Charles La Trobe

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Charles Joseph La Trobe (born March 20, 1801 in London , † December 4, 1875 in Litlington , East Sussex , England ) was the first Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria , one of today's six Australian states.

Charles La Trobe

Early life

La Trobe was born in London into a Huguenot family, the son of the musician Christian Ignatius Latrobe . Presumably he was trained in Switzerland. There he was an active mountaineer and made several first ascents in the Alps from 1824 to 1826 . In 1832 he toured the United States of America with Albert von Pourtalès and Henry Leavitt Ellsworth . In 1834 he traveled with Washington Irving from New Orleans to Mexico . La Trobe published several travel books in which he described his experiences, for example The Alpenstock (1829), The Pedestrian (1832), The Rambler in North America (1835) and The Rambler in Mexico (1836).

Lieutenant-Governor

In 1837 he was appointed by the West Indian Government Commission to report on the future training of the recently liberated slaves. In 1839 he was sent to the Port Phillip District (now the Australian state of Victoria with the state capital Melbourne) of New South Wales as Superintendent, although he had little organizational and management experience for this task. Melbourne had a population of around 3,000 at the time and was growing rapidly. La Trobe began its work by rehabilitating roads. Since the Port Phillip District was part of the New South Wales colony at that time, any land sale, building design and public regulations had to be approved by its governor, Sir George Gipps , to which La Trobe was both a good personal one had a good working relationship.

In 1840 a society had been formed that wanted to make the Port Phillip District an independent colony. In 1841 La Trobe wrote to Gipps and asked if he would like to visit the city of Melbourne to form his own opinion on the possible emergence of a new colony. La Trobe did not pursue an active campaign for the detachment of the district of New South Wales and took into account the fact that Henry Gray was pursuing state visions for the colony in an overall reorganization plan for Australia.

At the behest of Charles La Trobe, the Native Police Corps was set up in 1842 in the hope of "civilizing" the Aboriginal men. The approval of the Wurundjeri Billibellary tribal leader on his proposal was essential to his success. After consulting, he supported the initiative and joined the corps himself. After about a year, Billibellary left the Native Police Corps after finding out that it was being used to capture and even kill Aboriginal people.

To 1851, when in Melbourne the gold fever broke out, La Trobe was for three years Lieutenant-Governor ( Deputy Governor , the colony of Victoria finally solved) until in 1854 of New South Wales.

La Trobe, plagued by self-doubt over a lack of experience, withdrew in December 1852, awaiting his replacement by Governor (later Sir Charles) Hotham. Towards the end of his governorship, his Swiss wife fell ill; she died in Europe in 1854. The name of the Melbourne district of Jolimont is ascribed to her because she “quel joli mont! »Should have exclaimed.

La Trobe worked from 1846 to 1847 for four months as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, today's Australian state of Tasmania .

Names

Memorial plaque on Cape Otway
Statue of La Trobe near Parliament Station

The design of the inner city area of ​​Melbourne goes back to the foresight of La Trobe, which reserved land, e.g. B. for the catholic cathedral. Many places in Melbourne and Victoria are named in honor of La Trobe, including La Trobe University (the third after The University of Melbourne and Monash University ), La Trobe Street in downtown Melbourne, a suburb to the far east of Melbourne Latrobe Valley including the Latrobe River in southeast Victoria, Mount Latrobe on Wilson's Promontory and the La Trobe Library, part of the Victorian State Library (formerly known as the Melbourne Public Library). For most of these names, the name was incorrectly spelled together for a long time, which only began to be corrected in the middle of the 20th century, beginning with * ‹Latrobe St.›. The correction continues.

Geelong key

Charles La Trobe's name is linked to the discovery of keys indicating that the Portuguese discovered Australia. When Charles La Trobe, an avid amateur geologist, was examining a lime kiln at Limeburner Point near Geelong in Victoria in 1847 , a worker showed him five keys, known as Geelong Keys , which he said he had found.

La Trobe believed that the keys on the beach were lost about three hundred years ago. In 1977, Kenneth McIntyre suspected that they were lost by Portuguese sailors under the command of Cristóvão de Mendonça . How long the keys were in this location cannot be determined, concluded geologist Edmund Gill and PFB Because Alsop estimated the age of the container in which the keys were found to be between 2330 and 2800 years, hence the dating unlikely from La Trobe. La Trobe's mistake is understandable, as it was assumed in 1847 that the world was only 6,000 years old.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Latrobe, Charles Joseph . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 16 : L - Lord Advocate . London 1911, p. 275 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
  2. ↑ a b adb.online.anu.edu.au
  3. ^ A b c Dictionary of Australian Biography . gutenberg.net.au
  4. ^ Isabel Ellender, Peter Christiansen: People of the Merri Merri. The Wurundjeri in Colonial Days . Merri Creek Management Committee, 2001, ISBN 0-9577728-0-7 , p. 88
  5. ^ Shirley W. Wiencke: When the Wattles Bloom Again: The Life and Times of William Barak, Last Chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe . Self-published, 1984, ISBN 0-9590549-0-1
  6. ↑ The Dutch discoverer of the island and its current eponym, Abel Tasman, named it after his superior, the governor of the Dutch East Indies, then Anthony van Diemen.
  7. ^ K. McIntyre: The Secret Discovery of Australia, Portuguese ventures 200 years before Cook . Souvenir Press, Menindie 1977, ISBN 0-285-62303-6 , pp. 249-262
  8. ^ E. Gill: On the McKiggan Theory of the Geelong keys . In: The Mahogany ship. Relic or Legend? Proceedings of the Second Australian Symposium on the Mahogany Ship (Ed. Potter, B). Warrnambool Institute Press, 1987, ISBN 0-949759-09-0 , pp. 83-86
personal data
SURNAME La Trobe, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES La Trobe, Charles Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION First Lieutenant Governor of Victoria
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1801
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1875
Place of death Litlington , East Sussex, England