Water Stories

Melbourne is a City shaped by water. The choice of site for Melbourne was determined by the location and characteristics of the Yarra River. The availability of fresh water above Rocky Falls at a place on the river ten kilometers from its mouth persuaded John Batman in 1835 that ‘this will be the place for a village’.

Punts and ferries, and then bridges, crossed the Yarra River to permit the free movement of people and commerce. Upstream the growing city industries – fell-mongers, wool-washers, tanneries and other noxious trades – clustered along the banks.The river was not only a source of water for industry, but also a convenient place to dispose of waste, and an accumulating mass of rotting animal parts, household rubbish and other pollutants flowed down the stream towards Hobson's Bay. People living in Melbourne drew their drinking water from pumps between Queen and Russell streets and risked the ever-present threat of water-borne diseases until the Yan Yean Reservoir scheme rescued them in 1857. By the 1890s a Scottish traveller claimed it was; ‘the filthiest piece of water I ever had the misfortune to be afloat on’.

English engineer Sir John Coode’s 1879 report to the Melbourne Harbour Trust was an initiative for major flood control schemes and harbour extensions. In addition to taming the river by dredging he recommended the cutting of a channel to shorten the river’s erratic course at Fisherman’s Bend. In 1880 unemployed relief workers dug out reefs and water was let into new Fishermen’s Bend cut in 1886. Coode also recommended the construction of Victoria Dock. Its completion in 1892 was the first stage in the migration of the wharves and docks downstream towards Hobson's Bay, a process that has continued to the present day.

As the City of Melbourne boomed and grew after 1850, many of the services we now consider essential to good health and well-being were unavailable. As with many other emerging nineteenth-century cities, Melbourne had no reliable and abundant supply of fresh water to meet the thirst of its expanding population and industry. Likewise, there were no pipes lain in the ground to carry the water around and make it available at the places where it was needed. If you wanted water, you had to go where the water was. The disposal of human waste was rudimentary, leading to foul smells and disease. The sewerage system that we take for granted today had to be built from scratch.

In April 1873, the superintending engineer of Melbourne’s water supply, Charles Taylor, appointed William Davidson as his assistant. When Taylor was dismissed in January 1878, Davidson was left in charge. On 16 March 1878 a major flood destroyed most of the bridge which carried the Yan Yean aqueduct over the Plenty River, Davidson saw that the quickest way to restore the supply was to span the gap with a wooden channel (flume) on timber supports. Work continued for three days and nights without a halt under his personal supervision. A few weeks later the Commissioner of Public Works, (Sir) James B Patterson appointed him superintending engineer ‘for the outstanding part he had played in expediting repairs and restoring water to Melbourne in three days’ (Historical Records Collection, PROV, VPRS 8609/P28, Unit 4).

Yan Yean water was far from good. It was pure when it ran off the Plenty ranges, but before it reached the reservoir it had to flow through four miles of swamp where rotting vegetation discoloured it. Drainage from the small township of Whittlesea also flowed into the reservoir. One correspondent in the daily press asked: 'At the restaurants in town I have seen animals alive in the glasses … Would it not be advisable to call a public meeting to denounce such sickening stuff altogether, and use the healthy water of the Yarra?'  The Commissioner of Public Works recommended householders run the water each morning before using it.

For all the grandeur that was ‘Marvelous Melbourne’ in the 1880s, the city was nicknamed ‘Smellbourne’, and for good reason. The building of Yan Yean Reservoir in the 1850s ensured the availability of fresh water, but there was still no sewerage system. An appalling stench wafted from the many cesspits and open drains. ‘Nightsoil’ (as human waste was politely referred to) polluted the streets and ran into the Yarra. Nightsoil collectors frequently dumped their loads on public roads. Ignorance and neglect of the hygienic disposal of human waste had devastating results at this time when hundreds died in a savage outbreak of typhoid in the 1880s.

Each of Melbourne’s 12 municipalities – Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Footscray, Melbourne, Prahran, Richmond, St Kilda, Flemington, North Melbourne, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Hawthorn – were to be connected to the sewerage system, in that order. Spotswood Pumping Station built to pump Melbourne’s sewage to Werribee Farm, was finished in 1897. At the pumping station, steam engines (later replaced by electrical ones) worked to pump the sewage up a rising main to join the major sewer outfall at the head of the pumping mains near Millers Road at Brooklyn. The outfall sewer then carried the sewage to the Werribee Treatment Farm where it was purified and discharged into the sea.

Werribee was the perfect site for the MMBW’s new sewage farm. The farm was the Board’s most important project, and one of the largest public works undertaken in Australia in the nineteenth century. Land at Werribee was cheaper than at Mordialloc – the other site considered. Rainfall was low compared with the rest of Melbourne, which meant the land would adapt well to irrigation. Werribee Treatment Farm was also 9 miles (14.4 KM) away from the nearest boundary of the metropolitan district (Williamstown), and 24 miles (38.6 KM) away from the influential and well-to-do suburb of Brighton. The Chirnside family sold 8,857 acres (3.2 hectares) to the Board for 17 pounds per acre.The Earl of Hopetoun, Governor of Victoria, turned the first sod of earth in a ceremony on May 1892, which marked the beginning of the building of the outfall sewer near Werribee.

On 5 February 1898, a ceremony marked the official connection of Melbourne to the new sewerage system. Guests – politicians, Board members, City Councillors and Federal delegates – boarded a steamer to watch the Governor, Lord Brassey, raise the penstock (the partition between the smaller and larger sewers) at the Australian Wharf. They then visited the pumping station at Spotswood and the sewage farm at Werribee. Horses and carts conveyed the 180 guests around the farm.After lunch and toasts, many of which looked forward to the future of a federated Australia, MMBW Chairman Mr Fitzgibbon proudly declared it ‘was not a question of how much the scheme was going to cost, but how much it was going to save in the lives of the citizens. Before the work was completed he hoped to see those puny punsters and petty wits who spoke of Melbourne as Marvellous Smellbourne constrained to speak of her as one of the sweetest and healthiest cities of the world.

Soon after he arrived in September 1839 to take up the position of Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles Joseph La Trobe began setting aside from sale large areas of land near the city that he described as being for ‘the public advantage and recreation’. La Trobe’s vision of a society was one not wholly dominated by commercial interests, but which encouraged and provided for social, educational and religious concerns.The eight major gardens in Melbourne’s inner city are the Royal Botanic, Fitzroy, Carlton, Flagstaff, Treasury, Alexandra and Queen Victoria, as well as Birrarung Marr. Each garden has its own unique history and story to tell.

In 1857, the Gardens’ first full-time Director, Ferdinand von Mueller was appointed. Mueller was to become one of the most acclaimed botanists of the 19th century. Mueller established the Gardens’ scientific centre, The National Herbarium of Victoria, and amassed an extraordinary range of plants from every corner of the world.In 1873 Mueller was succeeded by William Guilfoyle, who set about creating the Gardens’ world-famous ‘picturesque’ landscape style. Guilfoyle sculpted sweeping lawns, meandering paths and glittering lakes, creating a series of vistas offering a surprise around every corner. Guilfoyle was aided in his work by Melbourne’s mild climate, which allows an exotic mix of tropical and temperate plants to be grown.Today, the Gardens are home to more than 51,000 individual plants, representing over 12,000 different species. They are a natural sanctuary for native wild life including black swans, bell birds, cockatoos and kookaburras.The Gardens are owned by the people of Victoria and managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens Board.

Located in East Melbourne, the Fitzroy Gardens are one of the city’s oldest public gardens. Named after Sir Charles FitzRoy, Governor of New South Wales, the land was considered undesirable for building purposes. It was set aside by the government around 1848, upon the advice of Superintendent La Trobe, to be developed as parkland.

Until 1862 the gardens were known as ‘Fitzroy Square’. In 1856 the Melbourne Council commissioned Edward La Trobe Bateman (Charles La Trobe’s cousin) to design a layout for the gardens. His elaborate plan, however, proved too expensive and was never realised.

 

In 1858 Clement Hodgkinson redesigned the gardens, doing away with Bateman’s elaborate symmetry of winding curves, replacing them with vertical, horizontal and diagonal paths. Hodgkinson’s design has often been thought to resemble the Union Jack, but this similarity was not intentional.

 

 Hodgkinson wrote of his planting scheme: 'the chief desiderata were shade along the numerous paths therein forming important lines of traffic, and such dense and continuous masses of foliage as would tend to check the inroad of dust from the adjacent streets. Consequently … strict adherence to the rules of landscape gardening, with regard to the grouping of trees … had to be abandoned in favour of the formal lining in the background of dense masses of conifers, evergreen shrubs, fern trees … small flowering shrubs and bedding flowers being merely introduced to mask the unsightly aspect of the grass in such reserves during summer.'

 

By the 1870s the gardens were much admired and considered the showpiece of Melbourne’s public gardens. Under JT Smith, curator of the Fitzroy Gardens from 1921, changes were made. Many of the Stone Pines and Moreton Bay figs were replaced with lawns planted with Ginko, Limes, Palms and Silver Birch. When the Spanish mission style conservatory opened during the Great Depression, hundreds of people queued up to see the free floral displays.

Early plantings in the gardens comprised of cypresses, pines, gums, wattles, cordylines, poplars and willows. The overall effect was informal and was poorly regarded by the press. In 1870. The Argus reported that 'From end to end of this parallelogram there is little else but the very squalor of vegetation. The Corporation Gardener (WM Hyndman) has seemed always to be contemplating some brilliant success, but never achieving it.'  Argus, 28 April 1870. Hyndman was suspended from duty in 1870, after which management became the responsibility of Clement Hodgkinson, Inspector General of Metropolitan Gardens, Parks and Reserves. Hodgkinson’s hard work was obliterated when the gardens were redesigned for the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition and the central third excised to accommodate Joseph Reed’s Royal Exhibition Building. The northern garden has many fine avenues of oaks, elms and plane trees dating from the period after the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. During the exhibition, the garden had been dug up to make way for exhibits, but was subsequently replanted.

These gardens in the city’s west end were laid out in the early 1860s on Flagstaff Hill, named after the flagstaff erected in 1840 at its highest point to send messages between the town and harbour. For the first few years of European settlement, the hill accommodated Melbourne’s first burial ground until a cemetery was established nearby on the site of the present Queen Victoria Market. 

An early resident, George Gordon McCrae, recalled Flagstaff Hill as a popular meeting place, where the latest ‘news from the Bay’ could be had and fine views enjoyed. It was also popular as a place to fight duels. In 1850 it was the scene of celebrations when news arrived of the impending separation of the Port Phillip District from New South Wales. Not long after, the electric telegraph superseded signalling flags and the hill lost its attraction as a rendezvous. In 1862 West Melbourne residents petitioned the government to transform what had become a derelict hillside into public gardens.

The Alexandra Gardens are located on the south bank of the Yarra River, opposite Federation Square. The gardens are part of the Domain parklands which stretch to the Royal Botanic Gardens and were first laid out in 1901, under the direction of Carlo Catani, Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department. They are listed on the Victorian Heritage Register due to their historical and archaeological significance. Originally this area of the gardens was used for timber cutting, cattle grazing and as a brick-makers’ field. Regular flooding occurred, until a new channel for the Yarra River was dug from 1896 to 1900 to straighten and widen the river. The spoil was used to fill the swampy lagoons and brickmakers pits and to help raise the height of the river bank where the Alexandra Gardens now stand. The gardens were planned and laid out ready for the visit of the Duke of York in May 1901.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the lower reaches of the Yarra flow through Melbourne’s central business district and the Docklands, a regulated canal contained by artificial banks, weaving its way between office and apartment skyscrapers, sprawling industry and port facitlies, and finally emptying out into Port Phillip Bay. 

Water Stories is a Public Record Office Victoria online exhibition. It displays original records from the Victorian government archives to explore the development of the first water storage, the Yan Yean Reservoir, the creation of the four parks that surround the city (Fitzroy, Exhibition, Flagstaff and the Botanic Gardens), the development of an innovative sewerage system for the city at Spotswood and Werribee, and the transformation of the Yarra River from a pristine source of drinking water into a shunned and polluted sewer, and then its slow return to being a central focus for the city.This exhibition can be incorporated in to learning experiences about sustainability, river systems, pollution, human impact on the environment, historical issues surrounding water resources, as well as current environmental concerns and ways to address them. Curriculum connections and classroom ideas are available to accompany the Water Stories exhibition.Water Stories provides students with access to digitised primary sources including records, maps and photographs that provide ways of visually understanding how and why Melbourne’s water supplies, rivers and landscapes developed.Additional ResourcesCulture Victoria aims to deliver access to Victorian cultural collections through:    stories that showcase the richness and diversity of Victoria;    a collections search across the websites and databases of Victorian collecting organisations; and    information on over 700 places in Victoria the hold publicly accessible collections.The following link to Culture Victoria will support learning about Melbourne’s water supply:    Culture Victoria: Melbourne and SmellbourneMelbourne Water website: History of Melbourne’s Water SupplyMichael Cathcart, Water Dreamers: How Water and Silence Made Australia, Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2009.CSIRO, Water for a Healthy Country, a research program addressing one of Australia’s most pressing natural resource issues, the sustainable management of our water resources.Australian Government, Department of Climate Change.Australian Government, Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Water for the Future, a long-term framework to secure the water supply of all Australians.Public warning which appeared on the reverse side of rate notices for the Melbourne water supply in the early 1860s