#1 Making Modern Melbourne with Jenny Lee
Jenny Lee, author of Making Modern Melbourne, and her publisher Dale Campisi from Arcade Publications talk about the many layers of Melbourne’s history.
Jenny and Dale's talk is 45 minutes long. It was recorded at Coburg Library on 28 October 2008.
Listen to Jenny Lee and Dale Campisi discuss Making Modern Melbourne
Download Making Modern Melbourne Library Talk (MP3 21Mb) or read the transcript
Subscribe to the Moreland Library Talks podcast
Jenny's Lee talk is one the public talks recorded at Moreland Libraries and made into the Moreland Library talks podcast.
Or copy this link into your podcast software:
http://www.moreland.vic.gov.au/action/RSS20?pc=PC_95917,svRSSChannelID=90005
Audience question and answer session
1. Did Fawkner and Batman do a deal?
My understanding is that John Fawkner was a well-established businessman in Tasmania. Since he was a publican, he knew that across Bass Strait was fertile land where he could graze sheep. Did Fawkner and John Batman have a business arrangement to run sheep in Victoria?
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question 1 (MP3 2Mb) Go to transcript
2. To what extent did the Colony of New South Wales have influence over the land of Victoria?
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question 2 (MP3 610Kb) Go to transcript
3. John Pascoe Fawkner in Oak Park
We live in Oak Park and I was just wondering when John Pascoe Fawkner lived in the “House on the Hill”?
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question 3 (MP3 659Kb) Go to transcript
4. Victoria Market Cemetary
Can you tell us a bit about the cemetary under where the Victoria Market is now and what happened?
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question four (MP3 1Mb) Go to transcript
5. The later settlement of the Moonee Ponds area
I thought it was very interesting, moving forward to modern times, the development of the settlement west of Coburg and Brunswick . The way that you described that was very interesting, development being caught up with transport and so on…
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question five (MP3 484Kb) Go to transcript
6. The Moonee Ponds area may have taken off earlier if there was transport...
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question six (MP3 1Mb) Go to transcript
7. The character of John Batman
When you were talking about your ambivalence towards Batman’s character earlier, I was really interested in how historians such as yourself how you go about evaluating his character. Were there any nice guys?
Download Jenny Lee's answer to question seven (MP3 2Mb) Go to transcript
Transcript: Jenny Lee's interview with her publisher Dale Campisi
Dale Campisi: Jenny Lee’s book begins firstly with a discussion about the Kulin country and we’ll get to that. And then the second chapter is about remaking the landscape and I was just wondering if Jenny Lee, if you could tell us first I think a bit about what it would have been like first arriving in Melbourne, Lancey and Fawkner. Coming through the heads, what they saw and what was the picture.
Jenny Lee: I mean, the thing that you keep on coming across every time you read an early account of Melbourne is that it was amazingly fertile and they couldn’t work out why, because they couldn’t find any water. So over and over again with one after another of the first incursions, the local people, well the various branches of the Kulin people were basically, pretend that they hadn’t heard the question whenever someone said where do we find some water? So over and over again the first, the early attempts to penetrate this country failed on the one occasion when they did manage to find the Yarra which was the one source of fresh water of any size.
The news of that, that that discovery didn’t get through until considerably later. So that soon after that there was an attempt made to settle down at Sorrento. They put themselves in an area which was short of water. There’s this kind of disjuncture, disjuncture if you like between what’s obviously a very fertile landscape and the fact that they can’t find water in it.
Thinking that kind of climatic fluctuations it’s obvious that they were here ... those very early white incursions into this area occurred at a very hot time. And a fairly extended one actually. I mean there’s, when Collins, who was the person who settled in Sorrento, pulled out the temperature hit 47 degrees, I think it was, the day that they gave up and all the hills were alight. And it’s the most amazing kind of apocalyptic image. I’m sure that those fires were lit deliberately by the Indigenous people. But this apocalyptic image that there’s this large convict settlement trying to kind of get away with the hills burning all around them.
Dale Campisi: Australia’s first arson.
Jenny Lee: Yeah, yes.
Dale Campisi: Melbourne is one of those sights of rare convergence where it’s an important site obviously as a site of fresh water for English explorers looking to establish a settlement but also the Aboriginal people have a long history with that area. Could you tell us a little bit about the people and their life and of course the fact that their first encounter with white people didn’t ... actually came with the spread of smallpox in the years before.
Jenny Lee: Yeah, I mean the thing that really ... it’s difficult to get your ahead around because it was only ever reported in the old culture but by the time westerners actually turned up in Melbourne the population had already been reduced by two successive waves of smallpox. So it was actually probably around a quarter, something like that, the population that was here beforehand. The other thing is that the life had changed so much for the people of this bay.
I mean I’ve got a Tasmanian Aboriginal friend whose family has surviving histories of coming across Bass Strait because it was relatively recent. I mean the strait was only formed about 8000 years ago and there were people here a long time before that. And the Yarra is actually, kind of, continuous with the Tamar River. Back in the days before Bass Strait the Yarra used to go sort of wobbling across where Bass Strait is now, join the Tamar, and then they used to empty of that into the sea right out to the south-west of Tasmania now. And people used to move backwards and forward across the strait a lot but then when the water rose that communication was cut off. As the water rose it got warmer.
In the period when the water was down it was actually very cold here. And that’s one of the reasons that when you see early portraits of Indigenous people they’re often wearing quite heavy and complicated possum skin clothes. One of the things that really distinguished ... from the point of view of the whites especially who were used to the idea that they were used to portraying Aboriginal people as naked savages.
One thing they had a bit of difficulty getting used to around here was that people wore these fantastic clothes. Intricately sewn, multi-pelt coats that were incredibly warm. And all you really needed was one of those. You could walk around in it during the day. You could sleep in it. They were an amazing garment. And at the same time ... I mean indigenous water usage wasn’t anything like what we’re used to in the sense that, you know, we just assume that you have to have fresh water for everything. Areas that we’d regard as being only semi-fertile were actually very fertile places for Indigenous people.
And near where I live at the moment which is on the Maribyrnong I can actually see the remains of what was a fantastic area of wetland. It’s the old explosives factory site in Maribyrnong itself. When they first built that explosives factory they recorded that there were huge numbers of tools found in the ground. So there were all these bunkers around the explosives factory and they were actually full of stone tools. But you can see from the landscape that it would have been absolutely amazing because there are two fresh water sources.
There’s a big wetland which has now been turned in to the explosives factory. And there was the river itself which was extremely good fishing territory and the one that was extraordinary was along that river were enormous banks of edible plants, including this amazing plant called Myrnong which is almost extinct now but you find its name all over the place. If you look for the name it comes in various forms. Like the little town of Myrniong is a variant of it. And there’s Myrnong Crescents and Myrnong Streets all over Melbourne. And basically it was like a little ... well, yam daisy is what the westerners called it. It’s like a little tuber with a yellow flower and a rosette of leaves. And I actually found some quite recently. But the thing about is that those tubers were incredibly nutritious and also very nice.
Even the westerners used to say they were like the best potatoes but the worst thing was that it was palatable to sheep. And so that was almost the first of the indigenous food crops that went because it was around the water courses which the sheep naturally follow and the sheep just took it out. If you eat the leaves and the flowers off the Myrnong for a few cycles the root dies. So it’s one of those little plants that ... in a different order you’d think this would be probably the food crop that we’d all be using. As it is it’s the food crop that we’re not.
It’s an amazing area though because it is a very central area for so many Indigenous people and at the same time it’s so well hidden from the sea. You know, it took them so long to actually find the spot.
Dale Campisi: On the topic of gardens and also to tie in neatly I think with John Pascoe‑Fawkner as well, who was a very busy gardener when he first arrived, can you give us a little back story on him; how he came to arrive in Melbourne?
Jenny Lee: Well he was here with Collins expedition, the first one that failed, and he was about 11 years old.
Dale Campisi: This is 1803?
Jenny Lee: 1803, yeah. So his father was a convict. Fawkner went from there with the rest of the expedition back. They decided to relocate to Tasmania and he followed them there. But the thing that’s really interesting about him is that ... I mean, if you go to the State Library website for example you can find these fantastic documents of his where even as he’s sitting in Tasmania and becoming a successful businessman, he’s writing a constitutional for an imaginary state that’s free of what he calls the so-called English Law. And he was an incredibly intellectually active man. He did all sorts of different things. But when it came ... well when he discovered that moves were being made to settle across the other side of Bass Strait, the thing that he knew immediately from his early experiences was that they had to find water. So when he first sent a boat out here, the parting instructions that he left them with were go and find fresh water. And it was the fact that they were looking specifically for drinkable water that landed them up in the centre of Melbourne.
It’s an amazing moment though because that particular site, it had a few people kind of working around it but they’d never stayed, because they didn’t realise the significance of it. These days, of course, you can barely see it because, you know, being really good at dealing with rivers in our culture, first of all we polluted the Yarra and then to try and make it flush better we removed the waterfall where ... actually I wonder if you can see the ... there was a bar when water turned fresh. I mean, all you can see now is the Turning Basin and it just gets a little bit wider above there.
That was actually an actual pool and above that was a set of rapids. And it was at those rapids that the river turned fresh which meant that they had an immediate source of drinking water very close to an area that they could get to. They could only just get their boats up. They actually had to winch their boats up first. This is the map. This is the most fantastic map. This is actually, in technical terms, a palimpsest - there’s two maps in one. Russell who was the first surveyor in Melbourne, was an artist and he was really careful about what he drew. So he lovingly drew every single tree, okay, which is where you get these trees. Now you can see what a huge number of ... like this is really ... this is the woodland stretching over the body of the city and down here, there’s the rapids and the pool. So this is where they came in. They used to have to go from right out, around because the river had a different course.
So this was the centre and this was the natural kind of place for everybody to congregate. But when Richard Bourke came down from New South Wales with his surveyor, Robert Hoddle, they just got out with a set square and a ruler and they drew this. That’s the grid but taking absolutely no heed of any of the natural features of the landscape.
So you can see the bit that’s really hairy is ... you can see down ... you can see this here. That was ... it was a natural course which ran down Elizabeth Street and for years Elizabeth Street was just a complete swamp. But, yeah, it’s the most amazing map. But you can see this is the spot. Because there’s fresh, there’s the Turning Basin and from thereon in you could go all the way through. That map gets drawn ... it was put on it in 1837. When I first came to Melbourne I could never work out why it was so windy. And, of course, one of the reasons its windy is it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a south‑westerly or a north-westerly, those streets catch it beautifully, you know.
I used to work at the Museum for a while and they were talking about how they were going to ... well the silly architects would say, “What we really want to do here is to pick up on the theme of the grid and reproduce it”. And I was, sort of, saying to them, “You realise of course that you’ll end up with a wind tunnel”. And they’d ... and you can see there ... I mean, there’s that’s Batman’s Hill. So it was really quite a hill and that hill comes up over and over and over again in all the descriptions of the early part of Melbourne. It’s the hill that everybody uses as a vantage point for example.
Audience: Is the turning circle ... it was a natural part of the river. It wasn’t actually man made or anything?
Jenny Lee: No. It was originally ... no it was actually a pool. I mean it was expanded and the sides were dug out and the bits around it were lifted but it used to get very muddy. So when you see that Turning Basin now you can actually just see the very faintest shadow of the outline of the river as it was. But there’s this amazing moment when Fawkner goes ... Fawkner shot through after an episode of racial violence. I’m possibly thinking that the settlement in Melbourne was about to fail. And while he was away the New South Wales Government sent in a police Magistrate to restore order. So Fawkner gets off the boat at that turning circle and the first thing that he sees when he gets off the boat is a whipping post.
This is unusually significant for him because he was actually sentenced to the most amazing ... he was sentenced to 500 lashes as a boy or as a young man which was actually technically ... he was sentenced to so many lashes that it was illegal even then in Tasmania, for trying to help some convicts to escape. And he never admitted that he’d been lashed, that he’d been flogged but there’s little comments that he makes all through his life that say things like, when a man has been flogged he loses all his respect for the law. And you know that there’s something in there that he’s trying to say, that is still so badly or so deeply repressed and blocked that he can’t bring himself to say it. When the State came in they took over that area very rapidly. Put in the Customs House, put in the first police station, put in whipping posts and a set of stocks, just for good measure.
Dale Campisi: So the Turning Basin there is a really defining feature of Melbourne settlement obviously. It’s based around that idea. And, of course, there we blew up the rapids which created that fresh water basin.
Jenny Lee: Yeah. So it turns it salt.
Dale Campisi: Turns it salt much further up stream. You make the point in the book that is in fact a reason why Melbourne is here, is this fresh water and, of course, we destroyed that. The grid, of course, has become one of Melbourne’s defining features.
Besides catching the wind it also has a number of other properties that are really useful for the officials of the town. Can you tell us a little bit about surveillance and the panopticons that we see throughout the city and in the grid?
Jenny Lee: Well one of the things about the grid is that Bourke who prompted its design, he didn’t actually draw it, he got his surveyor to design it. But Bourke was a military man and he’d been through the Napoleonic wars and like many people who’d been through the Napoleonic wars, there was this thing around that time of trying to design all sorts of things including military camps for ease of movement and ease of surveillance.
The French Revolution had taught them that it really wasn’t a very good idea to have kind of nasty little alleys in cities where people could fester. The idea was originally to devise ... I mean you can see those streets are big. They are really wide. They didn’t actually end up going quite as far. But there’d designed so that the blocks are quite deep and the streets were 99 feet I think; were they?
Dale Campisi: Yeah.
Jenny Lee: Yeah. The blocks were too big. You know they over estimated how deep people wanted their blocks. And they also underestimated the number of people who were going to want to come to Melbourne. Once they’d sold off these big blocks, before you knew where you were, the people were lopping off the backs of the big blocks and selling them separately. And so all these lovely little lanes, which are now, of course, the biggest feature of Melbourne, developed in between these.
They began to reproduce exactly what Bourke and Hoddle were trying to avoid and they still do. You know, I mean just at the moment there’s this controversy going on about the lanes of Melbourne. A whole stack of people trying to say for goodness sake don’t sanitise them. They represented a really strong push to try and make an orderly, controllable city. And that kind of tug-a-war between the official attempts to make an orderly, controllable, surveyable versus the natural tendency of the city to do other things, is one of those kind of really running themes in the whole district.
Once they built these strapping wide streets, the water of course came screaming down every time there was a storm and filled up Elizabeth Street. And Lake Cashmore became this fantastic water hole where kids would kind of hide around corners hoping to waylay a policeman and push them in.
Dale Campisi: So beyond the grid we’ve got two really important panoptical structures. Bentham’s panopticon, where inside a circle one person can stand in the central point at a station and survey everyone that’s in there. So one person surveilling everybody.
Jenny Lee: Yep.
Dale Campisi: Really effective prison system is its most famous incarnation. There’s a number around the world, a pretty nasty one at Port Arthur but of course Pentridge had its own.
Jenny Lee: Yeah.
Dale Campisi: And the most opulent ones are the State Library. Could you tell us a little about both of those?
Jenny Lee: Yeah. I always think it’s quite funny that Melbourne has got two really good classical panopticons. One’s at Pentridge although it’s now been ... the Pentridge one has been kind of built over so many times that there’s only sort of little traces of it left. There’s some exercise yards.
The idea of a panopticon is that everything radiates from the central point, you see. And ideally the central point is organised so you can’t tell whether there’s anyone in it. You can still see that. There are wooden shutters on one of the central observation towers at Pentridge so that you can’t see whether there’s anyone watching you or not. That’s the idea. It’s the uncertainty. But the other one is the State Library. And the State Library dome reading room is a perfectly developed panopticon. And it took me ages to work out what was going on there.
The very first time I went there, there were some kids mucking around. It was during school hours and the State Library has always been a great place to wag school. There were these kids sitting there giggling away. Suddenly there was this “shhh” and it was as if it was right in my ear and I just about jumped out of my skin and I realised that there was one attendant. That was all they needed. And that person didn’t even need to stand up. There’s a raised attendant’s station which is rarely ... it was rarely staffed, I have to say, to give the State Library credit. But when it is that person can watch the whole of that dome reading room without having to move. It’s the most extraordinary thing because all the individual desks are along these radiating spines and they all focus on the central thing.
But the moment I can kind of really noticed how it worked actually was someone tried to have a poetry reading there once that I went to and the distortion was incredible. And I realised that one of the reasons there was so much distortion was that it was actually designed to distort the voice of the person. They were trying to read poetry from the centre. And it’s actually designed to distort the voice by kind of taking it off around the dome and then dropping it in wherever you want to drop it. The idea is there in a whole series of other libraries as well. Where it all comes to is not that you’re being subjected to surveillance and control in a way that’s necessarily oppressive but the idea is that it sorts out the sheep from the goats so that those of us who like a quiet environment come to appreciate it.
Dale Campisi: And it’s efficiency too.
Jenny Lee: Yes. Well I mean I must admit I was ... if the girls next to me hadn’t stopped giggling soon I was going to have to leave.
Dale Campisi: The major part of Melbourne has got a decidedly western suburbs slant, western and northern suburbs, which is kind of unusual in histories of Melbourne. Why would you say ...?
Jenny Lee: Yeah. That’s because too many histories of Melbourne are written by native Melburnians, because everyone who comes to Melbourne lives on the other side.
Dale Campisi: Yes. I think there’s truth to that. Why is Coburg important to you and why do you think it’s ... certainly to give it the perspective you have in this book?
Jenny Lee: Well I actually lived right in the south bit of Coburg for years when I first came to Melbourne. I had this terrible period that I think everyone experiences when they move cities where I lived in about five different places in 18 months and then at the end of that I moved to Coburg and I stayed here for a decade because I was so tired of moving. I remember the last time we moved, when we moved to Coburg I said, I am not moving house for at least ten years. I couldn’t believe that area because there was just so much happening there. And to realise the range of historical buildings in Coburg is just extraordinary.
Audience: What year did you move into Coburg?
Jenny Lee: 1981. The only reason I left was that I’m allergic to renovations. And we had two small kids and the thought of doing a renovation with two small kids was just more than I could handle. But where we were was just starting to really feel the pressure. There were a lot of people starting to extend houses. But the area we were in had a little bit of a buffer because there was a couple of old titles.
So nobody was pulling their houses down unless they absolutely had to. And you weren’t allowed to build dual occupancy at that stage so, yeah. But it was an amazing landscape and, I mean, it still is. When you go up and down those streets leading north and south through West Coburg, I mean they’re ... all those State Bank Houses are just marvellous you know. Some of the older houses there ... I mean we were just around the corner from Glencairn which is, you know, still pretty much as it was. Although I think that they’ve got a development application out at the moment.
Audience: Well I think it got through.
Jenny Lee: The range was so extraordinary. From what the 1850s pretty much right through. And that enormous stretch of State Bank Houses which I just think they are one of the most wonderful things ever. The State Bank Houses are the ... they’re the terracotta roofed, weatherboard ... there’s actually stretches of them all through Coburg. Whenever you get a whole stack of terracotta roofs you could almost guarantee that underneath them will be State Bank Houses from the end of war period.
The deal was, the State Bank was really, really sneaky. They would only lend you money if they approved your plans but they were very helpful and they had a lot of plans. And so basically you could buy a house. You know you could buy your plans for a house without having to hire an architect. And those plans survive, you know. They’re still in the archives, yeah, thousands of them, absolutely, fantastic. They also form a sequence. One of these days I’d love to try and get some of them on the web actually. They form this fantastic sequence because you can actually see ... but I mean they keep on going through into the post-Second World War period too and you can see the houses changing.
Audience: And non-State Banks had tin roofs, I think.
Jenny Lee: If you build a State Bank house you just about had to put a tiled roof on, yeah. And you also had to ... you know, how a lot of those houses have good wood panelling? You had to use the panelling and it had to be a very particular kind of wood. And you had to use I thought ... I’m pretty sure that if you made it of weatherboards you had to use oregon. They were very prescriptive.
And what it means though is you get these amazingly readable suburbs, because you can tell to within two or three years when a house was built just by looking at it. You know, you can see from the shape of the shingles underneath the gables.
Like ours were like that, which meant that it was built, our house was built in 1926, right. Three doors up there was a place that had square shingles. That was built in 1923. And so you could actually ... yeah fantastic. And those houses last really well. I mean, they’re interesting houses because they actually sit quite lightly on the ground, apart from the terracotta. But you know they usually sat on stumps. You didn’t have to do kind of massive excavations. These days you could probably put a tank the size of God underneath them and keep yourself in water forever because they’ve got a huge roof catchment.
Audience: Have you ever come across in your research any houses that were not built in Coburg but were transported from another suburb from the past?
Jenny Lee: Oh, there’s quite a few.
Audience: Because the house that I grew up in, Mayfield Street which is just five minutes walk over the railway line, second one on your right.
Jenny Lee: Yeah, yeah.
Audience: Just, you know we’d go through the bridge underneath the railway, a little tunnel. It was transported there in 1928.
Jenny Lee: Oh yeah. No, there are quite a few of them. Well there’s ... I mean obviously the really spectacular ones, the Cape Cod American house near Moreland station. That was transported in slabs. But the other one that’s harder to see is the one, what’s it called? On Woodland Avenue, it’s the original house on Woodland Avenue.
It’s on its third site in Australia. It was shipped out in panels from ... it’s a beautiful house. It’s a big two storey panelled weatherboard. It was shipped out from Canada and reassembled there. It was reassembled in several other places. But I mean, you know pre-fab was the go right from the beginning. I mean, one of the things ... it’s easy to forget about. Well Latrobe’s Cottage is what we’d call a kit home, you know. And it’s on well it’s second or third site in Australia. But, you know, in one of the Botanic Gardens that was actually brought out in panels and assembled on site.
Dale Campisi: The cover line to Jenny Lee’s book is “You can read the past in this city if you know where to look”. And obviously Jenny Lee knows where to look and knows a lot about town. I wanted to move on to the subject of the collection of villages that make up so much of the fabric of the city of Melbourne that stretch obviously in a ring around the CBD. Why is that important?
Jenny Lee: Well I think you can see even from that photo of Coburg why it’s important. I mean because there’s a kind of a spine there of what would effectively be a much more sustainable city, I’ve got to say, a much less centralised city that’s connected by rail that has these very distinct clusters where people don’t necessarily have to travel massive distances to get to work. Just in terms of if you look at the post-war suburbs. And Werribee for example started out as a village.
It was a very independent village too. One of the things I love about Werribee was that they vigorously resisted being called Wyndham until they got declared Wyndham under Jeff Kennett or the Shire of Wyndham. That was just declared as the local government area. But it was a village on the river which is very ... I mean the Werribee River was a really important river. I mean, the name Werribee comes from the word.... yeah, was the Wautharong word for spine. And the whole idea was that the river was the spine of that part of the landscape.
That survived kind of more or less as an independent village until it got connected to and eventually enveloped by the city. What’s happened is in the process of turning what was a village into a dormitory suburb is that essentially you’ve just been pouring people in without necessarily adding jobs to it. I always think of Werribee as being the really big example of that because the Werribee area has got the lowest proportion of local jobs of any part of Melbourne. I mean, even out around Bayswater there are higher proportions of people who live and work locally. In Werribee it’s about 20 per cent. Nearly everybody from Werribee has to go somewhere else. And you can actually see them getting the train incredibly early, presumably going out east to work, because a lot of people these days can’t afford to drive from there.
Basically when I think about the collection of villages, what I’m thinking about is that this kind of substrate that’s there underneath Melbourne that’s worth looking at as being a possible way of kind of reorienting the way that we are developing the city. Some of the State Government’s current plan is actually ... had that idea behind them in that they’re talking about these activity nodes or activity hubs or whatever they call them. But the problem is that those activity hubs need to have something more than just State Government offices in them and they need to have more diversity and they need to have more of a concentration for it to really work.
One of the marvellous ideas from some of the more recent discussions of cities is that idea that really wouldn’t be putting houses on our land. You know, that’s one of the things that’s a little bit worrying around Melbourne that a lot of the post-war suburban development has actually taken out what used to be the prime agricultural land for the State. You know in Templestowe it was the orchards that went under. In Pakenham it was the market gardens and the dairy farms. In Brunswick it was ... there were market gardens in Brunswick to almost within living memory. I’ve interviewed people who can remember the market gardens along the Moonee Ponds Creek and Coburg. Oh yeah, well I mean I can remember seeing market gardens up the top of the Merri Creek, on the Preston boundary, yeah, yeah. Are they still there?
Audience: Still have one.
Jenny Lee: One is there? Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I suppose that one of the reasons they survive is they’re probably under … within flood reach are they or ... ?
Audience: Being a historically significant site.
Jenny Lee: When you look at the way that the city developed you can see these kind of green bands, green corridors. And in a way, you know that’s really what we should be kind of trying to work back to. Not that you necessarily want to be knocking houses down but a lot of the post-war houses that were put in, encroaching onto those green bands are being knocked down anyway. It’s just that what’s replacing them now. I don’t know whether ... has anyone been over Farnham Avenue, back of the racecourse recently? It’s like Sydney. There’s just five, six storeys of high density houses straight into the Maribyrnong River and they’ve excavated a gigantic false lake in the middle of the flood plain to try and take the water and, you know, all of us locals kind of look at it and say, if you get a really big flood that’s not going to help you one little bit, boy.
Basically what they’re doing is pulling further and further and further into these green belts. And obviously where I am one of the big fusses at the moment is about the explosives factory. Because having survived without being built on that’s ... and it is so toxic. Like what’s there is so toxic that they can’t even get anyone to take the spoil. I’ve been there since 1992. That’s when I moved there. And in the whole of that time there’s just been this incredible debate going about what they’re going to do if they scrape the site because no one will take it.
It’s got nitro-glycerine. It’s got benzene. It’s got heavy metals. It’s got everything, you know. And every time we’ve ever taken a petition up around there we’ve had all these people wandering in saying I can remember when we spilt you know ... in one case one bloke remembers spilling ten tons, in the old money, of nitro-glycerine. And the great thing about nitro-glycerine is if you spill it, it just goes … straight through the rock and pools. And you never know when you’re going to come across it. Fantastic.
Dale Campisi: To change the subject kind of entirely, I’m just really quite keen to get back to your take on John Batman who we constantly hear of, virtually one of the founding fathers of Melbourne, of course. Fawkner takes more credit but you do touch on him in the book and importantly, a friend of mine pointed out this line, just about the comment that you make on one of the pictures in the book about chipping away at the top of Batman’s Hill. And you referred to when in the 1890s the Spencer Street Station was extended and Batman’s Hill was beheaded erasing yet another trace of the original landscape. I think the words beheaded and erasing there are particularly important, because it seems that Batman is constantly erased from Melbourne’s history.
Jenny Lee: He’s originally been buried near the market and then when they changed the market he got … they moved him to Fawkner Cemetery.
Dale Campisi: It also seems that his beheading is particularly important. Can you tell us a little bit about John Batman?
Jenny Lee: Well I mean Batman basically didn’t come to Melbourne until Fawkner was already there. The thing that you need to understand about Batman was that he was a pastoralist. He wanted to run sheep. Insofar as you can reconstruct anything’s sensible from Batman’s early diaries, you can see him kind of wandering around the landscape naming every prominent feature after one of his patrons. He’s a really terrific bloke. After Fawkner moved down to the Yarra there was this great panic. As when the Port Phillip Association who’d illegally laid claim to the area and who had signed these kind of rather disputable treaties with the Indigenous people, realised that they had some competition, they moved to Melbourne as well but it was actually an afterthought.
It was only after they’d realised that this was obviously going to be the centre of the city that they moved there. Batman himself was a very strange character. I’m very ambivalent about him because there were a number of things about him that are really quite interesting. He’s native born which is really unusual. He was born in Sydney in the very early days of the convict settlement. His father was a convict. A strange thing happened in that very early frontier which was that a creole, as we’d call it these days, developed between the black and white, a means of communication, using a mixture of sign language, words from the Eora language of the local people in Sydney and bits and pieces of English.
So the sign language was there already because the sign language was used by different Indigenous groups to communicate with each other across these very, very long trade lines that they had. But some of the whites learnt that trade language. And there’s this fantastic little snippet from Threlkeld who was a missionary out around Wellington in western New South Wales who says that he laments the fact that this trade language is taking off so fast. He says there’s blacks and white converse together, each confident they’re speaking the language of the other. Which gives you some idea of ... it means a very strange language.
The thing about Batman is that he understood it. And there were only a very small number of people who came in to positions of influence at that stage who did understand it. One of the other people who did was Hamilton Hume. What it allowed them to do was to communicate in a detail with Indigenous people, put them in a position of being brokers, intermediaries and so forth. Now, I mean, what we know about Batman when he came here is that he may not … he may have though that he was conning the Indigenous people out of their land. But they were actually quite deliberately going out and seeking him because they’d made a conscious decision among themselves that they didn’t want to take a course of violence. If this man was offering them a deal that would allow them to regulate the terms in which the settlement took place then they were prepared to sign it because word had come down from the north.
People knew what had happened up there was really terrible and that there was a lot of violence and that Indigenous people were not benefiting from what was going on at all, that they were being dispossessed in huge numbers. That they were being killed in large numbers and that their society was being completely wrecked. So they actually made a conscious decision to sign this treaty with him. One of the things about Batman unfortunately was that although he was relatively well connected in Tasmania, signing that treaty put him on the wrong side of every other form of British law.
So it’s actually at that moment when Batman signs the treaty and it goes through to Richard Bourke for approval in Sydney and it’s at that point that the Terra Nullius, as we know it, is enunciated because Bourke decrees that that treaty is illegal and not because a few blankets and a bit of ... some guaranteed rations were pretty bad compensation for handing over this huge quantity of country, but because he decrees that the Indigenous people don’t own the country at all. So when Batman actually lands up here he’s always on the outer. He gets heroised a bit. There’s a drawing of Batman that gets reproduced all over the place. It’s completely fictitious.
One of the really interesting things about Batman is no-one knows what he looked like. By the time he came to prominence he had such advanced syphilis that his nose was falling off. There’s no image of him. He never sat for a portrait. He was probably too embarrassed. So he was this kind of marginal figure who was constantly being pulled and pushed between the authorities on the one hand, the Port Phillip Association which was his syndicate or the syndicate that he’d set up with various other people which was declared, more or less illegal. And then people like John Fawkner just lobbing in there and not going through any of the procedures, not signing any treaties, taking over the prime spot. So Batman lands up being kind of marginalised in quite a ... but there’s a lot of things about Batman that make your hair stand on end because he really isn’t a very nice character. But at the same time you can see him as representing and at least an attempt, an alternative way of organising western settlement of indigenous lands.
Dale Campisi: There’s quite a nice moment where Fawkner records ... instructive moment where Fawkner records in his diary on the 30th of November. What year was that, 1935?
Jenny Lee: Thirty-five, yeah.
Dale Campisi: All of the vegetables and fruit that he sows and in his final note it goes through a range of vegetables including your pumpkins, melons, vegetable marrow, cucumber seeds and his last note is he gave Mr Batman five gallons of red wine. Fawkner’s the opportunist and Batman, of course, is a drinker. But Fawkner is always there to provide for him. He does quite a lot of that in the early settlement as well. But he was a tee totaller.
Jenny Lee: Yeah. No, he was a tee-totaller, yeah, yeah. I suspect that he didn’t trust himself to get drunk actually. And he would have been ferocious. Actually the other moment that I really like is when, one of Henry Batman’s men shoots Fawkner’s rabbits because Fawkner had brought breeding pairs or rabbits and was hoping to establish a colony of them beside the Yarra. Fortunately one of Henry Batman’s men decided to shoot them first. So we at least had 20 rabbit-free years before somebody worked out a way of bringing them in.
Transcript: questions and answers from the audience
Did Fawkner and Batman do a deal?
My understanding is that John Fawkner was a well-established businessman in Tasmania. Since he was a publican, he knew that across Bass Strait was fertile land where he could graze sheep. Did Fawkner and John Batman have a business arrangement to run sheep in Victoria?
Answer
Fawkner hated sheep. He really hated them with a passion. It was a really interesting thing. He must have had a nasty experience with sheep. He didn’t bring any over with him, he became the big proponent of the agriculturists against the pastoralists. I don’t think there was that level of collusion. What there was once they got to Melbourne, Batman definitely went over first without telling Fawkner. He was being backed by a syndicate of people from Tasmania. The only one of those people apart from Joseph Gellibrand, his name survives in various places around Melbourne and further down in Victoria. The only other one who was involved in that syndicate whose name survives on the map, is Charles Swanston, who was probably, as in Swanston Street, he was probably the nastiest of them all. He was a big businessman in Tasmania and a banker. He was more or less using Batman it would seem.
The finances came from a syndicate … people who had held colonial government of Aus which included Gellibrand, John Wedge, John Helder Wedge who was the former surveyor general of Tasmania, Swanston and various other people who Swanston roped in who were kind of businessman and Batman was the kind of front-end. Batman goes back, there’s a big row because when he goes back there, he’s sick, syphilis is getting him and he was too ill to return immediately but when he went back to Tasmania he disclosed the fact that he’d just bought all this land from the indigenous people around Port Phillip and one of the people who heard that story was the publican, John Pascoe Fawkner who immediately having already been to Port Phillip decided to mount his own expedition which he could do.
They were actually very similar in their class position except that Fawkner suffers from a lot more discrimination against him because he had been a convict. Whereas Batman himself had had … both of them were convict sons, Batman kept his nose clean. He turned into a pastoralist, a small grazier in Tasmania. Whereas Fawkner having got caught for attempting to get these convicts to escape was subjected to discrimination over and over and over again. I mean, like it is quite possible that one of the reasons that Fawkner was so little is that he was undernourished. I mean he was really small, he was in old money, 5 foot, 2 I think, and really slight.
His convict past was constantly bought up against him and he also had quite serious health effects from having been a convict. His voice was croaky because he had been burning lime for years. That was one of the kinds of really nice punishments that they used to give you if you were caught doing the wrong in larger New South Wales, they’d send you up to the Coast of New South Wales to burn trees for lime or burn shells for lime and that’d mean that you’d have this constant fumes, no masks, you just had to breathe it in. So you can imagine burning trees, hard enough at high enough temperature to extract lime from them really takes some doing. And he was a really strange figure. He was very much an outsider.
To what extent did the Colony of New South Wales have influence over the land of Victoria?
Technically it owned it. The New South Wales government had decreed that no one was to be able to buy this land without it being surveyed. So they were asserting control over it. Although really they didn’t know anything about it much. There was an abortive attempt to set up a settlement in Western Port, not that long before Batman came here but everything was illegal until 1836, when Hamilton, Hume and William Hovel came down to Port Phillip in 1820 … in the 1820s.
They said they thought that it looked like pretty good grazing country but even then the Government of New South Wales wouldn’t agree to release any of the land for settlement.
John Pascoe Fawkner in Oak Park
We live in Oak Park and I was just wondering when John Pascoe Fawkner lived in the “House on the Hill”?
He moved there quite early. When there was a crash at the end of the 1830s, Fawkner went broke once. He actually made a fortune, lost it and then made a second one. He survived that first one by hiding out in Oak Park. Although that house that’s on the hill there now is built over the top of the site where he built, he was there quite early and when he was first elected … at the time of the separation from New South Wales he was one of the first people elected to the legislative council and he used to have to travel in from Oak Park to the legislative council meetings.
He was obviously very taken by the Moonee Ponds Creek Valley. And Pascoe Vale was one of his early settlements. That’s how John Batman landed up in Fawkner, that cemetery; the bodies were removed and taken to Fawkner Cemetery. I mean it had already been superseded as a burial ground because it just wasn’t big enough. No-one was planning anything when it came down to it. Nobody really could plan especially for the gold rushes. That was the really thing … the thing that kind of threw everything out because Melbourne just suddenly grew so darn fast. They’d started up Melbourne General Cemetery already but there had been this little old burial ground which included the very first people who were every buried in Western rites in Melbourne were there and Batman was there.
Queen Victoria Market Cemetary
Can you tell us a bit about the cemetary under where the Victoria Market is now and what happened?
So when they eventually decided to takeover that spot they moved the burial ground out to … but then you see all these little villages had their own burial grounds. You know, like Coburg has got that one on Merri Creek which there were all sorts of other little burial ground spotted. Yes, there is an amazing one.
Have you ever been to the one at Bulla? It’s the spookiest place but it is a very very old cemetery. There is a big sign saying “Beware of the snakes” which is particularly charming. It is well merited I can tell you, I saw one. Suddenly … on the jet flight path and it has got these big pine trees and when the jets come through there is this lag and then about 30 – 40 seconds later you hear this really spooky voice in the trees. It is the weirdest thing I have ever heard in my life. It just whistles on a completely still day, yeah.
So there are all these little cemeteries dotted all over the place. I mean I reckon cemeteries are the most fantastically interesting places. Unfortunately a lot of the early graves weren’t marked but there are still enough that are marked to be able to kind of reconstruct something of the familial relationship and the early deaths, which were a real characteristic of that period.
The later settlement of the Moonee Ponds area
I thought it was very interesting, moving forward to modern times, the development of the settlement west of Coburg and Brunswick . The way that you described that was very interesting, development being caught up with transport and so on…
I reckon that that area near the Moonee Ponds Creek, where that escarpment there where you have got literally the oldest surviving house in Melbourne just sitting there still being privately occupied. It is an amazing place. It is just extraordinary to think that that just sits there in the middle of post war suburb essentially well inter war to post war suburb. It is an incredible landscape. You can see them kind of trying furiously to sell it and no-one will buy.
It’s interesting how the area may have taken off way back when if there was transport, and into the 80s we’ve done the same thing...
Well the other one that makes my hair stand on end to be absolutely frank is the schools because one of the things that I’d worked on years ago was a history of secondary education in Victoria.
So I was brought up here so I never had to kind of experience … I never experienced what the secondary system here was. It was only when I was looking at the history of it that I realised just how late state secondary schools were to develop in Victoria and the fact that … and the thing that was really scary is that after the Second World War when suddenly there was a huge influx of kids into secondary schools, they’d run out of space. Secondary schools all over Melbourne on the sites of primary schools, on tips, on marshes, like the secondary school my kids went to was on a swamp. I mean that just makes it so horrendous that those sites were sold off and turned into housing.
You look at it and you think, “Well okay, we are selling off a site of the school. We are going to build medium density housing and attract more residence. At some point they will have children. And where are they going to go to school?” It is so short-sighted.
One of the places that I go past is the old Essendon Tech and I know the effort the people had to go through to get that school in the first place. It is now a TAFE but what they did was to flog off the oval. So if they ever have to turn it into a school again there is going to be no playground.
When you were talking about your ambivalence towards Batman’s character earlier, I was really interested in how historians such as yourself how you go about evaluating his character, and were there any nice guys?
I am a bit of a Fawkner fan I have to say but just because he is so unusual and really odd. Like a deeply strange individual. I always think it’s a huge lost opportunity in so many ways because there were … there was an awful lot of goodwill. If you have got a copy of historical records of Australia look at the bit about the Aborigines … the volume about the Aborigines who were protectors, William Thomas’ stuff in there. Okay, I mean Thomas was a terrible teetotaller and that was a real problem because whenever … he keeps on making bad judgements because he is so anti alcohol that as soon as anyone touches it he basically tries to cut them off at the knees. But the thing is that that man tends to … all these people who are living in what we now from a 20th century … 21st century perspective, we can see that what he was looking after was a refuge camp. There were people turning up there from all over Victoria because they had been displaced. His perseverance in doing that in the face of terrible, terrible odds, in a way he is almost emblematic of the kind of person who you’d really like to have been at least given a bit more power. He’s always trying … first he has to contend with Robinson as the protector and Robinson was a disaster. Then he has to contend with Latrobe who had this bizarre idea that he was going to turn Melbourne into a white space.
So the first thing that the protectors get told they have to do is to clear out the black camps from Central Melbourne. I mean once you’ve done that how on earth are you going to have any credibility from here on in? And yet he worked away at that and did establish a certain amount of rapport and there was a really important moment because when finally some indigenous reserves were declared, they were declared in places that people themselves chose.
And one thing that is really quite … I must say when I read this it made the hair stand up on my head, there is now a much better idea of the genealogy of the surviving indigenous people in Victoria and one thing they’ve worked out is that the people who survived were the people who did fall under the protection of the protector. And that’s now, 180 years later. There’s whole language groups that have effectively vanished but the people who survived were the people who did come under protection and that’s a pretty extraordinary thing. It’s a pretty good tribute to people like Thomas, working against the odds in that way. I mean okay, he was … he did some terrible things. I mean he turned dying people’s relatives away because they were drunk. It is sort of a … I mean which is really not very nice.
At the same time he at least had an understanding of what he was looking at. And I think a very contemporary one, it is really worth reading his diaries, they are fantastic.
