There's a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the lord of Swamp Castle explains to his son that everyone thought he was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but he did it anyway.
It sank into the swamp.
"So I built a second one," he says. "That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up."
You can see where I'm going with this.
Melbourne hasn't exactly sunk into a swamp, but it certainly was built on one.
And it's taken an awful lot of work to prevent it from going the same way as Swamp Castles one, two and three.
One of the first Europeans to reach the area, surveyor Charles Grimes, wrote in his diary in 1803 of travelling by boat up what we now call the Yarra River.
"Saw a large lagoon at a distance. Went over the hill to a large swamp," he wrote.
"The river appears to rise to the height of eight or ten feet at times by wreck on the trees."
The flood-prone landscape was no mystery to the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people, who had successfully managed their traditional lands for tens of thousands of years.
And those swampy features loomed large time and time again, in the first 50 or so years of Melbourne's existence.
Welcome to West Melbourne Swamp
To the west of what is now Melbourne's CBD existed what the early white settlers described as a saltwater lake.
In 1835, John Batman described it as a marsh with "a large lagoon" full of swans, duck and geese.
It actually sounds quite delightful.
The early European settlers utilised this marvellous natural feature the best way they knew how — by turning it into a dumping ground for waste from the settlement's slaughterhouses.
At least it got a good clean-out every few years when heavy rain would cause the Yarra to flood, putting large parts of the settlement under several feet of water — sometimes much more.
Lionel Frost from Monash University's Economics Department contributed to the book Cities in a Sunburnt Country, which examines the relationship between Australia's urban centres and water.
He says the Yarra River presented some particular challenges to Melbourne's early settlers.
"The Yarra River is an unusual river in that while it's not very long compared to others, the catchment is very large and there's lots of flood plains that will collect rainfall," he says.
"There's a large area of flat, naturally swampy ground. The actual CBD of Melbourne is slightly elevated but to the south it is naturally swampy ground."
Take Swamp Road past Batman's Swamp
The area between Footscray and the CBD was known to be particularly flood prone, so much so that stories exist of people travelling by boat between the two suburbs during some of the bigger floods.
In photos from the 19th century, a lake can be seen off in the distance, to the west of the CBD.
These days you'd probably call it a wetland, but back then, you got there by taking Swamp Road and watching for the signs that marked West Melbourne Swamp or Batman's Swamp.
What is now Dynon Road, which connects Footscray and the CBD, used to be called Swamp Road.
By all reports, West Melbourne Swamp was not the kind of place you'd go for a stroll or a picnic.
According to the Royal Commission into Low-lying Lands in 1873 — yes, that was a real inquiry — the swamp was "a nuisance, injurious to health, and a disgrace to the city".
This was in no small part down to the fact that Melburnians had dumped their garbage into it for several decades.
The royal commission recommended an urgent remediation of the area.
"We believe that, at an outlay which is small in comparison with the important results, the swamp may be made into a most valuable property, devoted partly to a public park and gardens, and partly, perhaps, to purposes more directly useful for docks, cultivation and grazing," it said.
Drain the swamp!
Part of the solution was to reshape the Yarra River to remove a bend that took water right to the doorstep of the West Melbourne Swamp.
Water was also pumped out of the swamp and into the Maribyrnong River and other creeks that circled the flood plain.
In 1880, work began on the Coode Canal, which effectively straightened the lower reaches of the Yarra, mitigating some of the flood risk.
It was a huge project that took seven years and involved cutting a swathe two kilometres long, 130 metres wide and six metres deep using steam driven machinery.
When it was finished, Melbourne was left with a straighter river, world-class docks, and newly-formed island — Coode Island — standing in the middle of the flood plain.
What do you do with a new island you've made in the middle of your city? You stick a Bubonic Plague Sanatorium on it of course.
Luckily, there was not much need to isolate plague sufferers in Melbourne in any great numbers, and the sanitorium soon made way for chemical plants and storage facilities.
Coode Island hasn't been an island since the 1930s, when the last remaining stretches of water separating it from the Port of Melbourne were filled in.
The West Melbourne Swamp wasn't the only part of the city prone to flooding, as 19th century residents of Richmond and South Melbourne would attest, but Lionel Frost from Monash University argues people were willing to take a punt.
"For a lot of people, building on flood plains is a sign that you're willing to take a risk to be close to a city that offers potential jobs and potential economic advancement," he said.
"This was something that people had to deal with as part of the bargain of living in a city."
As the flooding in Maribyrnong in October 2022 showed, the flood risk still very much exists.
But, as Mr Frost points out, you can't exactly turn back the clock and start again somewhere else.
"There was quite an unthinking expansion of industry and housing onto these low-lying areas," he says.
"Indigenous people had for thousands of years developed ways and knowledge to work around water supply to move away from flood-prone ground but that Indigenous knowledge was pretty much ignored."
