Occasional Tales from the Mountain No. 04

Occasional Tales from the Mountain No.4 `Driven to a diet of potatoes and water’: A cry for help from the forest in 1896 The Village Settlement Scheme of the 1890s was just one of a range of closer settlement measures adopted in Victoria over more than a century after the squatting age. Envisaged as an unemployment relief measure during the 1890s depression and born of a belief in the model of the “yeoman farmer”, the scheme was more broadly – and in the Dandenongs in particular – a failure for a range of reasons. Historian Tim Bonyhady noted that in the hills `the common experience was one of exchanging urban poverty for rural misery’. There were more than 70 village settlements established across Victoria, under which settlers were assisted to lease and eventually buy small allotments of farming land and given meagre additional financial aid to get established. In the Dandenongs, there were village settlements at Tremont-Ferny Creek (known as the Scoresby settlement), Monbulk and Croydon-Mooroolbark. In environmental terms, this type of settlement in the Dandenongs was a disaster recognised by many opponents at the time even before it began. Some 10,000 acres of largely pristine forest previously reserved as part of the Dandenong State Forest was excised for rural settlement in 1893. There were vehement protests against the proposal in the press, which pushed the case for preserving the attributes of such a beautiful landscape so close to Melbourne. One correspondent in the weekly Leader newspaper complained: `It is undesirable to part with a reserve of this kind within such easy access of Melbourne. That the beautiful fern gullies would suYer considerably from settlement in the immediate vicinity goes almost without saying. In fact, if settlement takes place, the only source of income the settlers would have for a couple of years would be from the sale of ferns smuggled and sold in Melbourne.’ While the soil was rich in places, the climate, terrain and natural vegetation of the upper Dandenongs conspired against its use for agriculture, as did the lack of farming experience among the settlers themselves. The oYicial 1895 report on the Scoresby village settlement noted 42 settlers, 37 of them married and with 65 children. There were six cows, 11 pigs and 200 fowl. Most were on allotments of 10 acres, many perched in a landscape dominated by huge eucalyptus trees and steep gullies. Barely a year after many had taken up land, they petitioned the Victorian Parliament for urgent assistance. After complaining that the financial aid to date had been totally insuYicient, the petitioners continued: `We are penny-less, our roads are in a[n] impassable condition and unless some work is granted to us immediately we shall be practically driven oY the settlement. Many of us are driven to a diet of potatoes and water’. Of the 42 settlers, 35 signed the petition, comprising 31 married and four single men. The petition was presented to the Legislative Assembly on 29 July 1896 by the Hon. Francis Longmore (1826-98), a long-serving MP who was by then the backbench Member for Dandenong and Berwick but a former minister responsible for agriculture, lands, roads and railways. Longmore was a liberal, a land reformer opposed to squatting and a champion of small farm holdings. He submitted the petition `praying that the House would take their case into consideration, and grant them some work to enable them to remain on their holdings’. A deputation of Scoresby settlers had already waited upon the Minister for Roads in April 1896, seeking to have a road constructed between the settlement and the railhead at Upper Ferntree Gully. The supplicants in this case called for funds to be made available and for the villagers themselves to employed under the “butty system”, where one would become the head contractor employing the rest on an equal pay basis. The eventual employment of village settlers on local road works to the exclusion of other “free” settlers, who funded their own equally struggling farming ventures in nearby Sassafras, was the source of some tension and disquiet. The plight of village settlers across Victoria was raised in the Legislative Assembly in August 1896 in the context of debate on public service salaries. George Michael Prendergast, at the time relatively new to the Assembly as the Member for North Melbourne, queried the excessive allowances being paid to some public servants `whilst there were people outside who were positively dying, and who asked the Minister to give them a few shillings a week to keep them in food’. In 1904, “Mick” Prendergast would become the first leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party and serve briefly as a Labor Premier and Treasurer in 1924. Within two years of the petition more than a dozen families left the Scoresby settlement. By 1912, only a dozen or so of the original families remained in the district, eking out a living as the district transitioned to a diYerent type of occupancy. Descendants of some of these original settlers still live locally. John Schauble Sources: Public Records O1ice Victoria VPRS 3253/P000; Victorian Parliamentary Hansard 29 July 1896; Helen Coulson, Story of the Dandenongs 1958; Michael Jones, Prolific in Gods Gifts, 1983; Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, 2002; Age, Argus, Leader (various dates) The original hand-written petition from the Scoresby village settlers in 1896. (Source: PROV) A typewritten version of the petition laid before Parliament. (Source: PROV)