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| Traditional land owners, possibly displaced Watha wurrung, at Geelong in 1852. Did they receive their blankets from Foster Fyans? |
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| Photographer unknown. Image contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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| The Fyans Ford Hotel, designed by Alexander Skene, is close to the site of Fyan's first hut on the Moorabool River. |
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| Photo by Jenny Lee, 1999. |
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Captain Foster Fyans of the 4th King's Own Regiment arrived at Geelong in September 1837 to take up his post as Police Magistrate.
He set up his headquarters in a rough hut by the Moorabool River, with a Union Jack slung under the roof to form a ceiling. The place soon became known as Fyansford.
With him came a wild-eyed ex-convict called William Buckley to act as interpreter with the Watha wurrung people. The partnership was short-lived. At his first attempt to distribute rations and blankets to the Watha wurrung, Fyans tried to impose order on the unexpectedly large crowd by threatening to use force. Within three weeks of Fyans' arrival, Buckley resigned; in December 1837 he left Port Phillip, never to return.
Fyans also had little time for the squatters, who were claiming to have bought huge areas of land under John Batman's 'treaty' - '50,000 acres or 90,000 for an old blanket or tomahawk', Fyans wrote scornfully - and were plaguing him with requests to build huts for themselves. In March 1838 Fyans wrote to Robert Hoddle, the Chief Surveyor, asking him to settle matters with 'these damned Sheep Keepers'. 'Come up', Fyans wrote, 'and you shall have all the assistance in my powers to lay out this cursed Township. One day would do all your business, for I am sure we shall agree on the spot for the City of Geelong.'
Fyans had brought with him a staff of constables, a court clerk, and a gang of convicts with brickmaking and building skills. On the Barwon River, Fyans soon had 20 extra convicts working to build a breakwater to limit the upstream push of the tide and ensure fresh water supplies. The breakwater still exists.
In 1840 Fyans was made Crown Lands Commissioner for the Portland Bay District, as the Victorian Western District was first called. He had to do a lot of travelling. Much of his riding, day after day, was through country without roads or even tracks. One of his first tasks was to ride his horse to the Hentys' sheep station at Portland Bay to inquire into a clash between Aborigines and white settlers there.
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| Traffic crossing the Barwon at Geelong, on the site of the breakwater Foster Fyans built with twenty convicts in the mid-nineteenth century. |
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| Photo by Graeme Kinross-Smith, 1999. |
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In 1840 Fyans toured the district again. He found 41 sheep stations already established. By 1841 there were 88. By 1843, the historical geographer J. M. Powell tells us, the best of the native grasslands of the Western District were all taken up by European squatters and were at least lightly grazed. Foster Fyans watched this happen in the space of a few eventful years.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Graeme Kinross-Smith for ITF.
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