THE 19TH CENTURY RECLAMATION OF THE WETLANDS OF WEST MELBOURNE
David Sornig is the author of ‘Blue Lake – Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp’. I haven’t as yet read the book, but I remember the Blue Lake area in the late 1950s. From Princes Pier looking to the north-west I could see masses of sea gulls hovering over what looked like a rubbish dump.
David discussed the first part of his book which concentrates on the transformation of the wet lands area into an engineered and industrial landscape. An area of about eight square miles, today including the Maribyrnong River, Coode Island, Swanston Dock, Appleton Dock, Coode’s Canal and the Bolte Bridge.
The area was the Yarra Delta with various rivers running into it: the Maribyrnong River, Stony Point Creek, the Moonee Ponds creek, and the Merri Creek which joins the Yarra further upstream. The Yarra then as now, ran into Port Phillip Bay.
Over time the geography of the area has changed. River levels have altered, rising and falling. Port Phillip Bay has at times been completely dry, making for good hunting grounds for the local aborigines. At other times it has been full of water. It last flooded about nine hundred years ago when sea levels rose and the heads of the bay opened up, forming the coast line within the bay and the mouth of the Yarra River as we know it.
The Yarra River was called Birrarung by the aborigine clans who lived around it – the Watha Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung. This area was a rich source of food and attracted visitors from further afield. Hundreds of people would congregate in seasons when food was plentiful. There was abundant birdlife such as ducks, geese, swans, and also eels, shellfish, and wallabies on land.
South of Birrarung, extending down to Hobson’s Bay, the area had a sandy base and there were sandy marshes and lagoons, Albert Park Lake being a remnant.
To the north and west of Melbourne there were wetlands, with a large tidal lagoon, which early settlers called the Blue Lake. It received water from the Moonee Woe chain of ponds when they overflowed into the Moonee Moonee Creek and it was also fed by salt water from seasonal flooding of the Birrarung, which was salty up to the falls, around today’s Queen Street in Melbourne.
When surveyor-general Charles Grimes surveyed Port Phillip Bay in 1803, he referred to the area as a swamp with many birds.
In 1835, John Batman described the area north of the Birrarung as a marsh, one and a half miles by three to four miles long and he saw about a thousand quail flying over the area. John Helda Wedge in his survey map of Port Phillip, proposed a public common around the lagoon. From today’s Flagstaff Hill, and Batman’s Hill, (flattened by 1866), there was a wonderful view of the Lagoon, Port Phillip Bay, and the surrounding countryside including Mt Macedon.
The area where Docklands is today, was low lying, but dry in the 1830s to 1850s. Early paintings of Melbourne show a road circling to the north of the marsh, Swamp Road, which is where Dynon Road is today. It was the way to the Barrabool Hills. It crossed the Maribyrnong River at a narrow section, probably Solomon’s Ford, near Braybrook, and headed towards Sunshine and Deer Park.
As Melbourne developed, smelly industries such as tanneries, boiling down works, piggeries, and glue factories, concentrated around the water ways and waste, including sewerage, was dumped in low lying areas. In 1866 a railway causeway went around the north of the swamp, and Swamp Road became Dynon Road. The swamp itself became a convenient site for dumping all sorts of waste.
In 1873, a Royal Commission on Low Lying Lands was appointed to enquire into the best means of making the low lands adjacent to the western and southern sides of the City of Melbourne, available for factory and trade waste. The solution was to drain the Lagoon and reclaim the land. The Birrarung was also to be realigned as it was not easily navigated by the bigger steam ships. British engineer, Sir John Coode was appointed for this task and thus we have the Yarra diverted through Coode’s Channel from Fishermen’s bend to Melbourne. Coode Island is the area between the original course of the Birrarung at Dynon Road and the Coode Canal.
Remnants of the original curve in the river exist in the form of the Dynon Road Tidal Canal, which runs along the south side of Dynon Road and empties into the Maribyrnong River just north of where a railway line crosses Sims Street (nearly opposite Bunbury Street, Footscray).
The other remnant from the 1890s was the Railway Coal Canal which travelled in a north South direction connecting the Moonee Moonee chain of ponds to the Coode Canal. It was used to transport coal to the rail yards. Today there is a Railway Canal reserve on the Moonee Ponds Creek but in the Depression of the 1930s it was known as the Dudley Flats shanty town.
It is very sad that we have lost forever, the Blue Lagoon, which Port Phillip Pioneer and son of artist, Georgian McCrae, loved as a child. Not just for the bird life, but also the vivid colour of the water, surrounded by magenta flowers of pigface, and yellow yam daisy flowers, along with the perfume of the fringe lilies.
Address at General Meeting on 13 November 2021 by David Sornig
Contributed by Jan Hanslow, PPPG Member No. 1057