Page 3 - 1978 NAB Calendar Early Australian Maritime Life Part Two

LIARDET’S BEACH AND HOTEL IN THEIR
HEYDAY (VIC)

regular carriage service along Bay Road to bring holiday-makers to Wilbraham Frederick Evelyn Liardet was forty years old and married
COVER PAGE
the beach. An archery club met at the hotel, using equipment Liardet with nine children when he first arrived in Melbourne from England in
In 1874 Liardet and his wife, both well into their seventies, returned to had shipped from England. November 1839. Although art had for long been his favourite pastime
Melbourne from New Zealand and lived in a rented house on the
Fishing parties were supplied with nets and lines, and boats were it was this watercolour that aroused great interest when he painted it
Esplanade at Sandridge only a few blocks from where they had
also available for those who wanted a quiet row-on the bay. On hot in 1875 and Liardet was urged to draw other scenes of Melbourne in
camped on a deserted beach thirty-five years before. Melbourne’s
summer nights the hotel guests and nearby campers woufd gather to the 1840's as he remembered it. He seems to have been helping to
population by this time had exceeded 200,000. It was the largest city
watch Liardet and his men haul in their seine-nets. The bountiful satisfy a growing interest in community origins and was indeed the
in Australia and famous for its prodigious growth. The contrast of then
catch would spill out onto the sand for the American negro cook to first — and because of his medium the most unusual — of a batch of
and now stirred old chords within Liardet and in 1875 he drew the Pier
select a supply "for supper and the morning’s breakfast. If the moon raconteurs who in the eighties and nineties produced a spate of
Hotel, long since vanished, as it had been when he built it in 1840 at a
was bright Liardet took his guests rowing or sailing, all the while reminiscences about life in early Melbourne and on the sheep runs of
cost of £1,300. Sandridge then had been known far and wide as
entertaining them with music and song. As they returned to the beach Port Phillip. Liardet returned to New Zealand towards the end of 1877
‘Liardet’s beach’.
one of the boys would give a blast on a trumpet so that a fine fish and died in March the following year.
In the summer of that year, Liardet’s Pier Hotel was the fashionable supper could be laid out ready. The highlight of the summer was a
resort of Melbourne ‘society’. Its enterprising proprietor began a regatta to be followed the next day by horseraces at the rear of the
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