Precinct 1: Melbourne’s Front Door

A good anchorage and a supply of fresh water made this the strategic place for a settlement. Private wharves and warehouses rose up along the waterfront, which became known as Queen’s Wharf. A market square and a Customs House to collect tariffs became the nucleus of a merchant’s city.

In 1803, a convict, William Buckley, had escaped from an earlier attempted settlement at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. For 32 years he lived with the local Aboriginal people. Imagine the amazement of Melbourne’s founders when a six foot six inch white stranger, barefoot and clothed in animal skins, emerged from the bush and greeted the newcomers!

In the 1850’s Queen’s Wharf became the gateway to the goldfields. Standing here you could have seen the steamers ferrying passengers from ships anchored in Port Phillip Bay, and heard the babble of tongues — English, Scottish, Irish, American, German, Chinese — as the newcomers claimed their baggage and set out to look for lodgings in the nearby hotels and boarding houses.

Stop 1
The walk begins on the steps of the Immigration Museum, the former Customs House completed by goldrush immigrant J.J. Clark in 1873. Even before Europeans arrived this was an important place. A rocky outcrop, known as the ‘Falls’, divided the fresh water upstream from the salt water of the lower Yarra. Here the indigenous people, the Woiworung, often crossed the river they called Bay-ray-rung.

Stop 2
The place for a village?
Melburnians long believed that John Batman came ashore near this spot on the corner of Flinders and William Streets and established ‘the place for a village’. But modern scholars believe he was actually up the Maribyrnong River making his ‘treaty’ with local Aboriginals when other members of his party reached this part of the river and came ashore, probably near Southbank.

Stop 3
Rum and river water
We pause on the corner of Flinders Lane, the site of Fawkner’s Hotel, Melbourne’s first permanent house (1836). Patrons complained that it offered only bad rum and river water, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. But its proprietor, the cantankerous John Pascoe Fawkner, became Melbourne’s first newspaper proprietor and a prominent politician as well as its first publican.

Stop 4
A widow’s winning ways
In 1852 John Zander, a Dane, began his storage business in a bluestone warehouse called Rutherglen House in Highlander Lane. It dates from the early 1850’s. Zander died in 1858, leaving his widow Cecilia to rear their nine children and run the business. By 1873 her premises had expanded to cover most of the block. Walking up King Street, you will pass several more 1850’s bluestone warehouses including the Grain Store and the York Butter Factory before turning into Collins Street.