On this day 175 years ago, a group of people from the schooner Enterprize disembarked near the mouth of the Yarra River to start a settlement. The Enterprize was owned by John Pascoe Fawkner, a Tasmania publican who was the son of a convict and had himself spent some time in jail. Fawkner did not arrive until two months after the settlement began because he was detained in Launceston because of seasickness and money owed to creditors.
The new settlement was known as Bearbrass, which is thought to have been a mispronunciation of the aboriginal name Birrarung. Fawkner’s party was joined by a rival group of settlers financed by John Batman, who had previously “purchased” 600,000 acres of land from the Aboriginals in exchange for a range of trinkets. Batman’s group included William Buckley, who had escaped from a convict settlement at Sorrento some 32 years previously then lived with a group of Aboriginal people who mistook him for a recently deceased relative returned from the dead.
The settlement of Bearbrass was renamed Melbourne two years later, in honour of the then British Prime Minister, the Viscount Melbourne. After another ten years, Queen Victoria issued letters patent declaring Melbourne to be a city, and four years after that, in the same year that the gold rush commenced, the colony of Victoria became a separate colony from that of New South Wales. Three decades later, the city was the richest in the world and the second largest in the British Empire.