History of Melbourne - Early Settlement

Early Settlement

Melbourne began as a collection of tents and huts on the banks of the Yarra. The river was used for bathing and drinking water. The river had by the 1850s become quite polluted and was the cause of an epidemic of typhoid fever which hit the town resulting in many deaths. Though the Melbourne City Council opened the first Melbourne City Baths on 9 January 1860, people continued to swim and drink the river water.

Until the building boom which followed the gold rushes, most of Melbourne was built of timber, and almost nothing from this period survives. Two exceptions are St James Old Cathedral (1839) in Collins St (now relocated to the Flagstaff Gardens), and St Francis Catholic Church (1841) in Elizabeth St. Suburban development had already begun. The first sale of Crown lands in St Kilda took place on 7 December 1842, and the wealthy began building houses by the seashore, and a port developing at Williamstown. In 1844, a bridge was built to span the Yarra River at Swanston Street. The bridge replaced the privately operated punts. The bridge was a privately built wooden trestle toll bridge. In 1850, a government-built sandstone free bridge replaced the wooden bridge.

In 1848, Charles Perry became the first Anglican bishop for Melbourne, and James Alipius Goold became the Catholic Bishop of Melbourne.

With the arrival of Europeans in the area, the local indigenous people were hard hit by introduced diseases, and their decline was hastened by mistreatment, alcohol and venereal disease. There were also frontier conflicts such as the Battle of Yering in 1840. Simon Wonga made moves to reclaim land for Kulin people to settle on in 1859, but they were not successful until 1863 when the surviving members of the Wurundjeri and other Woiwurrung speakers were given 'permissive occupancy' of Coranderrk Station, near Healesville and forcibly resettled.

In July 1851 the successful agitation of the Port Phillip settlers led to the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony, and La Trobe became its first Lieutenant-Governor. In 1851 the white population of the whole Port Phillip District was still only 77,000, and only 23,000 people lived in Melbourne. Melbourne had already become a centre of Australia's wool export trade.

A few months after separation, gold was discovered at several locations around the colony, most notably at Ballarat and Bendigo. The ensuing gold rush radically transformed Victoria, and particularly Melbourne. During land speculation of the 1850s many stone and brick public and financial buildings were built.