A HISTORY RINGING WITH MYSTERY
THE mysterious history of the Bell Post Hill bell added a new chapter this week, after it surfaced for sale online following its 2009 theft from a local school, and was returned. Hamilton 27-year-old Milos Durovic returned the bell to Kardinia International College this week after posting it for sale online, saying he’d found it in Cowies Creek as a teenager.
While Mr Durovic initially said he’d found it before 2009, upon discovering it had been stolen he said it must have been later, and handed the bell back to a thankful Kardinia International College yesterday.
The theft, near-sale and return of the historic Bell Post Hill item — the namesake for the suburb — is just the latest chapter in a contentious and often conflicting history of the bell. One of the first accounts of the bell is held in J.H. Heaton’s 1879 historic reference book Dictionary of
Dates, chronicling the history of Australia from 1542 to 1879, including the bell’s origins with settlers David Stead and James Cowie.
“… Bell Post Hill, so called in consequence of Messrs. Cowie and Stead having erected a bell on a high [illegible], to give alarm in case of an attack from the aborigines, 1837,” Heaton notes in the book.
There are varying historic accounts of the bell, including one in which it was rung to warn settlers of approaching indigenous people, resulting in the settlers fleeing and hiding rather than rushing to ‘assist’ the watchman, resulting in the bell being hurled into the Moorabool in disgust.
Other accounts suggest the bell was rung when indigenous people were seen, with the settlers taking up arms to kill them.
A May 29, 1901, article in the
Geelong Advertiser tried to trace the history of the original bell, which it believed was on display at the Mechanics Institute, but lamented a lack of available records.
The next month a letter from Mr S.V Stead — the son of David Stead — to the Addy claimed his father and James Cowie arrived in Melbourne from Tasmania in early 1836, “bringing a ship load of stock with them and ‘The Bell of Bell Post Hill’”.
Mr Stead said the bell was only to be rung if indigenous people “attacked the station”, and was cracked after being “too roughly used”, so was sent to Hobart for repairs. “Should the bell now at the Mechanics’ Institute show any signs of these repairs it may be counted as proof of its identity with the bell placed on Bell Post Hill in the year ’36,” Mr Stead wrote. Historian Dr John Cary this week said the bell was displayed at the Geelong Mechanics Institute before being donated to the Morongo Girls’ College, located at the homestead site, in 1927.
It was used as a school bell and was inherited by Kardinia Internation al College when its founders purchased the site, with the college opening in 1996. The bell went missing in 1953 in a suspected student prank, with the school’s thenprincipal receiving a letter claiming: “Have no fear your bell is near, it can be found hid in the ground”.
The bell was eventually discovered buried on the school oval and reattached to its post until its theft in October 2009.