Mitch Matters: John Pascoe Fawkner a Sorrento settler
HE’s known as the ‘Father of Melbourne’. But did you know about his Peninsula connection?
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THE city of Melbourne turns 183 this week, and again, the man known as a founding father will be honoured.
And yet, as a boy, he was known as little Johnny Fawkner and his home was on the Mornington Peninsula.
One can only imagine what was going through his mind as he stared out from a ship to the untamed bush near modern day Sorrento, where Victoria’s first European settlement was to be established.
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It was October, 1803 and little Johnny was only a few days away from turning 11.
He was on board the 56-gun frigate HMS Calcutta under the command of Lieutenant Colonel David Collins, who’d been sent to start a new settlement in the Port Phillip region.
This ambitious plan was primarily born of panic.
The British Government knew that French scientists were present in Australian waters and could claim some of the continent.
Collins was in charge of 299 male convicts, 16 convicts’ wives, seven children of the convicts, 50 Royal Marines and the civil staff.
Little Johnny was the son of a man who’d been sentenced to 14 years transportation for robbery.
Johnny’s mother and sister were part of the contingent, also trying to start a new life at this strange, brutal place on the other side of the world.
Who could have imagined that this boy, living in a tent, playing on the beach and exploring much of the southern Peninsula, would later return as John Pascoe Fawkner and help build Melbourne into the city it is today, home to 4.9 million people.
Collins was no fan of Sullivan Bay and packed up after just four months to establish Hobart instead.
This was where the hardworking Johnny became boss of the family’s bakery by the age of 22.
With his earnings he had a boat built so that his convict employees, whom he believed were being exploited by officialdom, could escape by sea. Their failed attempt earned Fawkner five hundred lashes and two years’ hard labour.
In 1816 he resumed his baker’s shop, but also began to sell liquor without a licence.
Three years later, possibly keen for new surroundings, he moved north to Launceston, and built the town’s first two-storey house, which he ran as the Cornwall Arms Hotel.
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Here, he crossed paths with a sheep farmer of some influence in the north of Van Diemen’s Land, John Batman, who’d had his eye on Port Phillip pastures during the 1820s.
For Fawkner and Batman, it was the start of a great rivalry.
It was indeed Batman who stood beside the Yarra in 1835 and uttered the immortal words, “This will be the place for a village,” but Fawkner’s footprints weren’t far behind.
He built the colony’s first hotel and published its first newspaper.
Fawkner purchased the first parcels of land, brought education and the arts, was elected the first councillor and member of the first Legislative Council.
Disfigured and disabled from syphilis, contracted in the brothels of Van Diemens Land, Batman died almost penniless at 38, less than four years after first standing beside the Yarra.
In stark contrast, all shops and offices were closed for Fawkner’s two-mile long funeral cortege, after his death in 1869 at the age of 76.
From Port Phillip’s first European settlement to the ‘Father of Melbourne’ it was a fitting farewell for John Pascoe Fawkner.
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