CHAPTER XVIII THE CHRISTENING OF HEIDELBERG
When we came to Melbourne in 1840 we might have bought all the land between Prince's Bridge and Upper Toorak for the merest trifle above "upset price." As to Sandridge, St. Kilda, and Brighton, they might almost have been "taken up," so low was the estimate of their value by the colonists of the period. Mr. Dendy did pre-empt 5000 acres hard by the city, at Brighton, under the special survey regulations which then obtained, at £1 per acre. We certainly secured a trifle of seventy acres, upon which the viceregal residence of Toorak was afterwards erected. But some frivolous objection to the agricultural properties of the soil weighed with the head of the family, who, after a few unimportant purchases of town allotments—such as two acres in Flinders Street running back to the lane so named and adjoining Degraves' buildings, a half-acre near to the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Streets, another in Bourke Street, besides a dozen more in various parts of Melbourne—finally decided to build and permanently reside at Heidelberg.
This romantically-named suburb was seven miles from Melbourne, with an unmade road through black soil of considerable richness, and a tenacity, when resolved into mud, which I have, during much after-experience, rarely seen equalled. It might have appeared to some persons a matter of supererogation this planting one's self so many miles away from an infant settlement, such as Melbourne then was. A matter involving loss of time, too, expense in transit, besides exile from whatever society was then available. But these considerations availed not against the charming prospect of a rural home, a country-house surrounded by an estate of fertile land, bordered by the clear-flowing Yarra, and glorified by a distant prospect of the Australian Alps. But chiefly alluring were the persuasive tongue, the sanguine predictions, and the enjoyable al fresco entertainments of Mr. R. H. Brown, a social celebrity of the day, fashionable and distinguished, generally known, from his reminiscent enthusiasm on the subject of the grand European tour, as Continental Brown.
This sentimental speculator, most refined of land agents, had, either personally or as deputy for a firm of Sydney capitalists, purchased a block of land extending nearly from the Darebin Creek to the village, and comprising the estates of Chelsworth, Waverley, Hartlands, and Leighton. There was also a section named Maltravers. I am not sure, indeed, whether he did not christen the whole block "Maltravers," in compliment to the Master upon whose melancholy, philosophical, resistless hero so many of the viveurs of the day fashioned themselves.
Slight, vivacious, soigné in dress and courteous of manner, a good business man (was he not a bank director in his leisure moments, that is, when he was not giving dinners and déjeuners, getting up picnics, improvising balls and generally faisant l'agréable all round?), he managed to "place" Heidelberg at a considerable advance upon the original purchase money.
I can see him now in the centre of a group of admiring friends, chiefly of the fair sex, standing on one of the heights which overlooked the meadows of the Yarra. "There, my dear madam, permit me to direct your gaze. Do you not observe the silver thread of the river winding through that exquisite green valley? It reminds me so vividly of the gliding Neckar, and, alas! (here a most telling sigh) of scenes, of friends, loved and lost. I can fancy that I look at my ever-remembered, ever-regretted Heidelberg! Those slopes rising from the farther river-shore will be terraced vineyards; and there, where you can faintly discern the snow pinnacle on yon spur of the Australian Alps, I can imagine the grand outline of the Hartz Mountains. It is, it shall be, Heidelberg! Charles, open more champagne. We must christen this thrice-favoured spot, on this trebly-auspicious day, worthily, irrevocably!"