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!n March 1802, Lt Murray took forma) possession of his discoveries, raising a new flag called
the Union Jack - the first time it was to fly over any part of the British Empire.
Murray was followed ashore in May by Matthew Flinders, eastward bound around Australia.
He climbed hiils, the better to assess the unknown country, and from the highest peak of the
You Yangs, which he named Station Peak (later it was renamed after him), he looked south to
Corio Bay and the land that would within a hundred years contain the second largest city in
Victoria - Geeiong. He liked what he saw. The land had 'a pleasing and in many parts a fertile
appearance' and was 'capable of supporting much cattle, though better calculated for sheep'.
Flinders was then 28, a vigorous and prescient Scot, who would be arrested by the French
when his ship later Sanded at Mauritius {France and England were then at war). He was
imprisoned there for six years. Released in 1810, he returned to England, dying there four years
later.
Governor Phiiip Gidley King in New South Wales, already locking for a new site for a convict
settlement and keen to forestall French colonial interest in the southern coast, had the area of
Port Phillip Bay surveyed in January 1803, and a hastily assembled expedition was sent by the
British Government to lay claim to the land.
It arrived in October: two ships, the Ocean and Calcutta., containing over 300 convicts, plus
wives and children, 45 settlers and their families, and 50 soldiers. The colonists were led by Lt
Col David Collins, who chose a pretty bay on the southern arm of Port Phillip Bay as a
settlement. It was east of the Rip and near what is now Sorrento. He called it Sullivan Bay.
Some seven months later the settlement, the first in Victoria, was abandoned, and the
community sailed south across the Bass Strait to the colder, wetter climes of Van Diemen's
Land, to another pretty place, where a camp had been set up by Lt John Bowen, acting on
orders similar to those given to Collins, in September 1803. This settlement was in the south of
the island at the mouth of a river, and was called Hobart. It became the second oldest state
capital after Sydney, and the smallest and most southerly. In due course, Collins became the
first Governor of Van Diemen's Land.
Sullivan Bay lapsed into nonentity. Its moment had passed; it would never be a town, nor a
significant name on any map. Collins had concluded that the location for various reasons was
ultimately unsuitable for a settlement, and for some reason, no other site, of the many around the
bay possessing better supplies of water and better soil, was chosen, although one of Collins'
lieutenants, exploring Corio Bay, had declared it to be 'a perfectly secure and commodious
harbour'.
Lt Tuckey added in his report: 'At the head of the harbour, the land rises from abrupt cliffs to
downs.' And there he landed, the first European to stand in a
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wood of gum-trees, that would nearly all be felted within 40 years, and where the citizens of
modern Geelong now conduct their busy lives. Further north, Tuckey's crew encountered some
aborigines. Gifts were exchanged, but some contretemps resulted and an aborigine died, the first
to be killed in Victoria by a white man.
Thenceforth, for 20 years, the whole area slumbered on in Stone Age simplicity, undisturbed by
no white man - apart from one.
William Buckley was one of three convicts who had escaped in 1804 from the aborted colony
at Sullivan Bay; he was 23. Somehow he survived, walking right round Port Phillip Bay until he
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