Port Phillip - Getting on the Map

Today the city of Melbourne, perched above the Yarra River at the head of Port Phillip’s broad bay, is the flourishing capital of a prosperous state. In the early 1850s the new colony of Victoria was kick-started by a period of intense economic and cultural expansion – the result of numerous gold rushes – and Melbourne was the entrepot through which immigrants and golden wealth flowed. But the beginnings of Victoria’s colonial predecessor, the Port Phillip District, were characterised by fits and starts, missteps, and miscalculations.

Royal Navy surgeon-turned-explorer George Bass was the first European to come tantalisingly close to Port Phillip. In 1797 he piloted an open whaleboat south from the penal colony at Port Jackson, now Sydney Harbour. He reached as far as Western Port*, investigating Phillip Island and surrounds, and returned the next year in company with Matthew Flinders aboard the sloop Norfolk, looking for – and finding – confirmation of a strait between Van Diemen’s Land and the northern land mass.

More Royal Navy men followed. Lieutenant James Grant sailed from Portsmouth in early 1800 in charge of the Lady Nelson, and by December had travelled Bass Strait from west to east, naming Portland Bay, Cape Otway and Cape Schanck, noting but passing by the entrance to Port Phillip. Only weeks behind him was the precocious John Black, en route from Cape Town to Sydney town in the brig Harbinger with a cargo of wine and rum for the thirsty colony. Grant returned to Bass Strait from Port Jackson in March 1801 in the Lady Nelson on the orders of the New South Wales governor, Philip Gidley King. Accompanied by the French-born engineer and explorer Francis Barrallier, he mapped the shore between Wilsons Promontory and Western Port. The land slowly revealed itself.

In Sydney, Governor King commissioned Grant’s First Mate, Acting Lieutenant John Murray, to continue the south coast exploration in November 1801. It was Murray’s own First Mate, William Bowen, who was the first Briton to enter Port Phillip, reporting it ‘a great and noble sheet of water.’ Murray’s group stayed for almost four weeks, and he noted the first interactions with the indigenous inhabitants there. These were initially amicable but thereafter violent – the first of many such episodes.

The warring Britain and France now sent two famous navigators, Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin, on exploratory missions to the south land. Flinders was an ambitious and capable young man, already experienced with exploration of New South Wales’ southeast coastline. In opposition to his surgeon father’s wishes for him to follow in his medical footsteps, Matthew junior - an avid fan of Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe - had set his sights on more distant horizons. At age 15 he joined the Royal Navy. By 1791, still only 17, he was appointed to the sloop HMS Providence, under William Bligh, for that commander’s second breadfruit voyage, a two-year circumnavigation. Flinders became a highly competent navigator and cartographer, and first sailed to New South Wales in 1795 as a midshipman. He stayed five years, rising to lieutenant and charting significant portions of coast north and south of Port Jackson, along Bass Strait, and around Van Diemen’s Land.

Once at sea the young lieutenant enjoyed some proverbial smooth sailing down the west coast of Africa to Cape Town, then across to Cape Leeuwin on New Holland’s south-west corner. By April 26th, 1802, Flinders was at the entrance to Port Phillip, and like Murray only ten weeks prior, brought his vessel through the Rip and past Point Nepean. In a momentary hitch he was grounded on a mud bar, but within days he had climbed Arthur’s Seat, from where he sighted neighbouring Western Port, and taken the ship’s boat across to Indented Head and Corio Bay, an excursion during which he climbed the highest peak of the You Yangs. From this vantage point he could make out the northern extent of the port area.

Flinders was perplexed that Port Phillip’s expanse – ‘on the one hand it is capable of receiving and sheltering a larger fleet of ships than ever went to sea’ – was accessible by such a narrow entrance, and was wary of its numerous shoals and the rocky outcrops of Point Nepean. He was otherwise optimistic of its attributes; ‘The country surrounding Port Phillip has a pleasing, and in many parts a fertile appearance; and the sides of some of the hills and several of the vallies, are fit for agricultural purposes.’

Baudin’s expedition to the south land was not a happy one. Master of the corvette Geographe, he was greatly put upon by an exasperating complement of scientists and a cantankerous crew. Delays, becalmings, crew deaths, and sedition bedevilled his voyage. After numerous collisions with, and separations from, his consort ship, the Naturaliste,?including a lengthy diversion north to Timor from Cape Leeuwin, Baudin reached and surveyed the eastern edge of Van Diemen’s Land before heading north and west through Bass Strait. He made contact with the mainland near Wilson’s Promontory in late March 1802.

Coasting north and west, he recognised Western Port but was too far offshore to take in the entrance to Port Phillip, departed by Murray only three weeks earlier. He continued charting the coast, area previously traversed by Grant, proceeding southwest until doubling Cape Otway, then turning northwest and onward to an unexpected seaborne encounter in what are now South Australian waters, with the young English navigator whose very chart he had been referencing through the strait, Matthew Flinders.

The French were to probe the southeast corner of the mainland a little further. The Naturaliste, under the command of Jacques Hamelin, was separated from the Geographe on the north east of Van Diemen’s Land, and crossed Bass Strait in early April 1802. At Wilson’s Promontory Hamelin despatched a boat for close-in sounding and charting work. A thorough survey of Western Port was conducted by Lieutenant-Commander Pierre Milius over ten days, during which he noted ‘I covered the length and breadth of the port in all its meanderings.’ The northern land mass in the bay was named Ile Des Francais after confirmation it was indeed an island. It is still known as French Island today. The Aboriginals encountered by Milius ‘seemed to me to have the same way of life as those whom we had previously observed in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.’ Amicable relations with the indigenous population were a hallmark of the French expedition. By mid-month Hamelin was headed north for Port Jackson.

From the British base in Sydney harbour, hemmed in by the as-yet impassable mountainous terrain to the west, and aware of the French incursions in the south, Governor King sent a surveying party to Port Phillip under Charles Grimes, the newly appointed Surveyor General. Although its explorations included the mouths of the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers, and party members recorded positive diary entries about the area, Grimes was not enamoured of Port Phillip. He cast a critical eye on all country, and often saw little to recommend. He wrote only a desultory report for King and referred to Port Phillip’s poor prospects for cultivation. ‘The Timber round the banks of this Port is very low and bad.’ But he did leave us the first detailed map of Port Phillip.

Its finely nuanced littorals are a pleasure to the eye, with the broad bows of Beaumaris Bay and Dromana Bay artfully reproduced. The cliffs at Mentone can be recognised, and soundings at every half-mile sprinkle the entire coast with a numerical certainty. For one familiar with modern maps of this body of water and its onshore accoutrements the chart is a geographical curio, due in part to its unusual aspect; rotated eight degrees to the west in alignment with magnetic north. The geographical and navigational nature of its display is spare to the point of starkness; it is workmanlike and efficient, but also rather elegant in its own way.

From Britain, a concerted attempt at settlement was made in 1803 under Lieutenant-Governor David Collins. However, this lasted only six months in the challenging country of Sullivan Bay (modern Sorrento) before Collins packed up for Van Diemen’s Land and established Hobart. He found the estuary of the Derwent River, an area reported upon favourably by Bass on his Norfolk expedition, much more amenable to settlement.

And with that, seven years of intensive inspection of Port Phillip and Western Port by European navigators were concluded. These explorers were largely tied to their vessels, and only skirted the edges of the landmass, ever careful to replenish ships stores, repair hulls, and record soundings. Their sorties ashore were usually in search of game or water, or to scale a hill to enhance their sea-level view of the country. It was not until ‘overlanders’ ventured south from Port Jackson with their flocks and herds that an appreciation of the interior of the future colony would be gained. More on that to come.

* Bass came upon a group of convicts, escapees who had stolen a boat from Port Jackson, on an island in the Glennie Group, to the west of Wilsons Promontory. He was able to rescue only two on his return trip – the others are lost to history.