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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241210 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Series: | The City Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 527 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Canberra
By Paul Daley
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Paul DaleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-611-6
CHAPTER 1
The Plains
In the beginning the plains were a vast expanse of limestone. Then the native groundcovers transformed them into one great blanket of colour as the button daisies, bluebells and vivid yellow kangaroo grass took root in brittle, rich soil.
The eucalypt, melaleuca, casuarina and grevillea stuck to the edges of the rises and gathered in occasional thicker copses around the rolling hills bordering the plains. It was a perfect natural grassland furrowed with a series of bubbling streams and faster-flowing, darker brooks that connected a series of billabongs. The Ngambri were the first inhabitants.
The Ngambri people wielded spears and boomerangs to take the emu and bustard, the kangaroo, wallaby and wallaroo, the bream and freshwater crayfish. They also needed weapons to fight off the others who trespassed to hunt and to steal their women. They were people such as the Ngurmal who shared the same Walgalu language group, the Woradgery, and yet others from the north like the Wallabalooa and Cookmai who spoke Ngunnawal.
It was Ngambri land originally. But others came, seeking permission to cross the rivers and in times of abundance to hunt the birds and animals and the fatty bogong moths that swarmed each spring.
'All around there, including around the Molonglo was grassland. It was perfect, beautifully managed grassland. If you can imagine it, it was so alive with food that the women would dig for yam daisies to go with the meat that the men hunted,' Ngambri elder Shane Mortimer explained to me.
This place could only have seemed like a woman: the two mountains to the north were her breasts, the basin – with its marsupials and moths, its birds and fish – was her fertile womb, and the wide expanse of snow-capped ranges to the south, her hips.
The argument about how Canberra, the city that would defiantly grow out of the plains, earned its name will never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. But some insist, with good reason, that it is a derivative of the word 'Ngambri', variously written by whites as Canbery, Canberry or even Kamberri or Kemberri, which might just mean a 'woman's breasts'.
Others maintain it means 'meeting place', for that's what the plains were for the Ngambri who lived there and the many other peoples who passed by.
Most days I wander about Red Hill, a steep escarpment of protected native bush that stands behind my house. I go there to muse among the trees, to run through the elements with my dog, a black girl Labrador who snuffles tentatively at the crevices beneath the volcanic boulders and around the great fallen trees that have been smoothed away, as if by sandpaper, by decades of sleet and breeze. The potent scent of the 'roos, blue-tongues, snakes and foxes arouses her twitchy senses. She chases the big eastern greys when they bounce into her pitifully short visual periphery. She'll race off after them, possessed, on the strength of the flimsiest whiff or a telling papery crunch. They'd tear her open with their sharp claws if ever she caught up. But she never does – and she wouldn't know what to do if she did. I sometimes think that even the dogs of Canberra are self-satisfied; in most other big Australian cities they must content themselves with ball and stick.
If I look north across the plains from here, it's easy to appreciate a décolletage, more gentle than buxom, between the mountains – Black and Ainslie.
Because I know what to look for I can also discern the ghostly outline of a century-old cityscape – a utopia that would only ever find completion in Marion Mahoney Griffin's breathtakingly beautiful pictures. Marion articulated the dream of her landscape architect husband, Walter Griffin, using a three-stage process that ended with watercolour and photographic dye images on roller-blind fabric.
Wooed by Marion's art, Australia chose the plan that Griffin somehow conjured in his office overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago over a period of just nine weeks. And then Australia mostly ignored the plan, abandoning the drawings along with the Griffins.
The land axis stretches out below me – an invisible line running from Parliament House and across the lake to the Australian War Memorial. This axis dissects a great inverted 'V' that also begins at Parliament House. One of its triangular lines ends at an awkward place called City Hill that today stands isolated in the middle of a monolithic traffic roundabout. The other finishes at Russell Hill, the home of Australia's military leaders, who ignore and scoff at their political masters across a lake that, ironically, takes the name 'Burley Griffin' from a man Canberra's ultimate planners so obstinately shunned.
A notional intersecting water axis cuts south-east to north-west across the Griffins' lake. The bones of the Griffin plan are subtly though defiantly evident from up here on Red Hill, like the veins of a leaf when held to the light. Within and around the triangle you can still find elements of the faded geometric Griffin blueprint – in the wide boulevards, the hexagons and circles that have been filled in – with the more prosaic plans of others, with public monuments and buildings (along with suburbs in the name of prime ministers and early settlers) whose symbolism is largely lost on the country to which they were dedicated. And filled too, of course, with many of the millions of trees that constitute Canberra's stunning urban forest. The Ngambri's grasslands were long ago planted with an array of exotic and colourful flora as part of its 'reforestation'. It's true this land was ruined by the white man's hoofed animals and even more so by his plague rabbits. Planting all those trees made it look better. As becoming as the urban forest below me looks today, these plains were never – as so many white men insist – previously covered in trees.
Given Mahoney Griffin's under-valued contribution, it seems appropriate that Canberra was thought of as woman from the Dreamtime.
One of the plains' pioneers, John Gale, who arrived in 1855, was taken with such symbolism.
In his Canberra History and Legends, published in 1927, he writes, 'It not only struck me as being supremely poetic, but also singularly appropriate to the site chosen as the mother city of the Australian Commonwealth.'
Initially I reckon this is probably just another yarn told by white men in the Queanbeyan pubs.
It's like so much of what Gale wrote and said. It's hard to be certain what to believe.
He arrived here barely three decades after the first whites arrived with their sheep. As he wrote about Canberra towards the very end of his life in 1927, Gale was being hailed as the longest continuously working and the oldest professional writer in the English language. Many consider Gale to be the founding father of Canberra, so energetically did he push for the Australian capital to be built on the plains – despite living in Queanbeyan, the New South Wales town still engaged in a lively provincial supremacy argument with its neighbour.
By the time Gale got here, the Limestone Plains had already become a vast dusty paddock. The area was divided into a series of stock stations belonging to a few wealthy squatters, later to become freeholders – if they were fortunate enough to receive such valuable grants courtesy of the New South Wales administration. The white man's arrival on the plains was an inevitable result of the southwesterly push through of animals and stock tracks by explorers who were commissioned to expand the colony at Port Jackson.
Today, the men at the vanguard would be described as an eclectic, even 'colourful', bunch. Among them were hardened veterans of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, ticket-of-leave convicts, a renowned ship's surgeon. There was also a colonial trader, Robert Campbell, a principal ally of the deposed New South Wales governor, Vice Admiral William Bligh, and a contemporary and admirer of the enlightened British MP and antislavery activist, William Wilberforce.
'Merchant Campbell', as he was known, came from a wealthy trading family whose company, Campbell & Co., imported goods to England from Calcutta. From 1798, Campbell used his family's ships to build a lucrative trading connection between India and Port Jackson. After buying land just inside Dawes Point (close to The Rocks), Campbell built a private wharf and warehouses to accommodate his thriving business.
Sydney, an expanding penitentiary, struggled to feed itself. Crops were subject to the fickleness of a harsh antipodean climate; livestock were few and expensive.
In March 1806 floods destroyed most of the colony's crops. Commandeering one of Campbell's ships, the Sydney, Governor Philip King ordered it to sail immediately for Calcutta and return with food for the starving colony.
Gale explained what happened in his book, in which he artfully weaves what seems to be quite often third- and even fourth-hand historical 'faction', with gruesome details of made-for-tabloid crimes, rumour and curious happenstance.
Just then there arrived in Port Jackson a couple of ships on their way to England with full cargoes of valuable furs, the fruit of some years' seal hunting in the south seas. The then governor saw in the timely arrival of these ships a practical means of averting the threatening famine. The ships were seized, their valuable cargoes dumped out on to the sandy foreshores of Sydney Cove, and the ships' captains ordered to proceed to the Cape of Good Hope for the much needed breadstuffs. The vessels were never afterwards heard of, and as for the furs, they had altogether perished and become worthless.
Although Gale believed two ships were involved, other accounts say there was only one. The Sydney is said to have been wrecked off the coast of New Guinea.
It was probably Bligh – Campbell having served him loyally as the colony's treasurer – who agreed to compensation for the loss. But compensation didn't arrive until the early 1820s, when Campbell was granted 710 sheep and a swathe of prime grazing land on the colony's south-eastern frontier.
Campbell became the first owner-occupier on the Limestone Plains.
But he was not the first white man to venture there.
That honour belonged to ticket-of-leave convict Joseph Wild and his master Charles Throsby, a brilliant but melancholic ship's surgeon who served Britain at sea in the French Revolutionary Wars.
* * *
Dr Throsby arrived in Port Jackson aboard the Coromandel on 13 June 1802 after crossing from England, still as a ship's surgeon, with a load of about 140 convicts and a few dozen free settlers. Because all who boarded the Coromandel at the Thames survived the voyage to disembark in Sydney, Throsby won immediate acclaim from King, who promptly earmarked him as a reliable colonial servant.
By April 1805 Throsby was commander of the penal colony at Newcastle where 'he controlled the settlement with zeal and success until the year 1809, when he resigned on account of ill health', as Frederick Watson's 1927 A Brief History of Canberra puts it. Throsby settled on a 1500-acre pastoral expanse at Minto, where he ran cattle, granted in exchange for his services at Newcastle. But Throsby was restless. He and his workers pushed into the high country and the along the southern coastal plains; in 1816 he settled in the Illawarra district and built huts in Moss Vale. Then in 1818 he reached Jervis Bay.
From the Southern Highlands, Throsby made at least five expeditions – some on contract to the New South Wales government – to chart the 'New Country' further inland to the south and on the coast. He found much-needed grazing country around Bathurst and blazed a pass, through which to drive stock, from the Illawarra to Robertson in the highlands. In 1820 Governor Lachlan Macquarie commissioned Throsby to build a road from the Southern Highlands at Cowpastures, near Exeter, into the unexplored southern frontier around the Goulburn Plains. Throsby put his man Wild in charge of the convict road-building party.
Wild – also known as 'Wilde' – was transported from England to Australia for life in 1797 for burglary. By the time he won his ticket of leave in 1810, the illiterate Wild was one of the colony's most accomplished bushmen. Unlike many free men and ticket-of-leavers, Wild – like his master Throsby – made great efforts to understand the culture and languages of the Aborigines around Sydney who were being dispossessed by the race for new pastoral settlements.
While building the road, Throsby was told by Aborigines about a large lake – 'Wee-ree-naa'. About two days further on, they said, was a tidal river – 'Murrumbidgee' or 'Murrumbeeja'. Throsby sent Wild, described as being superbly fit in his early sixties, to find the lake. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 1931 Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, it was late August in 1820 when Wild and several others, possibly including two Aborigines, set off.
They quickly found the lake and followed its eastern shore. After camping on the banks for two nights they emerged at Turullo Creek, near today's town of Bungendore. On 22 August Wild left the other men and ascended a rise later known as Gibraltar Mountain. The horizon was dominated, as Wild told Throsby, by the 'Snowy Mountains to the SW'. Wild thus became the first white man to see the continent's highest ranges.
While camping that night Wild noticed the lake's level dropped by about six inches. He could have been forgiven for assuming that the lake was tidal. Visiting the newly discovered lake in late October 1820 Governor Macquarie named it 'George' after King George III. Wild, I assume, told the governor about the lake's oscillating level, a phenomenon that remains mysterious.
Meanwhile, Throsby, determined to find the Murrumbidgee, set off in search of the river whileMacquarie was still in camp. He didn't find it, instead heading back to Macquarie, Wild and the others after reaching the country around Gungahlin – what is today a satellite town on the northern extremity of the Australian Capital Territory.
Determined to find the elusive Murrumbidgee, Throsby dispatched Wild and two others, including Charles Throsby Smith – his nephew and a dedicated journal keeper. He gave them enough supplies for a month and an order to follow the Yass River down until it met the Murrumbidgee.
Still they didn't find it. But they were the first known white men to stumble across the very part of the plains where Canberra's fractured city heart, Civic, stands today.
Throsby Smith's journal entry for 7 December 1820, reads:
Ascending a Stony Range, Barren and Scrubby; at 11 on the top of the hill; some beautiful clear plain in sight, bearing S. by E.; and extensive chain of mountains running S.S.E. and N.N.W. ... we then descended the range into a scrubby country for about 1/2 a mile, then into a most beautiful forest country, gentle hills and valleys well watered by streams, and a fine rich Black Soil. Came on toone of the plains, we saw at 11 o'clock. At 1/2 past 1, came to a very extensive plain, fine Rich Soil and plenty of grass. Came to a beautiful river that was running thro' the plains in a S.W. direction, by the side of which we slept that night. When we made the Hut this evening, we saw several pieces of stone ... which proved to be limestone.
On 8 December, he wrote:
At Daylight, ... Myself and Vaughan set out down the river in S.W. direction for the purpose of ascertaining which way the waters went; at 10 o'clock we ascended a very high hill from the top of which we had an extensive view all round; and, finding the waters still continue to run in a S.W. direction, we declined going down the River. We then returned to the hut, and staid for the Night; the Banks of the River on both sides, the whole of the way we went which was a distance of near 10 miles, is a most beautiful forest as far as we could see, thinly wooded by Gums and Bastard Box, the tops of the Hills stony and Stone Sand, but in the valleys a fine Rich Soil.
Writing in 1927, Dr Frederick Watson, a trustee of the Public Library of New South Wales and the editor of thirty-three volumes of transcribed 'significant' documents on Australia's colonial past, concluded Wild and his companions had stepped on the future site of the Australian capital.
'Wild and his companions crossed the low ridge of hills which separates the watersheds of the Yass and Molonglo Rivers. From one of these hills, they observed the Canberra Plains, and, after crossing these plains, camped somewhere near Duntroon. In the evening, they discovered the deposits of limestone, which gave the first name to the district – Limestone Plains.' The 'very high hill' Throsby Smith and Vaughan ascended was Black Mountain, Watson presumes, and on 'the 9th December, Wild and his companions, the discoverers of Canberra, travelled direct to the southern end of Lake George where they had camped seven days previously and returned thence to the settled districts'.
In late March 1821 Throsby made another journey south from Lake George. Watson says that while he finally found the Murrumbidgee during this trip, he didn't record precisely when in his journal.
Watson concludes: 'It is certain, however, that he travelled over the site of Canberra; that he traced the Molonglo River towards its junction with the Murrumbidgee, and that he discovered the Murrumbidgee.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Canberra by Paul Daley. Copyright © 2012 Paul Daley. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,The Plains,
Monuments in the Grass,
Continuing City,
Epilogue,
Notes and Acknowledgments,