98 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



examine Western Port, and failing any satisfactory discovery there 

 to proceed to Port Phillip, and if possible found a settlement on the 

 eastern shore of the bay, but not to finally settle down except upon 

 a river bank, or where there was a copious supply of fresh water. 

 The most careful search failed to discover these conditions at the 

 places indicated, and having arrived in Hobson's Bay, the mouth of 

 the Yarra was found and entered, and the site at the old falls fixed 

 upon nearly three months after it had been selected by Batman, 

 who had hurried back to Tasmania to bring over his stock and 

 stores and some of his partners in the venture. 



Before entering into the detailed proceedings of these rival 

 adventurers, some brief notice of the antecedents of the two men 

 whose names are so prominently associated with Victorian colon- 

 isation will not be without interest, and in some measure will be 

 found explanatory of subsequent events in their history. John 

 Batman was born in the year 1800 at Parramatta in New South 

 Wales, where he grew up to man's estate amidst the Arcadian 

 surroundings of that pretty river township, always celebrated for 

 its wealth of fruit and flowers, and the fertility of its immediate 

 environment. He was a fine type of physical manhood, tall, strong 

 and handsome, with the exuberance of spirits and love of adven- 

 ture which belongs to those qualities. Parramatta was not a very 

 progressive place, and its limitations palled upon the young athlete, 

 so by the time he was twenty years of age, sighing like Alexander 

 for new worlds to conquer, he betook himself to Van Diemen's 

 Land. Here in conjunction with his brother Henry he received a 

 grant of land in the wild Fingal district at the foot of Ben Lomond, 

 and for some years carried on an unequal fight with nature in 

 trying to induce his sheep to increase and multiply in a country 

 that yielded little grass, but abounded in rocky fastnesses, dense 

 scrub and other drawbacks to pastoral pursuits. A complete reign 

 of terror existed in the colony about this time from the ferocious 

 depredations of a number of outlawed convicts, who had taken to 

 the bush and carried on a savage contest, marked by episodes of 

 hideous brutality, rapine and murder against all the isolated 

 settlers. The conduct of these men was doubtless but the natural 

 outcome of the tyrannical ill-treatment to which they had been 



