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| A banjo shark swimming across a field of seagrass in Port Phillip Bay. These sharks are a very familiar sights off the beaches between Altona and the Bellarine Peninsula. |
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| Photo by Steve Frlan. |
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| A romantic interpretation of the Lady Nelson at anchor in Hobsons Bay, 1802, created more than eighty years after she sailed through the mouth of Port Phillip Bay. |
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| Etching by F.A. Sleap, published in the Illustrated Australian News, August 1, 1888. Contributed by La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Port Phillip Bay is a shallow drowned valley that forms an inlet of Bass Strait on the southern coast of the Australian mainland.
With several freshwater rivers and a coastline of 225 kilometres, it has been a natural focus of both Aboriginal and European occupation.
The first recorded European sighting of Port Phillip Bay was by Acting Lieutenant John Murray, in charge of the Lady Nelson, in February 1801. After negotiating the narrow, treacherous entrance at the mouth of the bay, Murray was startled to see a 'most noble sheet of water'. He spent several weeks exploring the southern shores, then claimed the land for the British Crown and named the bay Port King in honour of King George III - or perhaps as a compliment to the governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King.
If Murray intended to flatter his boss, he did not get far. When he returned to Sydney, the governor overruled him. The bay, King announced, would be called Port Phillip to honour his 'worthy and dear friend' Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, who 'until now has not had his name bestowed on either stick or stone in the colony'. So Port Phillip it was.
The authorities' opinion of the region soon soured. A survey expedition led by Charles Grimes in the summer of 1802-03 reported unfavourably on the area's agricultural potential, and a year later an attempt to establish a convict settlement on the eastern shore of the bay failed for lack of water. It was not until 1835 that new moves were made to establish a European settlement, and even then the push was led by the private adventurers John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner without government approval. Within a year there was a regular shipping traffic across Bass Strait, and Europeans and their flocks were pouring into the district from all directions.
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| Mussels on the sea bed in Port Phillip Bay, just off Point Lillias. |
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| Photo by Steve Frlan. |
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The breadth of Port Phillip may be 'noble', but its depth is less impressive. In fact, it is a shallow valley that has only been under water for 8500 years. The shipping channels of today were the river beds of not so long ago. Their buoys mark out the submerged valleys like highways across a vast plain.
Where the mouth of the bay is now, the rivers joined and thundered into a gorge, then emerged on to a lowland that stretched over the southern horizon. This was the land bridge to the rocky peninsula that is now the island of Tasmania.
By the time the sea reached its lowest level, about 15,000 years ago, people had been living in the valley and the lowlands beyond for many thousands of years. Then the sea began to rise again, first cutting the land bridge, then making its way through the gorge into the valley. Large areas of coastal plain were submerged and long stretches of coastline created. The peoples of the valley had to adapt to a smaller land area, but the climate became warmer and there was an abundance of resources along the sea-shore.
Oral tradition carried the memory of the flooding of the bay across the generations. In 1858 William Hull told the Victorian Legislative Council's Select Committee on the Aborigines:
The blacks say that their progenitors recollected when Hobson's Bay was a kangaroo ground. They say, 'Plenty catch kangaroo and plenty catch possum there' and the river once went out to the heads and that the sea broke in and that Hobson's Bay which was once a hunting ground became what it is.
His hearers were sceptical, just as other Europeans were disbelieving when the traditional owners of the vast plain west of the bay spoke of mountains 'chucking fire'. Europeans tended to think of the Australian continent as being changeless before their own arrival, and they had no conception of how long the country had been under human occupation before them. Volcanoes and tidal waves did not fit this image - let alone the notion that indigenous people had been around to witness such events.
Further reading: A. G. L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District, Miegunyah Press, 1996.
(Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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