Bulletin

Issue: March/April 2007

40th Anniversary

La Trobe - a genial gentleman

A pioneering administrator, Charles Joseph La Trobe, Victoria’s first Lieutenant - Governor came as Superintendent in 1839 to Port Phillip, a primitive, underdeveloped and underpopulated colony, and left it in 1854 as the then most affluent city in the world.

Charles Joseph La Trobe,
a gifted artist, amateur scientist
and travel writer, shown above
in an official portrait by
Sir Frances Grant, 1855.

La Trobe was, and remains, a profoundly controversial figure in Victoria’s history. From the day he set foot on the soil of Port Phillip, there was a distance between him and the colonists due to the fact that they did not understand each other.

Fundamental to his thoughts, words and actions were his spirituality and his evangelicalism. He was certain about his civilising mission in this outpost of empire, while the colonists had one major preoccupation - to improve their material lot in life.

La Trobe was born on 20 March, 1801, in London, of Huguenot origin, the son of an accomplished musician, composer and Moravian missionary active in the antislavery movement.

He was a gifted artist and amateur scientist who found topography fascinating. After his schooling, he left England in 1824 for Neuchâtel in Switzerland where he became a tutor, a keen alpinist noted for his skill as a mountaineer and wrote his first book, The Alpenstock.

Unexpectedly, he found himself in the occupation of travel writer, rambling again in the Tyrol, Italy and Switzerland where he wrote the book The Pedestrian.

In 1832 he began a tour of North America which resulted in The Rambler in North America. During this tour, he met his cousins, sons of Benjamin Henry La Trobe, the architect responsible for the redesign of the Capitol Building and the White House in Washington.

Next he ventured to Mexico, visited by few Europeans, and recorded this in The Rambler in Mexico. Returning to Switzerland in 1834, he was guest of Frederic de Montmollin, a Councillor of State, where he met Sophie, one of Montmollin’s thirteen children. They were married in 1835.

Taking advantage of the contacts of his well-connected family, he came to the attention of the Colonial Office in London and was posted to the West Indies, at that time in great turmoil following the emancipation of 700,000 slaves.

His reports to the British Parliament so impressed that, in January 1839, he was offered an appointment in Australia - as Superintendent of the newly settled Port Phillip District of NSW.

Accompanied by Sophie and their two year old daughter, Agnes, La Trobe arrived in Melbourne that year, with none of the training and experience which usually qualified a man for such an administrative role. The typical colonial governor had a naval or military background. La Trobe was radically different: refined, sensitive, cultured and learned.

On arrival, he found that Collins Street was the only road worthy of the name. Elizabeth Street followed a frequently-flooded creek bed, and Flinders Street was little better than a bog. The water supply was inadequate and polluted. There was no town council; no development could take place without revenue from the government in far-off Sydney. The only building of note was the gaol. Melbourne in 1839 was only four years old, with a population of less than two thousand free settlers.

La Trobe’s slowness to act on the question of separation from New South Wales - he believed timing was all-important - was misunderstood by those clamouring for it. Separation was a great achievement for La Trobe and cause for universal celebration in the new colony of Victoria when it arrived.

No sooner had the advance news of separation been received, than the single most revolutionary and momentous event in the history of the colony occurred. Gold was discovered, creating the dominant and most far-reaching issue of La Trobe’s 15 years in Victoria. La Trobe was described by the Geelong Advertiser as ‘Our Victorian Czar’, a dictator imposing an unrealistic and impossible tax when no goldfield in 1851 had yet proven its wealth.

A meeting in August 1853 over a petition demanding civil rights for miners and signed by 5,000 miners was eventually followed by the tragedy of Eureka. The historian Geoffrey Serle concluded that, when faced with the appalling difficulties of the times, La Trobe had tried to ‘govern chaos on a scale to which there are few or no parallels in British colonial history’. He had, in fact, managed to keep the colony for which he was responsible operating in circumstances ‘in which the archangel Gabriel might have been found wanting’.

In the years he spent as administrator of the colony, La Trobe made 94 major journeys through country Victoria. He charted routes, notably to Gippsland to investigate a report of coal deposits, and to Cape Otway where, after two abortive attempts, he personally blazed the trail to, and was responsible for the erection of the light house on that dangerous rocky promontory.

La Trobe also made a significant contribution to the cultural development of the infant city of Melbourne, and education was one of his major concerns. In 1853 under La Trobe’s aegis, the foundation stones for both the University of Melbourne and the Public Library of Victoria were laid.

La Trobe was a patron, and often the instigator, of such cultural and learned bodies as the Philosophical Society, now the Royal Society, the Mechanics’ Institute, now Melbourne Athenaeum, the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Aware of his increasing unpopularity, despite his considerable successes, La Trobe submitted his resignation on 31 December, 1852. He was eventually relieved of his post in May 1854 and returned to Britain.

La Trobe died aged 74 in 1875 in the village of Litlington near Eastbourne in Sussex. A chapel, the Chapelle de l’Ermitage, was built to his memory in Neuchâtel.

While streets, towns, rivers and an electorate bear his name, how fitting it is that this fine University is named for him - and that a full-scale bronze statue was recently erected to his memory on the forecourt of the State Library.

Dr Reilly is La Trobe Librarian at the State Library of Victoria and author of Charles Joseph La Trobe: the Making of a Governor and Charles Joseph La Trobe: Landscapes and Sketches. This is an edited text of her La Trobe University 40th Anniversary Lecture.