HISTORICAL REVIEW OF VICTORIA. 



335 



Hut in the meantime Batman's party encamped at Indented Head had seen the 







Enterprise as she cautiously crept up the Bay, and they hastened to warn the intruders 

 off the soil, which had been conveyed to the Association. The new-comers disputed the 

 title of their predecessors, and the latter, forsaking Indented Head, transferred their 

 camp to an eminence, afterwards 

 known as Batman's Hill, overlook- 

 ing the spot of which Fawkner's 

 party had taken possession. The 

 Hill itself has long since been 

 levelled in order to meet the re- 

 quirements of the great railway 

 station which now covers its site. 

 Fawkner came over from Laun- 

 ceston on the loth of October, 

 1835, and shifted his quarters to 

 the south side of the River, where 

 the writer remembers to have seen 

 the furrows of a corn-field upon a 

 low-lying plot of ground at present 

 occupied by manufactories and 

 warehouses. Five hundred sheep 

 and fifty head of cattle arrived 

 from Launceston in the following 

 month, and Mr. John Aitken, who 

 had chartered the schooner Endea- 

 vour at that port, brought with him a number of sheep, and proceeding in the direction 

 of Mount Macedon, where a gap which he discovered perpetuates his name, he became 

 the pioneer of the pastoral industry in that part of Victoria. 



In a map delineating Port Phillip Bay, which seems to have accompanied Batman's 

 letter to Governor Arthur, immediately after the transaction of the former with the 

 native chiefs, the applicant had marked out a large block of land embracing the whole 

 of the area now covered by South Melbourne, Port Melbourne and Fisherman's Bend, 

 as a reserve for a township and other purposes, while the marshy ground, which after- 

 wards came to be known as Batman's Swamp, he purposed setting apart as a public 

 common. But when the legality of the purchase of territory from the blacks was 

 disallowed by the authorities in Van Diemen's Land and at Westminster, and the whole 

 country was free for occupation, Fawkner, with superior judgment and foresight, chose 

 the rising ground on the north side of the River as the more eligible site for the rudi- 

 ments of a township. 



Batman, who had returned to Port Phillip from Launceston at the end of April, 

 1836 bringing with him his wife and family, Mr. James Simpson, who married his 

 daughter, and the Rev. James Orton, a Wesleyan minister fixed his residence on the 

 hill which afterwards bore his name, opened a store there, and pastured a flock on the 

 grassy slopes stretching thence to the hollow now known as Elizabeth Street, his shep- 



JOHN PASCOE FAWKNER. 



