Porcupine: A Story of Hills and Inns

  

The dangerous S-bend, Porcupine Hill, Old Calder Highway ca. 1950's 

The Calder Highway stretches all the way from Melbourne to Curlwaa in New South Wales. These days, south of Bendigo it's been replaced by the Calder Freeway. The freeway runs sometimes on top of, and, at other times, parallel to the old Highway. Nevertheless, it's not always easy to know what in fact IS the old Calder Hwy. Like many of our major highways its course has changed numerous times over the years, with new sections and detours lasting for some years before being replaced by straighter and/or safer alignments. It should be noted that the Calder has a special significance in Central Victoria because it was once known as Mount Alexander Road, the name of which still survives within the Melbourne metropolitan area.  It was the road the diggers took to the Mount Alexander goldfields, resting every now and then, at places like Diggers Rest! (In Central Victoria it was also known as the Bendigo Road, and later, the North-Western Hwy).

    This story looks at one tiny section of the old Calder Highway near Harcourt, demonstrating how within a few kilometres, the alignment has changed significantly over the years and in doing so, finally led to the loss of one of the major historic sites in this region. The section I'll be looking at is that between Harcourt North and Fogartys Gap Rd, Ravenswood South. All historic photos and a considerable part of the information used in this article have been provided by Harcourt Heritage.

    The above photo, taken sometime in the 1950s, is of a particularly notorious bend in the old Calder Hwy. It's the point where the highway, winding its way down Porcupine Hill, crossed over the Northern Railway line from east to west, after which its path towards Bendigo and beyond is relatively flat and uneventful (until Big Hill is reached, but that's another story!). Quite why the early road makers chose to place the bridge crossing on a steep downhill section of Porcupine Hill is lost in the mists of time but, although now long bypassed, it earned its place as one of the most treacherous sections of the highway as far back as the early 20th century, if not earlier.

    Now a minor service road, the S-bend and bridge approaches haven't changed since the early 1970's when a new, straighter alignment of the highway was constructed, a little further east, which required a new bridge over the railway.

The old S-bend crossing, 2026

        Older residents claim that after the new bridge was built this bypassed section of the highway was used as a shortcut for some years. When caught behind a slow moving truck they ducked around the old S-Bend to rejoin the highway further north, hoping to beat the traffic to Fogarty's Gap Road.

    In the above Google Earth view from 2009 (the freeway is in the final stages of construction), the complicated history of the main road to Bendigo can be seen. The earliest alignment of the highway is still visible, the S-bend section surviving, a remnant of a highway upgrade designed and constructed around 1914. The later alignment, now renamed Harmony Way, can be seen bypassing the S-bend and, subsequently, being bypassed in turn by the Calder Freeway. 

Mount Alexander Mail, July 22, 1914 page 2

    As can be seen in the newspaper article above, Porcupine hill was cut into and reduced in height, and a 5m embankment was created to reduce the slope. It appears, judging by the embankment at the S-bend today, that it was built up even higher before the bridge here was bypassed and the new road constructed.

    Despite the works having taken place, by the end of 1916 the Victorian Automobile Club was compelled to erect 'Drive Slowly' signs before and after the new cutting (Australasian, Saturday 23 December 1916, page 19).

    While all this was happening, just a few hundred metres north of the S-bend, the buildings of the Porcupine Inn stood firm, having survived for over 120 years (inside the white circle in the map above). The Inn was noteworthy because it predated the gold rush. 

    It's not known when this photo was taken but it may well have been prior to 1949 as by that time this section of road had been bitumenised. This building replaced the original timber inn which was lost to fire in 1852.

    The Porcupine Inn was established in 1846 by Samuel Hawkings (1816-1867). The initial Inn was a simple wattle and daub shack, one of the first in the area. The historian, Ken James, notes that between the years 1851 and 1855, in an attempt to keep order on the Forest Creek diggings, no liquor licences were issued. This resulted in the two hotels licensed before the Gold Rush, Saw Pit Gully (Elphinstone) and the Porcupine Inn, having the monopoly on legal alcohol for a time.

Porcupine Inn, prior to 1970

    The district was initially referred to as Porcupine after the Inn, but when the school opened in 1865 it was decided to call it South Ravenswood. Ken believes that it may have been because the name was already part of two other schools – Porcupine Flat near Maldon and Porcupine Ridge near Daylesford.  

    An early traveller had this to say about the Inn:

        'The journey from Forest Creek to Bendigo was uneventful, with the exception that we passed, and tried to obtain dinner at the afterwards notorious Porcupine Inn, which even in those early times was frequented by the most determined set of thieves, rogues and vagabonds to be found in the Australian colonies. The house was full of this undesirable company when we arrived there, the majority in different stages of intoxication: those that were soberest waiting for the opportunity to rob the others as the succumbed to the influence of the liquor they had been imbibing. Our application for dinner was met with a polite refusal, and we were glad to obtain some bottled ale and porter and get safely away from the place, and after two days' travelling arrived at our destination and pitched camp.'

    The Inn, located right next to the old Calder Hwy comprised a number of buildings. There was the inn itself (see above) as well as bedrooms and, as was common in those days, a separate kitchen (given the risk of fire).

    The Bedroom wing of the Inn    

        Even before the Inn was delicensed in 1910, apparently, in 1875, the South Ravenswood School had use of a room here which was leased for 2/6 weekly. After losing its liquor license, the building transitioned to a private residence, later becoming a dairy farm owned by the Martin family, Edward Martin having held the liquor licence of the Inn in 1856. The dormitory shown above was later used by the Martins as a packing shed, as they also had a substantial orchard here. It seems they held the property until 1934.

 

The kitchen of the old ‘Porcupine Inn’. 

    According to a note accompanying this photo at Harcourt Heritage, heavy red gum bearers held up the ceiling. And as was the case with so many early buildings it originally had a shingle roof. Quite often the new corrugated iron sheeting was laid straight over the shingle roof, as may have occurred here. The note given with this photo states that the stables of the Inn were located on the other side of the old Bendigo Road.

     More information can be found here, in an article (page 10) in 'The Core', written by Harcourt historian, George Milford. The Core is a monthly magazine produced by the Harcourt Progress Association Inc.

    And so it's time to work out the exact location of the Porcupine Inn and why it was deemed necessary to demolish it in 1971. 

    

    This early allotments map from 1857 provides an important clue to its whereabouts. Let's zoom in to the relevant portion.

    From this we can see that the country hadn't been surveyed when the Porcupine Inn was established, as it overlaps the boundaries of later allotments. In fact, the early surveyors used the inn buildings as a starting point for their surveying. With a solid, seemingly permanent and known structure upon which to place the first link of their chain, they headed out in all directions to accurately map their surroundings.

Photo: Wikipedia

    Here, the 1857 map is overlaid with a modern survey map, the boundaries of the Porcupine Inn marked in red. As you can see, the western boundary of the inn is already very close to the road reserve.

    The road at the top, leading off to the left (west) is Fogartys Gap Road and the one leading off to the right (east) near the bottom is McIvor Road.

    In this aerial map from 1949, farm buildings can be seen, as well as what remained of the Porcupine Inn at that time, the smaller buildings just within the top of the red circle.

    Given what we can deduce from the above maps we can now overlay them to come up with a composite image which shows the dramatic changes that have occurred here. 

    Once this alignment was chosen there was no alternative, the Martin's old farm would have to go and, with it, the last of the remaining Porcupine Inn buildings, a remnant of the times before the Gold Rush. 

    In this photo (looking north) we're standing just about where some of the Porcupine Inn outbuildings were located, the original Inn foundations buried under the embankment on our right. The road you see on the left isn't the older Calder Hwy. It's an access road created when the embankment and new road buried the old alignment of the highway.

    It certainly seems a shame that the new road couldn't have been built a little further to the east, and so preserve such a historic site. And, at any rate, less than 40 years later it was made redundant as a result of the construction of the Calder Freeway upon which hundreds of vehicles travel daily, unaware of the rich history of a stretch of old road just a hundred metres away.