ANÁLISIS DE PORTER

Cartography

In the development of Immersion/Excursion: Killeavy, I found a site for the performance and then

sought information about it. Conversely, for this urban project I was led to a performance site via cartographic and historical data, before I had even visited the geographical place. In the Rare

131 _Ibid. 132 _{Ibid., p15}

Muecke observes that in regions of Australia where imported versions of time have had less influence, place is the focus of death rituals. Genealogy in these regions (identity through parents and grandparents) is de-emphasised; relationship to the deceased is maintained ‘through their country, connecting country in a web of relatedness overlapping with the structure of kinship.’ (p15)

133 _{Kristin Otto, Yarra, Text Pub., Melbourne, 2005, p6}

134 _{Gary Presland, Aboriginal Melbourne- The Lost Land of the Kulin People, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne,}

Maps Room of the State Library, I looked at maps of early Melbourne. I did not know what I was looking for (knowing, I realised, very little about my home city’s history at all), but I very soon found it:

(excerpt of) Robert Hoddle 1837, ‘Town of Melbourne’ (with my handwritten indicators highlighting relevant features)

With the assistance of some local history sources, I deduced the following from the maps:

On Robert Hoddle’s 1837 ‘Town of Melbourne’ map a small dotted line crossed the ‘Yarra Yarra’ River near the base of Queen Street with a tiny handwritten ‘falls’ scrawled beside it. Hoddle had also marked ‘salt water’ in the wider area of river to the west (downstream) of the falls and ‘fresh water’ on the upstream side. There is certainly no waterfall in the city area of the Yarra River today, so I was intrigued. The town itself, which Hoddle planned, was the familiar linear grid pattern which is still the structure of central Melbourne’s streets, comprising neat rows of streets and subdivided blocks, bordered by Spencer, Flinders, Spring and Lonsdale Streets, positioned on the northern bank of the curving line of the river. On Hoddle’s map there was very little beyond these borders. An anonymous critic of Hoddle’s lay-out of the town wrote in 1850

that the surveyor’s credo must have been ‘The site must be made to suit the plan—not the plan to suit the site.’135

Robyn Annear describes early settlers crossing the Yarra Yarra ‘at their peril on foot across the rocks of the Falls or the crumbly dam wall that was later built there.’136 _{According to Proeschel’s}

map, by 1853 there was a ferry crossing just on the upstream side of the Falls and Queen’s Wharf well-established on the downstream side.137 _{By 1855 Kearney’s map marked a railway line}

crossing the river on a diagonal just upstream of a ferry ‘Landing Place’ on the north bank.138 _An

1866 illustration depicted many tall ships moored in the Turning Basin on the saltwater side of the Falls and two bridges on angles around the end of Queen Street. One was the Rail Bridge and the other the new ‘Falls Bridge’, over the rocky reef. An 1871 illustration/ etching more clearly showed a train crossing the rail bridge and horse and carriage traffic on the Falls Bridge, as well as a small jetty in between the two bridges from the northern bank going about halfway across the river.

A dotted line on a proposal for a Ship Canal and Dock in 1875 indicated a proposed bridge directly across the river from the end of Market Street, above the then-existing bridge crossing diagonally from Queen Street. It also proposed that the ‘Line of River Bank’ expand significantly further upstream through the swampy marshland (that is now the Botanical Gardens). Byron Moore’s 1879 map showed Falls Bridge still on an angle (though not as sharp an angle as Railway Bridge), but The Coode Report of the same year clearly proposed a bridge straight out from Market Street.

I started to get a sense that Banana Alley landing, which is today situated at the base of Market and William Streets, was the location of the once-existent Falls and was probably the point on the north bank of the Yarra River from where the first Falls Bridge started. The later 1889 Queen’s Bridge that is still there today follows the more direct crossing of the Coode proposal.

135

Robyn Annear, Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne, Reed Books, Melbourne, 1995, p26

136 _{Ibid, p29}

137 _{See Proeschel’s map in Appendix 2} 138 _{See Kearney’s map in Appendix 2}

excerpt of an 1866 illustration looking South (again with my defacements) excerpt of 1871 etching (facing North)

A plaque memorialising the Yarra Falls on a tourist trail along the river139 is inaccurately placed according to my study of the maps, as it is located at Enterprize Park (on the west/ saltwater side of the current Queen’s Bridge) at east two hundred metres away from the site of the Falls. Meyer Eidelson’s account of Aboriginal history in the Melbourne area, The Melbourne Dreaming, also refers to the ‘William Street Falls’,140 _{and Gary Presland in Aboriginal Melbourne states that the}

‘row of basalt boulders about sixty or seventy centimeters above the level of the water’ was located ‘just upstream from where William Street will later be’, (upstream being the other side of William Street, away from Enterprize Wharf).141 _{I now have very little doubt that the Yarra Falls}

existed just upstream of the current Queen’s Bridge.142

History

As a natural feature of the place that had existed before the Europeans had built the city, the site of the waterfall fit my criteria for a site to make a performance work that reminded my audience of layers of the place other than the current metropolis. Having revealed the lost waterfall’s location, I sought further information about its story and significance. To do this I needed to contextualise the site amidst a brief history of the area.

The three main clans of Melbourne region, the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Watharung people, and neighbouring clans the Taungurong and Kurung peoples, together comprise the Kulin language group. For this confederacy of nations, the rocky ledge of the falls across the Yarra was a highly important site. As well as the fresh water source it ensured, it enabled the tribes from their various directions to cross the river by foot, to meet on the South bank, which they did ‘at least twice a year to settle grievances and for other matters.’143 _{Melbourne had been, for thousands of years}

prior to European arrival, a centre for ceremonies, trading and intertribal gatherings (initiations and religious cycles), as well as dispute settlement.144 The area of Melbourne consisted of swamps and lagoons teeming with waterbirds—snipes, plovers, brolgas and quails, as well as

139 _{the ‘Yarra Trail’}

140 _{Meyer Eidelson, The Melbourne Dreaming: a guide to the Aboriginal places of Melbourne, Aboriginal}

Studies Press, Canberra, 1997, p6

141 _{Presland, 1994, p22}

142 _{The precise placement of the Falls is of no great consequence now, I suppose, given that no trace of}

them remains, but I was struck by the inaccuracy of our history: that a novice research student like myself could expose this sort of discrepancy from easily accessible sources made me dubious about what other errors, omissions, biases and downright lies have been handed down as the popular (white) history of this continent.

143 _{Eidelson, 1997, p6}

144 _{Burnum Burnum, (ed.) David Stewart, Burnum Burnum’s Aboriginal Australia: a traveller's guide,}

bush turkeys, emus, swans and lyrebirds. In the wetter months of winter when the Melbourne area was prone to flooding, people camped in the more sheltered hills of the Dandenong Ranges.145

Charles Grimes, the Surveyor-General of New South Wales and his party from Sydney were the first white visitors to the Port Phillip District, exploring the Maribyrnong (saltwater) and the Yarra (freshwater) Rivers in search of a site worth settling in 1803. Upon finding ‘excellent water’ beyond the rocky ridge of the Falls, Grimes reported to the London authorities that ‘the most eligible place for a settlement that I have seen is on the Freshwater River’. However, London had already decreed Sorrento as the place to settle. This Sorrento settlement failed after barely six months, partly due to lack of fresh water.146

Three decades later a flock-holder, John Batman, sailed from Van Diemen’s Land with the specific purpose of securing half a million acres of land in the Port Phillip area. Batman’s ‘treaty’ or ‘deed to Melbourne’ was the infamous exchange on a day in 1835 at an unspecified location, of twenty pairs of blankets, thirty tomahawks, one hundred knives, fifty pairs of scissors, thirty looking-glasses, two hundred handkerchiefs, one hundred pounds of flour and six shirts for about five hundred thousand acres ‘…to John Batman, his Heirs and Assigns for ever’. This ‘contract’ was allegedly ‘signed’ by some ‘native chiefs’ and sealed by their pouring of some soil into Batman’s hands (at his demand).147 _{The colonial government in Sydney refused to recognise}

Batman’s treaty, declaring it illegal and the settlers to be trespassers. The invalidation of the treaty was not because the Aboriginal people with whom the treaty had supposedly been made

did not understand English (nor was Batman or any in his company able to communicate in Woiwurrung language).148 _{Nor was the government against the treaty on the grounds that the}

Wurundjeri elders who signed it would not have comprehended the concept of land ownership at all, coming from an entirely different, anti-anthropocentric worldview. The reason for the colony’s invalidating Batman’s contract was that the whole continent was now ‘the vacant lands of the Crown.’149 It was the document decreed by Major General Sir Richard Bourke, which officially invalidated Batman’s treaty that set the precedent underpinning the doctrine of terra

145 _{Ibid., p286}

146 _{Otto, 2005, pp14-15} 147 _{Ibid., pp12-13.}

Batman had also been involved in the notorious ‘Black Line’ campaign, rounding up and murdering the last Tasmanian Aborigines. He later lost his son (and supposed heir), who slipped and fell from the Yarra Falls whilst fishing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of _Melbourne)

148 _{The Wurundjeri people belong to the Woiwurrung language group.} 149 _{Otto, 2005, pp13-14}

nullius—that the entire continent had no owners until the Crown arrived. This doctrine was the

legal basis for the British occupation of Australia until the High Court overturned it in the Mabo case of 1992.150

While Batman was back in Tasmania, planning to return to settle Melbourne, later in 1835, John Pascoe Fawkner’s party in ‘The Enterprize’ also landed at the Yarra Falls and fetched drinking water from a few hundred metres upstream.151 _{Boats could not be navigated further upstream}

because of the rocky falls, so settlement commenced then and there, primarily on the northern bank. There has been argument as to whether Batman’s or Fawkner’s parties were the true founders of Melbourne, but it seems definitive that the decision to settle at this site was largely due to the presence of the falls restraining the freshwater from mingling with the saltwater and inhibiting passage further up the river.

The Falls were also significant in the naming of the river. The river was called ‘Birrarung’ to the Aboriginal people and their words ‘yarra yarra’ described the running or falling water of the falls. Misinterpreted by Batman’s private surveyor John Wedge in 1835, the river was named the Yarra Yarra and later of course simply the Yarra.152 _{‘And ever since’, writes Kristin Otto, author of}

Yarra,

it has been the Yarra’s fate to be misunderstood: maligned for its muddiness, ill-used as sewer and tip; scooped, sculpted, straightened and stressed, ‘cleaned up’ to the detriment of its natural inhabitants; built-over, -under and -beside; worked mercilessly and then bridged almost to maritime extinction.153

Within twenty years of settlement, the dumping of industrial waste and sewerage along the river deemed the waters of the Yarra Yarra unfit for consumption and a new water source was exploited at Yan Yean. Several variations of bridges were attempted across the Yarra Falls, but in

150 _{Ibid. p14}

On 3 June 1992, the High Court in Mabo And Others v. Queensland (No. 2) upheld the claims of five plaintiffs from Murray Island that Australia was occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who had an on-going connection with their traditional lands as determined by their own laws and customs, and whose 'native title' to land survived the Crown's annexation. Thus the court recognised the existence of native title as part of Australian common law. (Accessed at Parliamentary Library website,

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/sp/mabo.htm, viewed June 2008)

151 _{Port of Melbourne website,}

http://www.portofmelbourne.com/community/maritimeheritage/porthistory.asp viewed April 2005

152 _{Eidelson, 1997, p6} 153 _{Otto, 2005, p}

the early 1880s the rocky ledge was ‘blasted away’ with dynamite to enable passage of ships upstream. The rock of the reef was used to line the Coode Canal and embank the river all the way to the bay.154

The plaque commemorating the Falls on a tourist trail along the river155 _{at Enterprize Park relates}

the history I have here recounted, concluding with ‘The Falls was a natural barrier to river transport and the reef was blasted away in 1880 as part of river widening and straightening works.’ Beneath this text on the sign is an image from an etching, entitled ‘Blasting away the Reef at the Yarra Falls’, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. This led me to investigate representations in art of the Yarra Falls area.156 _{Famed Heidelberg School artist}

Frederick McCubbin painted ‘Falls Bridge’ (see below) in 1882 from the old Princes Bridge, looking back downstream. The dark shapes in the river in the center of the work represent some rocks of the Falls157 _{(which, according to our sign, had already been blasted away). Another}

image in the State Library’s collection of the blasting away event was a print of a wood engraving: ‘Improvements on the Yarra- Removing the Falls Reef’ (1883, by an unknown artist). Depicting divers planting dynamite explosives, the final caption shows the blast itself.158

Frederick McCubbin ‘Falls Bridge’ 1882

154 _{Ibid, p84}

Otto also mentions there was another rocky reef in the river at the end of Spencer Street, which was dynamited away at about the same time as the Falls reef, and rock from both of these was used to line the banks.

155 _{The Yarra Trail}

156 _{Upon inspection, some artworks indicated to me that even the date on the public signage of the}

exploding of the reef (1880) could be inaccurate.

157 _{Accessed via www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/McCubbin_fallsbridge.htm, viewed May 2005} 158 _{See Appendix 2}

Prior to British settlement, the Birrarung itself followed quite a different course to the current day, the removal of the falls comprising only one part of the ‘improvements’ to this major waterway. Other developments included the changing and reducing of its bends, draining the surrounding marshes and swamps and the Coode Island development, which re-structured the river’s S-shaped course through the West Melbourne swamplands. The sharpest loop of the meander was cut off with the construction of the Coode Canal in 1886.159 _{There was also an}

attempt to dam the Turning Basin (previously known as ‘The Pond’) in 1843, resulting in floods. With no drainage system in Melbourne until 1854, the increasingly populated streets were open sewers and sometimes, raging torrents. In 1853 both Swanston and Elizabeth Streets were described as ‘complete rivers’, Elizabeth Street particularly prone to flooding as it was built upon a stream, with a major flood in December 1934 and another flash flood as recently as 1972.160

The Yarra ‘freshwater’ River was described in the 1880s ‘as offensive to the eye as to the sense of smell…’161 _{Less than twenty years after settlement, the fresh water upstream of the falls that}

had been a primary incentive for the position of the colony, was undrinkable, so rapidly had the settlers polluted this prized resource.

After tragic racial conflict in Van Diemen’s Land and the resulting annihilation of Aboriginal population there (the last few transported to Flinders Island and a few taken by Robinson, ‘Protector of Aborigines’, to Portland), there was some intention to ‘do better’ with settling on the mainland.162 _{But as early as 1836 clashes were reported: abductions of native women, shootings}

and excessive retributions by whites for petty crimes by Aborigines.163 _{Some of the ‘most}

degraded heathens’ were transported to Buntingdale Mission near Geelong, a ‘convenient distance’ from Melbourne.164 _{There was reportedly a ‘significant decline’ in Aboriginal}

population even by 1840, due to diseases, old age, ‘battle’ and the destruction at birth of any mixed race children.165

By the time (let us just say the early 1880s, for lack of certainty) the Falls were forcibly removed, the Wurundjeri people had been shunted from reserve to reserve, as their land became increasingly valuable to the white settlers, until the Wurundjeri had only Corranderrk

159 _{Port of Melbourne website} 160 _Ibid.

161 _{Otto, 2005, p68, citing from the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia}

162 _{Historical Records of Victoria Vol. 2A, ‘The Aborigines of Port Phillip 1835-1839’, Ch 1} 163 _{Ibid, pp36-7}

164 _{Ibid., p37, citing Reverend Orton} 165 _{Ibid, p77}

Presbyterian Mission (near Healesville) as their home.166 This approximately two thousand hectare allotment was the last of Wurundjeri country, although it was run by missionaries with British-style order—rations, roll-calls, prayers, work. In the 1880s however, possibly just after the ‘removal’ of the Falls, the government decided to appropriate this last vestige of Wurundjeri land also. The law was changed to define Aborigine to include only ‘… “full-bloods”, “half- castes” over the age of thirty-four, “half-caste” women with “full-blood” husbands, and infants of same’. Alfred Deakin pushed this law through parliament on the same day as his new water rights legislation, which defined ownership of the Yarra River, among other things.167 _{Anyone who did}

not fit the new definition of Aborigine had to leave Corranderrk, which greatly reduced the already diminished numbers, affecting the beginning of the mission’s dissolution and completing the final stage of Wurundjeri dispossession.168

The Indigenous people of Australia were identified under the Flora and Fauna Act by Australian law until 1967, when they were recognised as citizens. It is therefore not without irony that I would choose to parallel the erasure of the natural feature of the waterfall to the effacing of the Wurundjeri people. The almost-forgotten waterfall, removed entirely, as to render it without trace, was replaced with a bridge named after a British monarch. This is to me an echo of the story of the Wurundjeri people, who remain a barely visible presence in modern Melbourne. The site of the waterfall, by its very absence, carries potent metaphors about the relationship of people