Sandy Point History

Sandy Point has always been an interesting place. It has known roughly four periods of human activity, each quite different from the other but contributing to the storied landscape that beguiles us still today.

Prehistory and Aborigines up until 1820s

The Sealers and Graziers 1820s to 1900s

The Pilkingtons as farmers 1900- present

The Holiday Homes 1960s to present

Aborigines
The history of Sandy Point goes back almost as far as Europeans coming to Australia but its prehistory is much older. Undoubtedly Aborigines lived here before the sea level rose 10,000 years ago to create Bass Strait and separate it from Tasmania. Until then it was not a sandy point or coastal place at all but a slope leading down to plains which are now underwater.

Our knowledge of Aboriginal presence comes from the observations of early ethnographers like Fison and Howitt, from surviving traditions and from archaeological evidence.

The people who were here then were part of the Kurnai or Ganai nation which meant "human beings" or "the people". They were a loose amalgamation of five groups that shared a common language and religion, inter-married and owned the Gippsland area. Some estimates place their pre-European numbers as high as 4,000 and certainly the country could have carried that population since it was well-watered and full of bush foods, not unlike Arnhem Land today, which easily supports that density.

In what we now call South Gippsland was the Bratauolong clan and their territory stretched along the southern Strzelecki Ranges and the coastal plain from the Tarwin River and Cape Liptrap in the west to Merriman's Creek in the east, about 5000 square kilometres. They were self-sustaining, making the most of the seasonal cycles of plants and animals. Not at home in the forests and mountains, they were a salt-water and coastal people, inhabiting the lakes, shores, rivers, inlets and plains.

The Bratauolong in turn had five separate bands, each of sixty to eighty persons who moved in a semi-nomadic fashion annually over their territory. Sandy Point and Wilson's Promontory lay on the borders between two groups _ the Kut-wut on the Agnes River and the Jato-wara wara on the Tarwin River. They traced descent through the father, as our surnames operate and people married into another specific band of the neighbouring Briakolung clan who lived on the plain now known as Sale. They were also friendly with the non-Kurnai Bunorong in the area where the Tarwin River reaches the sea.

They saw the local year as having three, not four seasons. Winter was rather severe and lasted from July to October, Spring-Summer was November to February and Autumn had the best and most stable weather from March to June.

Autumn was ceremonial time, when larger animals were hunted to feed the crowds that gathered. In Spring-Summer the people hunted and gathered on the coastal wetlands and beaches, eating waterfowl, shellfish and fish, whereas in Winter they moved inland to the rivers.

Women provided the bulk of the food eaten and they caught fish and gathered shell-fish, birds' eggs and many vegetable like yams, fruits and seeds. Men hunted fish, eels, larger birds and animals, like koala, wombat, goanna, echidna, wallaby, swan, kangaroo and emu.

They built temporary shelters when the weather required it. Possum and kangaroo skin cloaks were worn for warmth. Their most prized ornament was the tail of the lyrebird, or woorayl. The paintings of William Barak in the National Gallery of Australia dating from 1880s show ceremonies of these and related people.

They navigated the rivers and the waters of the inlet in canoes made of bark. They traded lyrebird tails, quality stone from the Prom and Cape Liptrap and artefacts with other Kurnai and non-Kurnai groups. Their behaviour in all matters was governed by complex and clear-cut rules.

Their great creator being or sky-god was called Mungan-ngaua, which means the Father of All of Us, and he was similar to the more well-known Bunjil of the Bunorong.

Traces of their long presence can be seen in middens around Sandy Point and their descendants of course still live in Victoria.

Put alongside the 10,000 years at least that Aborigines have been in this area, historical times seem very short indeed _ in metaphorical terms, think of it as a mere fifty seconds in an hour.

European Sealers, Whalers and Graziers
It seems likely that the first Europeans came ashore at Sandy Point as early as 1797, when the Sydney Cove was wrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait. Seventeen sailors made an attempt to reach Port Jackson via the Promontory but only three arrived there.

Strange to tell, this exploit encouraged a group of mostly Irish convicts to escape from Sydney Town to try to find the wrecked boat. They were unsuccessful but fourteen of them landed on Seal Island, one of the larger islands on the west side of Wilson's Promontory where seven of them then seized their vessel and sailed away into oblivion. The remaining stranded men were encountered in early 1798 by George Bass who put them ashore on 24 January probably near Shallow Inlet at Sandy Point to walk to Port Jackson. They never reached Sydney.

Bass in a whaleboat had been trying, successfully, to establish the existence of Bass Strait. The great bay now known as Waratah Bay was later named Paterson Bay by the French navigator Baudin in 1803 and acquired its present name after the ship "Waratah"was beached there in 1858.

Sealers and whalers visited the Promontory area consistently and undoubtedly interacted with the Bratauolong people and contributed to the decline in their population that the pastoral annexation of the territory was about to complete. By the 1840s the numbers of seals and whales had been diminished too.

A different kind of European was now entering the area both by sea and overland from the mountains to the north. This intrusion was to be permanent and their coming was paved by the surveys of Thomas Townsend, who moved through the Sandy Point area in 1841. His work became the basis for George Smythe's map in 1847-8 and Smythe was so impressed that he took up the Cape Liptrap run, extending from Cape Liptrap to Shallow Inlet. Port Albert to the east became the main entry point to the area and for a while looked like rivalling Melbourne in size, but Sandy Point remained isolated.

Then in 1862 a mob of cattle from Yarram "found its way" to remote Sandy Point, no doubt a good place to carry out cattle duffing operations. Their owner, called Brown, appears subsequently to have acquired land in the area.

Smythe the map-maker held the Sandy Point run until 1864 when it was taken up by James Flanner, but rapidly changed hands: to John Elliot in 1865 and in 1867 to David Fraser. Shire records show Fraser to be the first rate-payer in the Sandy Point area and he and his wife lived in the original homestead two hundred yards from the beach on the property now called "Doonagatha".

The original homestead was two hundred yards from the beach on the property now called "Doonagatha"

The Sandy Point run had Shallow Inlet as its eastern boundary, Cook's Creek as its western one and it ran north-east to Dividing Creek. Fraser ran 1000 head of cattle and trained horses which were taken along the coast road to the Melbourne market. But the lack of transport to markets made grazing uncertain.

In 1878 mining of limestone began at the other end of Waratah Bay from Sandy Point and by 1882 the township of Waratah was well established under the cliffs and looking for all the world like a Cornish village, with access only by sea. The kilns were closed eventually in 1926.*

The coming of the railway to South Gippsland in 1891 made fattening cattle a more viable activity for the farmers and certainly helped develop dairying but alas, it arrived at the same time as a world-wide depression hit. Land speculators also moved in and the run was sold to the Bank of Western Australia.

The Golden Era of the Pilkingtons and other selectors
In 1898 the Pilkington brothers bought the pre-emptive right to the Fraser holding, which for some time had supplied beef to both Waratah and the mining town of Foster. The remainder of the Sandy Point run was surveyed into roughly 600 acre blocks (some were 620, others 640 acres). Among the selectors who took up runs were the Pilkington brothers and their cousin Charles Griffin from County Clare, Ireland.

Charles Pilkington left his Army career in India to join his younger brothers Dan and Fred, who had taken over the original homestead by this time very much in need of repair. (When it was renovated at that time, newspapers stripped from the walls were dated in the early 1860s. An 1802 penny was found under a large mulberry tree which lives still and is said to be the oldest fruit tree in Gippsland). These men all married and headed large families and many of their descendants still live in the Sandy Point area today.

Charles(1866-1947) married Evelyn Dewar (1874-1957), the daughter of the manager of the lime works at Walkerville, and built a house on the property "Ennisvale", named for the town of Ennis in County Clare, the birthplace of the Pilkingtons. Its 120 acres had been excised from his brother Fred's property when Charles joined them.

"Ennisvale" is long uninhabited

Dan Pilkington (1873- 1953) and his wife Rosa Robertson McFarlane(1888-1961) took up the block where the original homestead had stood, and built their own house, calling it "Doonagatha".**

Fred Pilkington (1869-1952) and his wife Mollie (Mary Hastings MOORE 1882-c 1968) named their property "Gyndahnook"*** and Fred kept a diary which describes life at Sandy Point. It remains in the custody of his son Keane and is a fine description of how these graziers lived and worked at Sandy Point throughout the first half of last century.

He describes beginning each morning with a swim in the ocean, and then followed a full day of fencing, draining or moving cattle. They cleared and burned scrub, planted strawberry clover, mustered cattle and worked in the vegetable garden. Bullocks were killed occasionally and the meat pickled. Autumn remained the good time at Sandy Point as in the days of the Kurnai, for the Pilkingtons bought cattle to fatten from the hills at that time. Flathead was available all year and exploring the beach yielded driftwood to make furniture.

On one occasion he found the beach strewn with salmon still kicking and so they dried it and ate it for months. Another harvest was oranges which were used to make huge quantities of marmalade. Other jetsam was not so bountiful for a friend found a chest or sea coffin which held the body of a tall black man. One wonders how that and other emergencies were dealt with without phone or authorities near.

No doubt their life was challenging, especially fighting the sea, which made constant incursions on their land.Six foot wide drains had to be dug and maintained to keep the salt water at bay. It washed sometimes right up to the house at "Blue Lookout" where their cousin Charles Griffin, who had come from Western Australia to join them had selected an eastern portion which is known today as "Blue Meadows." He built the first sea wall but those flooding tides forced him out in 1926.****

His sister Kathleen Griffin, a nurse, selected land north of the Pilkingtons and called it "Loch Shallow". She worked it alone for a few years before selling. One is in awe of the courage of that woman managing a property alone.

Charles Pilkington's daughter Isabel Baltvilks has written about growing up in Sandy Point in the early years of last century.

In 1911 the Reverend J. Reid held the first regular church service and it became a monthly event with each homestead taking its turn to host the gathering.

The families ran cattle, droving them to sell some forty-five miles away and taking their milk to the butter factory at Fish Creek three times weekly.

Mail came to Waratah Post Office eight miles away along the beach until in the early twenties a mail contractor using a horse-drawn vehicle started to go from Fish Creek to Walkerville three times a week. Mail and supplies for Sandy Point were then left at a box about three miles from the original homestead and some five miles (eight kilometres) away from the present township. As the Pilkington children grew older, they rode on their ponies to collect it.

Bulk groceries came to Fish Creek by rail from Moran & Cato's and from Croft's Stores every three months or so. Books too came this way from the Victoria League Bush Lending Library for the sum of 2/6 (25c in today's money) per consignment if returned within three months.

In 1919 school began on a part-time basis and was accommodated in one of the homes. Later that year the Education Department provided a teacher and the labour of the local parents built School Number 3986 at Sandy Point.

Fred's daughter Vi has also written about life in the area and reports how the families celebrated Christmas Day for years at a magnificent banksia named the Commonwealth Tree in a glade off the Sandy Point track (which grew somewhere along today's Oak Street).

In 1924 a telephone line was put in between Fish Creek and Waratah/Walkerville and in 1926 a single line ran to Sandy Point. In that same year the Sandy Point Post Office opened in the kitchen of "Doonagatha" but mail still came three times a week only.

By 1927 the car was beginning to change life in South Gippsland. In that year the brother of David Fraser, the pioneering grazier from Sandy Point, died in Toora and the young Pilkingtons were moving away. An era was ending.

Sandy Point remained quietly with the Pilkingtons and other families until the inevitable potential of the area for development was realised in the 1950s. Another sea wall was created which enabled more land to be reclaimed for grazing. The Pilkington youngsters' beloved playground "The Hummocks", an area which Fred Pilkington had excised from his holding as useless for grazing, was sold by the Government to their dismay and five years later subdivided. Today this is the township we call Sandy Point, a place of holiday homes. But virtually no grazing or farm land was subdivided and the town remains surrounded by the old properties.

Subdivision and Holiday Homes
History is now in the making!

Notes
*In 1892 the name of the town of Waratah was changed, according to some reports to avoid confusion with a town of the same name in New South Wales. Others say it was named for an owner who purchased the limeworks in 1884. Thus Walkerville as we now know it came into being.

** Family tradition reports that "Doonagatha" is Celtic for "Shut the _____ gate!"

*** Keane Pilkington tells how Charlie Griffin who had been in Western Australia gave this name to the property one windy night as they sat around the fire listening to a rumbling noise like the rolling of stones in the chimney. It made Charlie recall an Aboriginal word gyndhanook for a creature in the west that resembled the eastern Australian Bunyip or Rainbow Serpent.

**** Shallow Inlet is a volatile environment and depends on the location of the entrance which is shifting.

Shallow Inlet is a volatile environment