which was later renamed Port Melbourne. Half a mile out I went to the bow and took in the scene. The harbour at Williamstown, packed with shipping, was easily visible on the port; and the seaside villages of St. Kilda and Brighton, further around to the east, could be made out on the starboard. Three miles ahead, Melbourne’s taller buildings, some of them tipped with spires, could be seen towering over the mastheads of the docked ships at Sandridge. Three railroad tracks ran right up to and along Railway Pier. Melbourne’s central station, at Flinders Street, was only fifteen minutes away by train.
The tracks to the large wooden pier at Sandridge were part of an already elaborate railway system. A private line owned by the Hobson Bay United Railway Company ran from St. Kilda to Emerald Hill, then through Melbourne, Richmond, Prahran, and Elsternwick, to Brighton. It enabled people of moderate means, not just the wealthy, to enjoy a high standard of living, in pleasant country houses with gardens, in villages easily accessible from the city. There were also longer country lines from Melbourne to Ballarat (via Geelong) and from Melbourne to Castlemaine near Bendigo. Gold had been discovered in Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine in 1851 and was responsible for these distant rural centres being integrated into Melbourne’s railroad system.
My first impression of Melbourne was of a city far more magnificent and modern than I had been expecting. Still less than forty years old its population was already 200,000. It was the most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere, and the one, in the whole of recorded history, to have achieved that size in the shortest period of time. I was pleasantly surprised rather than overwhelmed. I was an urban creature after all, used to large cities, who had just spent several years in Second Empire Paris, Baron Haussman’s wonderful “City of Lights,” home to more than two million people.
Melbourne was built to a systematic rectangular plan, incorporating very wide streets, several large and beautiful public buildings, some smaller, architecturally elegant private ones, and many spacious parks and gardens. But no street was fully finished or splendid throughout. Gaps still existed between many buildings, and some smaller meaner little houses would, at times, detract from their more elegant neighbours.
Visitors always commented as to Melbourne’s peculiar gutters. These were deep and broad and paved with stones. After heavy rains they would collect such large quantities of water as to mimic rivulets running down each side of the street. At intersections little bridges had been placed over them to prevent pedestrians being impeded. Some citizens regarded these gutters as health hazards. Small children had drowned in them and new converts to the theories of Semmelweis, Pasteur and Lister queried them as breeding grounds for disease. There was talk that they should be covered over and soon after my arrival they were.
Unlike European cities there was no obvious squalor or misery. No beggars were seen on the streets. The Melbourne Benevolent Asylum provided food and shelter for twelve thousand poor and destitute each year. It was funded by Government and only augmented to a small extent by private donations. It was jokingly said that a pauper transferred from a traditional English union workhouse to the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum would have thought himself magically transported into Buckingham Palace. Because work was readily available in Melbourne and food cheap, most residents were temporary at the Asylum, which helped to keep it more pleasant.
Melbourne had a wonderful free Public Library. It served as an important meeting place for three thousand people each week, and it soon became my home away from home. The sixty thousand volumes housed there were available to one and all. The only requirements were that you sign your name to gain entry and that you exhibit reasonable dress and behaviour. Working men were permitted entry in their working clothes. The quiet reading rooms, with their long tables and comfortable chairs, were suitably heated and well lit; and women who preferred segregation had access to a special reading room of their own. The Library was open six days a week, twelve hours per day, from ten in the morning till ten at night.
The University had three faculties, Medicine, Law and Arts. It was still new, and as yet poorly attended. This enabled it to boast the best teacher to student ratio of any similar institution in the world. By 1870, a chancellor, a vice-chancellor, and a senate comprised of four professors and nine lecturers serviced the needs of only one hundred and twenty-two students.
Twilight life was active. When evening fell the city’s streets, bars, theatres and markets were crowded and ablaze with the glare of gaslights. Shops remained open until seven o’clock and did brisk business. What struck me most was the scarcity of older grey-haired people. Even middle-aged people were relatively rare. There was absolutely no doubt that Melbourne, in 1872, whether by day or by night, was very much a young person’s city. For me, only twenty-one years of age, the youthfulness of the City’s inhabitants proved quite exhilarating. I couldn’t help but feel that I had arrived in the right place, at the right time, and that even better was yet to come.
That same year the Adelaide to Darwin overland telegraph line was completed and made to join on to a submarine cable to Java. There was now a line all the way to London and on October 22nd 1872 the first message was transmitted along it. You can’t imagine what an incredible advance this was; to what extent this technology revolutionised and changed our world. A message that previously required more than 160 days in order to exact a reply could now be answered in a matter of hours. News reported to London could be printed in Melbourne’s newspapers the very next day. Australia, in an instant, was no longer cut off from the rest of the world.
Exciting new inventions from all over the world now made an immediate impact in Melbourne. Our thriving new metropolis - full of fearless, young, energetic, entrepreneurial adventurers, who had braved the dangers and remoteness of the antipodes, seeking gold and acquiring wealth - was equipped to compete on all fronts with any other place on earth. Henry Byron Moore (1839-1925), public servant and stockbroker, was an excellent example of such a Melbournian. In 1878 - not two years after Alexander Graham Bell had taken out his patent on the telephone - Moore founded the Melbourne Telephone Company. Telephone services commenced almost immediately, and by August 1880 Moore had opened Australia’s first telephone exchange, as a privately operated business. Thanks to his knack for realising the practical application of scientific inventions, Melbourne acquired this service two years ahead of London. Moore also founded the Melbourne Electric Light Company in 1880. Electric lighting had become a reality, in August 1879, when a game of Australian Rules football was first played under its beams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In July 1881, Moore gave us another memorable spectacle when he lit up the Eastern Market site and in November of that same year he similarly illuminated Spencer Street Railway Station.
By 1880 Melbourne had become the greatest boom city of the age, staging the International Exhibition, in an especially constructed building, at the north-eastern perimeter of the city. Previous cities that held it were London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Chicago, Munich, Vienna and Philadelphia. Marvellous Melbourne had now truly arrived on the international stage as a forefront world capital. So you can appreciate that the Melbourne that I first encountered on New Year’s Day 1872 was a city rapidly embarking on interesting times.
If it were not for my biographer, this story would not have been written. It lay hidden under the rubble of time for nearly eighty years. Then my biographer came along, and like an archaeologist, he found it, unearthed it, and revitalised it - ‘my autobiography!’
My biographer believes he discovered me by accident. He was a young doctor training to be an ophthalmologist who had a very determined interest in art. That he was interested in art is not surprising, for the study of ophthalmology, like the study of art, is a most visual science. Our young doctor realised that the first people who really understood the workings of the human retina were not the medical investigators who proved it scientifically, but rather artists of old. He frequented art galleries, not only to study paintings, but also to study artists, to see if they had grasped how the human retina really works. Did these artists appreciate that the human retina responds to lines - horizontal lines, vertical lines, oblique lines, fat lines and thin lines? The brain fills in the bits between