MELBOURNE.
Melbourne consists of two portions, older and newer. The former, which
grew much slower than the latter, lies between two low, irregular,
broad-browed ridges. These are of no great length, and flatten out their
south ends on the Yarra-Yarra river which here flows westward in front of
them. Elizabeth Street, the main thoroughfare of Melbourne, runs along
the bottom of the valley between these ridges, and in line with it is
now the highway to the Diggings in the north. The streets, unlike those
of the cities in the hot countries of the East, are wide and straight,
and run at right angles. This, while affording scope for traffic, is
attended with a sacrifice of comfort, as the rays of the sun, reflected
from the white plastered walls, and smiting direct upon the surface of
the roads, make the feet sweat and burn, while eyes unused to it and
perhaps fresh from the green shade of the forest, are oppressed by the
constant glare, and in vain seek relief in umbrellas and broad-brimmed
hats. The town lies two miles from the shipping direct, or four by the
river. The latter has its source in a diminutive spring in the Snowy
mountains, about a hundred miles to the eastward of Melbourne. The banks
are in general abrupt, and in many places high, and well wooded, with
here and there flats and gentle slopes of limited extent occurring. The
scenery is picturesque, the foliage diversified. Every short distance
presents new combinations of beauty in tree-clad height and hollow, with
birds of bright plumage, and schools of chattering parrots on the wing.
At Heidelberg, about seven miles above Melbourne, and at intervals along
the river side between, small farmers, market-gardeners, and vine-growers
have taken possession of the slopes and alluvial bottoms, and brought
them under cultivation. In times of drought, when hot winds and clouds
of dust come sweeping from the plains, these settlers may congratulate
themselves on their situation. They are exposed, however, to danger of
another kind, for the river, slow of descent, winding much, and confined
in basin, occasionally fails to carry off the waters poured down during
the heavy rains. The bottom lands and lower slopes are then laid fathoms
deep under a turbid flood. On reaching Melbourne, an elbow in the course
at Richmond, and abrupt projecting banks, a little lower down, in the
neighbourhood of the Botanic Gardens on the one side, with trees ranked
close along the margin of the other, retard and heap back the waters upon
the lower portions of the townships of Richmond and Low Collingwood.
Should this occur by night, and the condition of the weather at the time
allow it to be heard, the rippling of the current against the angles
of the houses which stand nearest to the swelling tide-way, may give
early warning to sleepers not too dull to unusual sound, but in places
more remote the water surrounds the habitations silently, progressing
from fence to door step, from doorstep to hearth, and steals upward on
the lighter furniture, and at last with slow oscillating motion, floats
it gently off the floor. Were an ear awake to listen, it might now and
again hear sounds like half-hushed lisping whispers, when the surface
of the deepening pool reaches the lips of empty vessels, and begins to
trickle into them; but the slumbering sense is inwardly engaged with
the incoherent details of dreams, the filling is accomplished, and the
silence that has scarce been broken is resumed. Before the mattresses on
which the sleeping inmates lie are reached, some one, more sensitive to
cold, or more lightly covered than the others may awaken, and struck by
the singular raw-smelling freshness of the confined air, and the strange
blackness where before he has been accustomed to see only the varying
shadow of the floor, puts his foot or his hand out, in an effort to get
up to learn the reason, and so discovers it. Wading may still save them;
there is little time for hesitation when life may depend on a few inches
more or less of depth on the uneven ground that has to be crossed in the
dark to a place of safety.
The flood is released only after passing under and around Prince’s
Bridge, abreast of Melbourne. It there finds room to spread, upon the
wharves and the streets adjoining, on the one hand, and the low marshy
ground between Emerald Hill and the town on the other. River and roads,
all are alike swallowed up in the wide deluge. A few tree tops and roofs,
a frothy swirl above submerged clumps of scrub and tea-tree, with a
drifting wreck of wooden houses and furniture, proclaim the extent of
the yet uncompleted disaster to the anxious, interested crowds on the
heights around. During the heavy rains, all unmacadamized or unpaved
roads are reduced to an almost impassable puddle. Elizabeth Street, from
its low situation, receives nearly the whole of the surface drainage of
the valley slopes, and, during rain-storms, becomes impassable on foot.
One morning during a flood of only ordinary magnitude, I found myself
with many others at the crossing of Great Collin Street, cut off from
communication with the opposite side, by a torrent that ran leg deep
close in by the foot path, while two men were ferrying people across in
carts. I never till then had known a man in danger of being swept away
and drowned at his very door. This was immediately after a rather heavy
and protracted fall of rain, but the capacious causewayed side-channels,
and the elevation of the footpath above the level of the road, showed
that emergencies of this kind were not unlooked for. It is good to turn
from these accidents of situation, to the contemplation of the climate,
with its generous salubrity, as exhibited in the fields and strips of
garden ground. Vines flourish, and when trained on rods round doors and
windows, serve at once for ornament and shelter from the sun.
The scarcity of houses that followed the sudden increase of the
population, led the Government to apportion a piece of Reserve ground,
near the south end of the bridge, whereon tents might be erected. At
the time of my arrival, about twenty families were so housed, some of
them looking as if they thought they had left home truly, and were in
the wilderness. Their firewood was scarce, and their hearth on the
hill side, their couch a brush bed on the ground, and the candle after
nightfall revealing unpleasantly their every movement by the shadows
on the cloth-walls. In the course of a walk through, I came upon a few
loose branches, and a blanket thrown over them as if to dry. I heard a
mumbling of voices, but was at a loss to know from what quarter, till
something round dimpled the blanket from underneath. There was life
there—I was looking on the roof of a house. A laugh, and more dimpling
as if by elbows and hands, then a merry commotion, during which the roof
fell in, and disclosed the inmates—two beardless youths—reminded me as
I walked away, while they were disentangling themselves from the ruins,
that happiness is not dependent on outward circumstances, else these
two, without a pillow or a dish, save one ship hook-pot, and with the
rain sapping its way under them down hill and gathering in the hollows
of their knee-high ceiling, to be dislodged by an upward punch of the
hand when found to drip too fast, would have been too serious for such
exercise of limb, as revealed their state to me.
On the northern or Melbourne side of the river, a vacant piece of ground
fronting the end of Elizabeth Street, came somehow into use as a ready
off-hand market place, where the needy might dispose of their spare
clothes, and such things as guns and pistols, razors, watches, trinkets,
books, chests, &c. Symptoms of feeling and of sadness were observable
now and then in those who were thus engaged, but in no instance so
very plainly as in that of a man well up in years, decently but humbly
dressed, who was offering for sale a fishing-rod, a fiddle, and two
walking sticks. When I approached he was seated on the shafts of a loose
cart; he had perhaps grown weary waiting, and had taken the fiddle up,
and was softly playing a sweet simple air. His eyes were bent upon the
ground, and his body drooped like one whose thoughts were elsewhere
than with the scene around him. A very little girl, who had no doubt
grown weary too, was standing by his knee, just old enough to know, on
being told, that the things were to be sold, if any one would buy them,
but too young to have any memories associated with the instrument that
was deepening the father’s melancholy reverie. Eagerly she eyed those
loitering past, in the hope of some one stopping to look at the slender
stock; her young simple face expressive of wonder and disappointment,
and, I thought, of hungry wistfulness, as she saw her father’s neighbours
getting money and he none. I never think of him but my heart reproaches
me for leaving without speaking, but I was then too poor to help him
much, and more than likely the story of the past that seemed revisiting
his mind was incommunicable to a stranger, while such words as he might
have spoken, failing to embody the dejection visible, might possibly have
weakened the impressions already made by making his case seem only common
after all.
The market increased in importance. The articles at first had been
exposed on boxes and chest lids, and in umbrellas opened and inverted, or
on the ground, but as trade grew brisker, tables and light stalls were
brought by those who, on making a good beginning, had commenced to buy
the stocks of others, and adopt the business regularly. Jews were very
numerous in the town, their faces began to appear among the throng, the
trade was quite in their way of life, and they soon expanded it to such
an extent, that a removal to more roomy quarters became necessary. Two
unoccupied building-sites, one in Great Bourke Street, East, and the
other in Great Collin Street, West, received them. Open-fronted frame
tents, and light temporary wooden shops were raised, and the character
of the business so changed from its recent humble original, that a poor
dealer with a box, or a yard of bare ground only, for the exhibition of
his wares, must have felt like a vagrant on forbidden ground.
The community of tents at the bridge end, which latterly was known by
the name of Canvas Town, met eventually with a somewhat different fate.
In Melbourne, house rents were high, and the place being of easy access
from the town, many workmen were induced to make their homes there; and,
stretching calico on light spar frames, with a calico door framed on
hinges, a turf fire-place and chimney at the end, they were enabled to
live comfortably enough in mild weather. Men with small means—builders
in the first stage of development—erected such places, and let them
by the week. Small shops were opened; hand-printed cards, announcing
that tailoring or cobbling was done within, began to appear, pasted to
the sides of doorways, with perhaps a pair of newly-mended boots, or a
small sheet of square cloth patterns. Before long, jobbing carpenters
and coopers found they need not cross the river, or go to the adjoining
townships in search of work, when the want of benches and stools and
water-barrels increased with the growing inclination of their neighbours
to settle permanently. Habitations that in the beginning of the week
had stood alone, would before the close have become hemmed in all round
by a crowd of new erections. The buzz of life grew louder, and the
hill-side began to be trodden bare by the increasing multitude of feet.
Tents where, on a stall before the door, a modest trade in harmless
effervescing drinks had been established, began, as the neighbourhood
became more populous, to outgrow their early humility, and aspire to
stronger liquor; the painted sign-board was set up, the wings of the
establishment spread out, and nightly from underneath came sounds of
clamour and reeling men, who, jostling and rubbing their way home along
the frail cotton walls, indenting the thin fabrics with staggering
thrusts of their numb elbows, made the place no longer habitable for the
timid or the weak. Lying beyond the city limits, the police had hitherto
left the inhabitants to their own care and keeping. This suited well the
tastes and habits of many about town, who, for reasons understood by
the police, but better known to themselves, gladly took the opportunity
to escape from observation, and came and settled down on the hill-side
amongst the unsuspecting tent-dwellers. Cries of distress, however, began
to be too common in the neighbourhood of the bridge after dark, for this
their retreat long to escape public notice. Every morning came fresh
reports of robberies and personal ill-usage, blows struck from behind
putting it past the power of the victims to say or know more than that
the thing was done. Policemen were set to patrol the district, but they
only shifted the crime from a centre to outlying roads and pathways.
The ground the tents stood on formed part of a Government Reserve. The
people had been allowed to settle on it only to meet a temporary want
of more regular accommodation, but, as they increased in number, the
opportunity for trade had induced many from choice to set up business
among them in the hope of Government yielding to the claims of vested
rights and occupation, and allowing them to buy the ground for the
permanent formation of a township. It was agreed that were this done,
substantial buildings would quickly take the place of the existing
motley and camp-like assemblage of canvas coverings, but the authorities
appeared to think that lawlessness had struck too deep root to be so
easily eradicated, and shortly before my return to town, gave orders
for the whole to be cleared away. The Brighton road now sweeps over the
silent site.