An important off-cut from the Newhill/Newell project – 2019/20
Above: Albany’s waterfront precinct cut from Albany 30A, King George’s Sound as marked by Philip Chauncy, Assistant Surveyor, 1851. Source: State Records Office of W.A.
AS we have seen from our investigations into 1830s and 1840s Albany, behind the imaginary fascia of the town constructed by the moneyed settlers whose role it was to promote and develop a society in the model of well-to-do Britain, Albany’s pre-eminent locale returned the image of a shabby disreputable waterfront populated by heavy drinking soldiers and mariners, foreign sailors running-off or else frolicking on shore-leave, and an otherwise supportive indigenous element sick and dying while embroiled in seedy prostitution.
This changed and improved to a degree from the 1850s with the expansion caused by appointment of Albany as coaling depot for the intercontinenal passenger steamers, especially those contracted to carry the royal mail, but what needs to be remembered is that based on population statistics and social make-up, Albany as a micrcosm of coastal colonial Australia was one part church and office to nine parts boat and vice. There are so many stories of excess carried out by whalers coming ashore between Geographe Bay and the South Coast over the 1840s in particular, author Tim Blue’s much needed Whale Hunters of the West carries 240 pages of startling insight.