which were tolerably well patronised by the sailors and boatmen knocking about, and such Melbournians as were disposed on fine evenings to undertake a pedestrian trip to the beach, to inhale the ozone, supplemented with a nip of the not over-proof rum or brandy which the seaside Taverners kept on draught.
Sandridge was very appropriately named by the Provincial Superintendent (Mr. Latrobe), for it was a veritable sand-hole when first visited by Europeans, and a barrel daubed with white paint had to be hoisted to a tree-trunk as afinger-postto point the way to Melbourne. The first civilised habitation there was a tent pitched on the wild beach, by an enterprising colonist named Liardet, some of whose family are still amongst us. The tent soon gave way to a tavern, another "pub" shortly sprang up a few yards off, and then an occasional house or two. When the corporate orbit of Melbourne was enlarged, Sandridge became one of the municipal adjuncts, and a troublesome and unprofitable one it was. The gold discoveries gave it a shove along, infused some life into what was almost moribund, and in process of time it expanded into a separate municipality, and thenceforth became a thriving town. Whoever had the naming of its streets made a sad mess of it, for with the exception of Liardet (the earliest inhabitant), Mr. Peter Lalor, Ex-Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Mr. James Carton, an old Sandridgite, and Mr. Inglis, an enterprising resident, the nomenclature was distributed amongst a batch of local mediocrities. Certainly they have amongst them a Pickles Street—no misnomer considering the briny nature of the place; but if there was any respect entertained for thefitnessof things, to make the pickles go well, the streets should be grafted with a "pork," "cabbage," "onions," or "cold beef" street, but such an alliance seems never to have been once thought of. Sandridge, with the surrounding district, is believed to have formed at some remote period a delta of the Yarra, which discharged into the sea through the old lagoon, and from Sandridge to Emerald Hill by this route was not a pleasant, though not a distant stroll, for almost every step of the way one was more than ankle deep in sand.
Several of the localities around Melbourne were named after well-known and cherished spots in the old country; and the only one whose nomenclature has given rise to newspaper controversy is Emerald Hill. This once beautiful eminence which rivalled Batman's Hill, and much exceeded it in size, was the grazing ground of the kangaroo, until a sheep station and the strange looking animals accompanying it, scared them away. Captain Lonsdale is said to have purchased 200 lambs at two guineas each, and turned them out on the hill to depasture. It was at all times a favourite trysting-place of the blacks, who held corroborees and native dances there, a pantomimic performance occasionally witnessed by the Melbournians on fine summer nights. It was known simply as "the green hill over the Yarra" until 1849, when for the first time it was styled "Emerald Hill" by Mr. Edmund Finn,[1] a Melbourne journalist, in a notice written by him, announcing that a picnic of the Father Matthew Society would be held there on a certain day. At the time no name could be more appropriate, for it was as green as if it had been by some miraculous agency imported in globo, but shamrockless, from the Emerald Isle.
In after years when the verdure had been annihilated by bricks and mortar, builders, carpenters, and plasterers, an attempt was made to change the name to Clarkestown after Sir. A. Clarke, one of the most active agents in the introduction to the colony of the system of Local Self-Government, but so much disfavour of the innovation was shown by the Hillites that the project was abandoned. The Hill, though a picturesque and beautiful place in itself, was surrounded by swamps, and deemed a rather unhealthy locality. On the flat between it and the Yarra, Mr. J. P. Fawkner performed the agricultural feat of planting a crop of wheat, and this wheatfieid was afterwards transformed into the more payable "spec" of a brickfield, the bricks from which many of the earlier brickwalled houses were built. The brickfield remained for some years, until thrust out of the market by the brick kilns of other more suitable places, and is now being gradually taken up as sites for brick-residences of every kind and degree, and breweries, factories, and manufactories of the most mixed kind. Some future day, one of those terrible floods, more than once seen by old colonists, will come tumbling down from the Upper Yarra Ranges, and sweep one half of the modern improvements into the sea.
The first Government sale of land at Emerald Hill took place in 1849, but there was not much request for the building allotments. After a little time the demand sharpened, and the events of the few
- ↑ "Garryowen."
