Boats, birds and bauxite

Point Henry wetlands and Alcoa pier

Finding a connection between this blog post and the Barwon River will be drawing a long bow indeed, however having discovered yet another hidden wetland in the region (it must be the month for it!) it was too hard to resist the temptation to write something about it.
This time, I headed out to the tip of Point Henry on the edge of Corio Bay. The views from here are sweeping: the You Yangs to the north, Corio Bay away to the left, Portarlington and Clifton Springs to the west. Behind are the buildings of Alcoa's aluminium smelter and stretching out into the water just around the tip of the point is the pier. Built to receive material for processing at the smelter, it is over a kilometre in length. The plant itself was built in 1963 and currently produces about 190,000 tons of aluminium per year for both local and Asian markets.

Part of the Alcoa plant with the wetlands in the foreground

Most surprisingly however, are the wetlands. Located on the land below Alcoa at the tip of Point Henry, these partly natural, partly constructed wetlands are home to the usual array of plant, bird and animal life including a variety of endangered and threatened species. The wetlands have been developed by Alcoa who own the land, in conjunction with Greening Australia. They include both saline and freshwater wetlands fed primarily by rain water and by some recycled water from Alcoa and controlled by a series of mini-weirs.
The "Moolapio" project as it is known also incorporates much of the surrounding land, including not only the foreshore, wetlands and smelter site, but also farmland.The whole is part of an innovative grasslands regeneration program which if successful, may change the way revegetation is managed across the country. It is also intended that the site be used for community education, scientific research, plant propagation and seed storage, providing a valuable resource for other regeneration projects in the region and beyond.

weir controlling water levels in the wetlands

Point Henry however, was not always the industrial wasteland it appears to many to be today. In the earliest days of European settlement, Point Henry was the first point of contact for those arriving in Geelong. The sandbar which blocked the mouth of Corio Bay prevented large vessels from entering, so it was at Point Henry that these ships unloaded their passengers.
As a result, a thriving tourist industry also developed here, with the 'California Tea Gardens' opening its doors in  October 1849. This name was an acknowledgement of the number of people leaving the district and traveling to the Californian goldfields to try their luck. It was not long however, be for the tide turned and waves of gold seekers were arriving at Point Henry on their way to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo in the early 1850s.
During this period, Point Henry also became a popular destination for tourist boats, with steamers running back and forth across the bay from Melbourne, bringing holidaymakers for a day at the beach. This state of affairs continued until the 1880s when the opening of the Hopetoun Channel allowed for the passage of larger vessels directly into the port of Geelong.

View of Point Henry Wetlands and Alcoa's pier

Following the demise of the tourist trade, Point Henry remained a signal station for incoming shipping whilst the surrounding land continued to be used for farming purposes. That noted Geelong resident James Harrison, inventor of refrigeration, founder of the Geelong Advertiser and one-time resident beside the Barwon River (I knew I'd find a connection) also held a block of land at Point Henry where he lived with his third wife and children in a small cottage. At the time of his death in 1893, he was planning to make soda on the site.
Another important early industry at Point Henry was the Cheetham Salt Works, established by Richard Cheetham - an English industrial chemist - in 1888. Today, the salt works form part of Alcoa's wetlands project whilst the company itself is now part of a multi-national operation with interests in Australia, Japan, Indonesia and New Zealand.
Including the saltworks, Alcoa currently own around 500 hectares of land around the smelter at Point Henry and continue to work with environmental groups and the community to regenerate the surrounding land.

A Scot on the rocks

James Harrison

There is one notable Geelong citizen who had strong ties to the Barwon River whom I have not yet mentioned in detail in any of my previous posts.
That person was James Harrison, founder of the Geelong Advertiser and the first person in the world to devise a method of making ice and he did this at Rocky Point, overlooking the river in Newtown.
Harrison was born in Scotland in 1816 and trained as a printer's apprentice in Glasgow, followed by a stint working in London before emigrating to Sydney in 1837. By 1839 he was in Melbourne and working with John Pascoe Fawkner, from whom he bought an old printing press. On 21st November, 1840, the first edition of the Geelong Advertiser was published and by 1842, Harrison along with John Scamble had bought out Fawkner. It was not long however, before Harrison became the sole proprietor, making the Advertiser successful on more than just a local level. It was his paper which was first to break the news of the discovery of gold at Clunes in 1850 and he also used it as a vehicle to agitate for the rights of squatters.
Nor was this his only project and it can be seen that his name was also associated with several of the earliest maps of Geelong, magazines and other publications, both locally and in NSW.  He was also active in local politics, serving as a councilor and in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, espousing progressive policies and maintaining a strongly humanitarian approach throughout his life.

Plaque at Rocky Point

However, it was his work in the printing industry which led to his eventually discovering a means of commercial refrigeration. Whilst using ether to clean the movable characters used to set type, he noticed that the metal became cold as the ether evaporated. It was this observation which led him in 1851 to develop the ether-vapour compression refrigeration system. His first mechanical ice-maker was built at Rocky Point in 1851 and then a machine capable of producing commercial quantities of ice (3,000kg per day) in 1854.
Over the next two decades, he twice attempted experiments aimed at shipping cold or frozen meat to London. Neither was successful and each ended in financial ruin, forcing him to turn back to journalism as editor and then columnist at the Melbourne Age to re-establish his finances.

James Harrison Bridge from the north bank

In 1892, after nearly two decades living in England and promoting his refrigeration techniques,  he returned to Geelong where he lived at Point Henry with his third wife and a number of children. He died there the following year and was buried at the Eastern Cemetery. Interestingly, his grave sits only a few metres away from that of his contemporary and fellow pioneer - Foster Fyans.
Whilst Harrison did not benefit financially in any great way from his pioneering work on ice-making, his contribution laid the foundations for the development of modern refrigeration. Recognition of this achievement came in 1990 when the newly completed bridge over the Barwon was named the James Harrison Bridge in his honour.

Plaque on the grave of James Harrison at the
Eastern Cemetery

The bridge - actually a pair of two-lane bridges -  is a concrete cantilever construction with box-girder sections on the south side of the river. It was built between 1988 and 1990, extending La Trobe Terrace and taking traffic from the Princes Highway off busy Moorabool Street and easing congestion through Belmont.

However, continued housing development south of the Barwon lead to significant congestion on this section of the highway and it was not until the opening of the long-awaited Geelong Ring Road in December 2008 that the problem was - at least in part - solved.

Grave of James Harrison at the Eastern Cemetery

Some sources report that a further tribute to James Harrison is planned in the form of a museum at Rocky Point where he conducted those first ice-making experiments on land leased from Ebenezer Davies, a local tannery worker. However, there does not seem to have been much progress of late and one recent report suggests that the project may not go ahead.