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Produced and published by the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Published July 2008
Published July 2008
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As early as 1838 stray dogs about the town were regarded as a nuisance, and the canine breed was certainly in no short supply. While the gentry assembled their hounds for the hunt in Market Street, the first Dog Act came into operation late in 1839. The early 1840s saw many ferocious dogs at large in the settlement, by day in packs of up to a dozen attacking the defenceless or inebriate, by night waking the town with their yelping. Vigilant pedestrians carried a 'genuine bit of blackthorn' to ward off savage mastiffs or bloodhounds in Elizabeth or Flinders streets. Town constables were ordered to destroy all stray and collarless dogs, but the practice of cutting off dogs' tails to claim a reward led to a further nuisance of rotting carcasses lying about the streets.
While stray animals were a nuisance about the streets, the dog was a valued personal companion. The dog was both pet and lookout for unwanted intruders - a category which, in the 1840s in the eyes of the white settlers, included the dispossessed Aborigines of the Melbourne district. Local Koories were fond of their companionable canines, much to the derision of the white settlers, who saw their dogs as 'scraggy' and 'mangy'. The regulation of stray dogs, while clearly a response to a localised problem, had further ramifications for white settlers' surveillance of the Aborigines. Indeed, a town by-law was passed in 1844 specifically to 'rid the town of the nuisance of the mangy dogs which follow in the Train of the Aborigines'.
Melbourne was still full of unregistered dogs in the 1850s, and police were continually encouraged to kill strays. Dog-baiting was popularly practised in public streets and in some hotels. In 1863 dogs destroyed by Richmond police were said to have been used to fertilise shrubberies at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. As Leigh Astbury has noted ('The dog in Australian art', Art and Australia 35(2) 1997), as hard as colonial authorities tried to remove dogs from the cityscape, colonial visual artists painted them back in. While Heidelberg School artists featured dogs as a companion of rural life, S.T. Gill, George Ashton and Tom Roberts, for example, featured the street cur, the spoilt pet and the independent dog as symbols of modernity and the social tensions of the burgeoning metropolis.
During 1885, out of a total of 1438 stray dogs, 60 were claimed and the balance destroyed under the Dog Act. City dog-catchers patrolled the streets twice a week, a job requiring 'tact and coolness'. In 1909, 4295 dogs were registered in the city, with 1275 being caught on Melbourne's streets. Out of these, 49 were sold at the city dog kennels, 14 were released by their owners and 1212 were drowned. Dogs were destroyed by being placed by the dozen in a perforated iron cage which was let down into a well, the drowning taking about 70 seconds. The bodies were then taken to a boiling-down establishment.
The Lost Dogs Home was established in North Melbourne in 1913, and animal welfare organisations lobbied for the protection of animal rights. While municipal regulation of dogs and cats saw stricter licensing requirements from the latter decades of the 20th century, dogs and humans increasingly compete for public open space. While many local authorities specify leash laws, a mixture of exclusion zones (around children's playgrounds; some parks and beaches) and free-running areas, and responsible dog ownership in general, erratic local enforcement results in the proliferation of faecal deposits on nature strips and in parks, as well as the presence of uncontrolled dogs in public spaces. Dogs and cats in city and suburbs have ravaged populations of native birds and mammals, and are banned from areas such as the Bend of Islands. With around 40% of Melbourne households owning a canine, walking the dog remains a popular leisure pursuit.