Victoria next weekend will concentrate its attention on the
Portland when the state begins a year-long celebration of 150 years of white settlement.
It was here on November 19, 1834 that Edward Henty went ashore to establish what became
Victoria's first permanent settlement.
Richard Hunt went to Portland for Weekend Magazine to look at how the towns developed
from those early days.
Portland lies in Victoria's southwest, one of the last stretches of Australia's coast
to be explored.
A spectacular and sometimes dangerous coastline.
Bass and flinters had mapped Victoria's southeast coast in circumnavigated Tasmania, proving
the existence of a strait.
By very early in the 1800s, an estimated 200 sealers were working Bass Strait.
At the time, sealskins were fetching five shillings each in China, big money for those
days.
It is known that nearly 5,000 seals were slaughtered in one month in just one area.
The roughest men from many nations, the sealers probably used Portland as a base while hunting
nearby colonies.
As seal numbers declined, whaling took over.
Whales were plentiful from April to October, and good profits from oil exports sustained
the industry on this coast for 30 years.
Portland's fine harbour persuaded Captain William Dutton, born in Sydney, to set up
a whaling station.
So local historian Joe Wiltshire believes Victoria is celebrating the wrong date.
In July of 1829 he built the first house, definitely the first house in Portland, and
he lived in that house for 18 months at that time.
Now of course there is no doubt about all this because it's all documented in the various
archives around the state and Australia.
Dutton began the whaling industry in 1833.
He felt trying out works and processing works.
Henties came here in November the following year in 1834.
They came over here to take part in the very profitable whaling that Dutton started.
A reenactment for the Victorian centenary portrays the official and now generally accepted
birthday for Victoria.
On November the 19th, 1834, Edward Henty arrived at Portland after a rough passage of 34 days
from Tasmania.
Unlike Dutton, Henty came equipped to settle with building materials, servants, cattle
and stores.
In six months Henty had built a house and begun ploughing with a bullock team for crops
of potatoes and wheat.
The little settlement grew steadily until 1840 when the future town was surveyed.
Henty meanwhile had explored far inland setting up flourishing stations and rapidly increasing
his stock.
Bursewood was erected for the wealthy pastoralist in 1855 on a site overlooking the harbour
he'd stepped ashore at 20 years earlier.
Wool took over from whaling and with a safe harbour Portland prospered.
There were about 15 industries here in 1850 and they were going concerns.
Although it was the whaling that made the port, the trading ships knew of this port
and there was a constant traffic between Melbourne and Launceston and Portland.
When the golden years came this was a jumping off place for the gold rush.
This is where Portland started and did go for about 10 years.
At the end of the golden years the population of Portland was around about the 3000 and
there it stayed for 80 years until the Second World War.
In 1934 the Duke of Gloucester disembarked at Portland to celebrate Victoria's 100th
birthday.
60,000 people crammed every vantage point to watch the Duke pay tribute to the state's
pioneers.
From its earliest days Portland has looked to the sea.
As the pastoral industry grew wool became an important export for the area.
Through a succession of jetties and piers Portland was transformed into a modern seaport
terminal.
Post war construction made Portland a secure deep water harbour.
And its bulk and general purpose berths have since been used by ships from more than 50
countries.
Each nationality has their own nautical characteristic.
Language is a problem on only probably two nationalities now.
The Koreans and the Chinese sometimes we do have difficulty but sign language and the
universal port from starboard and the midships tugs either way.
They're either the pilot knows the language or else the ship accepts that English is the
international language.
Port 20.
The assistant harbour master Captain Ian Braid believes Portland's safety record for shipping
is second to none.
Midships.
There's nothing between here and Antarctica so if you get a southerly or a southwesterly
it's got a long way to build up its power.
But the harbour itself is so well protected we do get a reflected swell which causes ships
to move up and down the water.
As far as outside swells concern it just doesn't get into the harbour because of the great
water.
The port of Portland is less than an hour's steaming time from the main overseas and interstate
shipping lanes.
And it's virtually the only sheltered or weather port between Adelaide and Melbourne.
Guthrie stop.
Stop Guthrie.
Targill push in slow.
Stop engines sir.
Captain Ian Braid sailed foreign ships before piloting for the past 19 years in Asia, the
Pacific and Australia.
He now brings about 150 ships a year into port.
It's fairly simple in that the area's quite small but the problems come with the wind.
We get a lot of wind in Portland unlike today and that really is the major problem.
We have big ships up to 72,000 tonnes.
Each one has its own problem.
On the whole it's a very safe port.
The predominant cargo would be wheat, a little bit of barley and some oats but we're putting
out about almost two million tonnes of grain in the year.
We import phosphate, sulphur and potash for the super phosphate works and quite a lot
of oil brought in from Jalal in Melbourne.
Portland's also had a long association with other seafarers needing a safe anchorage on
this often stormy coast.
Fishermen have operated from here since the very beginning when whaling was known as fishing.
Now different boats chase a wide variety of different catchers from abalone to ocean squid
and deep sea trawlers now use Portland to land tonnes of gemfish, blue grenadier or
red ocean perch.
But the traditional catch and the mainstay for the smaller fishing boats is the southern
rock lobster or crayfish.
Since Edward Henty brought the first merino sheep to Victoria in 1834, the wool from Victoria's
western district has become famous.
And for nearly 80 years the rich hinterland has supplied prime lamb, beef and mutton for
Borthwick's freezing works, Portland's major employer for most of that time.
The latest primary export is live sheep.
And livestock carriers like the Al Yassra take about 100,000 sheep each voyage to the
Middle East.
Worth 200 million dollars a year, live sheep exports have kept Portland in the news.
Workers have campaigned against them for years with picket lines and sometimes violent demonstrations,
blaming these shipments for job losses in the meat processing industry.
But this should be the industry of the future for Portland, the 1100 million dollar aluminium
smelter.
One should resume shortly after a two year suspension and mean thousands of jobs.
When 30,000 people help Portland launch Victoria's sesquicentennial next weekend, they should
keep in mind, like Joe Wiltshire, the one feature that attracted the state's first settlers.
That port is now proving itself to be what it was promised to be and in the very near
future it'll bring great prosperity, not only to Portland but to the whole of the Western
District.
Here's to the whalers and the sailors and the pioneers and wives, the builders and the
citizens who touched Portland with their lives, with so much to remember, so much to celebrate.
Portland's the heartland of our history, the birthplace of our state.
Portland's the heartland of our history, the birthplace of our state.