Before it was Docklands, the area in the west of the city was once so rich in wildlife that it has been compared with Kakadu.

In his introduction to his Birth of Melbourne book, Tim Flannery quotes from Melbourne pioneer George Gordon McCrae’s childhood memories of the famed “Blue Lake” which occupied the area in the 1830s. It was:

“intensely blue, nearly oval and full of the clearest salt water; but this by no means deep.  Fringed gaily all around mesembryanthemum (‘pig-face’) in full bloom, it seemed in the broad sunshine as though girdled about with a belt of magenta fire.  The ground gradually sloping down toward the lake was empurpled, but patchily, in the same manner, though perhaps not quite so brilliantly, while the whole air was heavy with the mingled odours of the golden myrrnong flowers and purple fringed lilies, or ratafias.  Curlews, ibises and ‘blue cranes’ were there in numbers … black swans occasionally visited it, as also flocks of wild ducks.”