In the misty morning of 20 April 1836, Eliza Batman, the lady of a thousand names and seven—soon to be eight—screaming offspring, first laid eyes on her new digs. The weatherboard fortress, perched on the slopes of “Batman Hill”, overlooked a Melbourne in its chaotic infancy – a jumble of tents and ramshackle huts. Across the Yarra, where Southbank now struts its fireball-lit stuff, an Aboriginal camp sat, blissfully ignorant of the mayhem about to be unleashed.
John Batman, that crafty land-swiping coloniser, the so-called "founder" of Melbourne, has already strutted his sordid stuff across history's stage. But his better half, Eliza, oh Eliza, a chameleon with almost as many aliases as offspring (that's a staggering eight, in case you're too soused to count), has been a spectre, a shadow in the grand, gory narrative of Melbourne's birth. Yet, this woman was a pioneer, a witness to the indigenous bloodbaths her husband wrought, a pillar in Melbourne's early days, and later, a solitary figure sucker-punched by her husband's syphilitic demise and a will as convoluted as a drunken spider’s web.
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