William Cooper, John Batman and a single bend in the Maribyrnong

“No man ever steps in the same river twice” is the condensed aphorism ascribed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. That is, the world and those who inhabit it are in a constant state of flux, even that which appears stable and unchanging. This understates things. You can’t cross the same river once — each step takes you into water that wasn’t there a second ago and will be gone before you can raise your foot. 

At the time Heraclitus put his thoughts to papyrus around 500 BC, people had been populating the volcanic plains sprawling to the west of the Maribyrnong river for at least 15,000 and possibly upwards of 40,000 years.

At the point of European incursion into the area, the two main clans based near the river were the Wurundjeri Willum and Marin Balluk. Their tools forged from silcrete, stone working sites and quarries have been found up and down the river’s banks. The name Maribyrnong is said to derive from the Woi wurrung word for “I can hear a ringtail possum”. 

A good deal of the journey from then to now — what has happened on this continent and the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened — can be sketched via a few kilometres either side of the bend made by what we now call Newell’s Paddock, which juts out to the east.

Northwest a little way, you hit the site of the old munitions factory, the largest and most important in Australia during the Second World War, and a major site for the influx of women into the workforce during that time. Next door is Jack’s Magazine, the earth reared up all around its long triangular halls, where those explosives were stored. Seven decades earlier, the site served the same purpose for the gold rush, which brought with it one of the great waves of migrants to an area that would come to be defined by them. Now it hosts walking tours and art exhibitions and is surrounded by towers and ice-cube-shaped new builds, and the ammunition factory is long gone.

Back towards Newell’s Paddock, across the water from Footscray Park, you can see the Flemington Racecourse. In 1974 the Maribyrnong swelled and surged beyond its banks and the racecourse was submerged. It was the only structure in the area that anyone had done anything to protect by the time the floods came again in 2022. There are sprawls of migrant families filling the area who lost nearly everything in 1974 and whose grandkids got it worse in 2022, thanks to failures of planning and early warning systems, and the floodwall around the racecourse batting yet more waves back in their direction. 

Further south, between the railway and the stockbridge is Newell’s Paddock, named for a man who made his living dumping the wetlands with what is euphemistically called “night soil” — the literal human waste of the young settlement. The river was filled with animal carcasses and pollution as industry bloomed in the 20th century. 

Parallel to that is the story of the great human waves that broke over Footscray and its surroundings after the Second World War. At first Greek and Italian, then, marked by the Heavenly Queen Temple with its luminous statue of Taoist deity Mazu, shifting towards Asia and then the Horn of Africa from the 1980s onward. Continuing past the Joseph Road precinct, the looming towers on the water’s edge are the most visible local remnant of a particularly nihilistic approach to planning in the early 21st century. Abandoned lots bought in this time dot throughout the area. They are being allowed to decay by developers, an attempt to bully the local council into allowing them favourable development terms.  

Just south of the arts centre building — previously used for the slaughter and curing of pigs — is the point where all these strands eventually intersect, the knot where one version of the world splits and splays in directions previously unimagined and unimaginable: Grimes Reserve. Now named for Charles Grimes, the first European to sail through the area in 1803, it marks the spot where it is thought that John Batman first disembarked on the western side of the river during his own exploration in 1835 (it was called Batman Reserve from 1943 to the 1970s).

Batman had already led an eventful life when he set sail from Launceston to Port Phillip and then on to the west. Setting up as a grazier in Van Diemen’s Land, now called Tasmania or lutruwita, in the 1820s he led “roving parties” that massacred Indigenous people as part of the “Black War” on the island, where the genocidal portion of the colonial project met with its greatest success. He sailed the Yarra to the site of the modern centre of Melbourne — famously noting “the spot for a village” in his journal — and near Merri Creek, he struck a “treaty” with the Kulin nation for the lands we now call Melbourne. 

Batman was largely forgotten in the decades following his miserable and squalid death, disfigured by syphilis and tended to by a pair of Indigenous servants, ostracised by the society he had helped bring about. In the years leading up to Federation, his image was revived and smoothed by biographers serving the need to assuage colonist guilt; he was reborn not as the butcher of Tasmania, but the beneficent pioneer, who had bought the lands beneath Melbourne’s buildings fair and square for an annual rent of 40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and six shirts. The treaty, far from being a meaningless con that was roundly rejected by the colonial administrators of the time, became a symbol of the goodwill felt towards the continent’s original occupants by the “fine gentlemen” who claimed it for the empire.

Though nothing so momentous happened when he explored further west, the site of Batman’s brief visit in June 1835 was picked for the “Pioneers Day” rally in January 1937, which hosted speeches, an Indigenous choir and a reenactment of the Merri Creek meeting. Among those watching was an elderly Yorta Yorta man named William Cooper. 

Cooper was born at the junction of the Murray and Goulburn rivers in the early 1860s. He was in his 70s, a long life of fighting for Indigenous rights behind him, when in 1933 he left the declining standards of his home at the Cummeragunja mission to live in a series of cottages in Footscray and the surrounding suburbs, where he would turn out scores of letters to politicians and newspapers by candlelight and host meetings of the Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL), the most prominent Indigenous activist group of its time. 

As a younger man Cooper, along with many of the other Indigenous people who lived there, had converted to Christianity during his time at the Maloga mission — a move that may have been practically advantageous, but certainly formed a sincere organising principle for the rest of his life. The mission was run by Daniel Matthews, who encouraged Cooper and others to see the parallels between themselves and the dispossessed Jews of the Book of Exodus. Cooper lost a son in the Battle of Ypres, as part of the grand horror of the First World War, a battle for an empire that in return would not recognise the likes of Cooper as citizens until 26 years after his death.

Whatever Cooper’s view of Batman, he liked the part about the treaty, insofar as it was one of the few gestures made by colonists that the land had already belonged to someone when they arrived. He had agreed to have the AAL involved with the Grand Pioneer Rally with some misgivings, and watched as it plummeted beneath his lowest expectations. The nadir was the speech by the head of the “Australian Natives Association”, which lauded the event as a chance to remember the legacy bequeathed to those present by their forebears: “white Australia”. Indigenous people did not rate a single mention in the address.

Cooper was furious, writing to the event’s organiser that “what is a memorial of the coming of the whites is a memorial of the death of us”. In the months that followed, Cooper and the AAL began to advocate the first-ever Indigenous Day of Mourning, which was held in Sydney in 1938, and was the first of what is now commonplace; counter-memorials marking what was lost after January 26, 1788.

Cooper issued two simultaneous appeals in December 1937. One regarded the day of mourning, the other revived a long-term goal; to deliver a petition to King George VI calling for a permanent Indigenous representative in Australian Parliament. Cooper had spent years travelling around the country in the early 1930s, eventually accruing signatures from nearly 2,000 Indigenous people.  

As it happened, the first Day of Mourning was largely taken up and organised by Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s Aborigines Progressive Association, and the resolution issued after the meeting on January 26, 1938 did not include Cooper’s demand for parliamentary representation. 

Undeterred, Cooper continued to push his own petition on the subject. It was never passed on to the King, neither by the Lyons nor Menzies’ government. The original was lost, along with the signatures it contained.

It was on December 6, 1938, in the midst of this series of indignities, that the AAL attempted to present a letter of protest regarding the events that came to be known as the Kristallnacht (which had occurred a month earlier) to the German consulate in Collins Street. This has come to dominate the public memory of Cooper in recent years, with an irresistible image surfacing: the staunch advocate, slowing with age but defiant and unbowed, the nation’s sole glint of conscience, marching through the bright December heat to be the only contemporary witness to the early writhing of the cocoon that would eventually split and let loose the full horrors of the Holocaust. A statue capturing in bronze Cooper’s dignity and bearing, a plaintive look on his face, the petition in hand, was unveiled in Shepparton in 2018. 

But just as a wide enough view of the water’s edge will obscure the inlets and waterways that swell into sharp relief on closer inspection, this account blurs details and hides gaps. The AAL’s petition was one of many expressions of horror to follow the night of broken glass, and while it’s highly likely that Cooper was present when it was delivered, and he was known to walk everywhere, there is no direct contemporary evidence to suggest that an organised march crossing the Maribyrnong on the way from Footscray to the consulate ever occurred. And yet it has become the thing he’s most famous for, the possible restated as concrete fact, the imprecise, rendered solid and tangible in news reports and educational material. 

In 2018, Batman, returned by history to his status as a mass murderer, was removed as the namesake of the federal electorate collecting Melbourne’s Northern Suburbs. His replacement was Cooper.

And so Cooper and Batman are moulded and posed according to the best uses future generations can find for them, and then sunk into the amber of commemoration. And the river is already through our fingers and off around the bend. 

This piece owes a huge debt to the work of Bain Attwood, Andrew Markus, Marcia Langton and Jack Horner, and to the help of the Footscray Historical Society.