110 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



stores and blankets to be paid over, and the ceremonial investment 

 of Batman with the " royal mantles " of two chiefs to be performed. 

 At length the requirements of business and etiquette had been 

 fully complied with, and after an invitation to the natives to visit 

 the ship, which was apparently declined out of pure laziness, 

 Batman marshalled his party and started to rejoin the Rebecca. 



Mr. G. W- Busden has fixed the site of this celebrated treaty 

 on Merri Creek, Northcote, at or near the spot now occupied by 

 the "Old Colonists' Home". He does not give the evidence for 

 this selection, and it is at variance with Batman's record of the 

 distances travelled, and the delineation on his map. 



Difficult as it is to follow Batman's itinerary on a modern map, 

 his own being hopelessly out of scale, careful computations, and 

 comparisons of the original diary, the touched-up report furnished 

 to Governor Arthur, and the narrative of Captain Bobson of the 

 Rebecca, place it beyond doubt that the celebrated treaty took 

 place on the river Plenty, two or three miles above its junction 

 with the Yarra, and distant about thirteen miles in a straight line 

 from the site of Melbourne. 



In a vague sort of way the Merri Creek has been generally 

 referred to as the site, having been adopted without examination by 

 Dr. Lang, Bonwick, Lloyd and other writers whom Mr. Busden 

 has followed. But in 1885, in a lecture delivered before the His- 

 torical Society of Australasia by a well-known surveyor, Mr. James 

 Blackburn, C.E., the locality as set forth above was established 

 beyond question. 



After leaving the camp Batman and his party marched, accord- 

 ing to the diary, twelve miles in a south-westerly direction, crossing 

 a small stream, which the explorer called Lucy's Creek, after his 

 favourite daughter, and which was evidently that now known as 

 the Merri Creek. Soon after passing this they entered a thinly 

 timbered forest abutting on a swamp, which they overlooked from 

 the ridge now covered by the borough of Flemington. When they 

 reached the swamp their attention was for a time diverted by the 

 clouds of quail that arose about them, and getting entangled in the 

 dense ti-tree scrub which grew around the marsh, they found on 

 forcing their way through that they were on the banks of a river 



