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Now and then boats from the shore came alongside, and soon a steamer... Now we were
actually at our destination and in the evening, it was very pleasant on deck.'
That was in August 1854. Melbourne in 1850, like Adelaide, was still something of a mess,
much like a Wild West town, with wooden shacks, huts and tents, dotted about or crammed
together. Stone buildings were few; the few wide streets were unpaved; trees for miies around
had been felled. Sited two and a half miles inland on the Yarra River by John Batman, a sheep
farmer from Van Diemen's Land, in 1835, it had been surveyed two years later and named
Melbourne after the British prime minister.
The Sea Queen would have anchored off Sandridge in Hobson's Bay, an indentation of Port
Phillip Bay that contained the mouth of the Yarra. Beyond was a promontory overbuilt with the
marine warehouses and shanties of Williamstown.
It was Sunday, 7 July, 1850, and the Honeycombes had arrived.
They left the ship on Monday, 8 July.
Like most if not all of the passengers they would have paid to be rowed with their possessions
to a jetty at Williamstown or Sandridge, from where most would then clamber onto a small
steamer that would take them up the nine miles of the curving Yarra to Melbourne, to one of the
many wharves that jammed the river's north bank, beside the grid of congested streets that
formed the nucleus of the muddled, messy new town.
Edward Webster wrote in 1857: 'A steamer came and took us with our luggage up the Yarra to
Cole's Wharf at Melbourne... It was an amusing sight to see us all assembled on the wharf, our
luggage around us. looking for all the world like so many birds who had escaped from their
cage, and did not know
where to fly to: each stood asking advice of his neighbour, one proposing this thing and another
that'
John Mereweather wrote on 8 July: 'Left the Sea Queen, after bidding farewell to the amiable
Captain, and went aboard a small river steamer at 8 am. Steamed up the Yarra Yarra, whose
banks are very ugly. They are low, covered with sad-looking, short scrub, and studded with
boiling-down establishments, which circumfuse most fetid odours. In about a couple of hours
we arrived at Melbourne, a considerable town, sufficiently well situated on two hills and the
intervening valley. The main streets are wide - too wide, if anything - and the drainage ought to
be perfect. The river is spanned by a handsome stone bridge of one arch. The streets are
infested by enormous dogs, who thrive here on the cheap butchers' meat Went to a very
excellent hotel called the Prince of Wales, where I dined and slept.'
The Honeycombes' lodging would not have been so comfortable. Where did they go? Where
did they spend their first night in Melbourne?
Or did they already have a local person's name and an address? They had to find a lodging for
that wintry night, and for the next few weeks, while they accustomed themselves to their
whereabouts and to the strangeness, not only of being ashore, but of attending the birth of a new
city and a colony, and a new way of life.
There was much to do, to learn, to organise; and William and Henry, stonemasons, must find a
job. Or did they already have one? Then there was food to cook, a fire to light, damp clothes to
be dried, damaged goods to discard, and time taken for a drink and a rest.
At some moment that night, by candle-light, they would have looked at each other, like all new
arrivals, with doubt and some regret. Why had they come here - all that way? And for what?
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