Visit Wilson Botanic Park

Wilson Botanic Park, in Berwick, is a place you should see, if you have not done so already. It was once in the tropics but it is now a much more temperate place.

Further, if you are fit enough you should walk the track around the rim for some great views of the world outside and some stunning views of the lakes on the inside. If you are not up to that, and it is not really too bad, you can walk along sealed pathways well up into the gardens alongside the edges of those lakes. Either way, it is worth the trip.

It all started countless thousands of years ago. Approximately 24 million years ago, a fair while back, volcanoes pushed lava flows up onto the surface on the west side of what is now Berwick, and in many other places locally. The effect was a large basalt plain, as the rock flowed outward and cooled.

Waterborne and windblown soils and sands slowly covered this plain and after a couple of million years that layer had hardened into sandstone rocks, with fossilised plant remains. One exciting discovery was the existence of eucalyptus fossils alongside Southern Beech trees. This is proof of climate change long ago – the Beeches are a tropical species where the eucalypts belong in temperate forests.

Twenty million (or so) years later white people came to the area and the lives of the Indigenous people already were changed forever. The Cardinia Creek was more or less the eastern boundary of the Bunurong area and it was a very productive food source. At that time what is now the Wilson Botanic Park was just a steep hill.

Terrence O’Connor took up the Cardinia pastoral run in 1838, running from the Eumemmering creek to the Cardinia. He sold it to Captain Gardiner and in 1854 Gardiner sold it up. Enter the Wilsons and the Buchanans, two families to play a powerful role in the growth of Berwick.

The Wilson family came to Victoria in 1841 and settled at Brighton. There were three boys and two girls, and two of the boys, William and James, bought 632 acres of Gardiner’s land. The Wilson station was bounded in the south by the track that became the Princes Highway and by Harkaway in the north. The Harkaway Road formed the east boundary and Hessell Road the west. It was heavily timbered but they cleared much of it and planted most of it down to wheat. They also grew potatoes and ran sheep.

Their sister Anne came with them as a housekeeper, and they lived in tents until the Quarry Hills house was built. Some of James Wilson’s wheat won a gold medal at the Paris Expo in 1858, only four years after the Wilsons came to the Berwick property. James was a leader of the farming world, President at different times of the Dandenong and the Berwick Show Societies. He was a noted breeder of Ayrshire cattle.

William seems to have been more interested in sheep. Buying additional land at Hallam and at Clyde for his flocks.

When William married (I don’t know the date) the property was divided diagonally so that each portion had access to the Berwick township. William got the southern portion, along the Gippsland track.

William was aware of the basalt deposits in the hill right from the start and hence the eventual name of his house, Quarry Hills. From 1859 he allowed extraction of the basalt by small-time contractors who paid him a royalty. The stone was vital to making roads that could be used in winter.

The quarry roared into life when the government announced the building of a railway into Gippsland. Thousands of tons of stone would be need as ballast for the line. Wilson negotiated a deal with railway contractors, who built an embankment south of the highway to a crushing plant near the railway line. Most of the best ideas are simple ones and someone had the simple idea of an endless cable from within the quarry, down to the crushers and back.

The loaded trucks would have their brakes released in the quarry and would then roll, quite slowly, down to the crushers. As they did so they’d be passed by the empty trucks coming back, being drawn by the cable attached to the full trucks rolling downhill. That meant crossing the road, but there was not so much traffic in those days.

The stone from the quarry ballasted the railway all the way from Dandenong to Bunyip so there were 70,000 cubic yards or crushed basalt, bluemetal, involved. I just don’t know how much that would have weighed. When the line was finished the railway contractors took up their spur line to the crushers and the loop line into the quarry.

The Wilsons had shown they could seize opportunities and William Junior was no exception. In about 1883 or so he revived the quarry by selling crushed rock to the District Roads Boards and the Shires all along the railway. He set up a similar operation with the railways. The stone walls were drilled, black powder was rammed into the holes and fired. The rock would fall and men with large sledgehammers would break it up. The crusher would break it down into “road metal”, about one and a half centimetre in size. It was loaded into tipping drays which would take it down to the railway spur.

This spur sloped downward from the Berwick yards and then rose slightly as it reached the end of the embankment. The tip drays would drop their stone from above into the trucks, and when a sufficient number, a ‘rake’, of trucks was filled the added weight would let them run halfway back to Berwick, where a locomotive would pick them and make up a train. Astutely, Wilson kept his price down to the point where it was not worthwhile for the shires to open their own quarries, so he dominated the market.

In today’s terms, the operation was about as eco-friendly as a quarry could get. We did need the stone, and we still do, whatever we think of quarrying. That stone literally made life possible by making transport possible.

Now, I have still not got to the Wilson Botanic Park, which was the point of all this. I’ll come back to this next week, and I’ll try to explain how Berwick came to have a botanical park, a garden which is developing into an attraction recognised overseas and not very far from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne, itself a spectacular success in every way.