An Ideal Location
Many of Australia’s first cities were planned by British bureaucrats who had never been there, which may explain why they put them in the wrong places.
1835
King William IV 1830-1837
© Melbpal, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Melbourne, capital of the State of Victoria, now has a population of over five million spread over some 3,858 square miles. After John Batman left in June 1835, more settlers came exploring, and that August the two groups agreed to pool their efforts. They gave their settlement the tribal name Dutigulla, and rented the land annually from the aboriginal Kulin people, though whether the Kulin quite grasped what they had signed up to remains unclear. However, Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, took the land for the British Crown with compensation to the settlers (though not the Kulin), and on April 10th, 1837, renamed the settlement Melbourne in honour of the Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, of Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. The State of Victoria was established in 1851.
Introduction
In 1835, John Batman (1801-1839) of Launceston in Tasmania set out across the Bass Strait in the schooner Rebecca to explore Port Philip, a large, sheltered bay on the southern coast of Australia. What he saw only confirmed what he had heard from others, and on June 8th he jotted down in his diary, next to a sketch of the place where the Yarra empties into the Bay: ‘reserved for a township and other purposes’.
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IT is very remarkable that, of the six state capitals of Australia,* the only one which stands today precisely in the place where it was in the first instance intended to build it, is Melbourne.
New South Wales was originally intended to be centred at Botany Bay, and had Arthur Phillip followed the letter of his instructions he would have commenced his work with misfortune and failure.* His own promptitude and initiative saved the situation there. In the Western Australian instance the first colonists were left shivering in misery on the white sand-dunes of Garden Island until the site of Perth was found.* South Australia was intended to be established on Kangaroo Island, which was lauded in glowing descriptions written by those who had never been there;* but Colonel Light* recognized at a glance that a blunder had been perpetrated, and insisted on the site of Adelaide.
The cases of Hobart and Brisbane are not so serious, though there also the situations originally chosen were afterwards found to be undesirable. But John Batman’s ‘place for a village’ was an excellent choice, which had not to be altered afterwards, and the village — rather large for its name, however — stands in justification of his judgement.
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Abridged from ‘A Short History of Australia’ (1891) by Sir Ernest Scott (1868-1939).
* Constitutionally, Australia consists of six federated states: New South Wales (capital Sydney), Queensland (Brisbane), South Australia (Adelaide), Tasmania (Hobart), Victoria (Melbourne), and Western Australia (Perth). There are also ten federal territories, which include the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) and Northern Territory (Darwin).
* Captain Arthur Phillip (1738-1814) was the first Governor of New South Wales and the man who brought the ‘First Fleet’ to Australia, reaching Botany Bay on January 20th, 1788, with his cargo of convicts, peacekeeping troops, livestock and agricultural supplies. “I am sorry to say” an officer of the marines recorded “the country for several miles round the bay does not afford a spot large enough for a cabbage-garden fit for cultivation”. Phillip was of the same mind, and six days later the settlement was established some eight miles away at Sydney Cove. See The First Fleet.
* Garden Island is a small island just off the western coast of Australia, close to what is now the mainland city of Perth in Western Australia. The island has an area of 4.2 square miles; Perth, founded in 1829, currently covers 2,478 square miles.
* Kangaroo Island lies just of the southern coast of Australia, close to what is now the mainland city of Adelaide in South Australia, established in 1836. In Whitehall, the constraints imposed by such island settlements were a feature and not a flaw, as expansion was not welcome. “The Secretary of State” wrote an official when the establishment of South Australia was broached in the 1830s “does not feel at liberty at the present moment to hold out any encouragement to schemes which have for their object the extension of the number of His Majesty’s settlements abroad, and which, whether formed in the outset by individuals or the Government, are always liable to end in becoming in some way or other a source of expense to the revenue of this country.” The American Revolution, and the defence of Canada, India and the Caribbean from European rivals, were still uppermost in the bureaucratic mind.
* Colonel William Light (1786-1839). His father, Captain Francis Light (1740-1794), founded Penang (now in Malaysia) and its capital city George Town in 1786.
