Geelong's Changing Landscape

Ecology, Development and Conservation

David S. Jones, Phillip B. Roös, David S. Jones, Phillip B. Roös

• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780643103627
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Geelong's Changing Landscape offers an insightful investigation of the ecological history of the Geelong and Bellarine Peninsula region. Commencing with the penetrating perspectives of Wadawurrung Elders, chapters explore colonisation and post-World War II industrial development through to the present challenges surrounding the ongoing urbanisation of this region.

Expert contributors provide thoughtful analysis of the ecological and cultural characteristics of the landscape, the impact of past actions, and options for ethical future management of the region. This book will be of value to scientists, engineers, land use planners, environmentalists and historians.

Winner, Planning Institute of Australia Awards for Planning Excellence 2020 (Victoria): Cutting Edge Research and Teaching
Shortlisted, 2020 Victorian Community History Awards: Collaborative Community History Award

1

Geelong: Djilang – a tapestry of histories, voices and ecologies

David S. Jones and Phillip B. Roös

Introducing the tapestry

This is the description of the country: ‘Beautiful land, and all good sheep country, rather sandy, but the sand black and rich, covered with kangaroo grass about ten inches high, and as green as a field of wheat, beautiful plains, excellent land, &c.’

On the Saturday he has more to say in praise. ‘Good hay could be made, and in any quantity. I never saw anything equal to the land in my life. I was never so astonished in my life.’ On the Friday they had walked but twelve miles, but on the Saturday twenty. They had anchored about St. Leonard’s, wandered over the Bellerine hills, and beheld the magnificent Geelong plains. Not astonishing that he said: ‘From what I have seen I am quite delighted with Port Phillip’.

– Batman in Bonwick (1867, p. 14).

In traversing the uplands of the Bellarine Peninsula and thence skirting Corio Bay in 1837, adventurer John Batman recorded the above observations of a verdant Elysian landscape fit for pastoral colonisation. This was the landscape of the Bengalat balug and Wada wurrung balug clans of the Wadawurrung peoples whom had long resided here (Clark 1990; CoGG 2014), and a place that in the future would witness western innovation and industry creating the Geelong we know today.

The following year surveyors Garrard and Shaw (Plate 1.1) prepared and published a map of the town and suburbs of Geelong comprising the lands in the parishes of Gheringhap, Moorpanyal, Barrabool, Duneed, Moolap, Bellerine and Pawit, together with the positions of the bar and the proposed improvements, that sets forth the first colonisation development vision for this landscape. Senbergs has offered a frightening visual projection of what Geelong could have been like if it had become the capital of Victoria (Plate 1.2).

This book seeks to translate the historical evolution of Geelong, with a particular emphasis upon its natural and cultural values, their tensions with accommodating growth and ‘advancement’, and the ideas and visions that created contemporary Geelong and are shaping its trajectory today. The book narration involves a survey of these tapestry threads supported by extensive referencing to enable readers to journey more deeply. Its chapters are written by a team of authors who are passionate about their topics, how they fit into the tapestry, and understand the need to respect these topics as Geelong ventures into the future. In moving forward, irrespective of institutional approved strategic plans, of scientific appraisals of ecological attributes and the sensitivity of places and ecologies, and of the cultural values of people and the meanings they ascribe to places, we need to appreciate the past of a place, appraise the human and ecological values and attributes of a place, and consider the decisions that informed place transformation. We need to take heed of these while at the same time setting forth a vision scaffolded carefully from all these variables. This approach is necessary so that we do not compromise the human ecological values and characteristics of place that would otherwise result in its despoliation.

This book offers insights and a translation of these human and ecological values and characteristics as they pertain to the wider Geelong landscape, as well as offering several warnings to be heeded.

What is evident is that the Geelong–Bellarine Peninsula–Surf Coast region is collectively experiencing exponential urbanisation. With urbanisation comes tensions as to physical and social infrastructure and provision, stresses upon terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their wildlife residents, and haphazard governance decision-making influenced by political expediency rather than long-term visions and equity. What suffers is the landscape, the place, Country, which more often is compromised in the name of development and sustainability despite the best intentions of vision-makers, land use planners and their plans. Thus, the very essence of what makes the qualities of Geelong can be compromised by these processes and deliberations, wilting the very reasons why humans consciously seek to shift and reside there, enjoy its lifestyle and believe in its future.

North American academic Ian McHarg (1920–2001) once stated, ‘Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the Earth’ (McHarg 1965). The legacy of our human actions in shaping and transforming planet Earth, let alone this corner of the Australian continent, have all been subject to human interventions, ‘management’, and ‘care’ irrespective whether pre-colonisation or post-colonisation. A key facet in our collective vision should be to care, to renourish, and to look to the health of our landscapes, our Country, our peoples.

Wadawurrung Elder Uncle Bryon Powell has observed, ‘From the headwaters down to where it joins with the Barwon River, the Moorabool River tells us if Country is well. Look at the sky, look for Bunjil, where the eagles fly we know the river is healthy’. As Geelong residents and visitors, we have an individual and collective responsibility to read and listen to this Country, to sensitively enable development at the same time as healing and caring for the place (Powell 2018).

As North American author Wallace Stegner (1909–93) has written: ‘We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause of fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy’ (Stegner in Fradkin 2009, p. 184).

The responsibility is in our hands. We reside within the legacy of the past – the vision of the future and the wildlife of our landscapes are what we leave to our children.

Narrating the tapestry

As co-authors of this publication, we both came to the Geelong region with fresh eyes and a desire to understand its landscape mosaic or tapestry. In many ways, this learning was a struggle. Not because of what was physically evident, planted, constructed, painted, dying, moving or plastered on signboards, but because there was a dearth of textual and oral resources that coalesced in explaining ‘why it is so’.

The lack of comprehensive or accessible literature, reports, scientific assessments or longevity of thought and insightful memories and oral coffee sessions was both frustrating and daunting.

This is not to say that individual local municipal area histories were not comprehensive (Brownhill 1990; Hundt 1971; Seaton 1978, 1983; Wynd 1971, 1981, 1988, 1992), nor that there was a lack of natural science overviews of the region (Dahlhaus et al. 2007; Pescott 1983, 1988, 1995, 2017; Wood 1878–1959), or that there were no isolated and exceedingly helpful specialised publications about Geelong-based topics (CoGG 2014) or that there were not several insightful architectural (Buchan Group 1980; Page 1990), landscape architectural (Lethlean 2013), Wadawurrung culture (CoGG 2014; Ferrier 1992; Pascoe 1997, 2003, 2007), archaeology (Rhoads 1986; Richards and Jordan 1999), cultural heritage (McLean 2005; Rowe 2002, 2016; Rowe and Huddle 2000; Rowe and Jacobs 2007, 2010, 2014–2016, 2016; Mary Sheehan and Associates 2003; Willingham 1986), natural resource management (CoGG 2018a) and urban planning-related (Almeida Correia and Denham 2016; CoGG 1994; G21 GRA 2018) references, but that they were more often topic-specific, lacked a holistic perspective, were increasingly dated, or were little known and of limited copy issue despite their locations on various websites.

This became the kernel of the rationale of this book – the need to synthesise much of this little accessible knowledge into one text to aid residents, visitors and students alike in better ‘reading’ and understanding this burgeoning place.

The scope of this discussion treats Geelong as encompassing the volcanic plains up to the You Yangs and Werribee River, across the middle and lower catchments of the Barwon and Moorabool rivers, from the eastern portion of the Otway Ranges from Aireys Inlet east, and the larger lands and waters of the Bellarine Peninsula. By colloquial terminology, it is ‘Geelong and the Surf Coast’.

In the Wadawurrung lens, is it the clan territories of the Bengalat balug, Wada Wurrung balug, Neerer balug, Yaawangil balug, Gerarlture balug and the Mon Mart balug peoples (CoGG 2014), and to us it is ‘home’.

Surveying the tapestry

Geelong, or Djilang in Wadawurrung language, is nestled on the south-western edge of Port Phillip Bay, inside Corio Bay. Uniquely in Australia, it is a city with a north-facing marine outlook.

Its Wadawurrung legacy lies in intensive Living Stations of occupancy encampments that offered reliable and rich food harvests, and thus the need for infrequent movements and greater permanency of residency. Some 40 000–60 000 years ago, the Wadawurrung settled across this region. They established a particular civilisation that had little reliance on physical manifestations and buildings, instead formulating a sustainable landscape management relationship built upon careful resource use and respectful human engagements through commonality.

From ~1800 European explorers, military, whalers and sealers, and adventurers set foot on this landscape with aspirations, sheep, cattle, guns, axes and a desire to ‘develop’, blinkered with personal economic gain. Names like Murray, Flinders, Hume, Hovell, Collins, Batman and Buckley litter contemporary regional and Port Phillip Bay histories and nomenclature as the ‘discoverers’ who ‘found this landscape’. Key places often mentioned in these histories are Geelong, Sorrento, Freshwater Creek, Indented Head, Queenscliff, Hovells Creek, Breamlea, Corio Bay, Point Henry and the You Yangs. It was in March 1836 that squatters formally arrived in Geelong with flocks of sheep, thus commencing ‘settlement’ and land clearance there. In October 1838, Assistant Surveyor W.H. Smythe surveyed the town plan of Geelong, a north–south oriented grid rectangle stretching from the bay to the river, using the mathematical survey template previously applied in the east–west survey of Melbourne. From the mid 1830s personalities like Fisher, Manifold, Strachan, Russell, Thomson, Smythe, Fyans and La Trobe forged Geelong’s initial development, enabling a governance system, the construction of wharfs, warehouses, the breakwater, bridges, steamship services, wool export businesses and lime extraction.

Invention and initiative were propitious at this time. Newspapers were established, wool treatment systems were pioneered, the world’s first ether vapour compression cycle ice-maker and refrigerator were invented, the first shipping channel was dredged in Port Phillip Bay, the first rabbits were introduced into Australia via Geelong, and the smell of gold at Ballarat opened Geelong up to the international shipping community.

Over the course of the 1850s to 1900 Geelong established itself as a city, a key wool export port and woollen mill venue, a regional railway node, a viticulture venue and an educational venue (with the advent of the Gordon Memorial Technical College, commemorating General Charles Gordon who died at Khartoum in January 1885). The threads of industrialisation and industrial processing were evident in this period even before the construction of major installations from 1900 to the 1970s that established its reputation as a blue-collar industrial centre. Sewerage, lights, tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Contents
• Acknowledgement of Country
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Geelong: Djilang – a tapestry of histories, voices and ecologies
• Part 1 Environmental history of the Geelong region
• 2 The lay of the land: the geological evolution of the landscape
• 3 Pre-European vegetation in the Geelong region
• 4 Welcome to Wadawurrung Country
• Colour plates
• 5 Djilang, Corayo and beyond: the Geelong region landscape and its European transformation
• Part 2 Ecology of the Geelong region
• 6 Vegetation changes since European arrival
• 7 The ecological history of the Bellarine Peninsula: native plant associations before 1835
• 8 Riverine ecology
• 9 Marine and coastal environments
• Part 3 Humans as agents of change in the Geelong region1
• 10 Key ecological principles adapted for regional green infrastructure
• 11 A landscape at risk
• 12 The Geelong suburban dream: origins, history and future
• 13 Greater Geelong’s planning future to 2050: determining spatial outcomes through agricultural land planning
• 14 Emerging cultures
• 15 The post-industrial landscape of Geelong
• 16 Event, fall, return and the transformation of sites: a diagnosis for Point Henry
• 17 The promise of vision-making a city: a perpetual journey
• 18 Land use planning challenges facing the Geelong region in the next 10–20 years
• 19 Ensuring a quality future for the tapestry of Geelong
• Index