Melbourne from the Falls


Since I moved to the CBD, I’ve been thinking a lot about Melbourne’s history.

As I’ve said before on this blog, I’ve always been a sucker for that feeling of historical immediacy that comes from the contrast between present-day locations and images of their past (that’s pretty much what the two Radical Melbourne books I co-wrote are about). When you learn, as I did yesterday, that the nondescript block a hundred metres from your apartment was where John Pascoe Fawkner built his home, something happens, so that thereafter, that site takes on a certain enchantment, becomes something different from what it was.

But what’s the nature of that enchantment? Richard Holmes describes biography as a ‘handshake across time’, an ‘act of human solidarity and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.’ The RM books were motivated by a similar sentiment. Re-excavating the physical traces of labour history was, as we said in the introduction, an effort to ‘provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present’.

After finishing those books, though, I became much less certain about their methodology. Researching a book about war, I spent some time in Gettysburg talking with historical re-enactors – that is, people who dress up in the uniforms of different eras to recreate the wars of the past. In the United States in particular, so-called ‘living history’ is a vibrant and mainstream hobby, with tens of thousands of enthusiasts engaged in playing out Civil War battles. In his Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz writes of men so devoted to recreating historical accuracy that they starve themselves so as to better resemble emaciated rebels. They wax their beards with bacon grease; they practice what they call ‘the bloat’, recreating the distinctive spectacle of corpses decomposing in the sun; they welcome the hacking coughs produced by sleeping outside, since it brings them closer to the illnesses of a bygone time.

In Melbourne, I interviewed a young guy who devoted himself to recreating the experiences of the First AIF, assembling not just an authentic uniform but all the kit that accompanied it – weird Edwardian cigarettes, tins of bully beef and so on. He showed me a Light Horseman’s shoulder bag, salvaged from a Great War battle. Holding it, feeling its weight, I understood the appeal of ‘living history’ and how, with its artefacts, it generates a sense of ‘this is what it must have felt like’. I thought of Walter Benjamin: ‘One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired.’

Yet my encounters with re-enactors made me retrospectively sceptical about what we’d done with Radical Melbourne. Living history seemed to generate a quite peculiar relationship with the past, a relationship that was decidedly apolitical. Re-enactors knew the most minute and trivial details about the eras they performed – the kind of buttons the soldiers wore, the style of caps they favoured and so on. Yet they often seemed indifferent to questions beyond haberdashery. They could tell you what lapels Union men sported at the Battle of Second Manassas; they showed much less interest in what the Civil War meant to America at the time, let alone what it meant now. I was also struck by how re-enacting invariably centres on battles and violence. Even though the hobby itself largely consists of collecting clothing, it’s very rare to find anyone who recreates peacetime occupations. That’s because, it seems to me, the identification spurred by re-enactments is aesthetic rather than historical, and thus sits easily with the conventional sense of combat as a Romantic experience (implicitly contrasted with the ennui of peacetime).

Benjamin also notes that it’s not that objects come alive in the collector; on the contrary, ‘it is he who lives in them’. There’s definitely something of that in re-enactment.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of running along the banks of the Yarra recently, and it’s led me to think about all this again.

It’s easier to explain with pictures.

This is a photo taken from the Queen’s Bridge on the south side of the Yarra, looking west. It’s my inept attempt at a contemporary version of a distinct local, artistic genre: ‘Melbourne from the Falls.’

The Falls were a basalt ledge that ran across the river, half a metre or so above the high tide mark. They’re gone now, of course – removed in the 1880s to make way for the bridge. If you look in the water near the bridge’s supports, you can see what I imagine is some of the original rock, left over from that clearance.

The Falls mattered for all kinds of reasons. Partly, you could cross there, the only place the river could be fjorded short of Dights Falls in Abbotsford. More importantly, they acted as a natural barrier dividing tidal water from fresh. Earlier white settlements in Sorrento and Westernport failed because they never established an adequate water supply. Batman’s venture did not make the same mistake. In a very real sense, The Falls made Melbourne possible.

This map from 1838 gives you a sense of how the city grew around the river.

You can see how the obstruction produced by The Falls caused the river to widen. The deep area (where you can see the boats) was known as The Turning Basin, the highest point in the river that ships could reach, and thus the obvious place to build docks and unload supplies.

The centrality of The Falls to the township was reflected in a series of paintings and drawings. Here’s a sketch by Robert Russell from 1837. It’s called, of course, ‘Melbourne from The Falls’.

Russell’s image features pretty much the same area as my photo, though he is standing a bit further back.

Here’s the same vista a year later, with the Falls rather more apparent.

In the late nineteenth century, Eleanor McGlinn did a version, basing her work on a sketch from about 1840 (I found this, like many of the other pictures, in Maree Coote’s excellent book The Art of Being Melbourne). She might have turned the Yarra into an English canal but the painting makes clear the river’s importance to the colony. Melbourne, at this stage, is a river port.

Here’s another picture, from an unknown artist in 1838. Again, it’s Melbourne as an English county, complete with children frolicking in the foreground.

The next image, again by Robert Russell, comes from 1844. Note the Customs House (today’s Immigration Museum) in the centre, and the wharfs for unloading cargo.

But let’s now go back a few years. The image below comes from 1837. The difference gives a sense of how quickly the town sprang up – the major structures that featured in the previous painting have not yet been built. No docks, no customs house. But look at the men walking across The Falls.

In his book The Melbourne Dreaming, Meyer Eidelson notes the obvious point: The Falls were significant long before white settlement. He writes:

The location was of great importance to the Aboriginal people of Melbourne. William Thomas, the Assistant Protector, recorded that the south bank of the Yarra opposite the settlement had long been the rendezvous point for clans in the area. The clans met there at least twice a year to settle grievances and for other matters.

The name ‘Yarra’ is, famously, said to have come from a white misinterpretation of the local term for The Falls.

In  1835, James Boyce  discusses the area and its importance to both whites and blacks:

This natural bridge, where salt water met fresh, was also where geology and botany divided in apex of ecological encounter. Within an easy walk could be found grasslands, various woodlands as well as, in almost every direction, mud. On the northern side of the river, stretching three kilometres to the north west, ‘was a wide expanse of flat, boggy land, greater than 1000 acres … in extent.’ In the middle of this was a permanent lagoon, which one early settler recalled as ‘a beautiful blue lake … intensely blue, nearly oval and full of the clearest salt water; but this by no means deep’. On the southern side of the Yarra, between the river and edge of the bay, swampy land stretched for about six and a half kilometres and included a number of permanent lagoons, including what was to become (with more than a little taming) Albert Park Lake. There were also extensive lagoons in the region of what is now Port Melbourne. By contrast, much of today’s central business district was well-drained grasslands, framed by gentle and lightly wooded hills, such as Batman’s Hill, where Southern Cross now stands, and the pastoral plains stretched far to the north and west.

The image below, a sketch from 1837 by Eliezer Levi Montefiore, makes clear Boyce’s point: the fertility and lushness of the area. Again, it’s entitled ‘Melbourne from The Falls’, but here the emphasis is on the southern side of the river. We don’t see the white settlers. We see instead, camped by The Falls, the Indigenous population they are already starting to displace.

One of the arguments Boyce makes in 1835 (a book everyone should read) is that the dispossession of the Indigenous population in Victoria happened incredibly quickly. As early as 1839 (four years after settlement), the missionary Joseph Orton commented that the Indigenous people in the Melbourne area ‘were almost in a state of starvation and can only obtain food day by day, by begging.’ How did this happen in an area so naturally rich?

In fact, it was the very nature of that geography that facilitated white conquest. The settlers used the grasslands for sheep. The number of sheep in the new colony increased incredibly rapidly – growing from 26 000 in June 1836 to 700 000 in 1840 and then doubling again by 1842. A small number of men could take a flock out to unclaimed grasslands and then secure vast acres, which meant seizing control of the water supply and thus disrupting the food chain for Indigenous people. Boyce quotes Richard Broome to the effect that the occupation of Aboriginal land was ‘as fast as any expansion in the history of European colonisation’.

Of course, that took place, for the most part, further inland. But you can see a striking visual representation in the changing landscape of the river.

Here’s Tim Flannery’s account of The Falls prior to white settlement:

A limpid river flowed over a rocky waterfall known as the Yarra Yarra, at what is now the foot of Market Street, before debouching into a large, deep pool at the head of a paperbark-lined estuary. Billabongs and swamps were prinkled right around the bay, and they teemed with brolgas, magpie-geese, Cape Barren Geese, swans, ducks, eels and frogs. So abundant was the wildlife that we can imagine the Melbourne area in 1830 as a sort of temperate Kakadu …

Compare that to the photo below, which shows the area below The Falls in 1858, a mere 23 years after Batman’s arrival.

Not much of a ‘temperate Kakadu’ now, is it!

Looking at the river this way is not necessarily an aestheticisation. We can’t peer south of Queen’s Bridge, imagine the ghostly presence of The Falls and then think we are sharing the experience either of Batman or of the people whose lives he destroyed. The river is too different (it’s been massively reshaped). More importantly, so are we.

Yet if that imaginative  projection doesn’t restore the past (whatever that would mean), it does enable you to grasp how politics and geography intersected to produce the scene we now encounter. Once you recognise the importance of the Turning Basin and The Falls, you can see Melbourne as a river city, something that’s not necessarily obvious today. From that, you can make sense of how the area nearby changed from being a residential district for early settlers (many of the views from The Falls show John Batman’s house, up where Southern Cross station now stands) to become instead a predominantly industrial area, dominated by waterside workers labouring on the docks. That’s why, for instance, in 1928, the old Customs House (the building you can see in some of those paintings) was used to register scab labour during the dispute over the so-called ‘Dog Collar Act’, a strike in which a man was actually killed by the police. It’s only comparatively recently that, with the river much less important for industry, that the docklands has been able to be re-invented as a tourist area – and if you walk down toward the sea, there’s still a quite uneasy relationship between the new waterside developments and the old.

In other words, establishing a sense of place in this way can help you see the city as a flow rather than as a static object. And that, I think, is what history should do – neither render the past as simply the present in different clothes, nor make the people of an earlier age seem impossibly distant, but rather establish a process linking their lives with ours.

I always think of William Morris in this context, since he became a socialist in the course of campaigning to save historic sites via the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. If Benjamin’s collector comes to life through his objects, Morris suggests an idea of history that’s almost a reversal of that. ‘The past is not dead,’ he said, ‘it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.’

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland.

More by Jeff Sparrow ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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  1. Great post, and quite relevant to my interests. I must take issue with the idea that “it’s very rare to find anyone who recreates peacetime occupations” however. I think this is in fact quite common, and not just as a television spectacle (in shows like Colonial House, etc.) but also through forms of re-enactment like Florentine football or theatre performances in the manner of the Elizabethans or musical performances with medieval or Baroque instruments and garb, all the way down to the churning of butter and the making of candles and all the other recovered daily activities that intersect so interestingly with austerity, either sought or imposed. It’s a huge topic, obviously, but it’s interesting to consider things like the slow food movement, which originated from a communist organisation in Italy and married ethnographic research with a set of political objectives. Which I guess is just my way of saying that the performative recovery of the past is not always apolitical.

  2. Glad you liked it. It was actually the conversation we had on a previous post that made me think about this stuff again.
    Maybe the focus on the military is an American thing, then. Like, there are US re-enactors who play period instruments or learn nineteenth century dances but very often those things still have to be connected, tangentially, with war. It’s civil war music, civil way dancing, and so on, and the performances take place on the fringe of a big reenactment of a battle.

  3. Really interesting post Jeff. I’ve been in Melbourne quite a bit in the past year, and in Melbourne it always seems so obvious to me that everything is layered in history in stories that you can read. Even inside houses built in the late 180’s or early 1900’s if you look closely you can see where walls used to be and doors and trace a house’s changes from cramped worker’s cottage to comfy middle-class residence.
    And ta for the note that Aboriginal dispossession was so fast. I’ll remember that when I’m there.
    And also I wonder if the US obsession with re-enactment is limited to the Civil War?

  4. Certainly, the Civil War is the big thing in US reenactment, which has grown out from that to other conflicts (WW1, Great War and even some Vietnam reenactors).
    It’s never been on any similar scale in Australia. The reenactors I spoke with here said that one of their big problems was finding enough people to put together a half-decent battle.

  5. I’m glad you started talking about this, not only because it’s reminded me (again) to read Boyce’s book, but because it’s so easy just to move around the city without thinking about how or why it came to exist – as if history happens elsewhere to other people, as if those links between the past and our own lives aren’t right there under our feet.

  6. I must say I do love these sort of historical posts, and what a difference the visual images make, because historiographical writing can be so dry, whereas with visual depictions I find my mind is more free to wander and wonder about what once was while remaining connected to what I’m seeing now. I walked that section of the Yarra last summer, wondering about its pristine state, its black, and white on black settlement and rural and industrial development, its rises and falls in wealth and poverty, both economically, environmentally and spiritually, and didn’t much like the whole South Bank thing that now dominates that side of the city, as I had walked the area many times previous going back forty years. I guess you have a sense for and of history, or you don’t (for me there seems to be little or no middle ground when it come to sensing the past with your whole body). Another thing I don’t like is how history becomes both uniform and a sort of uniform that is worn (so everyone sees and experiences only the one thing over and over – as in the historical recreations of which you write), much of which is due to the straitjacket of language. It’s trite I know to say that the word is not the thing, but we become totally conditioned to mistake language for the world that is or once was. All the spellings have to be standardised and correct, the syntax and ordering in place – people, names, places, dates etc – so that we end up with a totally uniform experience. For example, there is a stand of jarrah and marri trees not far from where I live, the same ones John Forrest rode through on one of his expeditions south, watched no doubt by Noongar people, and surrounded by a range of flora and fauna and insect and bird life no longer there. Today, idiosyncratically, many local people spell the word forest with two r’s, and there have been so many variations in the way to spell the generic name for the traditional owners of the area I’m totally confused each time I need to write the word, and always check to see what might be the latest preferred spelling. That’s exactly how I see history, the time before I existed – as a confusion of social and environmental forms and ideas, and not an idiosyncratic or uniform orderly pattern. As I say, when history becomes uniform, past, present and future expectations become so settled that all sense of history is lost. Not so with this post though, with its commentary supporting the visuals, which I see as its strength. I guess you could get too much of it though, if history does become an electronic app type thing?

  7. Great article, and the visuals really help too. I was reminded of a three hour tour I did earlier this year with a guide from the Koori Heritage Centre. He talked a lot about the importance of the falls for indigenous people, and painted the place as it was then for us all. He also pointed out those remaining rocks from the falls that you photographed. I blogged about it at the link below. I highly recommend doing the tour if you have some time in Melbourne.

    http://poeticise.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/seeing-the-place-for-the-first-time/

  8. I thiought the article was tremendous and the corresponding visual display added much impact..
    As a young lad I well remember the turning circle
    In the Yarra where steam ships berthed in the late
    1930’s.

  9. Great article, Jeff, even if I am late to find it. Thanks for the nod to my book. I find the use of art allows us into the mind and priorities of the artist, revealing so much about the orientation of the times. For me, writing and researching The Art of Being Melbourne was time travel of the most exquisite kind, through the aesthetic politic. I am glad you enjoyed it. M

  10. There is an interesting story about the MCC Power Statiojn concerning the Falls. The power staion required fresh water and when first constructed obtained it from above the Falls – the power stattion is still located in Spenser St. When the Falls were dismantled, the power station needed to fins a new fresh water source. The answer was to dig a tunnel from the basement of the power station building all the way to Dights Falls. That tunnel is still functiona. In the basement of the power house is a wharf and a boat used to be used to nvigate the tunnel to ensure it was still in good condition. If the building is eventually sold and redeveloped (it has massive asbestos problems hindering its sale) this tunnel may not survive unless it is protectected by Heritage or some other lobby group’s efforts.

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