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| Riverine eucalypts with an understorey of blackberries and other exotics along the Maribyrnong between Avondale Heights and Braybrook. |
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| Photo by Jenny Lee, 1999. |
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| Weeds infest the Maribyrnong at Braybrook, below the Quang Minh Buddhist Temple. This site is believed to be where Marin balug clans constructed some of their fish traps from basalt boulders. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1996. |
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The Maribyrnong valley was a natural focus for the Marin balug clan of the Woi wurrung people. Marin balug country stretched from the river across the basalt plain south-west to Kororoit Creek.
Although the water in the lower reaches of the river was too salty for drinking, there was fresh water to be had from its many tributaries, and the broad flood plains and wetlands in the river bends provided plenty of food. Edible plants such as murnong and cumbungi grew on the river flats, water birds, fish and eels thrived in the river itself, and game was plentiful on the grassy plain to the west.
The Maribyrnong valley also has outcrops of a hard rock called silcrete, formed from the weathering of basalt , which was quarried for use in making small, flaked stone implements. Eleven Aboriginal silcrete quarries have been found along the Maribyrnong and its tributaries. The most easily seen is near the Lily Street lookout.
Early European observers noted many signs of habitation along the Maribyrnong. In 1802 Charles Grimes observed a fish trap at Solomon's Ford, and in 1841 George Augustus Robinson noted numerous stone ovens along the river. Excavations for the Commonwealth Explosives Factory, which occupies a deep bend in the river, turned up huge numbers of stone implements in 1908-09.
It is only in the past few decades, however, that archaeologists have begun to realise just how ancient a civilisation existed in this valley. Since the 1940s, archaeological excavations near Keilor have uncovered some of the earliest known traces of human occupation in this part of Australia.
Dispossession
The Marin balug were among the first of the traditional owners to be displaced when European settlers began to stream into the Melbourne region late in 1835. By November 1836, when the first 'Return of Dwellings, Stock and Cultivation at Port Phillip' was prepared, squatters had occupied the fertile river frontages as far as Jackson's Creek and Deep Creek.
Not only did the intruders take up the best-watered country, but they brought in sheep, which ate out the food plants that generations of Marin balug had tended along the river. Cut off from their country at every turn, the survivors took refuge in Melbourne, where they could eke out an existence on rations and earn a little money by performing services for the Europeans. Living conditions in the encampments there were overcrowded, rations were inadequate and introduced diseases spread rapidly, causing heavy mortality. In his diaries, the Assistant Protector, William Thomas, vividly described the scenes of horror that he witnessed daily when attempting to tend to the refugees' needs, and recorded his despair at the authorities' indifference to the tragedy taking place before their eyes.
From sheep-run to slaughterhouse
Urban settlement was slow to become established west of the river, partly because of the lack of bridges, which made travel to the city difficult - and expensive, since the owners of private punts charged as much as the market would bear. Eventually, in 1854, much of the valley was auctioned off in hundred-acre lots, mainly for farming, though town sites were reserved at Footscray and Braybrook.
In the past 160 years, the Maribyrnong valley has changed almost beyond recognition, often in unsustainable ways. First the country along the river was taken over by sheep, which ate out native grasses and spread thistles and other exotic weeds. Later, as the city grew around it, the shape of the river itself began to change. The bed was dredged and cleared of fallen timber, the banks straightened and raised. Eucalypts and casuarinas along the frontage were cut out, wetlands were filled in, and tributaries channelled into drains.
Soon there was a regular traffic of small boats, many of them tugs towing strings of barges bound for the sand and bluestone (basalt) quarries upstream. Bluestone was used to pave Melbourne's streets and lanes and to construct many of the town's more notable buildings. In the 1930s, unemployed relief workers even used the stone to line the banks of the river, which took on the appearance of an artificial canal.
Nineteenth-century European settlers were not kind to Australia's waterways - and especially not to the Saltwater River, which could be used as a sewer without polluting Melbourne's drinking water or offending the sensibilities of middle-class inhabitants on the other side of town. The sources of pollution were multifarious. Melbourne did not have a closed sewerage system until the 1890s, by which time its population had reached 473,000. The impact of this volume of human waste on the city's waterways can only be imagined. Then there were the industries associated with wool-growing, many of which used large quantities of water and produced equal quantities of noxious waste. Wool was commonly washed or scoured before export; skins and hides were cured for leather; and in times of drought sheep carcasses were boiled down to extract the fat. Add thousands of tonnes of blood and offal from the city's slaughterhouses, and the result was a potent brew.
By the late 1860s these 'noxious trades', as they were called, were concentrated on the Yarra River flats and along the Saltwater, where they had spread upstream as far as the present suburb of Maribyrnong. Middle-class campaigns to clean up the Yarra only increased the pressure on the western river. In the summer of 1869-70, the Yarra became so polluted that fish perished in huge numbers for lack of oxygen. An inquiry recommended banishing the noxious trades to the Saltwater, safely out of sight or smell of the leafy suburbs in the east. So for many years the Saltwater River became an industrial drain. The old noxious trades were joined by other industries, which moved to Footscray , Braybrook and Yarraville to take advantage of cheap land and access to water. Pipe-works, meat canneries, paint factories, soap works, a sugar refinery and fertiliser plants - all lined the riverbanks, their liquid wastes turning the water red and their fumes polluting the air.
Cleaning up the river
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| The Maribyrnong from the Quang Minh Buddhist Temple at Braybrook. The river is far from rehabilitated but significant effort has been made to revegetate the valley with locally endemic species. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1996. |
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Although a few voices were raised against river pollution from the 1870s, it was only in the twentieth century that the state of the Saltwater River really emerged as a rallying point for local opinion. A turning point was the opening of the Maribyrnong tram line in 1906, which brought the river within reach of day-trippers and led to greater recognition of its recreational potential. The Essendon River League, founded the same year, not only campaigned to have the river renamed the Maribyrnong but also set to 'beautify' the river, holding an annual boating regatta - 'Henley on the Maribyrnong' - to raise money for the purpose. They were backed by amateur fishermen appalled that the river, which had once been a favourite angling haunt, was now practically dead.
The campaign to reduce pollution in the Maribyrnong, however, has been a long, hard haul, continuing well into the postwar period. Among the river's greatest champions in the 1970s and 1980s was Footscray councillor Matt Harris, who mounted a campaign to limit the outflows from meatworks and other factories, emphasising his claims by bringing smelly samples of river water along to council meetings. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (later Melbourne Parks and Waterways) has also played an important role, upgrading sewerage disposal with the construction of the Western Trunk Sewer, commissioned in 1999, and restoring wetlands and reed-beds, which provide breeding grounds for fish, birds and other creatures as well as trapping urban litter before it reaches Port Phillip Bay.
The river and its valley are still under heavy pressure. In the valley, long-established exotic weeds such as Scotch thistles, blackberries, kikuyu and boxthorn have been joined by the virulent serrated tussock grass and garden escapes such as pampas grass, cotoneaster and wandering jew. In spite of many signs that life in the river is reviving, chemicals and animal droppings carried in urban runoff remain a constant problem. In 1996 there was a new threat to the river, in the form of a scheme to establish a toxic waste dump in a disused quarry next to Steele Creek. After vigorous resistance from the local community and council over three-and-a-half years, the Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, withdrew his backing for the project during the 1999 election campaign (but his party still failed to win the seat).
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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