The Chronicles of Early Melbourne/Volume 2/Chapter 63
CHAPTER LXIII.
SOME RANDOM RECOLLECTIONS.
SYNOPSIS:— Batman's Hill. —Melbourne a Seven-hilled City. —The Superintendent's Official Locus. —Batman's Residence. —The Wesleyan Church Land Speculation. —Dr. Barry Colter, First Druggist. —First Billiard Room. —The "Nelson" Gold Robbery. —The Post Office Corner. —The Theatre Royal Section. —Gorges and Stone Quarries in Swanston Street. —The Town Hall Tree Stump. —Germain Nicholson's Corner. —"The Punch Bowl" and "Como." —Bisections of Society. —"New Chums" versus "Old Lags."
NOTWITHSTANDING the assiduity with which I have raked up olden reminiscences, several waifs have escaped my observation until too late to include them in any classified form, so they must have a separate chapter. In this final shaking of the kaleidoscope, some variegated particles appear which remained concealed, and have only been dislodged by repeated motion. The odds and ends here enumerated will, it is hoped, render my panorama of Old Melbourne as complete as it is possible for human brain and pen to make it.
Historic Places.
After the township was proclaimed in 1837, the portion of Little Flinders Street between Market and Queen Streets was considered to be the best locality for business, and preferred to any portion of Collins Street. What was known as the WTestern Hill was soon of most account, and the extension of Melbourne even to Elizabeth Street, was a process of some years. The original plan of the town embraced the Western and Eastern Hills. Batman's Hill was one of the earliest landmarks, and another first called Burial Hill from the formation of a small cemetery there, but subsequently known as "The Flagstaff," in consequence of its being appointed the signal station.
A super-sanguine scribe wrote of the Melbourne of the future as the City of the Seven Hills (semblant of Imperial Rome), the Eastern, Western, Batman's, The Flagstaff, Emerald, Richmond and North Melbourne (Hotham) Hills being the contnbutaries to the Urbs Septicollis. In 1870 Batman's, from which the primitive geographers determined Melbourne's latitude and longitude, was swept away for the Central Railway Terminus in Spencer Street.
We now stand on the intersection of Collins and William Streets and looking to the southwestern corner behold perhaps one of the most historic spots in Old Melbourne. The half-acre allotment was purchased by John Batman for £60, and on the corner portion he had erected the first two-storey brick building putting forth any claims to capaciousness. This tenement is easily recognized in the sketch of Melbourne (anno 1839). There was a large ground-floor room here used as an auction mart by Charles Williams. Here it was where Mr. C. J. Latrobe, the first Superintendent of Port Phillip, made his official début in September 1839.
Batman's residence was on the hill named from him, and in the course of a few years the family removed to the Collins Street tenement. They lived there in 1485. The adjoining half-acre, running from Collins to Little Flinders Streets, was bought for £33 by Mr. James Smith, the founder of our now extensive Savings' Bank system.
The half-acre section corner of Queen and Collins Streets, the present site of the Bank of Australasia, was knocked down at auction for £40, in 1837, but the purchaser, sooner than take it up, forfeited the ten per cent, deposit. There was some notion of reserving it as a site for a 
The opposite or north-eastern corner half-acre was purchased for £61 by Mr. G. W. Umpleby, and here was opened the first druggist's shop by Dr. Barry Cotter. It was succeeded by an hotel somewhat misnamed the Angel Inn, attached to which was Melbourne's first billiard room. Crossing the street to the south-east corner, bought by Mr. A. Willis for £42, we come on a place wherein it would appear the money changers were destined to abide. It was here the first agency of the Derwent Bank was started under the management of Mr. W. F. A. Rucker in 1838. It was afterwards taken over by the Union Bank started at the north-west corner of Queen and Little Flinders Streets, where the first regular banking house was put up. When the Union required more central premises, it returned to the old place, where an edifice was erected which for years was deemed one of the architectural ornaments of Melbourne.
The "Nelson" Gold Robbery.
Reverting to the old Union Bank there is an incident connected with its career, which, until now, may be numbered amongst the "lost secrets of history." It was a plain two-storey brick structure, with little in its build to liken it to the fortresses in which bank deposits are now stored. Immediately after its vacation by the bill discounters it was let for a public-house, and for years was known as the Woolpack Inn. In 1852 an audacious robbery was perpetrated on board the gold ship "Nelson" in Hobson's Bay, and it was in this tavern the outrage was concocted and elaborated. One night in April of that year a gang of seven or eight desperadoes took boat at Sandridge, and quietly boarded the "Nelson," ready to sail with a quantity of gold for England the next day. The very audacity of the raid ensured its success, for the possibility of such a robbery was unthought of. Half-a-dozen persons were afterwards convicted of the offence, and served long sentences of hard labour on board the hulks of Williamstown and Pentridge. A gentleman of the legal profession, than whom no one in the colony had better opportunity of knowing, assured me that in after years the ringleader had effected his escape from Victoria, and was never brought to book, and that two of the convicts were absolutely innocent of the offence. I had it also on reliable police authority that the gang who rifled the "Nelson" intended to have operated on the "Madagascar," which was anchored near the "Nelson," with 120,000 ozs. of gold, and was ready for sea; that the night was very dark and the robbers boarded the wrong ship, when finding out their mistake they resolved to make the best of it, and tackle what came next to hand, so their booty amounted only 14,000 ozs. This gold was stowed away in fourteen small strongly-made wooden boxes, of 1000 ozs. each. The robbers had some difficulty in secreting the spoil, and I myself recollect going to Sandridge the Sunday after the robbery, and seeing a crowd of persons in the bush between Emerald Hill and the beach. Approaching I found a party of police in possession of several of the empty boxes, which had been found under a large gum tree. Being known to the Chief Constable (Bloomfield), I was presented with one of the boxes, and I kept it as a sort of relic for several years. The Attorney, who incurred great trouble and expense in the defence of the prisoners, was said to have received another box (but a full one) in reimbursement of all he had done or undergone; and, if so, he certainly came off best of anyone mixed up with the affair.[1] The now great wood-blocked causeway at the intersection of Collins and Elizabeth Streets was during the early years a queer thoroughfare. The four half-acre corner allotments were purchased respectively for ^ 3 2 , £,o, ^ 4 2 , and ,£50, no doubt the full value at the time.
The most remarkable corner in Elizabeth Street is its north-east junction with Little Collins Street. The half-acre was bought for £28, and the corner was devoted to mercantile purposes by Campbell and Woolley, importers. The store was about half up on the arrival of Father Geoghegan, the first Roman Catholic priest, in July, 1838, and he obtained permission to solemnize therein the first mass offered in the colony.
About the General Post Office corner, a "cock-and-bull" story occasionally crops up to the effect that the place belongs to a pauper cripple, who acquired it legally in the days of yore, but the intervention of some legal or illegal hitch ousted him from his rights. There is little doubt of such a supposition being groundless. At the period of the early land sales the place was such that no sane man would put a shilling in it, and as no one even thought of then purchasing it, the block appears on the old charts of Melbourne, shaded off as a red blank, the indication of the unbought portions of the township. It was a species of bog, and, according to tradition, during the winter of 1837, a bullock team, including a drunken driver, got swamped there one evening after sundown whilst en route for Flemington, and no traces of them were ever brought to the surface. This latter is, no doubt, a stretch of the imagination.
The half-acre whereon is now the Theatre Royal was knocked down for £95. It was used as a timber yard until the Fates decreed it to form the principal Metropolitan home of the drama. From Swanston Street northward was for a length of time reckoned at little value, for not only trading, but even habitable purposes. It was an extensive upland of forest country, rent by water-worn gorges, and deemed valuable only for its supposed stone-quarrying resources. One of the most pleasurable pedestrian excursions that could be indulged in, was an afternoon stroll away over the ground now occupied by the Court House and Gaol Reserve, and away by the Cemetery towards Brunswick, so called by Mr. W. F. A. Rucker.
The first building erected in East Collins Street was the Scots' School, in 1838, primarily used also as a Kirk. Lower down, on the south side, where The Argus now forges and launches its typographical thunderbolts, was the first Baptist place of worship, a capacious tent, wherein the first service was held. Of this half-acre freehold Mr. Thomas Napier became the owner, and his heirs are still the ground lessors. H e lent the land temporarily to the Baptists, and subsequently had a building put up there, an apartment of which was dignified as Napier's Large Room, the scene of some early religious services and society meetings. When William Kerr started the Melbourne Argus in 1846, the place was converted into a newspaper office; and when this journal died and the present Argus sprung like a Phœnix from its ashes, the premises and the newspaper clove together, enlarging every year, and growing so attached to each other that it would be difficult to calculate upon the particular period (if ever) when they will dissolve partnership.
Crossing obliquely from The Argus, we come to a place which, before a stone of a Town Hall was laid there, figured as a locality of some note. The bole of a large gum tree remained there a few feet over the ground for years. This was the first stump utilized for orating purposes. From a platform attached to the stump, during the Anti-transportation campaign, the Tribunes of the period discharged their philippics against the threatened pestiferous invasion. Directly opposite was the half-acre known almost from time immemorial as Germain Nicholson's Corner, purchased for £45.
Old Melbourne could boast of (so-called) "Terraces," some particulars of which are worth rescuing from oblivion. The first erected in Stephen Street commenced at the corner of Little Bourke Street, and known as "Cleveland Terrace," but was afterwards known as "Porter's Cottages," after their owner, Mr. George Porter. If the memoirs of "Porter's Cottages" could be written, many a quaint and thrilling tale of Melbourne life would they unfold. The premises were in 1881 turned into a Hippodrome, under lease to a company of which an enterprising medico was the principal.
Latrobe Parade, a nomenclative compliment to the Provincial Superintendent, and still known as such, is a lane extending from Collins Street East to Little Flinders Street, between Stephen and 
There is a little history connected with the origin of one of the earliest villas in South Yarra, for ever so long classically Italianized as "Como." The place was in the first instance designated the "Punch-bowl," and it was taken up as a sort of small Home station by the popular old colonists, John and Joseph Hawdon. Melbourne, was at the time (1837), in want of a convenient butchery. The beasts were fetched in batches of fours, and one at a time killed and cut up, when each of the then four Melbourne butchers would attend propria persona, and getting his "quarters" at 8d. per lb. would have them removed to town and retailed at IS. It was in this same hut the final arrangements were made for starting the first overland mail from Melbourne to Yass.
Originally the population was bi-sected into branches known as the "Ex Convict" and "Immigration" sections. The Expiree Contingent, was, as a rule, the older, and at one time it would be something rare to find a resident of over forty years of age, who had not previously expiated some breach of the criminal law in chains, gang or prison. At first, what for convenience sake were termed the "bond" and the "free" did not take kindly to each other. The "Expirees" regarded the others with a feeling of pitying contempt, a species of simpletons who should have stayed at home. They called them "Johnny Raws," and "New Chums." On the other side, the immigrants snapped their fingers at those whom they inelegantly denominated "the Old Lags." Time, which softens everything, soon mitigated those asperities. There was one line of demarcation between the two castes which took several years to remove, viz., in their style of apparel. The English, Irish, and Scotch appeared clad in heterogeneous garb, the men's upper and nether garments of every known cut, fashion, and material cloth, frieze, and corduroy, and the head gear either a felt hat or bell-topper, then stylishly known as the "Caroline." Their coats were mostly not over-long swallow-tailed, and the would-be swellish portion went in for glaring brass buttons. With the "Expirees" there was more uniformity of costume, for their dress was a cabbage-tree hat, a cloth jacket, "loud" necktie, and moleskin or drill trousers.
- ↑ The following communication was subsequently received from Mr. Albert Read, Solicitor: "It is a pleasure to read 'Garryowen's' papers, generally correct and always amusing, but in his statements regarding the robbery of the ship "Nelson" he has been misled. The ship "Madagascar" was not anchored near the "Nelson", with 120,000 oz. of gold on board, and ready for sea on the night of the "Nelson" robbery. The "Madagascar" was afterwards in the Bay, and was the ship in which the escort robbers were arrested. After leaving the Bay this ship was never heard of. With regard to the number of the "Nelson" robbers, and the statement that the boat used came from Sandridge, he is incorrect. Having defended most of the men charged with the robbery, some of whom were found guilty, I presume I am the Attorney referred to by 'Garryowen', who incurred great trouble and expense in the defence of the prisoners, and was said to have received another box (but a full one) in re-imbursement of all he had done or undergone; and if so, he certainly came off hest of anyone mixed up in the affair. I beg to tell 'Garryowen' if he, as he stated, received a box, although an empty one, he had the best of it, for I never had one of the boxes, or had ever seen any of the gold.