On July 5, 1889 the Victorian Gazette announced the creation of a township at Mount Singapore on Wilson Promontory. This was to be one of several townships to be created around Corner Inlet and on the Prom, but the others did not get far enough to be announced in the Gazette.

This one might have got ahead of the others because by that time the spot was known as a shelter and as a good place to relax. Biddy's Camp and the nearby shanty were used by dingo hunters (there were once many dingoes on the Prom), fishermen, prospectors and even the tin-miners. We've told those stories in previous columns. There were also Chinese people in their own camp, some of them prospectors who had turned to fishing and fished mainly for squid. These were dried and sent home to China for a good price.
It was also a sheltered place for fishing boats to ride out bad weather. It was an interestingly motley group of people who occupied the camps and there was no officialdom at all.
In the event only two township sites were surveyed, Yanakie and Seaforth, over on the Singapore Peninsula, that part of the Prom that juts out to the north east, protecting much of Corner Inlet from Bass Strait's storms.
In about 1843 the Promontory had been divided into four parishes, administrative rather than clerical, and the Singapore Peninsula was part of the Parish of Warreen. This division never had importance until 1887.
"His Excellency Sir William Cleaver Francis Robinson, KCMG...the Administrator of the Government of Victoria...does by this notice now proclaim as townships the portions of Crown lands hereinafter described, that is to say, – Township at Mount Singapore, Wilson's Promontory, County of Buln Buln, Parish of Yanakie: bounded on the south by a line running from east to west and distant about one mile and a half south from the summit of Mount Hunter, and on the west, north and east by the shore of Corner Inlet."
Note that in this announcement Seaforth was in the Parish of Yanakie.
Seaforth was about a mile south of Mount Hunter and close to Freshwater Cove. The streets were laid out in a precise grid. Singapore Street ran north-south and was lined up on Mount Singapore. Hunter Street was parallel but lined up precisely with Mount Hunter. These are not imposing mountains, by the way. The Prom is a very ancient land mass and Mount Hunter is only 317 metres high. Mount Singapore rises only 218 metres.
Among the other street names – Mason (after a legendary local member of Parliament), The Esplanade and Latrobe - was Leonard Street, presumably named after Mount Leonard, further south.
George Smith had a hotel in the 'town', which was very basic. It was atop "Pub Hump", a name new to me. It was just above Chinaman's Beach, and the street was to be called Tre Esplanade. The hotel must have predated the laying-out of the township-to-be because poor old George was outbid and unable to buy the block on which his hotel stood. In one of those extraordinary efforts we see from back in those days, the whole hotel was moved to Port Welshpool, where George's daughter ran a store in it. It later became the Port Welshpool Post Office and residence of the Postmistress.
Up on the summit of Mount Singapore there is a cairn erected by Surveyor Alexander Black, of Black and Allen Line fame. He was one of the two head surveyors who determined Gippsland's northeast boundary, the straight line from the headwaters of the Murray to the sea. Among the many other tasks he carried was the surveying of Seaforth.
Black laid out 316 blocks, a large number for such a remote place, but when the sites were actually auctioned, in June 1892, they brought from 15 pounds to 40 pounds. There were 15 residential blocks sold, and one of them must have been the one that poor old George Smith had been using for his 'hotel'. I called it a shanty but that might have been a little hard. The building was substantial enough to be moved and given a new lift at Welshpool.
After the survey and the auction, nothing much happened. None of the 15 blocks sold were ever built upon or used. George Wilson could have stayed there after all.
When the new Committee of Management for the Wilsons Promontory National Park wanted to clear the legal slate by getting rid of Seaforth, most of the owners were happy to sell their blocks but three of them were owned by people who could not be traced and so the Minister for Lands bought the remaining three 'by acquisition'. Even so, Seaforth survived on official maps until 1952, when it was formally 'erased'.
Seaforth should have seen a revival of its fortunes with the revived tin-mining at Mount Hunter between 1914(?) and 1926, in which year the tin miners were given the boot and the land they had leased returned to the National Park Committee of Management.
Tin mining had begun long before the turn of the century with prospectors finding cassiterite – tin ore – in some of the gullies and on the beaches. One gully was named Grey Tin Gully, and the creek which flowed down it joined Lawson's Creek, named for the prospector who found it.
Forty pounds of valuable ore were recovered from a cut only 50 feet long, and the prospector made a fortune. The others who followed him were not so lucky. It was known there was tin ore there, as there was above Foster, on the opposite shoe, but I don't think anyone ever made much money from the bigger tin mine on Mount Hunter, which more or less replaced the prospectors.
This mine seemed to have a bright future at first. In 1905 the Director of the Victorian Geological Survey visited the mine and reported that with tin at one hundred and sixty five pounds a ton the mine had a good future – if the miners found the source of the 'wash' and its direction and extent. Unlike so many other miners, these blokes found the 'lead', and when tin became a vital material in the Great War prices boomed, and the government considered throwing the whole National Park open to prospecting.
The future looked so promising that 12 square miles were reserved for a township at Mt Singapore. This never eventuated and by 1926 the mining leases were being cancelled. It took many years for the scars to fade – the tin mine had even installed two large pumps to bring seawater 700 feet up Mt Hunter for sluicing, a very environmentally damaging form of mining.
The miners left open shafts that were very dangerous, and they left some very bare rocks where they had been sluicing on Mount Hunter. This corner of the Wilsons Promontory National Park has seen some very colourful history, but it never saw Seaforth come to fruition.