97 



forty, while the anticipated importance of the city was latent but 

 undeveloped, and left the prosecution of his claims to alien hands. 

 Fawkner, who lived to exceed the allotted span of years, and was 

 rewarded by his fellow-colonists with Legislative honours, spent a 

 large portion of his later years in persistently proclaiming his own 

 individual rights to be regarded as the creator of the community, 

 and in as incessantly deriding the pretensions of his deceased rival. 

 The fact is that the rivalry grew out of the animosity engendered 

 by greed, and the claim to pose as public benefactors is so in- 

 herently absurd, that the wild enthusiasm which greeted Fawkner 

 as the " Father of the Colony " and the " Founder of Melbourne " 

 is only to be explained on the ground that the original condition of 

 affairs was lost sight of in contemplating the great development 

 which had sprung from an insignificant fact. The world is gener- 

 ally ready to accord to an energetic and assertive man the status 

 which he claims for himself, but the calm investigator of facts, 

 uninfluenced by the personal presence, often reverses the popular 

 verdict. Any one now reading the various speeches, lectures and 

 articles wherein Fawkner advanced his claims with audacious 

 egotism, and with slanderous vituperation against all and sundry 

 who dared to controvert them, will naturally conclude that such an 

 amount of violent assertiveness could hardly have been required in 

 a good cause. 



If the term founder is properly applied to the first permanent 

 settler in a colony, then the little band of whalers and sheep 

 breeders at Portland Bay, who had reaped their crops within 

 Victorian territory before Fawkner had proposed to leave Laun- 

 ceston, are undoubtedly entitled to the appellation. And as to the 

 merit of selecting the site of the City of Melbourne, it was only by 

 the merest chance that the party which Fawkner sent over afforded 

 him the opportunity of vicariously claiming it. So far back as 

 1803 it had been indicated by Mr. Surveyor Grimes as the most 

 suitable place in Port Phillip, but as recently as June, 1835, it had 

 been marked by Batman on his rude chart as " reserved for a 

 township". The primary aid of Fawkner's colonising experiment 

 was not directed to the Yarra at all. His instructions to the pre- 

 liminary contingent he sent off in the Enterprise were to visit and 

 VOL. i. 7 



