Next year, 1845, I reached Warrnambool, just then commencing its urban life with a few straggling small white houses, along the edge of its pretty semicircular bay. I had passed Mounts Noorat and Shadwell, occupied respectively by Mr. Neil Black and Captain Webster, both early colonists, and was once more in raptures with the spectacle of almost continuously rich soil. I also came upon several round, deep, and mysterious-looking lakes, one of which, with its waters far below me, I descended to examine with no slight sensation of awe. I was told of beautiful and grand coast scenes towards the east and Cape Otway; but the ways were of Nature's uninviting hardness, and I apprehended a main difficulty of the Glenmutchkin Railway kind, from want of house or human being to help dependent humanity. I turned, however, the opposite way, to rising Belfast and Port Fairy, and wandered about through the Alison and Knight, and Rutledge and other acres; amongst cockatoos, as the small farmers were there called, observing a soil of unsurpassable richness, the potatoes and other products, the former particularly, being the finest in the world. The striking new feature of this journey seemed to me the picturesque and beautiful River Hopkins—beautiful in all but its name! Why give such starched, hard, dot-and-go-one names, when there are Eumerella, Wannon, Doutagalla, Modewarra, Yarra Yarra, and countless other such natural and genial modulations to be had of the natives for the asking?
The year following, when my dear old friends, Mr. and Mrs. A.M. McCrae, had betaken themselves from hard lines of law to the pleasant variety of an Arthur Seat cattle station—pleasant to their town visitors at least—I oftener than once looked in upon them from Melbourne. They had the life and adornment of a large family of pretty curly-headed young boys and girls, some of them with the aristocratic fine black hair and cream-white skin of their accomplished mother. McCrae and I galloped the thirty miles interval, and while crossing and watering at the ever-running Cannonook half way, and admiring the varied, almost park-like vistas among the three gentle hill rises of the bay's eastern coast, we would marvel at the stupidity of Collins in 1803 in abandoning such a country. To be sure he chanced to squat on the least inviting of its varied areas, and this benevolent excuse we confirmed by a ride across country one day to inspect the spot. All we could see was what seemed the remnant of a small fireplace. The "cups and saucers" country we passed over on the way might be interesting geologically, and even artistically; but on any dry, hot summer day the look around might not be enlivening to a new arrival. None the less, Sorrento has since arisen there—a considerable, lively, and pretty watering-place, as I hear, for which the colony's good friend, Mr. George Coppin, has provided, amongst other benefits to it, a regular steam communication. This steam route includes another like wonder of progress, Queenscliff, which, at the time I speak of, only possessed a lighthouse, but is now a breezy and lively crowded and fashionable retreat from the great dusty city of business and cares to the north.
SOME NAMES OF MARK IN THE EARLY YEARS.
"Some are born great; some achieve greatness,
And some have greatness thrust upon them."
—Twelfth Night.
Before endeavouring to give a sketch of our early society and its ways and means, I am fain to pick out a few prominent persons as they flitted before me at the time and have stuck to my recollection since. Although they might not all have been in an equal degree interesting, good or great in themselves, they were yet men of mark, closely associated in various ways with our early colonial life, and, like a busy dentist, much in the mouth of their public. By all right and reason, the first of these prominent personages is the brotherhood group of the Messrs. Henty.
THE HENTY FAMILY, AND THE FOUNDATION OF VICTORIA.
"Let the end try the man." —2nd Part Henry IV.
"Great world! Victoria brings thee meat and corn and wine,
With richly veined woods, and glittering gold from mine,
Fairy web of silken thread, soft thick snowy fleece;
Wide room for smiling homes of industry and peace."
—Mrs. H.N. Baker.
The founder of to-day's great colony of Victoria was Mr. Edward Henty, who landed at Portland Bay from Launceston, with live stock and stores, for the purpose of settlement, on the 19th November, 1834. But in regard to that notable event I prefer to speak of "The Henty Family," because, in their colonizing efforts they seem to have acted so much with mutual family purpose and in mutual help, and because there was a preparatory work in which the family were all more or less engaged, all leading up to this settlement at Portland, a site which had been selected after more than two years of previous adventurous excursions and observations along the coasts of Western Victoria and of South Australia.
The successful settlement of the noble Port Phillip Harbour the following year by Batman and Fawkner caused such general attention and such a tide of colonization, that remote Portland was comparatively overlooked. For many years, therefore, much less was heard of the Hentys than of those who had merely followed their steps. In fact, there can be but little doubt that these latter were first aroused to the colonizing of the vast areas, the all but terra incognita, across the Straits by the vigorous example set by the Henty family almost from the moment of their arrival in Launceston in 1831, and by the reports which they brought back from time to time of the lands of promise they were opening to public notice in South-Eastern Australia. But now that rail and telegraph have virtually abolished distance, and familiarized the central colonists with the value and beauty of the earliest occupied Western areas—the Australia Felix of Mitchell—the Messrs. Henty's position has passed more to the front, and their priority been universally acknowledged.