Pt Henry’s beauty, tragedy
TO most people reading today’s column, the area known as Point Henry is synonymous with one thing: the Alcoa aluminium smelter that dominated that section of the Corio Bay shoreline for several decades.
Now closed, the smelter provided work for generations of locals but when Geelong was first settled Point Henry was the point of arrival for a large percentage of people coming by boat to live to the region.
At the time inner Corio Bay was blocked by a sandbar stretching from Point Henry to Point Lillias, near the current Geelong Grammar School, which prevented all but the smallest of craft from entering inner Corio Bay.
In 1853 an initial attempt to minimise the barrier that was the sandbar was made by digging a channel that was only four metres deep.
The sandbar was seen at the time as an impediment to Geelong’s growth and it appeared to block any ambitions of Geelong becoming the capital.
The big breakthrough in the form of the deeper Hopetoun Channel was not opened until 1893, by which time Geelong had been left behind by the development of Melbourne.
Point Henry was also the arrival site for many to the Geelong region, some of whom walked from Point Henry into Geelong while others entered the town on smaller vessels or horse-drawn vehicles.
Eventually Point Henry started attracting visitors for other reasons, and as early as 1849 the first attempt at making Point Henry a picnic destination was made with the creation of the Point Henry Tea Gardens.
While that venture only survived for a short time, the Victoria Tea Gardens were established about 1870, and in 1871 a Mr Henshaw had taken
over the operation and created a pleasant picnic area.
It was during Henshaw’s time, on Boxing Day 1873, that Corio Bay was the scene of the
harbour’s worst tragedy.
The Geelong Advertiser had run an advertisement in the amusements column each day for a week leading up to
the Boxing Day tragedy, seeking patrons for excursions to the tea gardens.
The Advertiser wrote that Mr Henshaw had arranged for the steamer Sarah to run hourly trips to and from the Yarra Street Pier to the tea gardens at Point Henry on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
The steamer was unable to get closer than 400m to the landing because of the shallow water, and two smaller craft, the Briton and the Fanny, were hired to ferry passengers on the last leg of their journey.
Unfortunately, under the charge of Frank Sharpe and his assistant Matthew Thompson, the Fanny, laden with about 16 passengers for the return journey to the Sarah, was unable to reach the steamer because of a head wind and was blown across the bay towards Cowie’s Creek.
Luckily a local fisherman, Joseph Marmo, and another man John Blackney, were nearby in Marmo’s boat. A total of three men, three women and four boys were rescued on the day. At the time there was no certainty as to the total number of passengers in the Fanny, but seven bodies were eventually recovered.
Those drowned included the Fanny’s skipper Frank Sharpe, two girls from Geelong, a youth from Chilwell, two brothers from Collingwood, a youth from Carlton and another person from St Kilda.
A fund was later established to raise money for Marmo and Blackney, and 50 pounds ($100) was set aside to buy a cottage in Portarlington for Marmo.
By 1879 a James Sinclair was listed as the licensee of the Point Henry Hotel which had been established near the tip of the point.