A Brief History of Loch Sport

(As published by a private individual in 1979)

A bore was sunk in our backyard here in loch sport, and after a pile of greyish sludge was brought up, clean golden sand dotted with minute pebbles was reached. After that came water, at a depth of twenty-six feet. These samples of sand could be said to take Loch Sport back to its earliest beginnings, when the changing coastline and varying courses of rivers began the buildup of sand and silt and weed, which eventually formed the strip of land between Lakes Victoria and Reeve.

At one time, of course, the sea reached inland as far as Rosedale. Although it is accepted that aborigines were in Australia for about thirty thousand years prior to the white man's coming. Their occupation of this area would have been controlled by the ice ages and the rise and fall of the ocean. However, the Kurnai, the dark people of east Gippsland, must have witnessed many changes in the lakes.

When Europeans arrived, the entrance from the sea was nearer Lake Tyers than the modern artificial entrance, and it is believed that there was once another break in the coastline near Ocean Grange where these days a mere fragile strip of sand keeps out the forces of the ocean. Kurnai clan named Tatungalong roamed the land on the seaward side of Lake Victoria before white settlement. 

Some artifacts have been unearthed in the Loch Sport township area, and, across Lake Reeve, amidst the dunes backing the Ninety Mile Beach there are many relics of their long occupation in the form of kitchen middens. These weathered heaps of pipi shells are now, rather belatedly, under the protection of the Victoria archaeological survey, and all artifacts remaining are the property of the survey.

The native women gathered the pipi's by feeling with their toes in the soft sand near the sea's edge, and tossing the shellfish into woven bags slung from their necks. When winds expose the middens. It is plain that the same heaps were added to for many, many years. The Tatungalong wintered in the dunes, finding these spots so located as to protect them from both the cold ocean gales and the bleak land winds.

Tribal women gathered various vegetable foods and small animals, whilst their men fished and hunted. The aboriginal custom of burning out undergrowth ensured food for kangaroos and emus, made hunting easier, and protected the tribes people from the fierce and concentrated wildfire which today causes so much worry to those of us who live in the bush.

There here sporadic fights amidst the various clans of the Kurnai, who were occasional cannibals, but for the Tatungalong, living in a mostly mild climate with ample food supplies, life within the framework of their own culture continued uneventfully for countless centuries.

In 1798, ten years after the first settlement at Sydney, George Bass examined thirty miles of the long beach he named the Ninety Mile, and actually deduced that lagoons lay behind the low dune range, but the natives he saw from a distance appeared so hostile that he did not attempt to explore ashore.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, there were many shipwrecks off the Ninety Mile beach, but, as far as is recorded, the first European claiming to see any part of the Gippsland Lakes was Andrew Hutton who, with a small party, in 1838 brought cattle from the modern N.S.W. Border to near the present site of Lakes Entrance. He did not linger, owing to the warlike nature of the natives. The first outsider to realise the full extent of our beautiful lakes was Angus McMillan, the cattleman explorer, who saw them from Mt. McLeod, past Bairnsdale, in 1839. During 1840, he reached the body of water he named Lake Victoria at a spot between the Nicholson and Tambo rivers.

Later that year, polish explorer Paul Strzlecki also reached the same lake, calling it King, after his friend, Phillip Parker King, son of governor King. P. P. King later became the first Australian-born Admiral, and is also associated with the voyage of the beagle, which took Charles Darwin around the world. Eventually, it was sorted out, the name King was retained for the lake past Sperm Whale Head, and the lovely stretch of water we see from Loch Sport became Lake Victoria.

During 1841, a party of cattlemen settlers, led by Angus McMillan, explored the lakes more thoroughly by boat. On this expedition, McLennan's strait, between Lakes Wellington and Victoria, was named, and Lake Reeve was also found and named, after two brothers in the party. This suggests that Angus McMillan and his companions were the first whites to actually see the strip of land upon which Loch Sport now stands.

Of course, there could have been another European "first". It depends upon whether one is a pragmatic or romantic person. During the early 1840's, an extraordinary story became current amongst settlers in Gippsland (the words were not joined until much later) and the Port Phillip district that a white woman has held captive by the Tatungalong clan. Efforts to locate this woman, believed to be a Gaelic speaking Scot shipwrecked on the Ninety Mile Beach, make a story in themselves. After many ineffectual searches, a white-painted ship's figurehead was found and accepted as the origin of the rumours. On the other hand, that sensible Scot, Angus McMillan, believed that some bones found were those of a white woman, but unfortunately, these were not preserved for scientific scrutiny. So, the first white person in Loch Sport may just have been the centre of one of Gippsland's strangest mysteries.

Smoke on the Lake

Before long, all the pleasantly open grassland on the ocean side of Lake Victoria was taken up by cattle­men. Stock was driven in from the north, or shipped across from Van Diemen's Land to Port Albert. Attempts were made to land animals on the Ninety Mile Beach in the vicinity of the present Lake Reeve ranch, but this was impractical, and some of the horses escaped to breed into brumbies, which roamed the area until just before the First World War.

By now, time had run out for the aboriginal race. Disease and culture shock accounted for many. In the very early days, strife erupted over the spearing of cattle, and the late Aldo Massola, an authority on early European Victoria, has recorded that aborigines were shot as they tried to swim across Lake Reeve to Sperm Whale Head after a raid at boomerang point. This spot is at the netting limit sign on Lake Reeve. Handed down by word of mouth is an even more sinister tale of blacks rounded up under a pretext and then killed, their bodies being dumped in swamps and morasses. (The name Sperm Whale Head is self-explanatory, as a glance at the map will show).

With the discovery of gold in the East Gippsland hills, transport was an increasing problem. Much land near the lakes was boggy, and therefore the opening of the new entrance, liable to extreme flooding. So, it became obvious that the best means of moving goods and people was by water. As early as 1854, a publican in the Bairnsdale area acquired a whale boat, by which "diggers" returning to Melbourne could travel across to McLennan's Strait and land at Seacombe, finding their way thence to Port Albert.

In those days, Seacombe and the Loch Sport to be were included in Campbell’s giant Helensborough run. (Scotland’s Helens-borough is in traditional Campbell country). Campbell saw the possibilities in lakes shipping, and began an era, which lasted until 1939.

In 1855, a scheme was mooted that a canal be dug from Port Albert to the deepwater section of Lake Reeve. This idea was revived, and again, vetoed quite recently, the canal this time to be from Seaspray to Loch Sport. In 1869, the suggestion that an artificial entrance be pushed through at Ocean Grange came to nothing.

The days of the great cattle and sheep runs ended as gold miners demanded land. At the same time, lakes shipping boomed. Seacombe was surveyed as a township to act as port for several families who occupied both the peninsula and the land on the ocean side of Lake Reeve.

In its heyday, Seacombe boasted a black­smith and a Post-Office come-store. Unfortunately, the old wharf was burnt out some years ago, so that little remains to remind us of the days when smoke on Lake Victoria was a common sight. For many years, vessels came all the way from Melbourne. They docked near the intersection of Flinders and Spencer Streets, and were called, collectively, the Mosquito Fleet, some of these small craft servicing the Bass Straight islands as well as Gippsland.

Goods landed at Seacombe had to be moved by bullock dray to outlying homesteads. There are still traces of one of the old tracks along the Lake Reeve shore of Loch Sport. For strangely, this was less liable to flooding than the Lake Victoria side, which was impassable at the point where the marina is now established. This depression was the natural outlet for floodwaters, which, before the modern road was built, formed a barrier almost across the peninsula in wet seasons.

The Barton family took up land on Sperm Whale Head, and their homestead, a sad relic of happy days, stood at Point Wilson until about twenty years ago. The remains of a lovely garden are dotted here and there about the picnic area at Point Wilson in the Lakes National Park, daffodils in spring, pampas grass, garlic to ward off pests, and fine old pine trees, all reminders of a quieter, more leisurely age.

Cattle, horses and sheep were raised in the whole area, but angora goats ran on the narrows, as the place where Loch Sport stands was called, and the Barton Angora Stud was known Australia-wide.

Bark for tanning was stripped from black wattle trees am) taken by boat across to Bairnsdale. Firewood was chopped to fuel the steamers, and dolomite was extracted from two "dolomite swamps", one within the present National Park, and the other just off the National Park Road, opposite Seagull Drive.(Dolomite is used as a fertiliser, and also in steel manufacture. It is more commonly associated with hilly regions than with sandy areas such as Loch Sport.)

According to Mr. Arthur ward of Loch Sport, who was told much about the early days several years ago by an elderly man who worked for the Barton’s as a lad, the area was still fertile and Park like at the turn of the century. Pools such as cygnet swamp in the National Park were watering holes for stock, as well as breeding places for eels.

Wildfowl and fish abounded, so that although life was hard for the poorer settler, a "free feed" was readily available, and even that new scourge, the rabbit, had its uses in the cooking pot!In fact, during the booming seventies and eighties of the last century, many well-to-do Melbournians took their holidays at the Lakes, and sportsmen among them found Sperm Whale Head a paradise.

Overstocking, a lack of understanding of the essential fragility of the sandy soil, and several bushfires sweeping through the area before world war one changed the whole nature of the environment and drove out many settlers. The re-growth was dense and rapid, bracken and thriptomine taking over where grass had flourished before. The saw tooth banksias proliferated, the seed being spread; it is suggested, by black cockatoos. Foxes and rabbits increased rapidly, to the detriment of native birds and small marsupials. Likewise, the reeds fringing the lakes succumbed to increased salinity and a plague of crabs, so that the waterfowl decreased in numbers.

After the Great War, with its tragic decimation of Gippsland’s young men, other changes occurred. Road to transport superseded the boats which had been the lakes' lifeline, and tiny Seacombe, which had never grown into the township laid out in the buoyant days of the eighties, quietly died. Steamers, in decreasing numbers, battled on until 1939, mostly as pleasure craft.

In 1927, the Sperm Whale Head property of the Barton family was acquired as a National Park, but it was so isolated that only keen naturalists visited it. Mr. F. C. W. Barton acted as part-time ranger for many years on an unpaid basis. Eventually receiving a salary for continuing in the same way. His devotion to an ideal is commemorated in the F. C. W. Barton shelter at the point Wilson picnic reserve on the site of the old Barton homestead.

Modern technology reached out to Sperm Whale Head, Seacombe, and the narrows. Extensive oil exploration took place prior to world war two, without any real results, and then again in the postwar years. World war two touched our little corner of Australia in a particularly sad fashion. Several young pilots on training flights from Bairnsdale crashed into the lakes or into the sea, it being discovered too late that there was a fault in the design of the Beaufort. A somewhat corroded propeller off a ditched Beaufort was recovered from Lake Victoria a few years ago and is now on display at the Loch Sport Marina. Also, during the war years, a kitty hawk plunged into Lake Reeve and is said to be visible at very low tide.

The New Pioneers

During the mid-fifties, the new boom in leisure, and more especially, water sports, caused interest to be taken in the land lying between the Lakes National Park and the Crown Land to the west of the narrows. In 1957, partners Carroll and LeGrand commenced the subdivision of what is now Loch Sport, and the new wave of pioneers began trickling in.

The road from the Golden Beach turnoff was, to put it mildly, daunting, a narrow track of shifting sands and water filled potholes, according to season. What is now marked as the crest soon earned the title of boot hill (after the cemeteries of the wild west) because of the number of cars, which became bogged. Everything edible or drinkable had to be brought in by the visitor, and a simple trip to the National Park was so fraught with danger that Mr. LeGrand Snr. advised the intrepid to leave word in "town" when the expedition was undertaken. To reach the Ninety Mile beach, one walked across Lake Reeve, wet or dry. The alternative lay across the "old" causeway, and through gates and over bogs to Long Point.

Modern Loch Sport's first permanent resident was the late Charlie Morris, a wiry little man who acted as foreshore ranger and general do-anything. He opened the garage at the entrance to the township, and his name is commemorated in Charles Street. He is remembered well for his activities on a September night in the early sixties, which fire sweeping in from the heath land west of Loch Sport threatened those staying for the school holidays. At about ten that night, Charlie did the rounds in his VW accompanied by his dog "Cooee", knocking on every door, and crying, "All out! All out!"After valiant, all-night efforts by road-maker Clyde Campbell, his bulldozer, and the few men available, Loch Sport was saved at the seventh hour by a shower of rain. Incidentally, there was no telephone in Loch Sport at that time with which to call for help.

Houses increased in number, and the National Park's status improved with the appointment of Mr. Ron Cook Snr. as first full-time ranger in 1968, and also with the relocating and upgrading of the road to the park entrance at Pelican Bay. Another improvement was the deepwater jetty at the end of Charles Street, constructed by Ports and Harbours.

In 1970 the sealed road from Golden Beach road to Loch Sport was completed by the Shire of Rosedale, while the same year saw the construction of the new causeway from Wallaby Street across Lake Reeve, also built by the shire.

Then came problems. Too many campers on a stripped and eroding Lake Street foreshore, dune buggies on the sand hills, a wild element emerging in holiday periods because there was no policeman. These troubles were gradually overcome by the strenuous efforts of some local and holiday-home people.

In 1972, the shire of Rosedale was chosen for the first of the land conservation council's public land studies. A fascinating sidelight of the preliminary work done for the study was the discovery near Loch Sport of the tiny marsupial, the New Holland Mouse, last seen near Sydney about the year 1800.

Eventually, the sand dune system and much of the land west of Loch Sport was incorporated into a coastal park under the supervision of the National Parks service. Meantime, stiff new legislation has helped to control the dune buggy threat to the sand hills, which protect Loch Sport from the fierce ocean winds.

The revival of camping, the better amenities of the Shire of Rosedale's Caravan Park near the deepwater jetty and the dredging of sand to form new beach along Loch Sport's Lake Victoria foreshore, have both given the Lake Street Reserve an opportunity to revive.

Many people are settling permanently at Loch Sport, and encouragingly, there are enough young ones to warrant a daily school bus to Sale.

Behind progress, there is always hard work. The battle to obtain SEC power could fill a volume! The Ratepayers' and Progress Association, the Foreshore Committee, the fundraising Social Clubs, and the Boat Club, deserve the thanks of all who visit Loch Sport. The local C.F.A is always on standby, and its allied organisation, the State Emergency Service, is now operating in Loch Sport to make your holiday safer.  Behind these organisations are devoted workers giving freely of their time and talents.

No story of Loch Sport can be complete without mention of the oil and gas wells off the coast in Bass Strait. Gas, and in the future, oil, came in from the platforms about five miles from Loch Sport in the Lakes Entrance direction. The pipeline through to Longford and on to Melbourne was completed in 1968, and gas came ashore for the first time in 1969. The pipeline easement is noticeable on the other side of Lake Reeve, and the helicopters on their runs out to the platforms in Bass Strait are well known in the township.

On their way, the choppers pass over the ancient aboriginal middens amidst the sand dunes along the Ninety Mile Beach, and that in itself says quite a lot about the history of Loch Sport.

C Nara Lake, 1979

Footnote: Since this was written the Shire of Rosedale has been amalgamated into the Shire of Wellington.

Published Courtesy of the Wellington Shire Mobile Library Service.

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