Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Colonial Arrivals
Close to sunrise on 19 April 1770, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, on watch duty on board the
Endeavour
, spied a series of low sand hills. He immediately called his commander, Captain
Cook. Although they didn't know at the time whether it was an island or part of the main-
land, it would later prove to be the first European sighting of Australia's east coast (al-
though Dutch seamen had been intermittently exploring the west coast for more than a cen-
tury). Point Hicks is now part of Croajingolong National Park, between Cape Conran
Coastal Park and Mallacoota. In 1788, the first colony was established at Sydney Cove in
New South Wales (NSW).
The first European settlement in Victoria in 1803 didn't have an auspicious start. With a
missed mail-ship communiqué and a notoriously supercilious British government calling
the shots, Surveyor-General Charles Grimes' recommendation - that the best place to
found a southern settlement would be by the banks of the 'Freshwater River' (aka the
Yarra) - went unheeded. The alternative, Sorrento, on what is now the Mornington Penin-
sula, was an unmitigated disaster from the beginning; as Lieutenant David Collins pointed
out to his superiors, you can't survive long without drinkable water. The colony moved to
Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), but one extremely tenacious convict escapee, William
Buckley, was left behind; he was still on the lam when John Batman turned up a few dec-
ades later.
After the failed Sorrento colony it was 20-odd years before explorers made their way
overland to Port Phillip and another decade before a settlement was founded on the southw-
est coast at Portland. Around the same time, in the early 1830s, the Surveyor-General of
NSW, Major Thomas Mitchell, crossed the Murray River (then called the Hume) near
Swan Hill and travelled southwest. He was delighted to find the rich volcanic plains of the
Western District. His glowing reports of such fertile country included him dubbing the area
'Australia Felix' (Fortunate Australia) and encouraged pastoralists to venture into the area
with large flocks of sheep and herds of cattle.
It was not until 1835, when Australian-born entrepreneur John Batman sailed from Van
Diemen's Land to arrive in what we now know as Victoria, that the process of settling the
area began in earnest. He would later write of travelling through 'beautiful land…rather
sandy, but the sand black and rich, covered with kangaroo grass about ten inches high and
as green as a field of wheat'. He noted stone dams for catching fish built across creeks,
trees that bore the deep scars of bark harvesting, and women bearing wooden water con-
tainers and woven bags holding stone tools. However, the Indigenous people's profound
