It is totally fitting that Point Nepean is a giant park open to the public because there is possibly no other part of Victoria with such historical significance.
The stunted ti-trees and the sand dunes, the broad shallows and the low cliffs, have seen explorers and lime-burners, fever ships in quarantine and cadet soldiers, sealers and whalers, smugglers and customs patrols. They have seen the great ships of history come and go. Batman came this way, after Murray, Flinders, Collins, Grimes and all the others who mapped our pathways. The bones of some of those proud ships, and their men, lie on the rocks off the point, or beneath the pounding surf.
On January 31, 1802 a small boat from the armed survey vessel, HMS "Lady Nelson", slipped around Point Nepean and into Port Phillip. The "Lady Nelson" did not follow until 14 February. Lieutenant Murray, her commander, made an exploration of the bay, which he named Port King, after the Governor. On 8 March he took formal possession of Port King, using the Union Jack (in its present form) for the first time in a ceremony of possession on Australian soil. The cross of St Patrick had only recently been added.
Murray sailed out into the Strait on March 11 but the sound of anchor chains was heard again only 16 days later when Matthew Flinders sailed into the bay. Flinders stayed for 37 days. carrying out a fairly detailed exploration, unaware that Murray had been there before him.
In January 1803 Surveyor Grimes and Lieutenant Robbins arrived aboard the "Cumberland" to carry out a proper survey. Despatches to England resulted in a small convoy being assembled at Spithead to sail out and establish an outpost somewhere in the area. The convoy consisted of the ships "Ocean" and "Calcutta". They arrived on October 7 and 9 respectively.
On October 14, Colonel Collins decided to make his landing at Sorrento and set up an encampment there. He had with him eighteen free settlers and their families. These people had travelled aboard the "Ocean", which was essentially a store ship.
Collins was never very happy with the site and soon moved his expedition to Risdon Cove, near Hobart. This was allowed within the orders he'd been given. The "Sorrento expedition" cleared the Heads, outward bound, on January 30 1804.
It is an interesting sidelight on history that one of the convicts under Collins' command was a metal refiner sentenced to 14 years transportation for robbery. His wife and two children, John and Elizabeth, were allowed to accompany him. The son was John Pascoe Faulkiner (later spelled Fawkner), one of the founders of Melbourne.
The bay was fairly quiet again for another thirty years, visited only by the occasional whaler or sealer. In 1835 John Batman sailed through the Heads but he didn't stop anywhere near Point Nepean. In 1837 Governor Bourke visited Sullivan's Cove while looking for an anchorage for the pilot boat, but he thought it unsuitable. By now there was a growing traffic to the Yarra settlement.
Edward Hobson now entered the history of Point Nepean, taking up a grazing licence for 10 per year which let him use the land between the Point and Boneo. This was in 1837 but the holders of pastoral licences were often infrequent visitors and Hobson was no exception. It seems that the first 'permanent settler' was James Sandle Ford.
He came to the Point late in 1842 or early in 1843 and named Portsea after a suburb of his native Portsmouth. Ford was no fool. He established his own lime kiln and built up a profitable trade with passing ships, selling them the fresh vegetables for which they were desperate after long voyages from the old country. Ford soon had neighbours, who settled near the present-day Sorrento golf course. These were the Kettles, who'd emigrated on the ill-fated "Ticonderoga". Mr Kettle died on the voyage.
The quarantine station (The Anchorage) came into being in about 1840 but the need for such a facility became really obvious in 1852 with the arrival of four "fever ships". One was the "Ticonderoga", on which there were 850 people. One hundred died. The "Bourneuf" suffered 88 deaths among the 830 souls aboard.
The famous "Marco Polo", after a record passage from Liverpool of only 78 days, had to report 52 deaths, and the "Wanata" lost 39.
The disease which caused most of these deaths was typhoid fever, and it was due to the effectiveness of the quarantine arrangements (though there many 'escapees') that there was not a major epidemic throughout the infant colony. These were the times of the gold rushes and the typhoid would have been quickly spread from one end of the Victoria to the other.
The Commonwealth Government reserved 420 acres on the Point in 1908 and this reservation has played a significant role in our military history without ever being under attack itself. On the afternoon of 5 August 1914, at about 12.30 pm, the German freighter "Pfalz" approached the Heads, outward bound. The news of the declaration of the Great War reached the garrison in time for a gun to be manned. A shot was fired across the bows of the "Pfalz" and she was brought to a halt. She was confiscated and used by the Allies as a troop-carrier.
The shot that stopped her was the first shot fired in anger by any British forces in the Great War. By an astounding coincidence the same gun, with a new barrel, fired the first shot of World War II! On 4 September 1939 the freighter "Woniora" tried to enter Port Phillip at about 1.30am without identifying herself. A warning shot caused her to identify herself. The two gun barrels were kept and were used to decorate the entrance to the Officer Cadet School at Portsea.
This story has barely scraped the surface of a history rich in romance and beauty, stark with disaster and tragedy, involved in every phase of Victoria's growth.