Coo-ee is a regular column contributed by author John Barry that tells stories about Victoria’s history and the people who called it home.
When the average adult man stood 167cm tall, Henry Wilson Hutchinson Smythe or ‘Long’ Smythe towered over almost all others.
He stood 198cm tall or six feet six inches. The youngest of six children, he was born in Liverpool in the UK in 1815 and emigrated with his family to the Swan River Settlement in 1829.
However, his father, Benjamin Smythe, was never paid for the civil engineering and surveying work he undertook because of the dishonesty of his employer, Thomas Peel.
The Smythe family, now destitute, landed in Launceston in 1831.
Two of ‘Long’ Smythe’s older brothers remained in the Swan River Settlement to work off debts that the family had run up while awaiting payment for work.
Benjamin and his youngest son set up in Launceston as land surveyors, civil engineers, architects and general measurers.
However, that sort of work was not easily found, so the two gave lessons while they waited. By 1834, Benjamin was running a school while ‘Long’ Smythe gave lessons in drawing.
These drawing lessons were likely cartographic and technical because the Cornwall Chronicle in August 1835 announced that ‘Long’ Smythe’s map of Launceston was ‘ready for the engraver’. He was 19.
With the marriage of ‘Long’ Smythe’s sister Martha to Captain William Lonsdale that same year, life for the Smythe family improved immeasurably.
In September 1836, Lonsdale was appointed the first resident police magistrate at Port Phillip, now Melbourne.
‘Long’ Smythe followed them to Port Phillip in 1837, initially working as a surveyor in the Westernport district. He returned to Launceston in 1841 to marry Jessie Allan. She was 20; he was 26.
The couple then returned to the Port Phillip district. There, they squatted on land they called ‘Gowangardie’ on the Broken River.
The property was 24km from Shepparton, but the homestead, just outside Benalla, was called ‘Marangan’.
George Gipps was NSW Governor of the time and was dissatisfied with the surveying being conducted in the Port Phillip district.
He also found surveyors in Sydney were reluctant to travel south into the wilds of the Port Phillip district.
So in 1841, ‘Long’ Smythe was appointed as a contract surveyor to survey ‘the contour of the country’ on the western side of the great basin of Port Phillip.
His instructions were that ‘It is essential that your principal points should be fixed trigonometrically and your lines run horizontally so as to adopt themselves to the fixed points.’
The contract rate was 20 shillings per mile, 1½d per acre. For that year and the next, ‘Long’ Smythe surveyed Geelong and the western side of Melbourne.
In 1843, ‘Long’ Smythe was appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Murray district, his home district, at a handsome salary of $730 per annum or $2 per day.
Among his achievements as commissioner, ‘Long’ Smythe measured the portion of the Sydney Rd between Melbourne and Seymour and laid out a township reserve at Seymour.
He was also appointed as a justice of the peace.
When gold was discovered at Spring Creek near Beechworth in February 1852, more than 8000 hopeful fossickers descended on the town.
Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe appointed ‘Long’ Smythe as Resident Commissioner of Crown Lands (Goldfields) for Spring Creek in 1852.
His camp was near where the Beechworth courthouse now stands.
The following year, Mr La Trobe appointed ‘Long’ Smythe as police magistrate for these diggings.
He was to supervise the diggings and provide the legal structure underpinning the monthly licence fee.
To discourage a flood of people moving to this and other diggings, Mr La Trobe imposed a 30 shilling a month licence fee on miners.
As the surface gold began to run out, the fee was seen as oppressive. It would lead to a rebellion in Ballarat at the Eureka Stockade late in 1854.
Amid his tasks, ‘Long’ Smythe still found time to become a founding member of the Melbourne Club.
Then, in 1853, just when his life seemed to be full of opportunities and possibilities, ‘Long’ Smythe drowned when crossing the Broken River.
He was just 37 and apparently suffering a psychotic episode at the time.
He was buried in the Old Melbourne Cemetery.
– John Barry.