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river which he named the Murray. He followed the conjoined rivers, past their union with the
Darling River, until he reached the salty expanse of Lake Alexandrina and the Southern Ocean.
The expedition returned whence it came, reaching Sydney in May 1830, having travelled 2,735
kilometres in seven months.
The mystery of the west-flowing rivers was thus solved, and within 20 years, all the waterways
of the complex Murray/Darling River system were identified and explored, and graziers began
occupying the hinterland through which the rivers flowed, navigable for thousands of miles.
In 1842, when still part of the Colony of New South Wales, the district west of Echuca (which
still had no name or existence) was divided up. Two of the large runs, called Torrumbarry and
Wharparilla, were taken respectively by the Collyer brothers and by John Bett and George
Mather, the common boundary of their properties being marked by a chock and log fence
running north and south along a low ridge some 500 yards west of Wharparilla Road.
The Wharparilla run was gazetted in October 1848 as a Western Port Run, No 13, of 76,000
acres and carrying 12,000 sheep. But Bett and Mather can have made little impression on the
12 square miles of bush they owned. Even it they laid some of it waste with fire, the clearing of
the charred ground, the uprooting of every tree, would have taken them years to accomplish.
For the
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land, though flat, was heavily wooded, liable to be flooded, and as primitive as the conditions in
which the first settlers must have lived.
However, the Port Phillip settlement down south was growing apace and avid for
independence, ungoverned by the administrators in Sydney, This was achieved when the colony
of Victoria came into being in July 1851, with a population comprising 80,000 white settlers and
6 million sheep.
A year before this, an enterprising ex-Tasmanian convict, Henry Hopwood, had bought a punt
and began ferrying people and goods across the Murray River, near its confluence with the
Campaspe and Goulburn Rivers. This was also the closest point on the Murray to Melbourne.
The resulting settlement on the south bank, known at first as Hopwood's Ferry, was renamed
Echuca -the Anglicised version of an aboriginal word meaning 'Waters-meet'.
Within three years the first paddle-steamer, the Mary Ann, appeared on the scene, opening a
way to South Australia and the sea. Commerce and some comforts of urban life were
established among the gum trees, as brick buildings, houses, hotels, churches, stores, took
shape, replacing tents and huts.
In 1858 Hopwood built the Bridge Hotel, and when he died in 1869, he left a thriving town,
now linked to Melbourne by a railway. This in turn linked up with the steamboats and paddle-
steamers that had begun surging up and down the Murray in 1853, bearing increasing amounts
of settlers, timber and wool. By 1863 there were 20 of them, and Echuca had a population of
300.
Less than 10 years after that the population topped 1600, and Echuca was Victoria's second
largest port, though deep inland, with 240 boats a year tying up at its red-gum wharves.
Meanwhile, pressure groups in Melbourne sought to have the large original runs dismantled and
made available to all. As a result, several Land Acts were passed in the 1860's that took away
the tenure of the land from those squatters who had unofficially occupied it in the 40's.
The Land Act of 1869 enabled settlers like William Honeycombe to gain possession of 320-
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