by Bill Gammage
It varied locally. At Southern Cross Station stood Batman’s Hill, a place of dazzling beauty commanding the country in most directions. John Lancey claimed it for Fawkner, and on 24 August 1835 told the prospective squire,
Your lordship has been fortunate in the lot I chose for you. A more delightful spot, I think, cannot be. Beautiful grass, a pleasant prospect, a fine fresh-water river, and the vessel lying alongside the bank discharging at musket-shot distance from a pleasant hill where I intend to put your house. The garden will trend to the south by the east side of the hill . . . The west side of the hill is a beautiful prospect. A salt lagoon and piece of marsh will make a beautiful meadow and bounded on the south by the river. The hill is composed of rich, black soil, thinly wooded with honeysuckle and she-oak. Good grass, a quantity of herbage that I cannot name more than three, viz., parsley of good flavour, peppermint, as good as any I ever tasted, and geraniums in abundance.154
Sheoak stood along the river and sprinkled the slopes, but after summer fires such as in March 1836 the hill ‘looked so green and fresh that . . . I thought it was cultivated ground and that a crop of grain had been sown on it’.155 Every newcomer admired Batman’s Hill.
The hill sloped north down to grassy yam and herb flats and through scattered gum, sheoak, wattle and ‘patches of bushes’156 to Blue Lake and Flagstaff Hill. Beyond, ‘as far as the eyes could see’ shady trees, commonly Yellow or White Box, dotted ‘soft green grass, of a height that if a person rode through it it would reach above the saddle-girths’.157 At Preston was ‘Good cattle pasture’; at Coburg several small plains lay in ‘Light forest’. West of Batman’s Hill ‘a beautiful green lawn’ extended for 3–4 miles around a ‘small saltwater lake . . . generally covered with swans and wild fowl. On the banks of its margin the sheoak is thinly scattered, giving the whole the appearance of an extensive English park.’158 This was Melbourne Swamp, fed by Moonee Ponds and smaller creeks, ‘a wonderfully abundant resource’ now Victoria Dock.
North of Melbourne Swamp, Flemington’s hills were ‘Well wooded’. West was land
of the most excellent quality . . . very rich alluvial soil . . . unrivalled for sheep and cattle. A great part of it is plains, some vast in extent, but few trees. Other parts are highly timbered and bear a strong resemblance to a gentleman’s park kept for ornament . . . the land free from underwood, except in small patches near the rivers . . . The grass all through summer has retained its greenness and goodness . . . Fish are plentiful . . . Wild fowl and kangaroo abound.159
Wedge reported in August 1835, ‘The country between these rivers [Yarra and Maribyrnong] extending to the north forty or fifty miles, and to the east about twenty-five miles . . . is moderately wooded . . . to the north there are open plains.’160 Bourke wrote, ‘The route [west] for the first 4 miles leads through a very pretty country having the appearance of an English Park. Thence over a very arid plain of coarse grass to the Salt River.’161
Others located this change on the basalt plains further west:
The scenery from the Settlement to the Ford on the Saltwater river is most beautiful and some of the spots quite enchanting. The grass had been burnt about a month previously and it was then quite green and beautiful . . . the country completely changed when we crossed the Ford the Land was then quite flat and rather rocky and . . . up to Geelong Harbour consists of open plains with a thin coat of grass and exposed to the cold winds.162
From the Saltwater to the lower Werribee the land was ‘one-third grass, one-ditto stone, and one-ditto earth, mostly new burnt’, ‘bleak & herbage coarse, great part lately burnt’, but with ‘belts’ of trees.163 It was ‘exceedingly rich, and beautiful in the extreme’, Batman wrote,
thinly-timbered, richly grassed . . . The soil was of a fine, rich, oily, decomposed whinstone [basalt] . . . The trees were thinly-scattered in a park-like form, averaging five or six to the acre . . . Its general character presents that of cultivated pasture for centuries past; the few trees appear as though they owed their plantation to the hand of man. All the high hills are covered with grass to their summits.164
Grass and open forest followed the Saltwater up. It was salt 20 kilometres inland, showing how flat the delta was, and a succession of stone fish traps followed its course.165 It divided the country: grassy basalt plains beyond its high west bank, grass with scattered blackwood or banksia patches on its low east bank. Kangaroo Grass or in low places Wallaby Grass dominated. Batman thought the ‘whole of the land’ ‘excellent’, ‘with grass three feet high in places where it had not been burnt by the natives. Where it had been burned by these people, the young blades are from ten to twelve inches high, affording fine feed for kangaroos and other animals.’ Then he met an altered landscape:
an open forest two miles in length, composed of oak, with about ten of those trees to the acre, and the stems or buts [sic] about a foot in circumference . . . all around are rich open plains, with trees, gentle rising hills, and valleys of the best description of soil . . . We again renewed our journey over plains, until reaching a small forest of box gum trees, which formed a belt of about two miles . . . From the box and oak forest we came upon beautiful open plains, with the usual interruptions of gently rising eminences, on which grew oak, black wood, and wattle trees, and grass up to our waists, through which walking was both painful and tedious. We eventually came to a small lovely valley, where, to our great delight, was a dense tea-tree scrub, which we knew to be the surest indication of good water.166
Hoddle mapped this country. East of the Saltwater to Moonee Ponds Creek he marked ‘Thickly wooded country’, but upstream he mapped grass and named Westmeadows and Broadmeadows. West to Tullamarine was a ‘Plain, lightly timbered with clumps of She-oak, Banksia, and Blackwood Trees’, each of which respond differently to fire. East were plains with ‘Honeysuckle, Lightwood and Oaks’ enclosing clearings.167 These are familiar templates: grass on good soil broken by tree belts especially on higher ground, and sheoaks needing a decade to re-seed after fire above Kangaroo Grass burnt every 1–3 years, though as Leichhardt found in Queensland (ch 1), on the Saltwater headwaters the pattern reversed: ‘the country . . . [was] covered with timber excepting the tops of the hills. The country was well grassed, and might be called grassy open forest land.’168
East of the city, tea-tree and grass alternated up the Yarra until the country became ‘rather over thickly wooded, and with a good deal of underwood, which gives a scrubby appearance’.169 This was relieved by grass and open forest belts: Richmond was a ‘grassy hill’, Collingwood a ‘grassy forest’, Kew a ‘grassy range’, Bulleen ‘good grassy hills’, Heidelberg ‘an ever-varying succession of lightly-timbered hill and dale, well-grassed downs alternated with groups of tall, handsome trees’, Doncaster off the river a ‘barren forest of dwarf stringy bark’, about Lower Plenty ‘timber but of indifferent quality . . . Swampy Flat’,170 in the far hills Kangaroo Ground,171 grass then, forest now.
A few newcomers sensed that this variety was made. Griffiths reflected:
It is difficult when you see trees intermixed with the most graceful flowering shrubs, grouped with all the effect which a landscape gardener could desire, and growing from a green sward, entirely free from overgrowing weeds or brushwood, not to fancy that the hand of man had been engaged in combining and arranging these elements of natural beauty.172
‘Where else but in Australia’, Richard Howitt asked,
could I find such a park-like Arcady?—mile after mile of the smoothest greensward, unbroken by any kind of fence; a sweet undulating land of knoll and slope and glen, studded over, not too thickly, but in a most picturesque manner, with she-oaks, trees of the softest and richest character imaginable?173
Dozens of sharp-edged templates meshed into a seamless mosaic, a boundless estate, a lesson in beauty and utility.174
Adelaide, 28 December 1836
By 1836 the British knew not to be picky in trying to combine a port and fresh water. In South Australia th
is was just as well. On Kangaroo Island newcomers found a port in July 1836, but not enough fresh water, so most moved to the mainland, there to begin a squabble lasting years, on whether the capital should be at the port or the water.
Settlers first tried Holdfast Bay: Glenelg. ‘The country, as far as we could see, was certainly beautiful’, Mary Thomas wrote, ‘and resembled an English park, with long grass in abundance and fine trees scattered about, but not so many as to make it unpleasant, and no brushwood. We were about a hundred yards from the nearest lagoon.’175 Being summer the grass was green, on dunes pigface and other flowers mingled with shrubs and ‘cranberries’ [muntheries?], and wattle and banksia stood with ‘tall and stately gum-trees on all sides’. The district was alive with kangaroo, kangaroo rat, ‘kangaroo mouse’ and possum.176 Inland, lagoons and the Sturt River, thick with tall reeds, opened to ‘level land studded with trees, and every here and there a stretch of rich meadow-land . . . the grass in many places three or four feet high, and the whole tract evidently of the most luxurious description’.177
Glenelg was no port. For that William Light chose Port Adelaide, swampy, lined with mangroves in smelly mud, little fresh water, but a useful harbour.178 At its head Light saw ‘something like the mouth of a small river, and a country with trees so dispersed as to allow the sight of most luxuriant green underneath’. He probed inland, ‘seeing no bounds to a flat of fine rich-looking country with an abundance of fresh-water lagoons, which, if dry in summer, convinced me that one need not dig a deep well to give sufficient supply’. The plain had ‘fine soil . . . not a rock, tree, or bush in the way for six miles’.179
Not ‘in the way’ perhaps, but there. From the port’s ‘gloomy swamp’, salt land with pigface and saltbush reached past a sheoak bank to ‘two level plains, separated by a slight, sandy rise, covered with wood’ or ‘belts of wood’. Wattle, mallee, sheoak and perhaps pine formed these belts and lightly dotted the plains. Herbs, everlastings and other flowers sprinkled Spear or Wallaby Grass, some ‘eaten with avidity by cattle’ and therefore by kangaroos.180 A few miles inland the plains rose gently east, still grassland ‘scattered about with noble park-like’ eucalypts:181
The rich green plains, not covered by dense forest, but by stately trees, rising here and there from their green foundations in the same way as they do in the noble parks of England, the pretty streams, the broad lakes, margined with beautiful shrubs and flowers, and the gently undulating hills crowned with trees, forms altogether frequent scenes of interest and beauty.182
Stately giants survive in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs.
The plains ended at Mt Lofty Range, ‘covered with fine wood and grass to the very summits. There is little or no brushwood.’183 Hills parks are now heavily timbered, with thick undergrowth. East lay ‘a beautiful, open, undulating country, with grass up to the horses manes; the trees consisting principally of box and blue gum, were of large size’,184 and northeast
a most beautiful and rich Country. The Ranges . . . broken into smooth grassy vallies and the more level country resembled more an English Park than any thing else . . . dense brushes . . . separate the [grassy] limestone downs of the Murray from the richer country in which we were travelling.185
Hill and plain were usually burnt in late summer. In February 1837 the hills were ‘a mass of flame . . . At the end of summer as this was, the natives had set fire to the long dry grass to enable them more easily to obtain the animals and vermin on which a great part of their living depends.’186 These were controlled fires (ch 6), lit ‘generally . . . in January or February’187 meshing hill and plain into grass-forest templates. The plains were summer country, the time to burn, dig yams, fish in the warm coastal water, gather herbs and thistles, hunt possum and lure kangaroo. The hills were for winter and the hottest summer weather.188
The fires varied. Newcomers found pine stands in eucalypt woodland, scrub or tree belts on plains, grass clearings in forest. Just east of the city a ‘belt of small’ wattles ran ‘about half a mile wide’,189 recent regenerators from fire, perhaps the belt Berkeley painted in 1840 (picture 18). A plain lay ‘several miles wide . . . covered with grass, and intersected with belts of Gum-trees, and a sickle-leaved Acacia. Some of the Kangaroo-grass was up to our elbows, and resembled two years’ seed meadows, in England, in thickness; in many places, three tons of hay per acre, might be mown off it.’190 Norwood was ‘a magnificent gum forest with an undergrowth of Kangaroo Grass, too high in places for a man to see over. In fact people had lost their way in going from Adelaide to Kensington.’ Southeast was a corroboree ground, ‘a nice piece of cleared land . . . a few acres backed by noble gum trees’.191 North and south were stringybark belts and other forests. The Peachy Belt reached towards Gawler, about 15 x 5 kilometres of Grey Box, mallee, pine and shrubs thrusting into open country south and east. The Black Forest looped from the Sturt near Marion to the city and east to the hills, dominated by big, ‘densely packed’ Grey Box–SA Blue Gum over thick undergrowth and clogging debris.192 Yet it had a ‘very few clearings’,193 while irrespective of soil type, forest closed the land here but left it open nearby.
The soft soil plains held plenty of water, shielded by summer flourishing grasses (ch 3). It came from hills creeks and accumulated in swamps behind coastal dunes from south of Glenelg north past Port Adelaide, where it gave way to mangrove and sam-phire flats. In this vast, rich system people camped and raised mounds, perhaps when unclogging swamp inlets. Edging dunes carried flowers, sheoak and scrub sheltering bilbies, bandicoots and bettongs. Cowandilla, the Reedbeds, from the Torrens south, were especially bountiful.
They were fed by the Torrens, shallow, in summer a chain of ponds. A few observers despised it. A ‘miserable dribbling current with an occasional waterhole’, one called it. ‘Any number of fallen trees blocked the bed . . . and here and there were patches of ti-tree.’194 Most admired it. ‘A very beautiful stream it then was. The deep banks were covered with underwood and trees of various kinds, while the bed of the stream was covered with a thick, close, and beautiful growth of tea-tree, with a great variety of aromatic flowers and shrubs.’195 The water was ‘fresh, and of excellent quality’, even though
about one foot in depth, and four feet in width; there are numerous pools, of several fathoms deep, in its course, which are not likely to lack water in the driest seasons. In some places there are reedy flats below the [false] banks of the river, which are of red loam, and are ornamented by a variety of shrubs and flowers.196
Hawdon, skilled at assessing grass and water, found Adelaide
laid out on both sides of a very small stream of excellent water . . . In the summer season this stream is found running only for a short distance below the Town, where it disappears beneath its gravelly bed . . . The scenery around is very pleasing. Towards the sea it consists of plains studded and intersected with belts of trees. The Mount Lofty Range distant about two miles to the eastward, presents a beautiful picturesque appearance, with its various and sloping sides variegating by its shadow the luxuriant grass to every shade of green.197
George Hamilton, another overlander, wrote,
The land in the vicinity of this river was timbered with noble trees, and its banks sloped down to the water in gentle undulations thickly clothed with grass. The river itself meandered through a tangle of tea-tree, rushes, reeds, and many flowering weeds, here and there almost hidden by vegetation, but at intervals opening out into pretty ponds or tolerably large waterholes; along its banks grew in profusion the wattle (acacia) with its golden sweet-scented blossoms, as well as the noble eucalyptus, here at that time in great beauty. Towards the sea, to the westward, the land was flat, swampy, and not very picturesque; but towards the hills on the plains, where Norwood and Kensington now stand, wooded glades of great beauty opened out in all directions, extending to the foot of the Mount Lofty Range, the hills of which rose up in graceful gently swelling acclivities, picturesquely sprinkled with a variety of trees until they joine
d the forest which crowned the lovely mountain range.198
Hamilton caught the Torrens’ variety. It quit the hills through tea-tree, gouging 10-metre banks before it steadied on the plain over a shallow bed choked with tea-tree. Its banks were ‘closely covered with beautiful shrubs of all sorts; splendid gum trees also . . . small fish were plentiful, and . . . the platypus was occasionally seen’.199 It then spilled into reedy swamps, and River Red and SA Blue Gum, Drooping Sheoak, tea-tree, wattle and bottlebrush graced its banks and overflows, until above the city it was ‘picturesque in the extreme’, ‘full of shallow places and deep holes . . . a great number of Gum trees lying in the bed . . . apparently washed down by winter floods’.200 Below the city, wattle and River Reds tracked its sometimes dry course ‘across a plain of exceedingly fine land’, until it filtered through the Reedbeds to the sea.201 It was a typical Australian river, spreading and slow, easily forded, rich in swamps and reeds, with deep holes for fish, yabbies and platypus, and lined with possum trees, marsupial grassland, and bird and reptile shelter.202
Light put his capital 12 kilometres southeast of his port, where the Torrens curved south between ‘two gentle slopes . . . Beautiful grassy plains surround it, with a sufficiency of timber to make it look well.’203 North, open forest dominated grassy flats and hills, pines upstream, gums at the city and below, including the giant gums of piltawadli, possum place, at the golf course.204 South, a narrow plain rose to a plateau. George Kingston, Light’s deputy, put his tent there,205 and soon Light chose it for his city. It had more trees than the land around: ‘the obstructions for this work were greater on this particular spot than any other part of the plain’, Light claimed. ‘It may be asked then, “Why choose it?” I answer, “Because it was on a beautiful and gently rising ground, and formed altogether a better connection with the river than any other place.”’206 It was Grey Box–SA Blue Gum woodland, north grassy slopes and scrub patches to the river, east open gum forest with some Drooping Sheoak, west mallee, centre and south scrub clumps or belts under tall, spreading eucalypts. Perched above Kangaroo Grass land, it was a summer rest place for kangaroos— tarndana, red kangaroo place, with somewhere on it the rock of the Red Kangaroo ancestor.207 Light designated a park belt round the city; some newcomers thought it already there:
