John Helder Wedge - Port Phillip District

Port Phillip District

When Batman returned from his first visit in 1835 Wedge resigned from the Survey Department and crossed to Port Phillip, arriving on 7 August 1835 where he explored along the Barwon River and surveyed the 600,000 acres (2,400 km2) 'acquired' by Batman's Port Phillip Association from the Indigenous Australians. Wedge arrived the site of Melbourne on 2 September 1835, where he discovered members of a party organized by John Pascoe Fawkner. Wedge was against the forceful removal of Fawkner's party by its rivals, and played an important part in the founding of the settlement of Melbourne. Wedge named the Yarra River on 13 September 1835. Wedge was one of the first to bring over sheep from Tasmania, to his station at Werribee. Wedge also reported to Lieutenant-Governor Arthur on the wild white man, William Buckley, whose pardon he recommended, and on outrages against the Aboriginals, for whose hopeless condition he had much compassion. He had earlier adopted an Aboriginal boy, May Day, rescued from the surf near Circular Head, Victoria. His 'Narrative of an excursion amongst the natives of Port Phillip' and a 'Description of the country around Port Phillip' were among the expedition papers published as a Tasmanian parliamentary paper (1885). The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1836) printed Wedge's paper 'On the country around Port Phillip, South Australia'. The diaries of his explorations and survey work were sent to his father in England; the Royal Society of Tasmania published them in 1962.

From 1838-43 Wedge visited England; on the death of his father he returned to Tasmania to find his finances reduced by economic depression. In 1843 Wedge married Maria Medland Wills, who had been governess to Bishop Francis Russell Nixon's children, but within a year she died in childbirth. Wedge was then appointed by Nixon from 1846-51 to manage the farms which formed the endowment of Christ's College at Bishopsbourne. In 1855 Wedge was elected to the district of Morven in Tasmanian Legislative Council. Wedge held office in the short-lived ministry of Thomas Gregson in 1857, as member for North Esk, and initiated the inquiry into the convict department under its comptroller, Stephen Hampton. Wedge was an active Anglican; one of his last acts before withdrawing from parliament in 1868 was to support the commutation bill that granted £100,000 to religious denominations in place of annual state aid. Wedge died on 22 November 1872 at his home Medlands which he had built on the Forth River in 1865.