prepare for the worst. It resolved to build a north–south pipeline along which water, if urgently needed, could be pumped from the Goulburn River to Melbourne. It also decided in June 2007 to build at high expense a desalination works that would be much larger than those opened in the previous year at Kwinana in Western Australia. The fresh water extracted from the sea would be very expensive but in a long drought it could be vital. The desalination site, finally announced in January 2008, was a pretty beach of yellow sand and a low foreshore near the old coal-mining town of Wonthaggi. While the Greens Party and its supporters organised long vigils and rallies in protest, official scientists began to investigate whether the new works would harm the environment. In their 1600-page report they warned that the works would hurt but not gravely endanger the habitats of several vulnerable species ‘including the orange-bellied parrot, the growling grass frog and the giant Gippsland earthworm’. The particular earthworm and parrot were familiar, at least by name, to many Victorians, but the growling grass frog was a novelty. The male frogs, which are smaller than the females, make a call, described by some observers as a long growl punctuated by short grunts. These rare frogs, it was believed, had

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been in decline since the 1980s and might be affected by the new works. The desalination plant would be a massive user of fuel, and so would contribute in theory far more to global warming than would a new dam: but this argument was already lost. So the difficult decision was made, and the works were commenced near the sea, at Wonthaggi. The cost quietly soared beyond the estimates. The sheer size of the desalination plant and the high cost of operating it – or even keeping it idle – was a reflection of the government’s pessimism and, not least, its scientific advisers who believed that through manmade activities the climate was changing, perhaps, forever. Whether their financial and ecological advisers were correct will probably not be known for decades. Meanwhile, the long years of drought increased the danger of bushfires raging out of control. It is fair to say that the ‘dark green’ ideology increased the risk. The frequent refusal to cut down trees and clear away scrub near houses and on roadsides accentuated the risk that houses would be destroyed and lives lost in the event of a bushfire. Likewise a reluctance, before summer arrived, to burn deliberately the excessive layer of debris and bark and fallen branches on the floor of bushland and dense forest meant that an abnormal collection of dry fuel was waiting to intensify any bushfire that arrived. Victoria had endured a long history of terrible bushfires. Lessons had been offered, but not learned. One lesson was that people living near inflammable bush and forest must protect the vicinity of their own house, and remove native vegetation which was inflammable. Now many of these inhabitants were officially prevented, by municipal or state officials, from removing tinder-dry debris and trees. And if their house did catch alight during a bushfire their chances of escaping by car were lessened because the uncleared or unburned debris on the sides of the country roads leading to safety were also blazing fiercely. It is now recognised belatedly that large numbers of house owners should never have received an original building permit, so close were they to a forest prone to bushfires. Furthermore, for the inhabitants of townships surrounded by inflammable forest, a fireproof place of retreat was necessary. Not one retreat existed. Some of these

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important lessons had been set down on paper by the Stretton royal commission, which investigated the deadly Black Friday bushfires of 1939. Those lessons had largely been forgotten. In the first weeks of 2009, Victoria suffered from freakishly hot weather. Saturday 7 February was predicted to be exceptionally hot and windy too. The prediction was correct, and Melbourne’s temperature soared in the afternoon to 46.4 degrees Celsius. While that was certified as an all-time record, it is difficult to compare today’s recorded temperatures with those of the 19th century, when methods of measurement were less accurate. Certainly across most regions of Victoria the heat in the afternoon of 7 February was intense. More and more bushfires were reported as the day went on. They fanned from the Beechworth district to Wilsons Promontory. Fresh fires, breaking out on or near the Dividing Range, were propelled by the furnace-like wind, and in the late afternoon a change in the wind’s direction carried burning strips of bark long distances, thus extending the fires. The most dangerous fire began at Kilmore East, close to the Melbourne–Sydney highway and railway. It burned so fiercely and spread with such speed that it caused 119 deaths. In all, 173 Victorians were burned to death by bushfires in the first half of February 2009. Many victims were children; others were old and disabled. For months it was reported to be the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history, though the loss of life did not match the lives lost in several forgotten shipwrecks. Even so, 2133 houses were burned, and eventually the damage to property was estimated to be $4 billion. A royal commission, led by Mr Justice Bernard Teague, concluded that politicians, civil servants and citizens were insufficiently prepared to face such a fire, despite Victoria’s long experience of major bushfires. Here was one of the most vulnerable regions in the world, but after each deadly fire a mood of complacency and amnesia slowly set in. The bureaucracy itself was often tied up by its own red tape. Politicians when in power failed to cut the tape. Thus no supreme authority had been appointed to be totally in charge on days of acute fire danger. Special water-carrying aircraft were vital in discovering and initially fighting bushfires, especially

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while the flames were not yet fierce, but three layers of bureaucracy had to give their approval before an aircraft could set out to reach a bushfire. The regional and central telephone systems used by the police force were not compatible. The state-wide electricity network was not policed adequately, and tree branches fell on major electricity lines and started several of the deadliest fires. Inside the report of the royal commission one verdict was sobering. Of every thirty bushfires burning in Victoria in a typical year, probably ten of them were ‘lit by people acting with mischievous or criminal intent’. Amongst the fatal fires of February 2009, one in Gippsland was deliberately lit. The arsonist was tried, found guilty and imprisoned. These bushfires almost marked the end of the long drought. Late in 2009 the drought showed signs of breaking. The following year was wet in most of Victoria. Early in the following year, 2011, several districts suffered from unprecedented floods, and the farms in one shire alone lost so much fencing that it was equal to one long fence stretching from Bendigo to Perth. Together 2010 and 2011 were years of unusually heavy rainfall. At Wonthaggi the ground on which the big desalination works were arising was so sodden that trucks were bogged and work delayed. The first desalinated drinking water was finally produced in September 2012, by which time most of the dams serving Melbourne were full and, in sum total, the water was at its highest level for 15 years. Whether the last two and a half years in Victoria – and eastern Australia in general – prove to be a brief wet phase in a very long dry period we cannot tell. How future Victorians will view this period of climate history we do not know. Without entering the complicated controversy about the main cause of global warming, it is probably safe, at the time of writing, to draw these conclusions about Victoria. The recent drought in the very end proved to be drier and probably hotter than the Federation Drought. During the recent drought the total of about two years’ annual rainfall was not received: in contrast Victoria’s loss of rain in the Federation Drought was less. The recent drought ended much more decisively, and most of the missing rainfall was recouped in the space of two years. In contrast the Federation Drought was traditionally said to have ended in 1903, with one year of high rainfall, but it not only continued on

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and off for another five years but also ushered in four decades of inadequate rainfall. Of the two droughts, the Federation Drought was more dislocating to the economy and to the standard of living of the people: it severely bruised an economy far more reliant on wool and agriculture. In all these debates about drought and bushfires and conservation there was usually a middle ground. Both sides did agree that since the coming of the Europeans the cover of trees had retreated in more than half of Victoria; rivers had silted more rapidly than in the long past; and salt had accumulated on the surface of the irrigated plains. The flowery pastures which Major Mitchell crossed had often given way to the nutritious imported grasses, and the winds blowing across the bare wheatlands had sometimes sprinkled their red dust onto the snows of New Zealand. In a century and a half, at least eighteen Victorian land mammals and two native birds have completely disappeared, and seven other vertebrates, including the trout cod and the brush-tailed rock wallaby, are endangered. Until about 1980 we did not know that one endangered species, the long-footed potoroo of east Gippsland, even existed. On the other hand, in the new concern for nature, it was overlooked that many native species – the kangaroos amongst them – now flourish more than in Aboriginal times. It was easy to see how nature had been despoiled. It was easy to see how Aboriginal people had suffered. It was forgotten how much human beings in general had gained from the strenuous economic development pursued in Victoria in the pastoral era; in the gold rushes and in the railway era; in the rise of the dry-country wheatfields and the wet-country dairy farms; in discovering and exploiting brown coal in Gippsland and the gas and oil offshore; and in scientific research. Through ingenuity Victoria now supports perhaps 300 times as many people as it supported in Aboriginal times. Moreover, it feeds, clothes and warms tens of millions of people in other lands. Here, in a brief time, has been repeated one of the main themes of modern history: how ingenuity has enabled so many to live where once lived so few.

18 A Bulging City

In the first decade of the new century Melbourne’s population grew by more than 650 000. In those 10 years, from 2001 to 2011, it gained even more people than it had added in the eighty years between its founding in 1835 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. For a large, traditional city to grow by almost 20 per cent in one decade was surprising. Here too was one of those unusual periods when Melbourne grew much faster than Sydney. Its population was numbered at 4 137 000 on census night in August 2011, and if it was to grow at the same relative pace it might overtake Sydney before the year 2050. Part of Melbourne’s attraction, compared to Sydney’s, was cheaper housing. Moreover, Melbourne was hemmed in less by rugged ranges, and so had room for easy expansion. For long Sydney’s notable assets had been geography, and especially the wonderful harbour, but now most Sydney people lived far from the opera house and harbour bridge and rarely saw them except on television. A new spearhead of Melbourne’s expansion was the western volcanic plains. While the suburban city of Casey in the east was the largest of all the municipalities with 250 000 people, and still growing, Melton and Sunbury and others in the west were expanding too. At the 2011 census the fastest-growing municipality in the metropolis during the preceding decade was the western city of Wyndham, which grew at more than 50 per cent. Its hub, Werribee, was long remembered as the home of large egg farms, market gardens, and also a quiet stopping place on the road from Melbourne to Geelong. 287

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Many motorists halted here on Saturday night to buy a take-away meal. While they watched and waited, fish and chips were fried, sprinkled with salt from a large tin and wrapped in newspaper: and so the journey was resumed. Now Werribee and newer far-western suburbs were permanent stopping places for several hundred thousand newcomers. While most Victorians had heard of Point Cook, and many had passed by the huge outer fence of Caroline Springs on their way to Ballarat, the whereabouts of one of the fastest-growing western suburbs, Tarnelt, was a mystery to most. Close to the Princes Highway and not too far from the Werribee Islamic College and the Thomas Carr Catholic College – so the property-developers claimed – as well as the new Sikh temple, this new suburb on the plains offered that rare attraction of large building blocks only 25 kilometres west of Melbourne. The pinpointed centre of the metropolis, which for long was moving easterly towards the Dandenong Ranges and the Mornington Peninsula, was being tugged back by the fast growth of western and northern suburbs. In June 2011 the very centre of the metropolis was recalculated and found not to be near Mt Waverley but to be in Glen Iris, just west of the Monash Freeway. Avenues of Californian bungalows built mainly in the 1930s, and not houses of the 1960s, had became the true centre of Melbourne and its suburbs. Melbourne municipality, extending from Kensington to East Melbourne and from Carlton to South Yarra, now grew more rapidly than the surrounding suburbs. On the western perimeter of the city’s business district arose an irregular wall of tall buildings extending from South Bank round to Docklands. As late as 1990 the tallest buildings at the western end of the city, towards Spencer Street, possessed a commanding view of the port and the bay lying in the west. Now the same view was interrupted again and again by the new skyscrapers, many standing on land which had been swamp or warehouses during much of the city’s history. Many new and old buildings held tiny apartments which housed international students. Higher education was becoming the biggest single industry in the inner city. At one time city apartments had been frowned upon, but such was their increase since 1995 that they now constituted four of every five dwellings in the Melbourne municipality.

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Docklands was a favoured haven for new city dwellers. Here was opened in 2000 the middle-sized football stadium, at first called Colonial and later called Telstra and even later called Etihad. Nearby in 2006 arose the new Spencer Street railway station with its undulating glass roof and its grandiose but vague name of Southern Cross station. There was something to be said for the old rule that a name of a station should indicate where exactly it was, rather than the airy declaration that it was somewhere in the southern hemisphere. In adjacent Southbank, on the long-neglected south side of the river, the clusters of tall buildings included Crown Casino and, in 2006, the anorexic, horizontally striped Eureka Tower. Resembling an over-stretched Geelong guernsey, Eureka was said to be the tallest residential block in the world. At both Southbank and Docklands, the towering buildings and the sparseness of trees and parklands created a slightly overpowering atmosphere, which the presence of calm water in the adjacent river and the old docks did not dispel. Southbank as a place of riverside restaurants hoped to rival Lygon Street in Carlton. Between 1994 and 2004 the revival of what was now called the ‘central business district’ was startling. Restaurants, cafes and bars had increased by three times, the apartments by eight times. Alleyways and lanes which once were the passageways for walkers and a few delivery trucks were attracting little shops and especially places where people dropped in for a coffee. The fast increase in Melbourne’s city and suburban population after the year 2000 came mainly from permanent Asian migrants. In the previous quarter-century, Sydney had usually been the goal for the main groups of Asian migrants, except for the Vietnamese, but now more and more Asians tended to prefer Melbourne. In the five years ending in 2011, half of the immigrants reaching Victoria came from China and India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, and most were skilled and found jobs with ease. The taxi ranks reflected the change: at least half of their new drivers came from the Punjab. A city growing so fast could barely cope with the traffic it generated. In 2009 for the first time the motor vehicles in Victoria passed four million, and most were in Melbourne where they jammed the roads and freeways at peak hours. In the early 2000s there was

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a swift swing to public transport. Miraculously, Melbourne was one of the few cities in the world which had retained an extensive system of trams. Beginning as cable trams in the boom years of 1886–91, and later electrified and extended, they were in danger of being dismantled in the 1950s, for the new regiments of motorists complained that trams were often blocking the streets and slowing traffic. More people turned from trams to their own cars, and in Melbourne between 1950 and 1970 tramway journeys declined from 263 to 133 million a year. Meanwhile, in 1949, a Queenslander, Major General Robert Risson, had taken charge of Melbourne trams, and he insisted that they were far superior to motor vehicles in quickly moving crowds. The eleven important football grounds in Melbourne were on or near tramlines, and spectators knew how quickly a procession of trams could disperse a crowd on Saturday afternoons in winter. Only in Melbourne and in communist countries – where private cars were few – did the world’s very large networks of trams prosper. By the 1980s the largest surviving networks were in three Russian cities – St Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev – and in Bucharest in Romania and in Melbourne. The survival of Melbourne’s trams was an asset when public transport at last returned to favour. Today in many city streets, the trams have precedence over motor transport, and traffic lights beckon trams ahead. Other enthusiasts vowed that the revival of the bicycle was the answer to traffic congestion in the streets of inner Melbourne. Before the motor car became popular, tens of thousands of factory workers rode to work, and at certain times of day the streets of West Geelong and Footscray and other industrial areas were thick with cyclists. Students often rode to school. In 1940 far more Victorian families owned a bicycle than owned a car. Half a century later the bicycles, though defenceless in the face of erratic cars and trucks, were multiplying again. To foster safety the Cain government in July 1990 enacted a sensible but unpopular law compelling the wearing of a bike helmet. The injuries did not decline as much as anticipated. Bicycles were aided by fashion and tradition. For more than a century, cycling in Victoria had been glamorous as a sport, and that placed a premium on ordinary cycling. Few other parts of the world were the home of so many celebrated sporting cyclists. In 1939 on

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the open roads in France, Hubert Opperman on his Malvern Star rode a distance of 503 miles in 24 hours – a world record, and in the town of Rochester today a statue stands in his honour. In 2011 Cadel Evans of Barwon Heads became the first Australian cyclist to win the Tour de France. But the fate of another world champion, Russell Mockridge of Geelong, was a lasting warning that the open road was hazardous. Winner of two Olympic gold medals at Helsinki on the same afternoon in 1952, he was killed six years later when his racing cycle collided with a bus on the road to Dandenong. The Australian Greens and its supporters, upholding the bicycle as an enemy of pollution and a friend of fitness, became an advocate for more cycling paths running through parklands to the city and for the assigning of sections of roads solely to cyclists. By 2012 they had achieved much. Whether Melbourne would effectively imitate flat Amsterdam and Copenhagen, those hill-less cities dedicated to ‘the bike’, remained to be seen. The unmistakeable fact was that the private car or utility continued to be vital. In those newest suburbs, where buses were few and the nearest railway and tramline seemed far away, most families had no alternative but to own one car or even two. The fast growth of population, especially since 2004, created a traffic crisis. Suburban trains and trams – the main carriers – could not quite cope. Melbourne’s trains at peak hour began to resemble Tokyo’s. At breakfast hours, radio stations broadcast frequent halts or slowdowns on the Westgate Bridge and the key freeways. Nothing did more to end the 11-year reign of Labor, under Steve Bracks and John Brumby, than transport and traffic. On the eve of the state election in 2010 Ted Baillieu as leader of the Liberal–National coalition announced that if elected he would quickly acquire forty new trains each of six carriages, build new stations, and place security officers on suburban stations so that passengers felt safe at night. He won the election, with the help of bayside electorates where few tramlines existed or peak trains were crowded. Ted Baillieu had to listen to the pleas for new roads as well as new trains. In the Spring of 2012, thirteen holes were being drilled beneath North Fitzroy, Carlton cemetery and the Royal Park from which Burke and Wills and their camels set out to cross the

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continent. The drill would determine whether a road tunnel through volcanic rock could link suburbs in the inner east and west. Meanwhile road traffic would grow, and parking space would be scarcer. It was only in 1955 that the first parking meter had been installed in Melbourne. Now they stand in their silent thousands in suburbs far from the city, while in the hub of the city the off-street car parks probably occupy a larger area of ground than all shops, theatres, hotels, churches, restaurants, supermarkets and petrol stations combined. Compared to European cities, suburban Melbourne still seemed spacious and uncrowded. An unexpected advertisement was a television soap opera. Called Neighbours, it was first shown on 18 March 1985 and did not initially attract a nationwide audience. A homely story of a Melbourne suburban neighbourhood it was in the tradition of Coronation Street in north England and the East Enders in London but upmarket and middle class. Amongst television viewers in western Europe the series gained increasing popularity from its cheerful depiction of Melbourne suburbia, the neat gardens surrounding each single-storey house, and the emphasis on teenage as well as family life. In Britain, a nation accustomed to soap operas, Neighbours became the most popular of all daytime programs with a following of six million by 2001. Crowds of backpackers visiting Melbourne longed to see where these television families actually lived. The suburban cul de sac where the series was regularly filmed became an international tourist venue. On each weekday, foreign tourists join guided tours to the curving footpaths of what they know as Ramsey Street in a suburb they call Erinsborough: but the street’s real name is Pin Oak Court, which is in Vermont South, a leafy suburb within sight of the Dandenong Ranges. As Melbourne’s population has changed, so has the nationality of families taking part in the drama: in 2012, after more than 6000 episodes had been televised, an Indian-Sri Lankan family joined the cast. The way of life in the bulging heart of Melbourne and the spreading suburbs remained more pleasing and liveable than many of the critics could appreciate. In the opinion of judges from the outside world they formed an outstanding metropolis. In the early 2000s, around the globe, a team from The Economist examined about

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130 cities, measuring them by such criteria as health, safety, culture, the environment, the incidence of crime and the strength of infrastructure. The result was that Melbourne was reportedly acclaimed as the most liveable city in the world. The news was hailed with a smidgeon more exultation than was justified, for the award was actually shared. Melbourne was ranked equal with Vancouver in October 2002, and equal with Vancouver and Vienna in February 2004. This was high praise. At the bottom of the list were poor, fast-growing cities such as Lagos in West Africa, Karachi in Pakistan and Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. A gigantic city of the third world had no chance of winning the award, while the big western cities such as New York and London and Paris – almost overwhelmed by their own size – had little chance of appearing in the top ten: London, the home of The Economist, was actually ranked in the forties. The prospect of winning such an award was probably highest in cities of, say, half a million or two million people; they were more manageable. That Melbourne, with a population of four million, was ranked more favourably than much smaller competitors such as Geneva, Vienna, Zurich and Perth was a cause for celebration. Alas, in October 2005 Vancouver was placed on top, on its own. That news was slow to reach Melbourne, which continued to exult that it was the world’s most liveable city. Within six years Melbourne was again declared officially to be the most livable city, just ahead of Vienna and Vancouver. The lord mayor, Robert Doyle, thought Melbourne, compared to other liveable cities, deserved high praise for its parks and gardens, cultural amenities and restaurants, but the official judges also praised the health care and education – facilities that were often criticised in public discussions within the city. Meanwhile town planners envisaged a Melbourne with 10 million people in the year 2100, and wondered whether it would still be a most liveable city. Victoria remains the oddity amongst the Australian states. It occupies only 3 per cent of the area of the nation but holds about 25 per cent of the population. While Australia as a whole is one of the most sparsely settled places anywhere, Victoria is closely settled by the standards of many large regions of the world, a fact which is known to few Victorians. Though much of it consists of mountain

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ranges with few roads and few houses, or wide plains with only a sprinkling of farmers, the state as a whole is settled closely. The density of population in Victoria exceeds that of Brazil and Argentina and most other countries of South America: Victoria is more crowded than Russia. Measured against Europe, Victoria is not populous but at least it is peopled more thickly than Sweden or Norway. In Africa, some of the countries that we imagine as crowded – Sudan, Niger, Botswana, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – are less so than Victoria. Many of the states of the USA are thinly settled compared to Victoria. Asia of course is far more crowded but not uniformly so: Mongolia is far more sparsely populated than Victoria. Of the six Australian states, Victoria alone has any claim to closer or denser settlement. To be a large state, and to possess vast spaces in which lie untapped resources, has long been an advantage. Ultimately, Queensland and Western Australia, after a slow start, gained much of their economic zest from that advantage, and still benefit from it. In contrast Victoria, after a flying start, suffered from its smallness. But size of territory, as the 21st century advances, may cease to be so important. The knowledge industries and the health and other services, rather than the primary and secondary industries, increasingly drive most of the world’s economic engines. Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Holland, Ireland and other nations show that to be small in area is not necessarily an economic disadvantage.

SHORT CHRONOLOGY OF VICTORIAN HISTORY

17 000 years ago: Victoria and Tasmania were one land. Bass Strait did not exist. Aboriginal people occupied most of the country from the Murray River to the Derwent and also the icy mountains of Tasmania. 10 000 years ago: Rising seas, the result of global warming, completely cut off Victoria from Tasmania. 6000–7000 years ago: A volcano erupted at Tower Hill, near Warrnambool. 1770: Captain Cook in his ship Endeavour sighted the east Victorian coast. 1788: Governor Phillip and the first fleet entered Sydney harbour. The large territory governed by Phillip included Victoria. 1803: Short-lived British settlement of marines and convicts established at Sorrento, near Port Phillip Heads. 1834: Portland in western Victoria settled by the Hentys, who caught whales and pastured livestock. 1835: Village of Melbourne founded by northern Tasmanian adventurers. 1838: John Hepburn, a squatter, set out from Canberra district with three horses, eighteen bullocks and 1650 sheep, and eventually settled north of Ballarat. 295

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1851: The Port Phillip district separated from New South Wales to become the colony of Victoria. Rich shallow gold discovered at Clunes, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Bendigo and other parts of central Victoria. 1852: The first gold seekers from the British Isles poured into Melbourne. 1854: Gold miners erected Eureka Stockade in Ballarat and flew the republican flag, the Southern Cross, as an act of rebellion. 1856: Democracy reached Victoria, the parliament being elected by secret ballot. Famous public library (now State Library of Victoria) opened in Melbourne. Peak year of gold output in Victoria. 1857: Clashes between European and Chinese miners at Ararat and Buckland River. 1858: Birth of what was then called Victorian Rules football in Yarra Park in East Melbourne. 1859: Victoria’s population (71 000 in December 1850) passes half a million. 1861: Death of the Victorian explorers Burke and Wills; first bridge across Murray at Albury; running of first Melbourne Cup, though the consecration of the first Tuesday in November had to wait until 1875. 1864: Australia’s first long railway, Melbourne to Bendigo and beyond, reached the river port of Echuca. 1865: First woollen mill in Victoria built at Geelong. 1866: Political crisis in Victoria provoked by introduction of protective tariff on imported goods. 1869: Huge gold nugget, named ‘Welcome Stranger’, found near Dunolly. 1870: Adam Lindsay Gordon, poet who enthroned the wattle, committed suicide at Brighton.

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1873: All Victorian children over the age of six compelled to attend school. No fees charged except for needlework. 1874: Opening of new Scots Church: its spire was for long the tallest structure in Melbourne. 1877: First ‘Test’ cricket match, between Australia and England, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). 1880: Ned Kelly, the last of the major bushrangers, captured at Glenrowan. Australia’s first telephone exchange began in Melbourne. Opening of Exhibition Building. 1883: The first woman graduated from an Australian university: Bella Guerin from Melbourne University. First railway (‘please change trains at the border’) linked Melbourne and Sydney. 1887: Railway linked Melbourne and Adelaide through Serviceton and Bordertown. 1888: Three young men, Streeton and Roberts and Conder, painting at Heidelberg – Streeton painted his Golden Summer. 1891: St Paul’s cathedral, without the towers and spires, was opened. Melbourne’s population almost reached half a million – more than Los Angeles, Birmingham and many other celebrated cities of the northern hemisphere. 1893: Major Victorian banks closed their doors for many weeks, inaugurating a long economic crisis. 1897: In Melbourne, Henry Austin built a motor car, driven by the new internal combustion engine: his most famous cars were to be built in England. 1901: First Commonwealth parliament met in Melbourne, which remained the federal capital until 1927. 1902: Nellie Melba returned to perform in Melbourne, having become a famous opera singer. Worst year in Victoria’s long Federation Drought. 1903: Railway reached Mildura, one of few large towns previously lacking a railway.

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1908: Death of David Syme, owner of the Age when it was the most influential paper in Australia. 1911: Sidney Myer, from Bendigo, set up emporium in Melbourne. 1912: Victoria, with nearly 10 000 motor vehicles, created the Country Roads Board to transform the state’s roads and tracks. 1913: Victoria Quartz company’s shaft at Bendigo went down vertically for more than 4600 feet. 1914: First World War began: the peace was signed in 1918. 1920: Keith Murdoch became editor of the Herald. 1924: Electricity generated from brown coal in Latrobe Valley was transmitted to Melbourne. The valley slowly became the power house of Victoria, which hitherto relied mainly on local firewood and on black coal shipped from New South Wales. 1927: Canberra replaced Melbourne as federal capital city, and Victoria’s own parliament was able to move back from the Exhibition Building to its old parliament house. ACTU (Australasian Council of Trade Unions) formed in Melbourne. 1930: For the first time Victorians were connected to London by regular radio telephone and to Perth by landline telephone. 1931: The world depression deepened, and one-quarter of the Victorian workforce was unemployed. 1933: Lady Peacock, representing the old gold electorate of Allendale, became the first Victorian woman to sit in a parliament. 1935: Albert Dunstan and his Country Party commenced a 10-year reign in Victoria, initially with Labor as their ally. 1939: Bushfires of Black Friday. Spires at St Patrick’s Cathedral completed. The Wirraway, the first of a long line of military aircraft, was manufactured at Port Melbourne. 1942: In this perilous phase of the Second World War, soon after the Japanese raids on Darwin, air-raid trenches were dug in hundreds of Victorian public gardens and school grounds.

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1947: Large-scale immigration began from Europe, being sponsored by the federal member for Melbourne A. A. Calwell. Two years later he coined the term ‘New Australian’. 1948: The all-Australian car, the Holden, manufactured at Port Melbourne. 1949: The Victorian barrister Robert Gordon Menzies began a record term as prime minister, stepping down in 1966. 1950: End of petrol and tea rationing imposed during the Second World War. 1955: Henry Bolte, a farmer, began a record term as premier, finally stepping down in 1972. 1956: Olympic Games opened at the MCG, confirming the city as the sporting capital of the nation. The first television station transmitted in black and white. 1960: Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Gippsland-born Macfarlane Burnet, most of whose research had been conducted in Victoria. 1962: Housing Commission built 16-storey block of apartments in South Melbourne, the first of many in the inner suburbs. 1966: Repeal of 50-year-old law compulsorily closing all hotel bars at 6 p.m. Decimal currency launched. 1970: Opening of Tullamarine airport and freeway. 1972: Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam announced plans to boost economic growth in Albury and Wodonga which, combined, soon outgrew all but two cities in Victoria. 1976: The Victorian Aboriginal man, Pastor Doug Nicholls, became the governor of South Australia. 1978: Opening of West Gate Bridge: while under construction in 1970 it had collapsed. 1979: Dartmouth dam on the Mitta Mitta River, the last big dam built in Victoria.

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1982: Sydney Swans, alias South Melbourne, was the first interstate football club to enter the main Australian league. 1983: The bushfires of Ash Wednesday, 16 February. 1986: Car bomb exploded outside police headquarters in Russell Street, injuring twenty and fatally wounding a policewoman. 1988: National Tennis Centre, now called Melbourne Park, opened near MCG. 1990: Collapse of State Bank of Victoria and Geelong’s Pyramid Building Society, leading to severe recession in Victoria and the resignation of John Cain, so far the longest-serving Labor premier. Joan Kirner became first woman to lead Victoria. 1994: Docklands mini-city project commenced. 1997: Crown Entertainment Complex opened on Southbank. 1998: Victoria, revived by Jeff Kennett as premier, attracted a net gain of migrants from other states for the first time in 26 years. First of a long chain of gangland murders in Melbourne. 2001: Centenary of federation: the federal parliament met in Melbourne for the first time since Canberra became the capital city. 2002: Opening of Federation Square, including the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria. 2005: Victoria’s population passed five million, having grown from two million in 1947. 2006: Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne. New voting system for legislative council. World’s tallest residential tower, the Eureka, completed at Southbank. 2009: Fierce bushfires of Black Saturday, 7 February. Final year of long Victorian drought – the worst since records began. Muslim extremists who had plotted an act of terrorism at the MCG at the 2005 Grand Final were convicted. 2010: Labor’s longest reign – 11 years under Steve Bracks and then John Brumby – ended by election victory of Ted Baillieu and his

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Liberal–National coalition. Mary MacKillop, born in Fitzroy in 1842, became first Australian to be proclaimed a saint. 2012: Census reveals that in recent years the Chinese and Indians became Victoria’s main immigrant groups. Desalination works at Wonthaggi completed. 2013: Freeways network extended, allowing motorists to go from several western suburbs to Mornington Peninsula without confronting a traffic light. In heart of city the east–west road and rail tunnels were on the drawing board. Ted Baillieu resigned, and his Liberal colleague Denis Napthine became premier; for the first time since 1972 a member of a non-Melbourne electorate is premier.

SOURCES

The notes below list my main sources of information. The many statistics used will be easily found in the annual Victorian Year Book, first published in 1874, or in the Statistical Register or the periodical censuses, the first of which was held in 1841. When statistics are not easily located or when I have borrowed them from other historians, I give a source. I should add that the book relies much on statistics though usually I try to disguise them or express them in words. Sometimes a source is clearly indicated in the narrative – for instance the quotation from Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life – and so I do not repeat the source in the notes. Much evidence in the chapters on social history is the accumulation of years of casual reading of old newspapers, looking at historic sites, and talking with old people, many of whom remembered the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Many changes, especially in sport, I have verified by consulting old sporting records and occasionally a life in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but much information cannot be documented in the normal way. Most of the explanations of why change came are probably my own. Very long titles of books and articles are sometimes abbreviated. References repeated are sometimes abbreviated. In listing books, the place of publication is given only for those places outside Melbourne.

1 a turban of feathers V i c t o r i a i n i c e a g e : Information from unpublished papers by Eric C. F. Bird of Geography Department, University of Melbourne, and A. Barrie Pittock, CSIRO, Mordialloc, Vic; Edmund D. Gill, ‘Palaeo-ecological Changes in Victoria and Bass Strait’, etc., in Artefact, June 1978, p. 72 for Mallee dustbowl. T a s m a n i a n A b o r i g i n a l p e o p l e : N. J. B. Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines 1802 (Hobart, 1983),

302

Sources

303

pp. 162–5, 171–2; D. J. Mulvaney, ‘The Aboriginal Heritage’ in The Heritage of Australia (1981), p. 60; G. Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads (1982 edn), ch. 3; P. J. F. Coutts, ‘The Prehistory of Victoria’ in Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, no. 2, p. 61 for Kow Swamp; John Mulvaney & Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (St Leonards, 1999), esp. ch. 10 for later controversies about Kow Swamp and Lake Mungo and Tasmanian peoples. V o l c a n o e s : Information from Bernard Joyce, Geology Department, University of Melbourne. T e r r i t o r y a n d t r i b e : T. G. Strehlow, An Australian Viewpoint (1950), p. 17; Norman B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia (Canberra, 1974), pp. 203–9 for names and territories of Victorian tribes, and p. 115 for A. P. Elkin’s definition of a tribe. W a y o f l i f e : Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal Settlement and Land Use in South Western Victoria’, Artefact, December 1976, p. 178 for housing; Nicholas Pateshall, A Short Account of a Voyage Round the Globe in H.M.S. Calcutta 1803–1804 (1980), pp. 62–3 for ‘Turban of feathers’; Pateshall, p. 61, and R. B. Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria (1878), vol. I, pp. 271, 273–4, 277 for bone through septum; for possum-skin cloaks, see Smyth, p. 271, and Aldo Massola, The Aborigines of South-Eastern Australia As They Were (1971), p. 12. R o c k a r t : Sites listed in The Heritage of Australia, 3/93, 3/176, 3/178; Coutts, p. 73. F o o d s : Alison Gates & Annette Seeman, Victorian Aborigines – Plant Foods (National Museum of Victoria, 1979); Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads, pp. 157ff. M o u n d p e o p l e : Articles by S. Simmons, M. E. Sullivan & R. A. Buchan, P. J. Elliott and L. Lane, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, June 1980. A x e s : Mulvaney, Heritage of Australia, p. 65 and also 3/166; W. H. Hovell & Hamilton Hume, Journey of Discovery to Port Phillip (State Library of South Australia, 1965), p. 45 for iron tomahawks. F i s h e r i e s : Lourandos, Artefact, December 1976, pp. 180–1; K. Hotchin, ‘Aboriginal Stone Alignments’ in Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, June 1980, pp. 122–5; Mulvaney, p. 65. B i r d d e c o y : G. A. Robinson, ‘Journals’ in Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, July 1977, p. 50. F i r e : Legend of Gippsland lakes in Smyth, vol. 1, pp. 478–9; for explorers’ observations, see published journals of Grant, pp. 68, 69–71; Baudin, p. 373; Pateshall, p. 59; Hovell & Hume, p. 48. M a h o g a n y s h i p a n d C o o k ’ s s h i p : Murray Johns, ‘Facts, Speculation and Fibs in the ‘Mahogany Ship’ Story 1835–2012’, Victorian Historical Journal (June 2011), pp. 59–85; G. Blainey, Sea of Dangers (2008), pp. 172–8.

304

Sources 2 australia felix

E a r l y c o m e r s : Marnie Bassett, The Hentys (Oxford, 1954), p. 303 for lush grass; Major T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (London, 1839), vol. 2, pp. 240–1, 284. J o h n B a t m a n : Rex Harcourt, Southern Invasion: Northern Conquest (2010), pp. 20, 68 (map), 91–2; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians (2005), p. 11. P o r t P h i l l i p a n d M e l b o u r n e : Susan Adams & Weston Bate, Liardet’s Water-Colours of Early Melbourne (1972); Hugh Anderson, Victoria: Prom Discovery to Federation (Adelaide, 1974), chs 5, 6; Robert D. Boys, First Years at Port Phillip 1834–42 (1935); G. Blainey, ‘History of Victoria’ in G. Leeper (ed.), Introducing Victoria (1955); ‘Garryowen’, The Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835 to 1852 (1888), p. 570 for flags of Flagstaff Hill. F l o o d s : Results of Rainfall Observations Made in Victoria during 1840– 1910 (Bureau of Meteorology, 1911), pp. xxi–xxvii; Donald S. Garden, Heidelberg: The Land and Its People 1838–1900 (1972), pp. 106–10, 112. S q u a t t e r s : Naming of Australia Felix in Mitchell, vol. 2, p. 333; Frank Strahan, foreword to Darren Baillieu, Australia Felix: A Miscellany from the Geelong Advertiser 1840–1850 (1982), p. 7 for ‘lucky country’; Hepburn’s long letter in T. F. Bride (ed.), Letters from Victorian Pioneers (1899), pp. 57–82; Lucille M. Quinlan, Here My Home (1967), p. 62; Annie Baxter, Memories of Tasmania (Sullivan’s Cove, 1980), p. 51. P o r t A l b e r t : R. D. Boys, p. 119; Garryowen, pp. 567, 578; Port Phillip Gazette, 24 March 1841; J. A. Clements & W. H. Richmond, ‘Port Albert and Gippsland Trade, 1840–66’, Australian Economic History Review, September 1968. A b o r i g i n a l p e o p l e : G. Blainey, A Land Half Won (1980) for misunderstandings; Edgar Morrison, Frontier Life in the Loddon Protectorate (Daylesford, n.d.), esp. pp. 12–13 (Glengower), appendix p. 25 for returning ‘spirits’ and appendix p. 16 for ‘Before you came here’; Beverley Nance, ‘The Level of Violence: Europeans and Aborigines in Port Phillip, 1835–1850’, Historical Studies, October 1981, esp. p. 533; M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86 (Sydney, 1979) for v.d., p. 43; William Thomas, in W. H. Archer, Statistical Register of Victoria (1854), p. 230. D e p r e s s i o n : Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday (1961), p. 137; S. J. Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank (London, 1961), pp. 90–1; Paul de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen (1980), p. 156 for Russell’s ‘Melbourne is no longer Melbourne’. S h e e p r u n s i n 1840: P. L. Brown (ed.), Clyde Company Papers (London, 1959), vol. 4, pp. 307–10 for troubles with shepherds, and pp. 392, 413– 14 for Asian shepherds; William Westgarth, Australia Felix (Edinburgh,

Sources

305

1848), pp. 250–4 for shearing and carting; Kiddle, p. 67, for the types of shearers. L a t e 1840 b o o m : E. A. Beever, ‘The Pre-Gold Boom in Australia 1843– 51’, Australian Economic History Review, March 1979, esp. pp. 6–11; Westgarth, pp. 266–9 for farms and wine; information from Ian Wynd and Keith Trace on Geelong; C. P. Billot, The Life of Our Years (1969), pp. 30–2. t r a n s p o r t : Spencer Childers, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Hugh C. E. Childers (London, 1901), pp 32–4; Garryowen, p. 60; Westgarth, pp. 204–5, 213–14; J. J. Mouritz, The Port Phillip Almanac and Directory for 1847, pp. 30–1; Boys, p. 95. Y e n s o o n : Clyde Company Papers, vol. 5, p. 17.

3 a golden ant hill F i r s t r u s h e s : G. Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended (1963), chs 3, 4; G. Serle, The Golden Age (1963), ch. 1; Henry Reynolds (ed.), Aborigines and Settlers (1972), p. 118 for Aboriginal harvesters; G. Blainey, A Land Half Won (1980), p. 164 for inflation; G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (1966), p. 185 for Boston clippers; W. H. Archer, The Statistical Register of Victoria (1854), pp. 278–83 for imports on which my summary is based; William Baker in Records of the Castlemaine Pioneers (Adelaide, 1972), p. 121; William Howitt, Land, Labour, and Gold (Sydney, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 167–81, for Beechworth. E u r e k a : Hotham’s despatch of 18 September 1854 for ‘network of rabbit burrows’ (pub. in Eureka Documents, part 1, Public Record Office, Melbourne, n.d.), p. 4; Weston Bate, Lucky City (1978), p. 70; Serle pp. 167–9. M e l b o u r n e i n 1 8 5 0 s : Miles Lewis, ‘Architecture from Colonial Origins’ in The Heritage of Australia (1981), p. 79 for J. J. Clark; G. Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne (1957), pp. 13–14. N e w Z e a l a n d : Victorian gold names culled from Philip R. May, The West Coast Gold Rushes (Christchurch, 1967). C h i n e s e : Jean Gittins, The Diggers from China (1981), esp. chs 4–6; Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended, ch. 7; Rev. William Young, ‘Report on the Condition of the Chinese Population in Victoria’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1868, no. 56; J. A. Patterson, The Gold-fields of Victoria in 1862 (1862), p. 136 for absence of Chinese drunkards; Lesley Dixon, ‘The Australian Missionary Effort in China’ (PhD, Melbourne University, 1978), esp. pp. 256–8; A. M. Laughton & T. S. Hall, Handbook to Victoria (1914), p. 81 for naturalisation of Chinese. D e f e n c e : Alan McNicholl, Australian Encyclopaedia (Sydney, 1977), vol. 2, p. 221 for Victorian navy; Edward Jenks, The Government of Victoria (Australia) (London, 1891), p. 300 for Victoria’s minister for defence.

306

Sources

D a r l i n g c r i s i s : W. G. McMinn, A Constitutional History of Australia (1979), pp. 65–8; F. K. Crowley, ‘Darling’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography [ADB], vol. 4, pp. 19–21. S c h o o l s : A. B. Orlebar in ‘Second Report of the Commissioners of National Education’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1854, p. 38 for tent schools; A. R. Hall, The Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy 1852–1900 (Canberra, 1968), pp. 51–3 for freak population structure; Denis Grundy, Secular, Compulsory and Free: The Education Act of 1872 (1972), esp. pp. 5–8, 93–4; A. G. Austin, Australian Education, 1788–1900 (1961), pp. 204–6; Joy Parnaby, ‘Gavan Duffy’ in ADB, vol. 4; Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A History (1977), pp. 165–8, 213–14. D e e p m i n e s : Firewood in Mineral Statistics (1873), p. 45; Reports of the Mining Surveyors and Registrars, quarter ending 31 December 1874, table opp. p. 5, for depth of shafts.

4 the silver stick G r a z i e r s : Michael Clarke, ‘Big’ Clarke (1980), p. 244 for ‘Stop that train’; J. M. Powell, The Public Lands of Australia Felix (1970), esp. part 2; Australasian, 21 December 1867, p. 776 for shearers. W h e a t f a r m e r s : Highways ‘thronged’, in Wesleyan Chronicle, 20 June 1874, p. 82; James Fry in Victoria and Its Metropolis (1888), vol. 2, p. 563; Clear Lake in J. W. E. Edmonds, ‘Social Development of a Small Rural Community’ (M.Ag.Sci. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973). G i p p s l a n d : Jane Goldsmith and others describe experiences in Warwick Eunson, The Unfolding Hills (Mirboo, 1978), esp. pp. 51, 66–70. K e l l y g a n g : John Molony, I Am Ned Kelly (1980); John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak 1878–1880 (1979); Colin Cave (ed.), Ned Kelly: Man and Myth (North Ryde, 1968); the railway guard was Jesse Dowsett, ‘The Capture of Ned Kelly’ in La Trobe Library Journal, April 1973, pp. 60–1 (I have altered his punctuation). V i n e y a r d s : Lloyd Evans, Wine (1973), pp. 61ff; James Froude, Oceana or England and Her Colonies (London, 1886), p. 124. L o l l i e s : See ‘lolly’ in Oxford English Dictionary; Robertson’s career in George Taylor, Making It Happen: The Rise of Sir Macpherson Robertson (1934), esp. pp. 23, 48, 57–8, 78, 83. M e l b o u r n e ’ s c o m m e r c e : See G. Blainey, A Land Half Won, ch. 13; wheat-growing efficiency in E. Dunsdorf’s The Australian WheatGrowing Industry 1788–1948 (1956), pp. 489–91; Coode Canal and Victoria Dock in Victorian Year Book 1973, pp. 235, 375. C i t i e s g r o w t h : Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (Aust. edn, 1873), p. 263; Bendigo’s opera house in Frank Cusack, Bendigo: A History (1973), p. 161; A. Sutherland, Victoria and Its Metropolis (1888), vol. 1, p. 541.

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307

S e a m y M e l b o u r n e : Chris McConville, ‘The Location of Melbourne’s Prostitutes, 1870–1920’, Historical Studies, April 1980, pp. 68ff; John S. James, The Vagabond Papers, Michael Cannon (ed.), esp. p. 8 for crowd glimpsing Vagabond; Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978), p. 238; Jacqueline Templeton, Prince Henry’s (1969), pp. 87, 96 for typhoid. N a m e c h a n g i n g : ‘Report upon the Affairs of the Post Office and Telegraph Department, 1874’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1875, no. 6, p. 5; Frank Cusack, Bendigo, pp. 67, 188.

5 one in ten thousand F o o t b a l l : The first landmark in the academic study of sporting history in Australia was W. F. Mandle, ‘Games People Played’, Historical Studies, April 1973; rise of football in G. Blainey, A Game of Our Own: The Origins of Australian Football (2003, rev. edn), esp. chs 1–2; Geelong v. Melbourne in 1886 in Graeme Atkinson, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Australian Rules Football (1982), p. 5; Carlton v. Melbourne in 1876 in M. Cannon (ed.), The Vagabond Papers (1969), p. 208; John Lack, ‘Working-Class Leisure’, Victorian Historical Journal, February 1978, p. 50 for Saturday holidays; Atkinson, p. 208 for Burns’ memories. B o x i n g : Peter Corris, Lords of the Ring (North Ryde, 1980), esp. pp. 30, 33, 43. U n o r t h o d o x s p o r t s : For sources, see G. Blainey, ‘The History of Leisure in Australia: The Late Colonial Era’ in Victorian Historical Journal, February 1978, pp. 15–16, 21–2. N e w s p a p e r s : Melbourne University history student, June Yugovic, and Argus supplement, 9 September 1926, for Adelaide telegraph; C. E. Sayers, David Syme: A Life (1965), p. 216 for physical portrait; M. Mahood, The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature 1788–1901 (1973), p. 124 for cartoon; much on the Age comes from my introduction to G. Mutton & L. Tanner (ed.), 125 Years of Age (1979); country newspapers advertised in The Australian Handbook (London, 1886), pp. 224– 32 of advertisement section; the five snippets come from Australasian Sketcher, 18 April, 13 June and 11 July 1874. V i s u a l a r t s : John Hetherington, Norman Lindsay (1973), pp. 7–8; R. T. M. Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle 1840–1912: The Master of Landscaping (1974), p. 80 for weeds and p. 80 for his ‘Garden of God’. S i n g e r s : Barbara & Findlay MacKenzie, Singers of Australia from Melba to Sutherland (London, 1968); Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories (1980), p. 5 for ‘Presbyterian Sundays’; K. S. Inglis, This Is the ABC (1983), pp. 7, 9 for Melba on radio; Roger Covell, Australia’s Music (1967), p. 236 for opera cf. sport.

308

Sources 6 ‘my lord the workingman’

W o r k e t h i c : Alan Villiers, Falmouth for Orders (1929), last paragraph. H a r d w o r k : Gippsland farmers in Hugh Copeland, The Path of Progress (Warragul, 1934), pp. 121–2, 348, and memoirs in The Land of the Lyre Bird (Korumburra, 1966); ‘Donegal Jim’ in 2nd supplement to Victorian Govt. Gazette, 24 April 1876; Welsh farmer in William Evans (ed.), Diary of a Welsh Swagman (1975), p. 57. h a r v e s t i n g : Old man was H. S. Parris of Nagambie, born c.1885; Evans, Diary pp. 12–15, 101; The Australasian Farmer (pub. by The Australasian, 1885), pp. 68–76. T r a m w a y m e n : Evidence to Royal Commission on Grievances of ‘Employees of Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company Limited’, Vic. Parliamentary Papers, 1898, p. 192 for hours on South Melbourne tram. W o m a n ’ s w o r k : The Australian Handbook, 1880 (London), adverts between pp. 304–5; Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann (1975), pp. 36–7. c h i l d r e n : Information from Merle Howard, Economic History Department, Melbourne University; Royal Commission on Employees in Shops, Vic. Parliamentary Papers, 1884. S h o r t e r h o u r s : Eric Fry, ‘The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in Australia in the 1880s’, thesis, Australian National University, 1956, p. 209; S. Dougan Bird, On Australasian Climates . . . and Pulmonary Consumption (London, 1863), p. 136; I deduce that the decline in rate of inflation must have been an aid to the winning of the eight-hour day but lack confirming evidence; Galloway in K. S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists (1974), p. 117. Incidentally, Inglis, p. 118, after looking at weather records, rightly challenges Stephen’s memory of the ‘burning hot day’ but maybe Stephen was right on weather but wrong on date; Helen Hughes, ‘The Eight Hour Day’, Historical Studies, May 1961; Richard Tangye, Notes of My Fourth Voyage to the Australian Colonies (Birmingham, 1866), pp. 38, 40, 50.

7 sunshine and moonshine E a r l y c h u r c h e s : Orton’s service in R. D. Boys, First Years at Port Phillip, p. 501; W. L. Blamires & J. B. Smith, The Early Story of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Victoria (1886), p. 14; John Barrett, That Better Country (1966). 1 8 6 0 s r e v i v a l : Blamires & Young, pp. 97–106 for ‘California Taylor’; Frances O’Kane, A Path Is Set (1976), p. 154; Robert Sutherland, History of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria (London, 1876), pp. 232–4. I n f l u e n c e o f C h r i s t i a n i t y : The Gippsland girl was Mary E. Fullerton, Bark House Days (1964), p. 45; Marjory McKay, Cecil McKay (1974), p. 4; for Heber at Bendigo see G. Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended, p. 35; Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed (London, 1889),

Sources

309

vol. 1, p. iv; Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835–1851 (1965), p. 144 for Presbyterian in violent storm; M. Clark (ed.), Sources of Australian History (London, 1957), pp. 416–17 for the humiliation of 1893; wreck of London in John C. Symons, Life of the Rev. Daniel James Draper (1870), pp. 320–5, 336–7, 410–11; Catholic attitudes in W. M. Finn, Glimpses of North-Eastern Victoria (Kilmore, 1971); W. G. Spence, Australia’s Awakening (Sydney, 1909), pp. 567, 569, 595 for his puritanical comments – note the evangelical title of what is essentially a trade union history. S e c t a r i a n d i f f e r e n c e s : Election riots of 1843, see O’Kane, pp. 6– 9; Bishop Perry in A. de Q. Robin, Charles Ferry: Bishop of Melbourne (Nedlands, 1967), pp. 46–7; for Irish suburbs, see Neil Coughlan, ‘The Coming of the Irish to Victoria’, Historical Studies, October 1965, esp. pp. 68, 85; the potato-country parish in J. Conroy, Gordon Parish Centenary (1975 pamphlet) under heading ‘Our Honour Roll’; Census of 1861, part 4, p. viii for Aboriginal people and religion; Census of 1871, part 4, table 7, for unbelievers. M e l b o u r n e J e w s : Samuel Alexander discussed by Lionel E. Fredman in Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal (November 1995), p. 42. P u r i t a n i s m o n s o c i a l i s s u e s : G. Goodman, The Church in Victoria during the Episcopate of the Rt. Rev. Charles Perry (London, 1892), pp. 437–8; John Freeman, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (London, 1888), pp. 47–9 for barmaids and beer in jugs; Swanston St. hotels in Sands & McDougall’s Melbourne and Suburban Directory for 1868, pp. 55–7; D. T. Merrett, ‘The Victorian Licensing Court 1906–68’ in Australian Economic History Review, September 1979; W. H. Archer, Statistical Register of Victoria (1854), p. 400 for deaths attributed to intemperance; K. S. Inglis, Hospital and Community (1958), p. 47 for brandy ration; Keith Dunstan, Wowsers (Sydney, 1968), esp. pp. 90–102; A. E. Dingle, ‘The Truly Magnificent Thirst: An Historical Survey of Australian Drinking Habits’, Historical Studies, October 1980.

8 who am i? H u g e t r e e : Anthony Trollope, Australia, ed. by P. D. Edwards & R. B. Joyce (Brisbane, 1967), p. 423. R e c r e a t i n g E n g l a n d : Eric Rolls, They All Ran Wild (Sydney, 1969), pp. 236, 323 for birds and foxes. P o l l u t i o n : Dust storm of 1903 in H. A. Hunt, G. Taylor & E. T. Quayle (eds), The Climate and Weather of Australia (1913), p. 85; goldfields’ squalor in A. Sutherland, A New Geography (1885), pp. 66–7; F. Cusack, Bendigo: A History (1973), pp. 116–17 for puddling; G. Blainey in David Saunders (ed.), Historic Buildings of Victoria (Brisbane, 1966), p. 55 for goldfields mess.

310

Sources

G e o g r a p h e r : H. B. de la Peer Wall, Manual of Physical Geography of Australia (1883), pp. 29, 164. T r a v e l l i n g t o E u r o p e : The sheep-owner in Pisa and Inverary was Thomas Shaw, A Victorian in Europe (Geelong, 1883), pp. 116, 305; for returning Italians, see John Watsford, Glorious Gospel Triumphs (London, 1900), pp. 204–5; Henry Lawson, Autobiographical and Other Writings 1887–1922 (Sydney, 1972.), p. 171; for Constantinople’s likeness to Geelong, see Shaw, p. 239, and his coming home, p. 339; Rolf Boldrewood, in C. Higham & M. Wilding (eds), Australians Abroad: An Anthology (1967), p. 18, but it’s not clear whether Boldrewood is seeing his visit of c.1860 through later emotions. H e i d e l b e r g S c h o o l : R. H. Croll (ed.), Smike to Bulldog (Sydney, 1946), p. 6 for view of ranges. Streeton’s letters exult in the summer in a way which seems to have gone unnoticed. F e d e r a t i o n s t y l e : Conrad Hamann, ‘Nationalism and Reform in Australian Architecture 1880–1920’, Historical Studies, April 1979; Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home (Penguin edn, 1978), pp. 67, 73–4; G. Serle, The Rush to be Rich (1971), p. 279 for importing of Marseilles tiles. M a r y G r a n t B r u c e : Lynne Strahan, ‘Minnie Bruce’ in ADB, vol. 7, pp. 452–3; Mary G. Bruce, Captain Jim (London, 1919), p. 16 for ‘deep glint’; Brenda Niall, ‘Mythmakers of Our Childhood’ in This Australia, Summer 1981–2, pp. 64–72. R e p u b l i c a n i s m : Brian McKinlay, A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement (1979), pp. 519–24, incl. p. 524 for ‘dying leper’; Serle, pp. 308–9.

9 when the bubble burst B a n k c r a s h e s : E. A. Boehm, Prosperity and Depression in Australia 1887–1897 (Oxford, 1971), ch. 10; G. Blainey, Gold and Paper (1958), chs 10–12. D i s t r e s s : For unions, see W. Bannow, The Colony of Victoria (1896), pp. 185–7; statistics on unmarried women in 1921 came from Lesley Critchfield, Education Faculty, Melbourne University. K y a b r a m r e f o r m : J. Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910 (Canberra, 1976), pp. 177–82. D r o u g h t a n d i r r i g a t i o n : W. S. Watt, Rainfall Observations in Victoria (Bureau of Meteorology, 1937), pp. 18–19; T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia (Oxford, 1918), vol. 4, pp. 2138–9; H. J. Frith & G. Sawer (eds), The Murray Waters (Sydney, 1974) for L. F. Myers on faulty irrigation, pp. 164–6; for Mallee in 1879, see T. G. Watson, The First Fifty Years of Responsible Government in Victoria (1906 or 1907), p. xvii.

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N e w C o m m o n w e a l t h : G. Blainey, ‘The Role of Economic Interests in Australian Federation’, Historical Studies, November 1950, pp. 230–1, for Victorian votes in referenda. M e l b o u r n e a s c a p i t a l : Adelaide Lubbock, People in Glass Houses: Growing Up at Government House (1977), pp. xi, 52 for Lady Stanley’s complaints; Victorian Municipal Directory . . . and Commonwealth Guide for 1911 for list of foreign consuls, p. 2, and address of federal offices, pp. 16–23; copies of Fred Johns’s Annual (Adelaide) list addresses of prime ministers. L a b o r ’ s w e a k n e s s i n V i c t o r i a : Rickard, Class and Politics, p. 117; Lindsay Tanner, ‘A Protracted Evolution: Labor in Victorian Politics 1889–1903’, Labour History, May 1982; G. Blainey, A Land Half Won, ch. 16; for Elmslie and Hogan, see ADB, vols 8, 9. E a r l y f e d e r a l p o l i t i c s : The difference in background and time of immigration between leading Vic. liberals and leading NSW and other Labor politicians stands out if one reads entries in Joan Rydon, A Biographical Register of the Commonwealth Parliament 1901–1972 (Canberra, 1975). W a r : A. W. Jose, The Royal Australian Navy 1914–1918 (Sydney, 1928), pp. 45–61, 413, 421, 503, 535, 547 for details of Pfalz. A n t i - G e r m a n f e e l i n g : Les Blake, The Land of the Lowan (Nhill, 1976), p. 194; C. Meyer, ‘German Schools of Victoria’, Victorian Historical Journal, August 1980. C o n s c r i p t i o n : Glenn Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda’, Historical Studies, April 1982, p. 45; Official Year Book, no. 14, p. 859 for votes in referenda; Vincent Buckley, Cutting Green Hay (1983), p. 20 for Mannix on the parlour wall. W a r f i n a n c e : Official Year Book, no. 14, p. 721.

10 the horse and its conquerors M o s t l y r a i l : For the mode of travel to each Victorian town, see the annual Australian Handbook, pub. by Gordon & Gotch, London, esp. 1870–1905. C a r s : H. Thomson & E. L. Holmes, The Pioneer Motor Car Trip of Australia, 16-page pamphlet, 1900; Country Roads Board: First Annual Report, 1914, pp. 11–37; Calder’s 1913 prediction, see R. Southern, ‘William Calder’ in Victorian Historical Journal, August 1977, p. 151; for his 1919 prediction, see C.R.B. Sixth Annual Report, p. 4; Harry Gordon, An Eyewitness History of Australia (Adelaide, 1976), pp. 229–30, for ‘Squizzy’ Taylor’s death; for J. C. Watson’s complaint on motoring laws, see his article in E. Knox (ed.), The Australian Year Book 1933 (Melbourne), p. 297. H o r s e s : ‘Every team a matched one’ – S. A. Cameron in Handbook to Victoria, eds A. M. Laughton & T. S. Hall (1914), p. 287; Edward Dyson,

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Rhymes from the Mines and Other Lines (Sydney, 1898), pp. 19–22; blacksmith shop as ‘political centre’ in Donald Macdonald, Gum Boughs and Wattle Bloom (London, 1887), p. 136; The Weekly Times Farmers’ Handbook (Melbourne, n.d. 2nd edn), p. 24. P h o n e s , m o v i e s , a i r c r a f t : A. J. Villiers, Falmouth for Orders (New York, 1929), p. 3; ‘The Palace of Winged Words’: The Development of Telephone Exchanges in Australia (Telecom, n.d.); for Ballarat call, see The Courier, 5 December 1981, p. 30; for inventors, see ADB; on infant movie industry, see G. Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973), p. 117, and Eric Reade, History and Heartburn (Sydney, 1979), pp. 3–5; Harry Gordon, pp. 288–90 for air race.

11 hope, depression, fire and war M i n e s : H. Herman in Handbook to Victoria, 1914, p. 356 for deep shafts of Bendigo; Cecil Edwards, Brown Power (1969), for the SEC and brown coal. M e l b o u r n e i n m i d -1920s: Victorian Year Book, 1925–6, pp. 201– 3 for population; Robert H. Croll, The Open Road in Victoria (1928), pp. 18–21 for weekend walks. B u s i n e s s m e n : Alan Marshall, The Gay Provider: The Myer Story (1961); Desmond Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch (1980), esp. p. 72 for ‘Melbourne’s character’; Murdoch and radio in K. S. Inglis, This Is the ABC, pp. 9, 64–5; Judah Waten, Scenes of Revolutionary Life (Angus & Robertson, 1982), p. 31. F a r m e r s : John F. Edey, From Lone Pine to Murray Pine (Red Cliffs, 1981) for the story of a Mallee settler; J. M. Powell, ‘The Debt of Honour: Soldier Settlement in the Dominions, 1915–1940’, in Journal of Australian Studies, June 1981. D e p r e s s i o n : Valuable evidence on how the depression hit retailers is in University of Melbourne Archives, esp. Foy & Gibson records; James Grant & G. Serle, The Melbourne Scene 1803–1956 (1957), pp. 274– 6; C. B. Schedvin, Australia and the Great Depression (Sydney, 1970), p. 235 for Lang’s bank. B u s h f i r e s : J.C. Foley, A Study of Meteorological Conditions Associated with Bush and Grass Fires (Bureau of Meteorology, 1947). W a r : Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People 1939–1941 (Canberra, 1952), esp. pp. 244, 259–61 for Melbourne ‘domination’.

12 the rise and fall of albert the great G r o w t h o f C o u n t r y P a r t y : Jean Holmes, The Government of Victoria (Brisbane, 1976), esp. p. 87 for his policies; Ulrich Ellis, A History of the Australian Country Party (Melbourne, 1963), esp. p. 31 for Woodend meeting and pp. 149–50 for birth of Stewart–Dunstan party; Joan

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Rydon, A Biographical Register of the Commonwealth Parliament 1901– 1972; L. F. Crisp, The Parliamentary Government of the Australian Commonwealth (Yale, 1949), esp. pp. 128–9; Who’s Who in Australia; J. B. Paul on A. A. Dunstan in ADB, vol. 8; B. D. Graham, The Formation of the Australian Country Parties (Canberra, 1966); Barry Muir, Bolte from Bamganie (1973); J. B. Paul, ‘The Victorian Country Party: Its Organization and Leadership’ (Pol. Sci. Dept. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1958), esp. p. 9 for Stewart sitting with Labor members, and opp. p. 45 for the weighting of country and city votes. A l l i a n c e w i t h L a b o r : A. A. Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (1972), pp. 40–2 on Wren; Colin A. Hughes & B. D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 (Canberra, 1968), pp. 127–30.

13 the jolting merry-go-round This chapter relies heavily on interpreting statistics in Victorian and Commonwealth year books, new legislation announced in year books, and the focus acquired by almost everyone who has lived through an era. A massive source on post-war Victoria is the Victorian Year Book 1973, the centenary edition edited by H. L. Speagle. H i g h r i s e : Victorian Year Book 1973, pp. 203–6; Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities (North Adelaide, 1970), esp. pp. 218–36, with comment on children on p. 224. B o n e g i l l a : Robert Pascoe, Bongiorno Australia: Our Italian Heritage (1987), pp. 125–8; Patrick McCaughey, Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs (2006), p. 3; personal information from Jan Senbergs, September 2012. I m m i g r a n t s : A. A. Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (1972), pp. 10–14; J. Lyng, Non-Britishers in Australia (1925), pp. 95–6 for influential Italians in Victoria; Charles A. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia (Canberra, 1963) for Italians and Greeks in Melbourne; W. D. Borrie in Australia and the Migrant (Australian Institute of Political Science, 1953) for analysis of 1947–51 migrants; Stephanie L. Thompson, Australia through Italian Eyes (1980), p. 149 for ‘Everyone was terrific’. H o m e s , s c h o o l s a n d m e d i a : Owner-built houses in 1950s, Victorian Year Book 1973, p. 202; Lindsay Thompson, I Remember: An Autobiography (1989), pp. 161–81 for the two kidnappings in rural schools; opulent cinemas of 1920s, R. M. Younger, Keith Murdoch: Founder of a Media Empire (Sydney, 2003), p. 162. D e a t h p e n a l t y : Vernon Wilcox, Minister of the Crown: A Personal Story of Life, Politics and People (2001), pp. 81–4; Peter Blazey, Bolte: A Political Biography (Milton, Qld, 1972), chs 11, 15. H o l i d a y s : Waldemar Bannow, The Colony of Victoria: Socially and Materially (1896), p. 88 for Queenscliff; ‘Interim Report of State

314

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Development Committee on Tourist Facilities and National Parks’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1950, no. 29, pp. 10–11 for railways and tourism. A b o r i g i n a l p e o p l e : A. M. Laughton, in Laughton & T. S. Hall (eds), Handbook to Victoria (1914), p. 81 for ‘surely dying out’. For the origin of the name Koori, see Tim Rowse ‘Aboriginal Nomenclature’ in Graeme Davison, John Hirst & Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998), p. 10.

14 a long race: melbourne and sydney As recently as 1984 little had been written about the rivalry between New South Wales and Victoria and between Melbourne and Sydney, but it is important not only for Victorian but also for Australian history. It is a complex question interacting with other issues. On 23 September 1981, in the annual Alfred Deakin Lecture at Melbourne University, I tried to depict the Melbourne–Sydney issue in a wider context. That lecture, ‘Interstate Rivalries – A Historian’s View’, was published as a 24-page pamphlet by the Alfred Deakin Lecture Trust, and all except the first section was also published in the magazine Quadrant (Sydney, December 1981, pp. 19–27). These two articles may help to explain some of the interpretations expressed in this chapter. V i c t o r i a ’ s l o n g d e c l i n e : The 1881–1947 comparison is taken from E. A. Boehm, Twentieth Century Economic Development in Australia (1971), p. 38. A i r p o r t s : I had access to Department of Transport reports and memoranda and clippings on the international airports of Sydney and Melbourne. S y d n e y a s h e a d o f f i c e : The Reserve Bank kindly supplied me with a copy of the Evening News, 20 January 1913, reporting remarks of Denison Miller at the opening of the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney. For the ABC’s choice of Sydney, see K. S. Inglis, This Is the ABC (1983), pp. 21, 27. T o u r i s m : W. J. Loftie, Orient-Pacific Line Guide (London, c. 1901, 6th edn), p. 227. V i c t o r i a ’ s s e l f - h e l p : On home ownership, see 1921 Census, vol. 2, pp. 1759ff; and compare it with 1976 Census. A summary of other statistical differences is in Parochial Australia, published by the Clemenger Network in December 1981. W o m e n i n L i b e r a l s : Anon. ‘Liberal Party in Victoria’ in Victorian Year Book 1979, pp. 84–5. C a n b e r r a : R. G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years (London, 1970), p. 143; Warren Denning, Capital City (Sydney, 1938), p. 50 for ‘loathing’ towards Canberra.

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15 whirlwind in spring street E v e n t s a n d e p i s o d e s : Key events were briefly reported in the annual chronology published in successive editions of the excellent Victorian Year Book, edited by Henry Speagle from 1958 to 1983 and then by Max Chamberlain. Ash Wednesday is vividly described by an American historian, Stephen J. Pyne, in Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (New York, 1991), pp. 410–12. C a i n a s p r e m i e r : Raymond Wright, A People’s Counsel: A History of the Parliament of Victoria 1856–1990 (1992) for the overseas-born members and the first female minister, pp. 226–7. Certain observations on Cain’s reign as premier stem from articles in the Age, especially Shaun Carney’s of 8 August 1990. Several other comments were first used in a weekly column I wrote for the Herald, 1984–87. Cain later wrote his story, John Cain’s Years: Power, Parties and Politics (1995). V i c t o r i a ’ s f i n a n c i a l s h i v e r s : Background to the State Bank of Victoria came partly from the long article, ‘End of an Era’, by Philippa Murray in the Sunday Herald on 23 September 1990. For Cain’s final troubled years, see Wright, A People’s Counsel, pp. 227–35. Labor’s weakness in legislative council and rural a r e a s : N. Economou, B. Coster & P. Strangio in J. Moon & C. Sharman (eds), Australian Politics and Government (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 155, 159; Jean Holmes, John Halligan & Peter Hay, ch. 2 on ‘Victoria’ in Brian Galligan (ed.), Australian State Politics (1986), pp. 29–31. K e n n e t t a n d B r a c k s : N. Economou, B. Coster & P. Strangio in Australian Politics and Government, ch. 7. A vital contemporary source on Victorian politics and legislation is Alistair Urquhart’s monthly ‘Letter from Melbourne’ (published by Affairs of State, Collins St, Melbourne, since 1993). Dr Malcolm Kennedy, then of Monash University, wrote a valuable insider’s manuscript on the work of the Kennett government. It would have been published if the Kennett government survived. Instead, in 2000 it was locked away by the new government, which, owning the copyright, had the right to forbid its publication. P r e m i e r s a n d p u b l i c s e r v a n t s : The conclusions about the apparent reluctance of Victorians to elect outsiders as premier, in contrast to the success of Victorians in winning high office in other states and in New Zealand, derive from a fairly quick survey of the evidence. I listed the names of leaders of Victoria, other states and New Zealand since 1890 and discovered their Victorian or non-Victorian background from the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Who’s Who in Australia and other sources. Coates’s praise of the competence of old public servants is recorded in Henry Speagle, Editor’s Odyssey: A Reminiscence of Civil Service, 1945–1985 (2005), p. 125.

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16 the new victorians: life, work and play G e n e r a l : This chapter is based partly on my own observations of events in the quarter-century to 2006. Much of the statistical evidence came from a range of data produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), available through its publications and libraries. I especially thank Steve Toohey of the Melbourne office for statistics on the 1980s. Just before this chapter was completed there appeared a remarkable cooperative book, Andrew Brown-May & Shurlee Swain (eds), The Encyclopedia of Melbourne (Melbourne, 2005). I gained from some of its entries including John Lack on Footscray and its disappearing name, Dave Nadel on Waverley Park, and David Dunstan and Graeme Davison on wider urban topics. I n n e r c i t y a n d D o c k l a n d s : Information on Melbourne’s tall buildings owes much to a folio of notes on buildings and projects, kept by the buildings office of the Melbourne City Council in the late 1980s and entitled ‘Melbourne Cityscape’. For docklands in the 1940s, see John Morrison, ‘The Nightshift’ in Walter Murdoch & H. Drake-Brockman (eds), Australian Short Stories (London, 1966), pp. 322ff. I t a l i a n C a r l t o n : Allan Willingham, ‘The Mediterranean Idiom’, in Peter Yule (ed.), Carlton: A History (2004), pp. 475–83. For the revival of Carlton’s population, see Alan Mayne & Kasia Zygmuntowicz, ‘Postwar Carlton’ in Carlton: A History, p. 54. R e l i g i o n s a n d l o c a l i t i e s : Gary D. Bouma & Ian R. Dobson, ‘Patterns of Religious Concentration in Victoria: Changes 1996–2001’, People and Place (2005), vol. 13, no. 4, esp. p. 5. J o u r n e y o f 1905 t o D a n d e n o n g a n d b e y o n d : Annual copies of Victorian Municipal Directory and Gazetteer (1906–11), which gave details of municipalities, towns and villages, including Caulfield, Carnegie, Oakleigh, Clayton, Dandenong, Berwick and Cranbourne; The Australasian Handbook (London, 1906), esp. Oakleigh, p. 475, Dandenong, p. 445, Cranbourne, p. 444 and Clayton, p. 441. G a r d e n s u b u r b s : Nellie Sutherland of Vermont South recalled in Murray Lewis (ed.), A Bucket Full of Berries: Reflections of White-horse (2000), p. 76; Graham Pizzey, A Garden of Birds: Australian Birds in Australian Gardens (1988) for Hoppers Crossing, pp. 290–1, and return of native birds, p. 283. P r o v i n c i a l c i t i e s a n d r u r a l a r e a s : Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government: 1972–1975 (1985), pp. 385–6 for AlburyWodonga; Matthew Tonts, ‘Internal Migration and Australia’s Agricultural Regions’, Dialogue (Canberra, 2005), vol. 24, p. 55 for decline of Wimmera-Mallee population; Bernard Salt, Australia on the Move: Population Growth and Dwelling Demand 2001–2031 (Sydney, 2005) for city populations in 2001 and projections for 2031.

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17 koala, growling frog, drought and fire F a s c i n a t i o n w i t h n a t u r a l h i s t o r y : Spencer & von Mueller: D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, ‘So Much That Is New’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, A Biography (1985), pp. 94, 97; E. B. Joyce & D. A. McCann (eds), Burke and Wills: The Scientific Legacy of the Victorian Exploring Expedition (2011); Early National Parks in Victorian Year Book 1973: Centenary Edition, pp. 108–9. W a l l a b y c l u b : Philip Ayres, Owen Dixon (2003), p. 86 on Mr Justice Dixon being a leader of this walking-conversing club. C r o s b i e M o r r i s o n : Graham Pizzey, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, pp. 418–20. K o a l a s a n d o t h e r f a u n a : Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (2007), p. 168; ‘Victoria’s Koala Management Strategy’, Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment (September 2004); Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, press release on snakes, 31 January 2011; canopy bridges over Hume Highway in Kylie Soanes & Rodney van der Ree, ‘Highway Impacts on Arboreal Mammals . . . ’, research paper, c. 2011, and http://ksoanesresearch.wordpress.com, esp. 4 September 2012 on gliders. W a t e r a n d c o n s e r v a t i o n : Post-war dams and reservoirs, Victorian Year Book 1984, pp. 290–2; Tony Dingle, The Victorians: Settling (McMahons Point, NSW, 1984), ch. 12. T h e a l p s a n d c a t t l e : Dale Collins, Victoria’s My Home Ground (1951), esp. pp. 153, 155. Hansard for mountain cattle: Parliament of Victoria 14–17 June 2005 for long debate in both houses on the bill to evict mountain cattle. ‘Conservation in Victoria: A Discussion Paper’ with foreword by Evan Walker, Minister for Conservation, August 1983, p. 39 for shade, pp. 38–40 for potoroo. Fertility of soil today based on information from David Smith, former director of agriculture. D r o u g h t s : Pattern of wet–dry years: C. H. B. Priestley et al., Report of a Committee on Climate Change, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra (1976); author’s personal correspondence with Priestley, 1976; Seymour’s official rainfall reports, Bureau of Meteorology. C o m p a r i n g t h e t w o d r o u g h t s : G. Blainey, ‘Dry and Drier’ in Inquirer, Weekend Australian, 30–31 December 2006. Martin Summons, Water, the Vital Element: 150 Years of Shepparton’s Growth (Shepparton, 2010); ‘Worst drought’ in Dr David Jones, Australian, 11 October 2008. B u s h f i r e s : 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, summary final report and 4 vols. (2010). G r o w l i n g g r a s s f r o g : Report by Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment (Warrnambool, 2007).

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U r b a n p o p u l a t i o n , 2011: ABS news releases and publications in 2012, after the results of the August 2011 census had been collated. D e a d c e n t r e o f M e l b o u r n e : ABS media release on Regional Population Growth, 30 March, 3 July 2012. T r a m s : Compared to communist cities: Graeme Turnbull, Working paper, 01/2002, Transport Research Centre (2002). G r o w i n g B r i t i s h p o p u l a r i t y o f N e i g h b o u r s: BBC News, 26 October 2001. M o s t l i v e a b l e c i t y : The Australian, 14 August 2012; The Age, 15 August 2012. D e n s i t y o f V i c t o r i a ’ s p o p u l a t i o n : This is a version of the argument advanced in G. Blainey, ‘The Cabbage Patch That Grew’ in Steve Foley (ed.), The Age: Reflections – 150 Years of History (Milsons Point, NSW, 2004), p. 46.

INDEX

3DB (radio station), 185 3LO (radio station), 185 101 Collins Street (building), 258 1880 International Exhibition, 72 A Little Bush Maid, 141 A Summer Morning Tiff (painting), 138 Aboriginal people achievements of, 227–9 apparel, 9–10 arrival in Victoria, 3–4 cooking and diet, 10–12 earthworks and stoneworks, 13 effects of disease on, 34–5 first contact, 15–17 gold rush and, 44 government reserves, 227–8 hunting, 14 physical differences between, 6–7 population, 34–5, 228 protection system, 34 relations with early settlers, 32–3 rock art, 10 Tasmania, 4–5, 6 trading networks, 12–13 treaty with Batman, 21–2 tribes, 8–9, 34 use of fire, 14–15

victims of massacres, 33–4 way of life, 13, 33, 35 Acclimatization Society, 133 affinity to Britain, 135–7 See also nationalism Age (newspaper), 184, 220 exploration of New Guinea and, 93 influence of, 94, 95 airports, 233 Albert Park acquatic centre, 261 Albert Park lake, 261 Albury–Wodonga, 271, 272 alcohol adulteration of, 128 consumption, 126–7, 130–1 drink driving, 222, 259 goldfields prohibition on selling, 128 medicinal use of, 128 See also temperance movement ‘Aldershot camp’, 266 Alexander, Professor Samuel (‘Sammy’), 125 Allan, John, 189, 201, 203, 204 Allendale, 202 Alma Road Grammar School, 135 alpine grazing, 279–81 ANA Weekend, 141

319

320

Index

Anglicans. See Church of England Anti-Sweating League, 160 Anzac Day, 226 Ararat, 46, 66, 148, 179, 212, 281 architecture, 139–40 Argus (newspaper), 43, 95, 184, 220 exploration of New Guinea and, 93 use of telegraph by, 92 Argyle, Sir Stanley, 205 Armistice Day, 226 arts, 225 government support, 225 visual, 96–7, 138–9, 225 Ash Wednesday (bushfire), 243–4 Austin, Herbert, 176 Austin, Thomas, 133 Austral, Florence, 101 Australasian (weekly), 99 Australia Council, 235 Australia Felix, 29, 35, 41 Australia and New Zealand Bank, 186 Australian Ballet, 225 Australian Broadcasting Commission, 185, 235 Australian Council of Trade Unions, 186 Australian Football League, 260 Australian Grand Prix, 251, 261 Australian Greens Party, 277, 278, 282, 291 Australian Labor Party. See Labor Party Australian Natives’ Association, 141 Australian Rules football. See football Australian Women’s National League, 239–40 Avoca, 49, 56, 66

Bacchus Marsh, 171, 174, 270 Bacon, Jim, 255 Baillieu, Edward Norman (‘Ted’), 280, 291 Baillieu, W. L., 187 Bair, Robert, 69 Bairnsdale, 150, 166, 175, 270 Baker, William, 47 Ballarat, 61, 65, 66, 78, 105, 124, 125, 134, 155, 160, 168, 179, 196, 211, 212, 241, 252, 266, 271, 272, 281 football and, 86 gold rush, 43, 47 hotels, 127, 128 manufacturing industry, 74 South Street eisteddfod, 98, 100, 101 Ballarat Art Gallery, 96 Ballarat Banking Company, 186 Bank of New South Wales, 71 Bank of Victoria, 186 banking 1920s–1930s depression, 191 crisis, 1890s, 148 mergers, 186 self-service, 217 Banks, Joseph, 16 Banks, Norman, 226 Baptists, 118 Barassi, Ron, 215 barmaids, 127 Barry, Mr Justice Redmond, 51 Barwon Park (house), 273 Bass Strait, 3, 5, 15, 16 importance to British, 18, 19 Batman, John, 20–2 lands claimed by, 21 treaty with Aboriginal people, 21–2 Batman’s Hill, 27 Baudin, Nicholas, 15, 18 Baxter, Annie, 30–1 Bean, C. E. W., 184 Beatrice (ship), 174

Index Beaurepaire, Frank, 181 Beechworth, 45, 56, 179, 284 gold rush, 47–8 Belfast Gazette (newspaper), 95 Bell, Graeme, 225 Benalla, 270 Bendigo, 46, 61, 66, 78, 103, 125, 134, 155, 167, 168, 183, 197, 211, 212, 266, 267, 271, 272 gold rush, 43 restoration of name from Sandhurst, 82 Benevolent Asylum, 111 Bent, Thomas, 161 Berwick, 209, 262, 266 BHP House, 258 Bible Christians, 124 Bird, S. Dougan, 111 birds, 133 eggs, collection of, 275 Black, Tom Campbell, 176 Black Friday (bushfire), 192 Black Saturday (bushfire), 284–5 Black Wednesday (constitutional crisis), 72 Blackburn, 182, 183 Blackham, John, 88 blacksmiths, 173–4 Blamey, Sir Thomas, 195 Boldrewood, Rolf, 137 Bolte, Sir Henry, 207, 208, 223, 225, 231, 245, 252, 253 Bolte Bridge, 262 Bonegilla, 231 riots, 214 bookshops, 91 Bootmakers’ Union, 149 Borbridge, Bob, 255 Boroondara, 201 Botanical Gardens. See Royal Botanic Gardens Bourke Street, 70, 164, 170, 184 Bowser, John, 255 Box Hill, 130, 138, 182, 183, 201

321

boxing, 89 Boyd, Arthur, 225 Brack, John, 225 Bracks, Steve, 252–3, 278, 279, 282, 291 comparison to Kennett, 252 breweries, 186 Broadmeadows, 163, 182, 209 Brooke, G. V., 120 Brookes, Norman, 224 Brownlee, John, 101 Bruce, Mary Grant, 141 Billabong books, 141 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne, 238 Brumby, John, 252, 282, 291 Brunswick, 182, 215 Buckley & Nunn (company), 185 Buddhism, 263 Bulga National Park, 275 Bulletin (magazine), 142 Buninyong, 39, 43 Bunurong (tribe), 8 Burke and Wills expedition, 53, 274 Burnet, Sir Macfarlane, 235 Burns, Peter, 87 bushfires, 41, 133, 191–3, 283–5 1926, 191–2 1939, 192–3 1943–4, 193 Ash Wednesday, 243–4 Black Friday, 284 Black Saturday, 284–5 bushrangers, 69–72 Kelly gang, 69–71 public fascination towards, 71–2 butter, 152, 189 Buvelot, Louis, 138 Byrne, Joe, 71 cable trams, 182 Cain, John, 198, 207–8 Cain, John, junior, 238, 243–9, 253, 261

322

Index

Calder, William, 169, 187 Calder Thunderdome (raceway), 260 ‘California’ Taylor, 117 Calwell, Arthur, 185, 205–6, 213, 214 Camberwell, 130, 182, 184, 209 Cape Weed, 133 Carey, Peter, 225 Carlton, 72, 170, 214, 215, 259, 288 Lygon Street, 214, 289 Carlton Football Club, 88, 224 Carlton & United Breweries, 186 Carlton’s Hotel, 127 Carlyon, Les, 250 Caroline Springs, 268, 288 Carols by Candlelight, 226 Casey, 266, 287 Castle, Amy, 100–1 Castlemaine, 43, 66, 179, 183, 212 Catholicism, 118, 122, 123, 222, 263 attitude to alcohol, 129 growth, 264 Irish and, 123–4 Caulfield, 84, 182 census 1851, 40 1861, 125 1891, 110 2011, 272, 287 centenary air race, 176 Chadstone shopping centre, 264 Champion of the Seas (ship), 44 child labour, 109–10 farming, 109 manufacturing industries and, 110 Childers, Hugh, 39 Chinese immigrants citizenship and, 56 European reaction to, 53, 54, 55–6

gold rush and, 53–6 landing tax and, 53–4 opium and, 54–5 sheep industry and, 36, 53 as strike breakers, 54 Christianity, 220–1 awakening of 1860s, 117 concentrations of 2001–, 263–4 decline of, 222 denominations, 118 funerals and burials and, 120 government subsidy of, 123 hymns, 119 influence on attitude to dying, 120–1 liberal theology and, 125–6 marriage and, 120 nonconformists, 126 participation rates, 125 pre gold rush, 116–17 Protestant–Catholic antagonism and, 122–3 social influence, 118–21, 122 welfare role of, 121–2 See also individual denominations Church of England, 40, 118, 122, 123, 124, 126, 222, 263 churches building of 1860s–1870s, 118 outer suburbs, 263 Cigarmakers Union, 149 cinemas, 220 Clapp, Sir Harold, 187, 254 Clark, J. James, 52 Clarke, Marcus, 134–5 Clarke, W. J. T., 64 Clayton, 265, 266 climate, 212, 281 1850s and 1860s, 134 1870s–1880s, contemporary perceptions of, 134–5 1890s, 150–1

Index early Aboriginal era, 4, 5, 7 rainfall 2011–, 285 working hours and, 110 clipper ships gold rush immigration and, 44–5 Clonmel (paddle steamer), 31–2 Clow, James, 27 Clunes, 43, 54, 134 coal mining, 180–1 Latrobe Valley, 180–1 Melbourne–Sydney rivalry, 231 Wonthaggi, 180 Coates, Sir Ernest, 254 coffee palaces, 130 Cole, George Ward, 24 Coles, G. J., 184, 190 Collier, Phillip, 255 Collingwood, 155, 181, 184, 190, 210, 215, 216 Collingwood Football Club, 86, 224 Collins, Dale, 279 Colonial Bank, 186 Colonial Stadium, 289 ‘Columbine Caramel’, 75 combine harvester, 107 Commercial Bank of Australia, 148 banknotes in Chinese and, 56 Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, 186 Committee on Climate Change, 281 Commonwealth Bank, 234, 247 Commonwealth Games 2006, 261 Como (house), 227, 273 Connelly, Sir Raymond, 215 conscription, 163–4 constitution proclamation of, 50 convict labour, 36 Coode Canal, 78 Cook, Captain James, 16 Coombs, Dr H. C., 235 Corinella, military camp, 19

323

Corlett, Peter, 253 Corrigan, Tommy, 84 Cosgrove, Robert, 255 Country Fire Authority, 193 Country Party, 203, 210, 273, 281 decline of, 207 formation, 198–201 merger with Stewart–Dunstan Progressive Country Party, 205 radical wing, 203 Country Roads Board, 168, 187 country towns, growth of, 270–1 Courier (newspaper), 175 Cowen, Sir Zelman, 125 Cranbourne, 262, 266 crematoriums, 265 Creswick, 54, 62, 65, 96, 122 cricket, 84, 88 Cricketers’ Hotel, 127 Crossley, Ada, 100 Crown Casino, 289 Crystal Tavern (hotel), 127 CSIRO, 235 Curtin, John, 195, 255 cycling, 290–1 helmet laws, 290 Daglish, Henry, 255 Daily Telegraph (newspaper), 95 dairy industry, 109, 152, 273 dam construction, 279 Dandenong, 262, 265–6 Dandenong Ranges, 209, 226, 227, 243, 260, 288 Dargie, Sir William, 225 Darling, Sir Charles, 58 Darling, Harold, 187 Darwin, Charles, 275 Davis Cup, 224 Dawe, Bruce, 225 Daylesford, 55, 179, 215, 226 de Castella, Hubert, 72–3 de Pury, Frederick Guillaume, 72

324

Index

Deakin, Alfred, 94, 154, 156, 160, 238, 275 Deakin University, 219 death penalty, 222–4 Deeds That Won the Empire, 142 deer, 133 Delacombe, Sir Rohan, 223 Democratic Labor Party, 221 Denison, Sir Hugh, 185 depression (economic) 1840s, 35 1890s, 147–50, 152–4 1920s–1930s, 189–91 ‘sustenance’ payments, 191 Derwent drums, 37 desalination plant, 282–3, 285 Dickens, Charles, 41 Dillon, Sir John, 254 dingos, 278 Docklands, 250, 258, 259, 288, 289 stadium, 261 Don, Charles Jardine, 158 Doncaster, 182, 183 ‘Donegal Jim’, 104–5 Doyle, Robert, 293 Draper, Daniel, 120–1 dredging, Port Phillip Bay, 278–9 drought, 199, 281 1890s, 150–1 1914, 162 1980s, 243–4 1990s–2009, 281–2, 285–6 Duffy, Gavan, 60 Duigan, John R., 176 Dunedin (New Zealand), 77–8, 134 Dunlop (company), 181 Dunstan, Albert, 203–4, 205, 206–7, 210, 253 dust storms, 133 Dyson, Edward, 173

East, Sir Ronald, 254 East Melbourne, 86, 259, 288 Echuca, 66, 197 Economist (magazine), 292 Edey, John, 188 education denominational schools, 59 depression, 1890s and, 150 Education Act 1872, 59, 61 effect of gold rush on, 58–9 free and compulsory, 60–1, 109 German schools, World War I, 163 national schools, 59 rates, secondary and tertiary, 219 religious lessons and, 59–60 role of churches in, 121–2 secondary, establishment of, 61 eight-hour day, 110–13, 207 government departments and, 112 influence of Chartists on campaign for, 111 mining industry and, 112 railways and, 112 skilled trades and, 112 stonemasons and, 111–12 unskilled labourers and, 113 Eight Hours Day (celebration). See Labour Day Eildon Weir, 152, 279, 282 elections, 238 1843, 122 1848, 40 1856, 50 1982, 251 1992, 249 1999, 251–2 2002, 253 preferential voting, 200, 202 secret ballot, introduction of, 50

Index electoral boundary redistribution, 201–2, 207 1926, 202 Elmslie, George, 161 Eltham, 182, 209 emigration (from Victoria) 1890s, 149–50 after gold rush, 53 Empire Day, 226 employment, full, 197 endurance sports, 89–90 English, Scottish & Australian (ES&A) Bank, 148, 186 environmental debates, 278–9, 286 environmental protection alpine grazing debate, 279–81 Cain government 1982–90, 244 ‘dark green’ ideology, 277, 278, 283 ‘light green’ ideology, 277 native flora and fauna, 276–8 Essendon, 182, 201, 262, 267 Essendon airport, 233 Essendon Football Club, 86 Etihad Stadium, 289 Eureka Hotel burning of, 49 Eureka rebellion, 48, 50, 56, 140, 215 casualties, 50 Victorian democracy and, 50 Eureka Tower, 289 Evans, Cadel, 291 Exhibition Building, 175, 210 state parliament and, 156 factories. See manufacturing industry Fairbairn, J. V., 195 Fanning, Peter, 27 Faraday school kidnapping, 219 farmers politics and, 198–201 farming, 38, 152, 199

325

1870s, 67–8 between world wars, 189 child labour and, 109 effect of farm size on, 68 effect on landscape of, 132–3 female labour, 106 Gippsland, 68–9 wheat. See wheat industry Farrow collapse, 248 Fawkner, John Pascoe, 22–3, 38 Federal Hotel, 130 federation depression, 1890s and, 154 referenda, Victorian support for, 154–5 Federation Drought, 151, 281, 282, 285–6 Federation Square, 250 Federation villa, 139 Fellows, T. H., 61 Felt Hatters Union, 149 Ferntree Gully National Park, 275 Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, 275, 276 Fisher, Andrew, 156 Fishermen’s Bend, 197, 210, 230 Fitchett, Rev W. H., 142 Fitzroy, 61, 74, 75, 155, 210, 215, 216, 259 Fitzroy Football Club, 260 Flagstaff Hill, 28 Flemington, 72, 258, 262 racecourse, 26, 176 Flinders Street station, 182 Flinders, Matthew, 18 flying foxes, 277–8 Foley, Larry, 89 football, 84–8 1970s–, 260–1 announcement of marks, 85 cohesive nature of, 87–8 development of rules, 85, 87 Docklands stadium, 261

326 football (cont.) importance of free Saturday to, 86, 114 introduction of goal signalling, 85 introduction of umpires, 85 loss of suburban grounds, 260–1 need for large ovals and, 85 South Melbourne v Geelong 4 September 1886, 86–7 suburban rivalry and, 86 televised, 220 Waverley Park, 260, 261 as winter sport, 85–6 See also Melbourne Cricket Ground Footscray, 86, 182, 197, 267, 290 For the Term of His Natural Life, 135 Ford Motor Company, 181, 211 Foresters’ Hotel, 127 foxes, 133 Francis, James, 60 Frankston, 227, 262, 267 Fraser, Malcolm, 238, 256 Freemason’s Hotel, 127 French, Leonard, 225 Froude, James, 73 funerals and burials, 120 Galloway, James, 111 gambling, 259 Chinese immigrants and, 55 gangland murders, 269 garage. See petrol stations Gardiner, John, 25 Gas and Fuel Corporation, 250 Geelong, 29, 37–8, 43, 78, 125, 168, 175, 179, 181, 211–12, 226, 248, 262, 271, 272 football and, 86 wine industry, 72

Index Geelong Advertiser (newspaper), 38 Geelong Football Club, 86, 260 Geelong Grammar School, 238 General Motors-Holden, 181 gentrification, 210 George, Henry, 159 gerrymander. See electoral boundary redistribution Gibbs, Mary Elizabeth, 219 Gibson, William G., 202–3, 204 Gillard, Julia, 256 Gippsland, 103, 104, 133, 152, 187, 198, 200, 286 early pastoral settlement, 31–2 farming, 68–9 Glenrowan, 168 Goe, Bishop Dr, 120 gold licences, 48–9 burning of, 49 inspections for, 49 See also Eureka rebellion gold mining 1990s–, 271–2 after gold rush, 61–3 Bendigo, 178–9 decline of, 179–80 output, 179 gold rush Ballarat, 43, 46–7 Beechworth, 47–8 Bendigo, 43 Bunninyong, 43 Chinese miners. See Chinese immigrants clipper ships and, 44–5 Clunes, 43 exodus of miners from, 53 government administration, 48–9 immigration to Victoria, 44 imports to Victoria during, 45 inflation during, 44 Mount Alexander, 43

Index reef evaluation 1857, 53 transportation to, 45, 46, 52 Warrandyte, 25, 43 See also Eureka rebellion Golden Summer (painting), 138 Goldsmith, Jane, 69 golf, 260 Goold, Bishop James Alipius, 60, 117 Gordon, Adam Lindsay, 138 Gorton, John, 225, 238, 256 Goulburn River, 151, 282 Goulburn Valley, 68, 105, 196, 198, 200 Goulburn Weir, 151 Gould League of Bird Lovers, 275 Grainger, Percy, 100 Grant, James, 14, 18 Great Ocean Road, 171, 227 Greer, Germaine, 218 Grey, Earl Henry George, 40 Grollo brothers, 258 Guilfoyle, Dame Margaret, 218 Guilfoyle, William, 97 Gullett, Sir Henry, 195 Guy Fawkes Day, 226 Haines, William Clark, 50 Hamer, Sir Rupert, 208, 225, 244, 246, 253 Hamilton, 7, 39, 66, 205 Harrison, James, 38 Hart, Isaac, 199 Hart, Steve, 71 Harvester Judgment, 199 Hawdon, Joseph, 25 Hawke, Robert James Lee (‘Bob’), 238, 256 Hawthorn, 86, 201 Hawthorn Football Club, 261 Heidelberg, 27, 29, 138, 139, 183, 262, 267 Heidelberg School (art movement), 26, 138, 237

327

Henty, James, 19–20 Henty, William, 19–20 Hepburn, James, 41 Hepburn, John, 30, 37 Herald (newspaper), 95, 185, 220 Herzogin Cecilie (ship), 174 Hicken, Abe, 89 Hicks, Zachary, 16 Higgins, Justice Henry Bournes, 160, 199 highways. See roads Hitchcock, Howard, 171 Hogan, Edmund, 189 Hogan, Edward John (‘Ned’), 161–2, 204 holiday homes, 227 Holt, Harold, 214, 238, 256 homosexuality, 222 horses, 172–3 decline of, 173, 174 draught, 172 replacement by motor cars, 169 as transport, 169 Horsham, 66, 67 hotels effect of temperance movement on, 130 gambling machines and, 221 opening hours, 128, 163, 221 ratio to population, 127–8 Hotham, Sir Charles, 48, 52 Eureka rebellion and, 49 housework, 108–9 innovations in, 218 Housing Commission, 210–11 Hovell, William, 15 Howard, John, 242 Howard Florey Institute, 187 Howitt, William, 47–8 Hughes, William Morris (‘Billy’), 156, 163, 238 Hume, Fergus, 78 Hume, Hamilton, 15

328

Index

Hume Weir, 152, 282 Hummer (journal), 142 Humphries, Barry, 225 Huntingfield, Lord, 205 hymns, 119 ICI House, 210 Immigrants’ Aid Society, 111 immigration, 240–1 1980s, 245 2005–, 266 from Asia, 189, 289 from Baltic states, 213 from Greece, 215, 216 from Italy, 214–16 from Poland, 216 post World War II, 213–16, 231–3 Imperial Chemical Industries, 181 Independent church, 117 International Centennial Exhibition, 227 International Harvester, 181, 266 introduced species, see pests, introduced irrigation, 152 Irvine, William (‘Iceberg’), 161 Islam, 263 Isaacs, Sir Isaac, 125 James Baines (ship), 44 Jones, Charles Lloyd, 235 Judaism, 125, 263 Jungwirth, Sir John, 254 Jupagalk (tribe), 8 Keating, Paul, 242 Keilor, 27, 46, 182, 209, 266 Kelly gang, 69–71 capture at Glenrowan, 71 Euroa bank robbery, 70–1 Jerilderie bank robbery, 71 Kelly, Dan, 71 Kelly, Edward (‘Ned’), 69, 71, 170 Kennedy, Graham, 220

Kennett, Jeff, 249–52 comparison to Bracks, 252 Kirner, Joan, 249 Kitchener, Lord, 157 koalas, 276–7 Koori, 229 Kow Swamp excavation of, 6 La Trobe, Charles Joseph, 28, 48 La Trobe University, 219 Laanecoorie Weir, 151 Labor Party, 205 emergence of, 157 split 1955, 221 support of Dunstan government, 206 Victorian support for, 157, 158–60, 161 Labour Day, 114, 226 See also eight-hour day Lakes Entrance, 3, 32, 166 Lalor, Peter, 49, 50, 54 landscape anglicanisation of, 132 effect of farming on, 132–3 effect of gold rush on, 134 effect of land clearing on, 133 effect of ringbarking, 133 man-made structures and, 133–4 visual arts and, 138–9 landscape gardening, 97 Lang, J. T., 191 Latrobe Valley, 231, 251, 272 Lawler, Ray, 225 Lawrence, Marjorie, 101 Lawson, Harry, 189 Lawson, Henry, 136, 278 Lewis, Essington, 187, 195 Liardet, William, 24 Liberal Party, 159, 160–1, 207 libraries Carnegie, 264 Melbourne Public Library, 52, 90–1

Index public and mechanics’ institutes, 91 State Library of Victoria, 251 Sunday School, 91 Lightning (ship), 44 Lindrum, Walter, 224 Lindsay, Norman, 96–7 Lisna, Panda (‘Princess Panda’), 220 Loddon River, 151 London (steamship), 120–1 London Chartered Bank, 148 long-footed potoroo, 286 Lonsdale, Captain William, 23 Lutheranism, 122, 124, 263 Lyons, Joseph, 186 MacArthur, General Douglas, 196 ‘mahogany ship’, 15–16 mail services, 39 Mair, Alex, 255 Maldon, 46, 183 Mallee, 4, 7, 8, 35, 133, 151, 152, 198, 200 decline, 272 Maloney, Dr William, 158 Malvern, 75, 155, 182 Mannix, Archbishop Daniel, 163, 164 manufacturing industry, 180, 181–2 child labour and, 110 decline, 257–8 Melbourne–Sydney rivalry, 230–1 motor cars, 176, 181 participation in, 181 wealth generation, 181 Marco Polo (ship), 44 Maribyrnong, 160, 197 Maribyrnong River, 27, 244 ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, 82 Maryborough, 54, 55, 66, 96, 179, 212 Maryborough Knitting Mills, 181 Mathews, R. H., 55

329

Mauger, Samuel, 160 McCaughey, Rev Dr Davis, 244 McCoy, Professor Frederick, 53 McCulloch, Sir James, 58, 253 McDonald, John, 204 McEwen, John, 204 McKay, Hugh Victor, 107, 199 factory, 181 McMahon, William, 238 McMillan, Angus, 31 McNamara, Pat, 250 Melba, Dame Nellie, 98–100 Melbourne alcohol consumption during gold rush, 128 amenities, 1950s, 52 appartments, inner city, 288 applied and medical research, 187 banking crisis 1890s and, 148 ‘The Big Smoke’, 258 British army and, 56–7 buildings, height limit, 210 businessmen 1920s–1930s, 187 central business district, 258, 288, 289 closer settlement, 268 commerical importance, 77 depression 1890s, 148–9 differences to Sydney, 195 during gold rush, 45 early relationship to sheep industry, 29 early settlement, 23–4, 27 entertainment hub, 261 exodus from, 1920s–1930s, 190–1 federal capital, 155–7 growth 2001–2011, 287 housing scarcity, 214 liveability ranking, 292–3 ‘Marvellous’, 82 migration from, 1890s, 149 nature clubs and societies, 275–6 parking meters, 292

330

Index

Melbourne (cont.) pinpointed centre, 288 population, 51, 79, 182, 209–10, 211, 241, 264, 287 prostitution 1880s, 80 public transport, 289–90 relationship with Dunedin (New Zealand), 77–8 relationship with Riverina, 77 return of resident population, 258–9 rivalry with Sydney. See Melbourne–Sydney rivalry sewerage, 1880s–1890s, 81–2 skyline, 210–11, 288 sports hub, 259–60 standard of living 1880s–1890s, 80–1 suburbs, 26, 79, 81, 82, 86, 124, 130, 139, 149, 182–3, 209 telegraph installation, 51 traffic crisis, 291–2 urban revival, 259 western expansion, 287–8 ‘Yankee city’, 149 See also individual suburbs, municipalities Melbourne 2030 plan, 268 Melbourne Club, 24, 156 Melbourne Cricket Club, 224, 261 Melbourne Cricket Ground, 88, 196, 224, 244, 261 Melbourne Cup, 84, 193, 224, 262 filming, 177, 260 Melbourne Football Club, 88, 260 Melbourne Grammar School, 238 Melbourne High School, 196 Melbourne Hospital, 128 Melbourne Hunt Club, 265 Melbourne Illustrated Post (newspaper), 74 Melbourne Public Library, 52, 90–1

Melbourne–Sydney rivalry, 76–7, 230 air travel, 232–3 coal mining, 231 cultural life, 235 finance, 233–5 immigration, 231–3, 240–1 industrial relations, 231 manufacturing industry, 230–1 philanthropy, 235–6 politics, 237–9, 242 role of Canberra in, 241–2 scientific and medical research, 235 self-help tradition, 239 social cohesion and, 287 tourism, 236–7 women’s lobbies, 239–40 Melbourne Theatre Company, 225 Melton, 182, 266, 287 Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon (‘Bob’), 195, 219, 238, 241, 256 Menzies Hotel, 196, 258 Methodism, 118, 124, 128, 130 Primitive, 124 Methodist Ladies’ College, 142 Michell, A. G. M., 187 Mildura, 151, 167, 188, 189, 251, 270, 272 military defences, 57 Miller, Denison, 234 mining industry eight-hour day and, 112 Minister of the Crown, 223 missionaries to China, 55 Mitchell, Helen. See Melba, Dame Nellie Mitchell, Major Sir Thomas, 20, 29, 286 Mockridge, Russell, 291 Monash, Sir John, 125, 164, 187, 250

Index Monash University, 219, 265 Moomba, 226 Moorabbin, 209, 260 Moorehead, Alan, 225 Mora, Mirka, 225 Mornington Peninsula, 3, 8, 213, 288 Morrison, Crosbie, 276 Morrison, George, 93 Morrison, John, 258 Morrow, James, 107 Morwell, 212, 231 mosques, 263 motor cars, 167–8, 289 1920s, 169–70 accidents, 170–1 country journeys, 171 first Holden, 230, 263 manufacturing, 176, 181 replacement of horses by, 169 road deaths and, 211 spread of suburbs and, 211 tourism and, 226 motorcycles, 169 Mount Alexander massacre, 34 Mount Buffalo, 227 Mount Buffalo National Park, 275 Mount Eccles National Park, 277 Mount Hotham, 227 Mount Macedon, 20, 27, 134, 155, 183, 226, 236, 243 mountain cattlemen, 280 movie industry, 176–7 municipalities, 182, 209, 262 redrawing of boundaries, 250, 266–8 Murchison, Sir Roderick, 52 Murdoch, Sir Keith, 184–6, 187, 220 Murdoch, Rupert, 186 Murray, Sir Brian, 244 Murray River, 3, 4, 10, 12, 15, 29, 39, 67, 73, 151, 152, 271, 282

331

music, 96 churches and, 122 hymns, 119 Myer, Sidney, 183–4, 187 Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 78 myxomatosis, 212 National Australia Bank, 186 National Bank, 70, 148, 186 National Gallery of Victoria, 139, 251 Ian Potter Centre, 250 National Herbarium, 275 National Life and Character, 142 national parks, 227, 275 National Party, 267 National Tennis Centre, 261 nationalism assertive, 141 dual patriotism, 141 negative, 140, 142 positive, 140, 142 symbols and, 137–8 natural history, 274–5 nature appreciation, 275–6 Nauru House, 258 Neighbours (television show) 292 newspapers, 91–6, 184, 220 content 1880s, 93 country, 95 effect of television on, 220 foreign-language, 95 Geelong, 38 importance of, 91–2 role of telegraph, 92 Nicholls, Doug, 228 Noble Park, 265, 266 Nolan, Sidney, 225 nonconformists, 126, 130 attitude to alcohol, 126 decline of, 222 North Melbourne, 82, 124, 160, 259

332

Index

North Melbourne Football Club, 260 north–south pipeline, 282 Nunawading, 130, 209, 251 Oakleigh, 79, 182, 262, 264–5 Ocean Grove, 270 temperance movement and, 130 old-age pension, 161 Olympic (company), 181 Olympic Games 1956, 220, 224–5, 281 Olympic Park, 261 opium, 54–5 Opperman, Hubert, 291 oral contraceptive, introduction of, 218 Orbost, 17, 166–7 Order of Rechabites, 127 Ormond, Francis, 121 Orthodox faiths, 216, 263 Orton, Rev John, 116 Otways, 103, 152 Outer Circle Railway, 79, 182 Page, Sir Earle, 195 Parker, E. S., 34 parliament, establishment of, 50 Parliament House, 80 Commonwealth use of, 155 parliamentary terms, 50, 57, 244 Paterson, Andrew Barton (‘Banjo’), 280 Pateshall, Nicholas, 15 Patterson’s Curse, 133 Peacock, Sir Alexander, 201 Peacock, Lady Millie Gertrude, 202 Pearson, Charles Henry, 142 Pell, Cardinal George, 264 Pentridge prison, 250 Perry, Admiral Charles Stillman, 157 Perry, Bishop Charles, 123, 126

pests, introduced, 132–3 birds, 133 deer, 133 foxes, 133 ‘live fences’, 132 rabbits, 133 weeds, 132 petrol stations, 170 self-service, 217 Pfalz (steamship), 162, 163 Phar Lap, 224 philanthropic trusts, 235–6 phylloxera, 73–4 Pianto, Peter, 215 Pilkington (company), 181 pioneering, 134 Point Henry, 38 political disputes with London, 57–8 politicians, native Victorian service outside Victoria, 255 population, 102, 209, 253, 286, 293 1840s, 40 1850s, 52 1970s–1980s, 245–6 1997–1998, 250 2011, 272 age and sex distribution, 1850s–1870s, 59 farmlands, 268, 273 post-World War II, 212 rural, 212 suburban, 1990s–, 263 Port Albert, 31–2 Port Fairy, 19, 39, 66, 95 Port Melbourne, 23, 45, 51, 57, 78, 82, 181, 197, 214, 231 Port Phillip (colony) authorisation of, 23 early government, 28–9 establishment of, 40 Port Phillip Association, 21

Index Port Phillip Bay, 9, 20, 21, 77, 213, 227, 237 dredging, 278–9 early Aboriginal era, 3 early settlement, 20 Portland, 19, 20, 29, 39, 66, 213, 270 Portsea, 3, 227 possums, 277 Prahran, 182, 184 premiers statues of, 253–4 Prendergast, G. M., 161 Presbyterian Ladies’ College, 121, 143 Presbyterianism, 124, 130 Presbyterians, 118, 120, 121, 123 unification of, 117 Preston, 209, 216, 262 Priestley, Dr C. H. B., 281 Primitive Methodists, 124 Prince Henry’s Hospital, 82 Princes Bridge, 26 Prince’s Bridge Hotel, 127 private holidays, 226–7 proportional representation, 253 prostitution, 80 protectionism, 74, 159, 199 Protestantism, 123, 221, 263 attitude to alcohol, 129 decline, 264 public holidays and celebrations, 226 pubs. See hotels Pugh, Clifton, 225 Pyramid Building Society, 248 Queenscliff, 226, 267 Quick, John, 109, 154 rabbits, 133, 212 as food for needy, 148 racecourses, 84, 122, 190, 260

333

Flemington, 26, 176 Sandown, 260 radicalism (politics), 129, 157, 158 radio industry, 185 railways competition with roads, 168–9 construction, 103 depression 1890s and, 150 distribution, 166–7 eight-hour day and, 112 electrification, 182 football and, 87 Gippsland line, 264–5 inland, 66–7 interstate travel, 171–2 Outer Circle, 79, 182 patronage of, 172 racecourses and, 84 to goldfields, 52 tourism and, 226–7 Rainbow Hotel, 127 Ramblers (club), 276 Religious Tract Society, 127 republicanism, 142 restaurants, 215, 259, 263, 289 retirement villages, 219 Rialto (building), 156, 258 Richmond, 25, 118, 124, 182, 184, 210, 215, 259, 260 Risson, Major General Robert, 290 Riverina, 6, 12, 77 Riversdale golf club, 260 Rivett, Sir David, 187 RMIT University, 121 roads, 168, 262 central authority for, 168 competition with railways, 168–9 Roberts, Tom, 138, 139 Robertson, George, 91 Robertson, Macpherson, 74–6 Rose, Lionel, 228 Royal Bank, 186

334

Index

Royal Botanic Gardens, 97, 262, 274, 277 royal commissions, 152, 247, 284 Royal Mail Hotel, 127 Royal Melbourne golf club, 259 Royal Park, 196, 291 Russell Street bombing, 269 Rutherglen, 53, 73 Ryan, Robert, 223 Ryan, T. J., 255 Sale, 61, 141, 212, 270 Salvation Army, 123, 177 Santamaria, B. A. (‘Bob’), 240 Savage, Michael, 255 Save the Forests (society), 276 Scaddan, Jack, 255 Scenes of Revolutionary Life, 186 schools. See education Scobie (goldminer), 49 Scotch College, 121, 249 Scots Church, 118, 124, 263 Scott, Flight Lt C. W. A., 176 Scullin, James H., 203, 237 Seddon, Richard, 255 Selwyn, Alfred, 53 Senbergs, Jan, 214 separation (government), 40–1, 43 settlement density, 293–4 settlements (pre-Batman), 19 Seven Little Australians, 141 Seymour, 168, 281 Seymour Express (newspaper), 95 Shamrock (steamship), 39 Shaw, Thomas, 136–7 Shearers’ Union, 65, 142 sheep industry 1840s, 35–7 1860s–1870s, 64 1890s drought and, 151 Chinese immigrants and, 36, 53 fences, impact on shepherds and, 65 overlanders, 30–1, 33

relationship to early Melbourne, 29 shearers, 65 shearing, 37 Shepparton, 133, 212, 266, 270 Shepparton-Mooroopna, 271 shipping, 213 sail, 24, 38, 39, 44, 51, 174 steam, 32, 39, 78, 104, 174, 175 Shrine of Remembrance, 164–5 Silk Hatters Union, 149 singers, 97–101 snakes, 278 soldier settlements, 187–8 desertion and failure rate, 188 Soldiers of the Cross (movie), 177 Sorrento, 226 military camp at, 19 settlement of, 19 South Melbourne, 26, 82, 182, 210, 257, 259 South Melbourne Football Club, 86, 260, 261 South Street eisteddfod, 98, 100, 101 South Yarra, 227, 273, 288 Southbank, 288, 289 Southern Cross (flag), 140 Southern Cross station, 289 Sovereign Hill historical park, 227 Space, Time and Deity, 125 Spence, William Guthrie, 109, 122 Spencer, Baldwin, 177, 275 Spencer Street, 27, 288 Spofforth, F. R., 88 sport, 84–90, 262 rural, 90 See also particular sports Springvale, 263, 265, 266, 267 squatters, 33, 35, 64–5, 268 land title and, 36 St Arnaud, 179 St Arnaud Times and Kara Kara Advertiser (newspaper), 95 St Enoch church, 118

Index St Ignatius church, 118 St James’ Cathedral, 118 St Kilda, 135, 182 St Kilda Football Club, 260 St Kilda Road, 26, 51, 57, 125, 156 St Patrick’s Cathedral, 117, 236 St Patrick’s College, 252 St Patrick’s Day, 226 St Paul’s Cathedral, 117, 127, 263 St Vincent’s Hospital, 170 Stanley, Lady, 155 State Bank of Victoria, 246–7 State Electricity Commission of Victoria, 180, 187, 250 State Library of Victoria, 251 State Rivers and Water Supply Commission, 151 Stawell, 62, 66, 103, 179, 212 Stephens, James, 111–12 Stewart, Percy G., 203 Stewart–Dunstan Progressive Country Party, 204 Stockdale, Alan, 250 Stone, Dr Victor, 176 stonemasons eight-hour day and, 111–12 Stoney, Graeme, 280 Stonnington (house), 155 Street, Brigadier G. A., 195 Streeton, Arthur, 138–9 Stretton, Hugh, 211, 284 strikes, 206 Strong, Dr Charles, 100, 124 suburbs gardens, 269–70 outer, 263, 268–9 sense of security and, 269 Sun Aria prize, 101 Sun News-Pictorial (newspaper), 185, 220 Sunbury, 72, 266, 287 Sunday observance of, 86, 98, 122, 126, 215, 220, 221, 224

335

Sunday School, 91, 118, 128, 221 Creswick, 122 Sunday Utopia, 215 Sunshine, 119, 181, 209 superannuation schemes, state, 246 supermarkets, 217 Supreme Court of Victoria, 156 Sutherland, Alexander, 79 Sutherland, Mrs Nellie, 269 Sutton, Henry, 176 Swan Hill, 10, 20, 167, 203, 270 historical park, 227 Swanston Street, 27, 84 Sydney Swans. See South Melbourne Football Club Syme, David, 93–4, 185, 220 political influence, 94–5 Syme, Ebenezer, 93 synagogues, 125 Tait, Robert Peter, 222–3 Tangye, Sir Richard, 113–14 Tarrant, Harley, 176 Tasman, Abel, 16 Tasmanian interest in Victoria, 19–20 Tate, Frank, 187, 254 Tattersall’s (lottery), 221 taxes and tariffs, 161, 245 confectionery, 76 foreign goods, 74 gold rush landing tax, 53–4 import, 58 income tax, 164, 195, 206–7 inter-colonial, 76 wine, 73 taxi cabs, 190 Taylor, Joseph Leslie (‘Squizzy’), 170 Teague, Mr Justice Bernard, 284 teenagers, 219 telegrams, 92, 95, 175

336 telegraph installation, Melbourne, 51 news reporting and, 92 telephones, 175–6 television, 219–20 Neighbours, 292 Telstra stadium, 289 temperance movement, 129–30 ‘dry’ suburbs, 130 effect on hotels, 130 role of churches in, 128–9 Templestowe, 26, 182 ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (story), 278 ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (ballad), 280 ‘The Night Shift’ (story), 259 The Story of the Kelly Gang (movie), 177 ‘The Vagabond’, 81 Thomas, William, 34 Thompson, Lindsay, 208, 219 Thomson, Herbert, 167, 176 Thurung (tribe), 8 Thwaites, John, 279–80 Toner, Pauline, 245 totalisator betting, 221 tourism, 226–7, 236–7, 273 Tower Hill National Park, 275 trade unions, 110, 141, 158, 244, 250 membership, 149 Trades Hall Council, 149, 158 tramways, 107–8, 290 cable, 182 city-loop, 262 Traralgon, 270 travel Port Phillip to Sydney, 39 within Port Phillip, 39 Treasury (building), 52 Trewith, William, 158 Tricontinental (bank), 247 Trollope, Anthony, 78 Trucanini, 6

Index Tucker, Albert, 225 Tullamarine airport, 233, 262 Turner, Ethel, 141 typhoid, 82 Typographical Society, 149 unemployment 1890s, 149 1920s–1930s, 189 1980s, 246 United Presbyterians, 118 Uniting Church, 222, 263 University of Ballarat, 252 University of Melbourne, 45, 52, 112, 141, 150, 219, 235, 238, 274 Ormond College, 121 ‘Victoria – Garden State’, 270 Victoria (sloop), 137 Victoria Auxiliary Bible Society, 127 Victoria Barracks, 156 Victoria Dock, 78 Victoria Quartz, 178 Victoria State Opera, 225 ‘Victorian ballot’, 50 Victorian Cavalry, 150 Victorian Economic Development Corporation, 246 Victorian Farmers’ Union, 200 Victorian Institute of Colleges, 219 Victorian Navy, 57 Villiers, Alan, 102–3, 174 visual arts, 96–7, 225 artists’ camps, 138 paintings, 138–9 volcanoes erruption of, early Aboriginal era, 7–8 von Meuller, Baron Ferdinand, 275 Wadham, Sir Samuel, 210 wages, 111, 112, 160

Index boards, establishment of, 161 Chinese miners and, 56 Harvester Judgment, 199 Walhalla, 32, 62, 201 Wallaby Club, 276 Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, 187 Wangaratta, 212 war loans, 163, 164 Warragul, 9, 104, 270 Warrandyte, 25, 43, 192 Warrnambool, 15, 61, 97, 179, 243, 248, 270 Waten, Judah, 186 water infrastructure, 281–3 desalination plant, 282–3, 285 north–south pipeline, 282 Waterpool at Coleraine (painting), 138 Watson, J. C., 160, 172 Waverley, 209, 262 Waverley Park, 260, 261 Wedge, J. H., 25 weeds, 132 Weekly Times Farmers’ Handbook, 174 weirs, 151–2 Welcome Stranger nugget, 62–3 Werribee, 209, 215, 262, 270, 287 Werribee Park (house), 273 Wesley College, 120, 125, 196, 238 Wesleyans, 118, 123, 124 West Gate Bridge, 211, 258, 262 Westernport, 7, 8, 19, 20, 34, 213 wheat industry, 38, 65–6, 152, 243 1870s–1880s, 68 harvesting and threshing, 105–6, 107 White, Sir Brudenell, 195 Whitlam, Edward Gough, 225, 271 Wilcox, Vernon, 223 Wilding, Tony, 224 Williams, Fred, 225 Williamson, David, 225 Williamstown, 23, 28, 252, 260

337

Willis, Mr Justice, 28 Wills, Tom, 84 Wilsons Promontory, 284 Wilsons Promontory National Park, 275 Wimmera, 66, 67, 107, 124, 150, 163, 203 decline, 272 Windsor Hotel, 130, 155 wine industry, 38, 72–4 Geelong, 72 phylloxera, 73–4 Rutherglen, 73 St Hubert’s vineyard, 72–3 Sunbury, 72 Winter, John, 37 Wodonga, 66, 76, 152, 212, 214, 231 women, 244 achievement of high political office, 245 Commonwealth support schemes for, 218–19 farm labour and, 106 housework and, 108–9, 218 outside home employment, 218 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 239 Wonthaggi, 180, 205 desalination plant, 282–3, 285 wool industry decline, 258, 273 work, 102–5 child labour, 109–10 ‘do-it-yourself’ movement and, 217–18 farm, 104 farm, female, 106 harvesting and threshing, 105–6, 107 hours of, 107–8, 113, 114, 217 housework, 108–9

338

Index

work (cont.) itinerant, 104–5 lifting and, 103–4 on family home, 217 physical nature of, 102–3 See also eight-hour day Work Care scheme, 246 Workers’ Educational Association, 160 Working Man’s Club (Mildura), 130 World War I, 162–4, 165 casualties, 164 enlistment, 162–3 hostility to local Germans, 163 World War II, 193–7 casualties, 197 rationing, 196 wowsers, 131, 221 Wren, John, 206

Yallourn, 180, 191, 231 Yan Yean reservoir, 25, 52 Yarra River, 3, 244 as social barrier, 26 early crossing points, 25 falls, 25 floods, 26–7 naming of, 25 role of for early Melbourne settlement, 25–6 Yarra Valley, 138, 139 Yarraville, 203, 216 Yensoon (shepherd), 41 Yorta Yorta (tribe) land claim, 229 You Yangs, 183, 236 Young and Jackson Hotel, 127 Young, Rev William, 54, 55 zoological gardens, 274

Plate 1.1 The stormy coastline near Point Nepean and the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay. This was one of the first views of Victoria for early settlers arriving from Tasmania in the 1830s and hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving from Europe thereafter. The prime minister Harold Holt disappeared nearby in 1967, while swimming in the surf. John R. Reid.

Plate 1.2 The Yarra River falls – recalled by artist W. Liardet in 1875 – dictated the site of Melbourne. Upstream was fresh water for people and sheep, and just downstream was deep water for small ships. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Plate 1.3 In May 1835 John Batman stood on the slopes of the Bellarine Peninsula and looked north across the bay to the rugged You Yangs and the basalt plains, where he set out to find Aboriginal people and negotiate a treaty. John R. Reid.

Plate 1.4 In the early 1860s the new Barkly gold rush, near Avoca, was a jumble of tents, huts, windlasses (or winders) and mullock heaps. Placards on trees advertised local gold-buyers. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H36592.

Plate 1.5 In East Gippsland in the 1880s Lake Tyers was both a haven and place of exile for many Victorian Aboriginal families. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Plate 1.6 As a wool port Geelong challenged Melbourne at first, but by 1896 its Yarra Street pier mostly attracted the slow sailing ships rather than steamships. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H19555.

Plate 1.7 The fishing fleet at Queenscliff – preserved on a postcard of 1914 – served Melbourne’s demand for fresh fish. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/4610.

Plate 1.8 A farm, cleared from dense forest near Warburton, photographed in 1889. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H32939.

Plate 1.9 In south-west Victoria, from the 1850s, thousands of miles of dry stone walls were built to enclose sheep and cattle. John R. Reid, c. 1982.

Plate 1.10 The customs houses in Flinders Street looked down on the ships in the river docks in 1889. The high railway viaduct linking Flinders and Spencer Street stations was about to be built in the foreground. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H32939/b47810.

Plate 1.11 The Sandringham railway, 1907. The steam locomotives served all suburban and country lines. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/3092.

Plate 1.12 The Federal Coffee Palace, a grand no-alcohol hotel opened at the western end of Collins Street in 1888, reflected the power of the evangelical churches and their temperance crusade. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H32939.

Plate 1.13 Sturt Street in Ballarat, viewed from the post office’s tower in about 1900. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H2002.130/10.

Plate 2.1 The ornate Flinders Street railway station, opened in 1908, made the Swanston Street intersection the busiest in Victoria. The cable tram is about to depart for Bridge Road, Richmond. Women in long dresses compete with new automobiles, bicycles, trams and horse teams for right of way. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H2008.105/24.

Plate 2.2 When North Melbourne played Richmond in 1903, neither team had yet been admitted to the Victorian Football League. News Ltd/Newspix, NP114168.

Plate 2.3 In country towns before the First World War, boxing matches in the local hall always drew an audience of men. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/5951.

Plate 2.4 Politicians visiting Long Lakes in the Mallee in 1904, in search of the best route for another wheatbelt railway. University of Melbourne Archives, George Swinburne collection, 1991.0090. ‘The Mallee, Mildura and the Murray: The narrative of a record tour’.

Plate 2.5 A cable tram passing the Melbourne Hospital in Lonsdale Street. The first cable tram ran in 1885 and the last – in Bourke Street – in 1940. The cables, propelled by small power houses scattered through the city and suburbs, ran along the middle of the main streets. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H87.269/16.

Plate 2.6 In Benalla in about 1905, newsboys cycled out from Mrs Clark’s shop, delivering the latest Melbourne newspapers that had come by train. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/5949.

Plate 2.7 Street procession in Benalla on Patriotic Sunday, 20 September 1914. The Great War is nearly seven weeks old. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/5778.

Plate 2.8 A Geelong sewage aqueduct, built in 1914. Most houses in the main Victorian cities were sewered for the first time in the years 1897– 1925. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/6468.

Plate 2.9 Before 1914, on a few go-ahead farms, a steam traction engine with iron wheels was replacing horse teams in ploughing the north Victorian plains. A dog stands beside the driver. University of Melbourne Archives, UMA/I/5760.

Plate 2.10 The vast Exhibition Building was opened in the Carlton Gardens in October 1880 for an international trade fair. Melbourne was Australia’s largest city and eager to proclaim that fact. The dome was modelled on Florence Cathedral’s, and from its flagpole in September 1901 was unveiled the present Australian flag. John R. Reid.

Plate 2.11 The first federal parliament was formally opened in the Exhibition Building on 9 May 1901. Thereafter it sat in the Victorian parliament house in Spring Street before moving to Canberra in 1927. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H27418.

Plate 2.12 Miss Bella Guerin (later Mrs Julia Halloran) was a household name after she took out her arts degree at Melbourne University in December 1883. She was the first of all Australian female graduates. Melbourne University Archives, UMA/I/1814.

Plate 2.13 The funeral of Dame Nellie Melba, leaving Scots Church and processing up Collins Street in February 1931. World renowned as a singer, Melba was then the best known of all Australians. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H2004.61/453.

Plate 3.1 Ron Clarke carried the torch into the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 22 November 1956, for the opening of the Olympic Games. News Ltd/Newspix, NP1913.

Plate 3.2 Melbourne Football Club, Australia’s oldest, celebrates its 150th birthday at the MCG in 2008. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.3 Milking time at Bena, South Gippsland. The dairy farm was once dense forest. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.4 In 1976 the iron shed at Heathcote was surrounded by a short history of rural fencing, with wire fence, remnants of wooden post-and-rail fence, log and branch fence, dog leg fence, and – in the background – the hawthorn hedge once used as a ‘live fence’. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.5 The Shrine of Remembrance, modelled on ancient Greek monuments, was opened on 11 November 1934 to commemorate the fallen of the First World War. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.6 ‘Age shall not weary them’: each Anzac Day the parade crosses the Princes Bridge and moves towards the Shrine. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.7 Magazine seller on the steps in Flinders Street, the street where the first stage of the Murdoch news empire was founded. The stock on display in 1987 hints at the decline of the daily newspaper. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.8 Collins Street, for long the symbol of Australian banking and finance, meets Queen Street. Here in 1838 was opened the village’s first bank, the Derwent of Hobart. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.9 The ‘trammy’, now an extinct species. This tram conductor, with his money bag and summer uniform, re-emerges at Federation Square along with the thousands who welcome the Queen on 26 October 2011. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.10 In the distance, behind the Fitzroy Gardens and their avenues of ancient elm trees, rise the skyscrapers of Melbourne’s east end. It is 1990 and the Southbank and Docklands buildings are not yet thought of. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.11 The tree-shaded Melbourne suburb of Doncaster: 150 years ago it was – like Thomastown, Berwick and Geelong’s Grovedale – the home of German farmers and orchardists. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.12 The Grace Darling Hotel in Smith Street, Collingwood, was built in 1854, of Victorian bluestone and Tasmanian sandstone. The men who set out to form Collingwood’s football club, later famous, met here in May 1892. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.13 Visitors either like it or hate it. A Melbourne city lane, painted with graffiti in the early 2000s. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.14 One of 2000 houses destroyed in the huge Victorian bushfires of Black Saturday, 7 February 2009. John R. Reid.

Plate 3.15 Holiday-makers cluster at Sorrento while the tide is high. Here is an echo of that momentous event in Aboriginal history – the rising of the seas to create Port Phillip Bay and the Sorrento beach less than 10 000 years ago. John R. Reid.