Annear - Bearbrass : imagining early Melbourne

In her history of the London suburb of Kentish Town, Gillian Tindall wrote:

just because you transfer the descendants of ploughmen to paved streets or turn villages into urban areas, you do not in fact alter human beings; they will still make their villages where they can.*

When I lived there, I made Melbourne my village. Im not talking about suburban Melbourne, where rusticity can be as close as the corner shop: a few Scotch thistles, a galvanised iron fence and a flickering Peters ice cream cone can work magic on your sense of time and place. I made my village of central Melbourne and its a village that takes some finding. I think of it as Bearbrass.

* Gillian Tindall, The Fields Beneath: The history of one London village, Paladin Books, London, 1980 (new ed. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002)

Bearbrass was one of the names by which Melbourne was known in its early days apparently a mis-rendering of Birrarung, meaning river of mists in the language of the Wurundjeri people. Other variations tried out by the settlers included Bareport, Bareheep, Barehurp, and Bareberp. In my imagination, Ive raised again the village (or the Township, as it was called) that was early Melbourne, whose physical traces have been almost entirely displaced and pulverised by the out-gougings and up-thrustings of the Melbourne we see today.

Let me clarify what I mean by early Melbourne. Im talking of the period from the arrival of white settlers in 1835 until 1851 when the first gold rushes shook the town. Long before 1851, of course, Melbourne had grown well beyond a township, but its era of grandeur and Marvellousness was still far in the future: the Block was a quagmire and Collins Street had no Paris end. Early Melbourne was a different place thats why I prefer to think of it as Bearbrass.

What fascinates me most is the shaping of the place, and its resistance to shaping. As soon as settlement commenced, the government, judiciary and men who called themselves masters did their best to make the place proper and meek and profitable. Their attempts and successes are well documented by historians, as are the men themselves. But the ground itself resisted tree stumps held fast where thoroughfares were intended and so, to a large extent, did common inhabitants of the town. This book is about the streetlife of Bearbrass the people on the streets, the buildings on the streets, and those unyielding streets themselves.

I subtitled this book Imagining Early Melbourne to make it clear that this is not a conventional history. Im no historian; thoroughness and authority are not qualities I can lay claim to. This book about Bearbrass, the earliest Melbourne, is sometimes inaccurate, unfactual and fanciful apocryphal, in fact. But apocrypha can also refer to something hidden, a secret, and I wanted to convey that element, too. Bearbrass is a hidden place; it relies for its existence on the imagination of the observer. It is my hope that readers of this book will carry their awareness of Bearbrass with them when they visit central Melbourne, and so rebuild the township. And just as Ive overlaid Bearbrass with my impressions and experiences of the modern city, so readers will add their own snickleways, divergences and sacred sites the wall that supported an ancient knee-trembler, the now-defunct cake shop that once sold the best Neenish tarts in town, the grate that ate your stiletto heel as you hurried to a big date and so on. Remember, they will still make their villages where they can.

This book is intended, most of all, as a counterbalance to modern Melbourne, as a way of saying: There is more to the place than carparks, concrete and cafs. And if I see just one person wearing an inexplicable smirk in Market Street or near Spencer Street station, Ill know this book has achieved its purpose Ill know that theyre imagining Bearbrass.

1. Batmans Hill

2. Mooring place of the Enterprise , August 1835

3. Yarra Falls

4. Site of Enterprise settlers first huts