The Birth of Melbourne by Tim Flannery

Author:Tim Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS004000, SCI026000
ISBN: 9781921776571
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM KELLY

The Bunghole of a Brandy-butt

William Kelly’s two-volume Life in Victoria is a forgotten classic memoir of Australian life. The Irish lawyer and inveterate traveller informs us in his introduction, ‘In the year 1850, crippled from the effects of my excursion across the Rocky Mountains and the great Sierra Nevada, and suffering from land scurvy after a severe winter’s exposure in the northern diggings of California, I was advised to try a sojourn in those emerald gems of the Pacific…where fruits, vegetables and goat’s milk over-abound.’ He arrived in Melbourne in May 1853, and attended, if his account is to be believed, one of the most extraordinary performances of Hamlet ever witnessed.

When I stepped on its rickety pier, which rocked enough to make an inlander sea-sick, the only symptoms of a town I could discover were some large weatherboard arks anchored in the mud; one or two occupied as butchers’ shops to supply the shipping, one or two licensed to stupefy their customers with adulterated alcohol, a leviathan eating-house, superscribed with the notification ‘Dinners always ready from morning till night’, and the postscript, ‘Hot soups always on hand’. There was a large grey calico smithy alongside, emitting showers of sparks, which, curiously enough, flew upwards without igniting the inflammable roof, and close by a shipwright’s yard, with an office and dry workshop, covered in by a long-boat inverted and elevated on piles. There was a straggling suburb of ships’ galleys and hurricane-houses, with here and there a few buoys, as if to indicate the line of safe thoroughfares, while the shore, up to high-water mark, was covered with a debris of drift spars, broken oars, ship-blocks, dead-eyes, used-up passengers’ beds and pillows, dilapidated hen-coops, empty brandy cases, broken bottles, and kegs with a ballast of salt water…

Although the current of the Yarra-Yarra is sluggish, it took nearly two hours to breast—not cleave—that tortuous river. For seven miles above its junction with the Saltwater River, its southern bank was thickly and deeply fringed with a tea-tree scrub, which would be impenetrable but for its suppleness…

The north bank of the Yarra, at that time, from the falls down to the slaughterhouses, was a slough of dark mud in a state of liquidity, only a very few degrees removed from that of the river, and along it the entire distance was a line of lighters and intercolonial vessels, four deep, discharging promiscuously into the mire bales of soft goods, delicate boxes of dry goods, cases of brandy, barrels of flour, packages of Glenfield’s patent starch, ‘warranted used in the royal laundry’, mixed pickles, real Havannahs, Cossepore sugar, Mocha coffee, Bass’s pale ale, Barclay’s brown stout, double-rose Cork butter, Scotch oatmeal, and a hundred and one other and sundry articles, piled up in mountains in the muck, of which the ‘dry goods’ not unfrequently constituted the lower stratum or foundation…

Endeavouring to kill two birds with one stone by combining business with amusement, we turned our steps towards Canvas Town, on the south side of

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