This debarkation place
got to be called, par excellence, "The Beach." It consisted already of
two public-houses, kept respectively by Liardet and Lingham. Both were
respectable people in their way, but the first was also a character. Of
good family connection, he had enjoyed a life of endless adventure,
which, however, had never seemed any more to elevate him by fortune than
to depress him by its reverse. He was a kind of roving Garibaldi, minus,
indeed, the hero's war-paint and the Italian unity, but with all his
frankness and indomitable resource. Having a family of active young
sons, he secured the boating of "the Beach" as well as the other thing.
But his untold riches of experience seemed never to condescend to
develop into riches of mere money--and perhaps without one pang of
regret to his versatile and resourceful mind.
This Beach was a sterile spot, afterwards fittingly called Sandridge,
and presented so little inducement to occupancy that these two
public-houses were the whole of it till well on to the days of gold.
Then The Beach awoke to its destinies. When the Melbourne and Hobson's
Bay railway was projected, in 1852, there were already a good few
houses, mostly wooden, straggling along either side of the original bush
track.
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