Issue 35 October 2005
Secrets of the Yarra
The way we were: An 1864 lithograph of Queen's Wharf looking up Market Street to Collins Street, etched and drawn by Francois Cogne.
By permission of the National Library of Austral
How very typical of Melbourne that the Yarra's treasures are not flashily on display but, mostly, discreetly hidden. And what an extraordinary river it is, for its many extremes, and historical causes and effects.
Melbourne was founded where it was because of the river. Where Queens Bridge is now was once a low rocky falls separating the freshwater upstream - which became a continual water supply - from the saltwater below, where early settlers could sail up and moor their ships. It was the logical spot to build a city. (The falls were blown away in the 1880s, extending saltwater reach up to Dights Falls.)
Before it was known as Melbourne, the area was defined by the river. Where water fell on the ground and ended up via creeks or other rivers in the Yarra was Wurundjeri land. The boundaries of their country were those of the catchment.
Batman's surveyor, John Wedge, named the river 'Yarra' in a brilliant mistake. He overheard some Kulin - the nation the Wurundjeri belong to - using this word at the falls. They were referring to the pattern of flow in the water. 'Yarra' as part of another word may also refer to the pattern of flow in a man's beard, or tide surging on a beach.
Wurundjeri life revolved around the river and its apparently endless food and water supply in various seasons: fish, duck, eel, greens, roo and possum. Particularly important sites for large corroborees and meetings were the former billabong in the Botanic Gardens, the Merri Creek confluence, Bolin Bolin Billabong (in what is now Bulleen), Pound Bend and Yering Station.
The Yarra originally featured billabongs all the way from the mountains to the city. In the stretch between Darebin Creek and Burke Road, there were about 50. Only a few survive today.
So many things thought of as outback experiences used to be found in what is now suburban Melbourne.
Below the falls at the Queens Bridge site were salt lakes and wetlands. The largest, known as West Melbourne Swamp, the Blue Lagoon or Lake Lonsdale, covered an area as big as the city's central grid.
The swamp was such a rich wetland that when John Batman walked by it, he described seeing a thousand quail in the air at the one time. Other visitors noted a 'belt of magenta fire' around it - that was the pigface in bloom - and yellow Myrniong flowers, the root of which were a major food source all over Victoria. All gone.
We've even managed to make some Yarra creeks disappear, generally into underground drains. Some have sportsgrounds on top; others even have a major city street. Photographs taken in 1972 during one of the last big floods show an inland waterway on Elizabeth Street with waves breaking on the steps of the now departed General Post Office or GPO.
The Yarra has given us some of the best drinking water in the world. Those fantastic forests of the Great Dividing Range that Robert Hoddle struggled through to get to the source of the river in 1845 are now part of a closed catchment. Luckily for us, the catchment exists purely to provide pristine water for this great city; truly Melbourne water.
The biggest waterfall in Victoria, Yarra Falls, can be found there on one of the headwater streams, cascading through 300-odd metres. The tallest tree in the world - according to the Guinness Book of Records - was measured as a fallen giant in one of those catchments in the 19th century.
At the same time down the other end of the river, the Yarra was one of the most disgusting streams on the planet. All the abattoirs' blood and guts, the fall-off from the tanneries, the globs of fat from the carcass renderers, and raw sewage from the odd suburb's worth of people flowed in or stagnated. Even in 1970 Prince Charles wondered if it was one of the dirtiest rivers he'd seen.
An enormous amount of work has been done since, in a complex process directed and carried out by Melbourne Water crews. Considering one and a half million people are busily living in the river's catchment, the Yarra is surprisingly clean.
Some interesting records have been set in the river. In 1918 the world's highest dive was recorded by Alec Wickham off a tower in Studley Park and several long-distance swimming records were set in the early 1900s by the million dollar mermaid with the medically certified perfect body, Annette Kellerman. Even Harry Houdini jumped off Queens Bridge - chained, padlocked and cuffed - in an escape act from Yarra mud in 1910.
The first flight in Australia took place at Cremorne - now under the Monash Freeway in Richmond - in 1858 withEnglish aeronaut Joseph Dean and his gas balloon. Pleasure gardens there had fireworks, fountains, dancing, drinking, fortune telling, waxworks, a shooting gallery and vaudeville, among other things.
Not much further downstream is the site of the Henley Regatta. By the 1920s Henley drew about 250,000 people. It was held on the Saturday afternoon before the Melbourne Cup, downstream from where Swan Street Bridge is now. The 1930s judge's box is still to be found at the end of the straight close to the boatsheds.
Nearby, the prettiest bridge over the Yarra was completed on dry land, in about 1900. Morell Bridge was part of the river-rerouting scheme that cut off a few bends and saw one of them transformed into a lake in the Botanic Gardens.
The largest river resection was the Coode Scheme, making the lowest stretch of the Maribyrnong River as we know it out of an original Yarra northward loop, and burying the rest. Coode Canal, entirely artificial, replaced the Yarra from what we see now as the two rivers' confluence up to around Bolte Bridge, cutting the trip to port by one kilometre.
We've worked the river pretty hard. Australia's breakfast, beer and art have all come from its banks.
The hydro power that drove the Sanitarium Weet-Bix factory in Warburton came from the same flow that in the 1880s pushed the hydraulics of the first lifts in Melbourne, enabling the tallest building in the country to be built: the 12-storey Australia building on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane (some say it was the tallest in the world).
From the reliability of Carlton United beers to the beauty of the Heidelberg School painters, Yarra waters and landscapes are a common element. Unfortunately, the beauty cannot always be reproduced.
Kristin Otto: Yarra - a diverting history of Melbourne's murky river (Text Publishing), $32