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| Traditional owners of what is now Geelong boating on the Barwon River in the late nineteenth century. |
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| Photographer unknown. Image contributed by Geelong Historical Archive. |
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| Geelong 1840, looking across the bay. |
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| Wood engraving by Charles S. Bennett (1869-1930) based on an earlier drawing, published in a supplement to the Illustrated Australian news, August 1, 1888. |
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Greater Geelong lies about 70 kilometres from Melbourne on the shores of Corio Bay, which forms the south-western corner of Port Phillip Bay.
A port with a strong industrial base, Geelong has a population of 186,000 and is Victoria's second-largest city. It was through Geelong that European settlers and their flocks moved westward into the grasslands of the volcanic plain in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the city remains a major entry point for trade to and from Victoria's Western District.
Sometimes, when I want to start knowing again, I look back at the maps. Maps showing different things. Maps for different purposes, maps with different scales. Maps from other times. Before I can start knowing new things, I have to remind myself of what I already know and what I knew once but have forgotten.
I think of the old map drawn by Alexander Skene in 1845, when he was Surveyor to the District Council of Grant. 'Map of the District of Geelong', it says. And there are Mount Hesse, Mount Gellibrand and Mount Moriac to Geelong's west. There is Geelong close to the bay and the river and a network of land-holdings behind it in the Barrabool Hills. There is the road to Colac marked as a dotted, uncertain line. There is the Barwon River coming in from the forests in the west to be joined by the Moorabool River close to Geelong. There is Corio Bay and the Geelong port. It is almost as if I could see the masts of the ships waiting there if I look closely enough.
There, much further to the north, is Mount Buninyong - but there is no Ballarat. It is still six years before that huge bustle of men and women - the painter Von Guerard and his friends among them - floods north to dig for gold. West of Geelong there are long tracts marked mysteriously 'Densely Timbered Land' and others marked 'Ranges and Gullies - Very Scrubby' and large blanks where no Europeans have ever been.
There is Melbourne on the northern tip of Port Phillip. There is the Yarra coming to the sea, and the other streams - the Merri Creek, Moonee Ponds Creek, the Maribyrnong River joining it near Melbourne's port. On the rim of the Bay is the lighthouse at Williamstown, but not much more. I smell space and early mornings and hear the sound of waves along empty shores.
If I learn how to look out from Geelong, I can see the names of the squatters pencilled lightly by Skene. By the Werribee River on the rough track to Melbourne I can read Wedge and Greeves. Then Synnott, Hope, Riley, Mercer, Costigan, Learmonth, Connor, Bates and others clustered near Geelong. Further north up the Moorabool River are Cowie and Stead, then Steiglitz, Wilson, Sutherland. On the lower reaches of the Barwon the names of Drysdale and Newcomb are faintly lettered in. West and north are Kiddle and Lawson and Russell, while due west are Austin, Harding, Beale, Calvert, McKinnon and Murray. Out beyond Colac a Border Police post is marked at the start of the Stony Rises.[text link to come] A bit beyond is the name Manifold close to Lake Purrumbete, with Mount Leura reeling up further west.
Eight years before this map is made, many of these names appear on a petition[text link to come from JL] asking Governor Bourke of New South Wales for protection against the Aborigines. Bourke responds by appointing Foster Fyans as the first Police Magistrate for the district. And Fyans in turn lays the groundwork for the town of Geelong.
It is a map that speaks - about the wool that would continue to come in by wagon every year, about the properties where the wool was grown and shorn, about the rough men who would become the aristocrats of the Western District, about the trials of travelling through a country without roads, about the forest of ships' masts in Corio Bay. And about the unknown, and the fear of it.
1840 and now
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| 'Geelong 1840': 'two lines of cottages following a rough road across the brow of a rise in the ground ... low cliffs running to the shore and a schooner riding off in the bay, well out from the thin line of a small jetty.' |
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| Painting by Samuel Mossman. Image contributed by Geelong Art Gallery. |
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I look at the paintings in the Geelong Art Gallery. I strain to understand what Geelong must have been like in its early years. What would my ears have heard if I had been there? What would I have smelt? Who would I have heard speaking or singing? What horses? What houses? I don't know. My footsteps echo on the hard floor.
Then it is there, suddenly, unexpected. 'Geelong 1840' - a rudimentary painting, fading away, cracking with age. It shows two lines of cottages following a rough road across the brow of a rise in the ground. 'Geelong 1840'. It is painted by a Samuel Mossman. I have never heard of him. The painting shows low cliffs running to the shore and a schooner riding off in the bay, well out from the thin line of a small jetty. There are sparse trees and scrub running down a cleft to the shore. In the foreground is a rough, chimneyed hut. Then I see that underneath the painting are numbers and faded names written below some of the meagre buildings. The numbers are fading, the ink paling away.
'M. Butterworth's Customs House and Office' - the first Customs House, because Geelong has been a port from the beginning. 'Strachan and Company Wool and Goods Store' says another caption in dim, brown-yellow ink. Only a few streets towards the sea from the alcove where I stand, the great red-brick woolstores still face the bay. 'Strachan, Murray and Shannon - Wool Warehouse' the old lettering proclaims. But there is no wool here. The building now houses the bustle and music and lights and window-dressing of the Bay City Plaza shopping centre.
Further down Moorabool Street on the other side towards the bay is the National Wool Museum, housed in the old bluestone walls of the former Dennys Lascelles woolstores. Until recently the Geelong wool sales were held in its upstairs auction room. Two corners away, tucked in behind business offices and hotels, is the Wool Exchange, the scene of countless wool auctions, the buyers sitting in the tiered seats and flashing their bids for some of the best fleeces in the country, grown on the pastures of the Victorian volcanic plain. But Victorian wool sales are now held in Melbourne, and the Wool Exchange has become a nightclub. Times change.
There was a geography-class mantra that children used to chant: 'Geelong on Corio Bay sends wheat and wool away'. No longer - wheat, yes, but no wool.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Graeme Kinross-Smith for ITF.
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