INTRODUCTION 1985 Souvenir Edition
Author
Ron Stephens
PICTURESQUE - ATLAS
This book is a reproduction of a section of a magnificent old three-volume geographic encyclopaedia of Australia and New Zealand compiled and published I00 years ago.
It depicts Victoria at the end of its first 50 years of settlement. The size of the original pages has been reduced photographically as these huge century-old volumes (440mm x 350mm) would never fit a modern book shelf.
Those original three publications heavily bound in embossed board, gold leaved on the cover and page ends, with introductory illustrations prefaced by protective tissues, weigh 15.3 kilos.
These magnificent publications were called the "Picturesque Atlas of Australasia" and took many years to assemble.
All illustrations are hand-engraved reproductions of people, scenes and places - several thousand of them - as they were in the 1880's.
Every word in every line of type was set by hand. The flowing, romantically descriptive language of these masterpieces makes any lover of English despondent at the decline of our literary standards which has occurred since those volumes were written.
Reading this Victorian section of the volumes will correct many misconceptions we have of our yesterday;. Victoria of the 1880s had a far more evenly spread population than today, centred particularly in growing rural cities like Ballarat, Bendigo, Maryborough, Benalla, Echuca, which reflect the enormous wealth of now declined gold-fields, the growing wealth of the pastoral industries and the burgeoning trading in land and farm products by rail and river, to the ports of the Southern coast.
Victoria was Australia's wealthiest State, centre of commerce, trade and in particular finance capital. This was reflected in the opulence of the public buildings in the major cities, the grand mansions of the rich, and more than anything else, the untroubled conviction that it was all there to stay and grow, for ever and ever.
Melbourne's grand Parliament House, museum, library and Exhibition Building, Ballarat's Sturt Street, Bendigo's golden square, private homes like "Werribee House': "Ripponlea" and "Como" had the luxury and architectural endurance of the country mansions of 18th century England.
The rich grew richer and the poor were still 20 years away from a legal basic wage. It was the age of "Upstairs, Downstairs" in a colonial setting.
Australia was still six separate colonies, but the impetus for union and nationhood was generated and blossoming in Victoria in 1885, home of Alfred Deakin and our Commonwealth founding fathers. It was called the Federal Council.
Melbourne's Exhibition Building launched our first parliament and Victoria was seat of the national parliament until 1927, when it moved to Canberra.
"Our First 50 Years" seems far more than a century removed from our time. It reflects the optimism uncritical acceptance of Victorian-age values, the "God's in his heaven, all's right with the a patriotism of a colony of the mighty British Empire, which ruled one-fifth of the world under a Queen whose capital was far richer than that of any Emperor of ancient Rome.
The mammoth catastrophe of World War One, which was to sweepaway the pillars of their power - and wipe out physically an entire generation born to rule, was still 30 years away.
It would have been utterly impossible for these great-grandfathers of ours to have foreseen the very best and the very worst of the Victoria in which we live today.
There are many surprises in this book. Electric street lighting was replacing gas lighting already, while Edison was still perfecting his invention. The first cable trams were running in the streets of Melbourne.
The railway steam train network serviced areas of suburban and Country Victoria not serviced today.
The first iron-hulled steam-driven oceanliners, unassisted by sail, had birthed at the docks of Port Melbourne and Williamstown.
Names of small towns and hamlets no longer in existence appear on the map of the state. Names of places still in existence have changed and need to be identified.
Cobb & Co. still provided their vast chain of coaching services over weather-washed and pitted, dirt country roads, but asphalt macadam streets were spreading through the cities and large towns. Sewerage was a decade away for Melbourne but Town water and gas pipes were well established services.
Sorrento and Queenscliffe were, even then, the summer holiday resorts of Melbourne and Geelong and famous excursion steamers ran weekend trips from Melbourne to Sorrento.
Iron-piercing shells were stacked next to long-ranged guns in the bay at Point Lonsdale ready to repel any invading fleet threatening to enter Port Phillip.
Our real beginnings, the 1803-1804 settlement at Sorrento (abandoned after six months) are the curtain-raiser to vivid descriptions of the 1834 - 1835 settlements of the State and the birth of Melbourne. Most school children today are familiar with the story of Batman's meeting with William Buckley (the wild white man], sole surviving convict escapee from the original Sorrento settlement, Batman's treaty with the Yarra River natives, the "site for a village which became Melbourne, the vision of Fawkner, Hoddle, Latrobe and Von Mueller.
This same history is there, but the heroes and the villains have, in many cases, changed sides.
The "rebels" of Eureka were seen with sympathy, but not as the flag carriers of colonial democracy the way they are seen today.
Ned Kelly was a 'murderous villain' not the national hero and symbol of revolt against injustice he has become in our modern folk legends.
Aborigines were not seen as tragically violated original settlers, unable to comprehend or cope with the European invasion of a land where they had lived for 40,000 perhaps 50,000 years.
Our great-grandfathers saw them as a strictly second-class humanity to be removed when and wherever they impeded the white settler's requirements.
They had no doubt whatever that all moral virtue resided in their Christian religions and commercial values and that non-members of the club were eternally damned.
Still, they were great and memorable achievers.
We are inclined to believe that we have rebuilt and trans6amed Melbourne since the end of World War Two at a pace which outstrips what would have required a millennia of pre-I945 history.
True, but when we read this history of the total creation of a state comprising millions of people with cities as advanced as the world's greatest - in a mere 50 years - we must pause to re-assess our perspectives.
This book, "Our First Fifty Years" will help us do this as few others can, because it sees those years through the eyes of those who lived them.