When Aboriginal people reached Victoria the land was not as we know it. That exposed part of the coast which is now pounded by surf was silent and dry. No waves rolled majestically towards the beach at Lorne and Portsea and Lakes Entrance.

Those dark people who first roamed near the site of Melbourne had to make a long journey in a canoe if they wished to reach the sea. There was no Port Phillip Bay: the present bed of the bay was dry and across that land flowed the Yarra. A piece of tree has been found in the bed of that old river, and the tree was alive only 8000 years ago. The big ships which now enter the bay tend to follow that old Yarra bed, close to the Mornington Peninsula.

If Aboriginal people canoeing down the old Yarra had reached the twin cliffs which we now call Point Nepean and Point Lonsdale, they would still have been far from the sea because Bass Strait did not exist for most of the human history of Victoria. The Yarra then lowed across the Bass Plains towards the south west, where it must have met the River Tamar, lowing from the present Launceston and northern Tasmania. Where the Yarra and Tamar joined would have been a swirl of waters more dramatic than the junction of the Murray and the Darling, especially when the rivers ran strongly. At times the Tamar was the larger river because it carried away, in late spring and summer, the melted ice from the cold mountains of northern Tasmania.