Chapter Ix. Old Melbourne Described

CHAPTER IX. OLD MELBOURNE DESCRIBED. 1840—1843. SYNOPSIS:—Difficulties of Pedcstrianism—Early Legal Difficulties.—The Queen's Wharf—Solar Perplexities.—First Public Clock.—Early Letter-carriers. —Tardy Mail-deliveries.—First Burial Ground.—A Threatened Famine.—Early Mercantile Firms.—Jewish Residents.—Population of Colony in 1840-1.—Nocturnal Outrages.—Bill of Wants.—Sir Gcor«e Gipps' Visit.—•" Kiteflying."—The Unemployed.—Street Procession.—Open-air Demonstration.—Population of the Town. —First Executions of Criminals. —Commercial Depression.—Mr. Wentworth.—First Boiling-down Establishments.—Revival of Trade. PERSON now standing on the summit of Parliament House, and looking at the city spreading its wings, fan-like in every direction—its steeples, domes, and edifices glinting in the sunlight—the people, like bees, buzzing and busying about—the vehicles of every description, tram cars, and other evidences of active li'e thronging the streets—the whinnying and whistling of the "iron horse" as he rushes through the suburbs, and the fleet of shipping in Hobson's Bay—will smile with incredulity at my portraiture of the Melbourne of nearly half a century ago, yet it will be limned to the life without a single shade or tint of exaggeration thrown in to set off the effect. Forty odd years is such a brief period in the life of a great city, that unless the Melbourne of 1840 could be attested by an eye witness, it is difficult even to imagine the state of things then existent as compared with the present, and there never has been a stronger verification than the comparison supplies, of Burke's famous adage, that " fiction lags after fact, invention is unfruitful, and imagination is cold and barren." Melbourne in 1840 was certainly not a city, and could hardly be called a town ; nor did it even partake of the characteristics of a village or a hamlet. It was a kind of big " settlement," in groups pitched here and there, with houses, sheds, and tents in clusters, or scattered in ones and twos. There were streets marked out, and stores, shops, and counting-bouses; but with the exception of those in the old Market Square and portions of Flinders, Little Flinders, Collins, and Elizabeth Streets, so dispersed that, after dark, residents incurred not only trouble but danger in moving about. The taverns, or houses of entertainment, were few in number, and, with a couple of exceptions, the accommodation for the public was of the most limited and comfortless description. There were several brick-built houses and a few weather-board cottages, with some, though not much, pretension to comfort; but the majority of the business or residential tenements were made up of colonial " wattle-and-daub," roofed with sheets of bark or coarse shingle, for slates or tiles were not to be thought of, and the corrugated iron age had not arrived. As for the thoroughfares (misnamed streets), they were almost indescribable. In the dry season some of them were in places barely passable, but in wet weather it needed no sign-board with "No Thoroughfare," or "This street is closed" inscribed thereon, for then a " close season " veritably set in, and all out-door operations, if not stopped, were materially impeded by flood-waters. In fact, during winter, the streets were chains of water-holes, and the traffic had to be suspended in places. Along the street line there was the greatest irregularity in the manner in which the tenements were placed, some being in accordance with the surveyed alignment, others several feet back ; and not a few built out on what could be only in courtesy, styled the footpath. A considerable number of the allotments abutting on the streets were either unenclosed commonage, or, in some places fenced in, and a miserable abortion of a potato or cabbage garden attempted. Trees, tree-trunks and stumps were to be found everywhere; and laundresses used to suspend their wash-tub lines from tree to tree across the streets. Frequent accidents occurred through the fluttering and flapping of the white drapery so elevated, frightening horses and causing " bolts." In one instance a THE CHRONICLES OF EARL Y MELBOURNE. 109 very respectable townsman was treated to a broken collar-bone, by being jerked from his trap into the highway, and just stopped short of a coroner's inquest. The washerwomen, and the half-dozen police then in existence, were on the best of terms and seemed to understand each other thoroughly; so the ladies were allowed to have a good deal their own way. Elizabeth and Swanstons Streets were shallow gullies, with deep and dangerous ruts every twenty yards. Flinders Street was a swamp, and even Collins Street was so slushy and sticky, that often to cross over from any portion of the now well-flagged and fashionable " Block" one required to be equipped in a pair of leggings or long mud-boots. Horse-power was useless in many places, bullock teams being chiefly the order of the day, and some of the most dangerous " hoggings " of the cumbersome vehicles of the time happened at the intersections of Collins and Queen, and Elizabeth and Bourke Streets. In two of the localities of greatest traffic now, there were then two fissures running towards and discharging into the Yarra, which for some years were known as the rivers Townend and Enscoe. The former starting from near the junction of Collins and Elizabeth Streets, some thirty-six feet above sea level, took its name from a fat, comfortable-looking grocer who long did business in a little shop at the south-west corner; whilst the other propelled its waters along near the north-west corner of William and Flinders Streets, and was designated after one of the limbs of a mercantile firm having a counting-house there. Such was the condition of Elizabeth Street in winter, that it was seriously proposed to put on a punt or two there for the transit of goods and passengers ; but the project was regarded as unworkable. In one of the newspapers of the day this advertisement appears—"THE STREETS—Wanted immediately one thousand pairs of stilts for the purpose of enabling the inhabitants of Melbourne to carry on their usual avocations— the mud in most of the principal thoroughfares being now waist deep." Stilts would be about as useless as walking-sticks for the purpose indicated, and the notice, though a skit, did not very much overrate a condition of affairs which now appears simply incredible. One of the earliest popular delusions was a belief that Little Flinders Street would be the best business part of the town, Collins, Elizabeth and Bourke Streets being merely second, third, and fourth fiddles. Swanston Street was little thought of, and all the other streets except portions of William and Flinders Streets, as business places, were completely out of the running. There was, consequently, a desire to secure building sites in the western quarter of Little Flinders Street; and how the longest heads may sometimes be foiled in their calculations is amusingly exemplified by this incident:—Mr. W. F. Rucker, deemed a shrewd and wide awake man for his generation, owned as part-purchaser with J. P. Fawkner, the allotments of land about the corner of Collins and Market Streets, upon part of which the Union Club Hotel is now built. The purchase took in frontages to Collins, Market and Little Flinders Streets, and when it came to a division of the property, Rucker thought he had done a very clever trick when he persuaded Fawkner to take the Collins Street half, which was considered the less valuable. Time soon told him that he had the worse of the bargain, and Fawkner used to laugh over the supposed smart stroke of business for many a day after. The township east of Swanston Street was then known as " Eastern Hill;" and anyone who could think of investing there for anything other than a dwelling, a timber yard, a brewery, or a house of prayer, was booked as little less mad than a hare in the March season. An auctioneer in puffing a tract of land offered for sale a short distance above the present Argus office asseverated as a strong inducement to intending purchasers that there was a very valuable and inexhaustible stone quarry on the ground. As for the suburbs, they were at a discount. A few well-to do merchants and professionals had cottages (which they called villas) erected at Brighton, South Yarra, Richmond and Fitzroy (then Newtown); but nothing in the shape of business was dreamed of in such far-away places. In consequence of the manner in which land was sliced up into small sub-sections at Newtown, bunches of cabin residences leaped up there, formed of sods, brick, wood, canvas, or any other sort of material available ; and down about where Brunswick and Moor Streets now embrace each other, there gathered a conglomeration of huts, which offered a harbour of refuge for the worse half of the rascality of the town, and whenever a " spotted" individual was wanted by the police, he was sure to be picked up either there or at the Brickfields between the Yarra and Emerald Hill, an area squatted upon by a brood of the greatest scoundrels in the district. As for Emerald Hill itself, it was a sheep pasturage; and the present flourishing Sandridge was represented by the one tent of an adventurer, who afterwards was well and favourably known as " the Liardet," but in the course of a few months he put up an hotel there, and was generous enough to offer to bring the mails from the shipping to Melbourne without charge.

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