This rare original antique engraving titled Swan River is after a sketch by Harden Sidney Melville, showing two dwellings located close to the Swan River, one in dis-repair and the other with a thatched roof. After much research we assume that this image shows the first and second dwellings of Joseph Hardey. The first house was built in May 1830 from materials probably brought out on the Tranby and was located on the low land about 100 metres from present day Tranby House. This house was destroyed by flood in July of the same year. Hardey built a new house of wattle and daub with a thatched roof in the following year (see the foreground of the illustration). This was also believed to have been destroyed by flood forcing them to rebuild again in 1836. The family moved to York for two years where they had taken up a grant of land (16,000 acres) and established another farm. He diarised that he had purchased bricks and wood for the new construction in 1836 and by June 1839 the roof was completed, on this his final home (present day Tranby House). Made of brick it makes it one of the oldest brick houses in the State and the earliest domestic residence still extant in the inner metropolitan area.
Several oak, olive and mulberry trees believed to have been planted by the Hardey family remain and surround the house. Tow of the oaks were listed on the National Trusts Register of Significant Trees in 1984
After the property was divided in 1903, the existing lot which includes the house remained as the family home until 1913 when it was brought by Henry Baker. It was named Tranby House in 1923. IN 1951 it changed hands again and in 1967 was bought by the Bond Corporation which demolished the barn and small cottages with a view to a redevelopment of the site. Following public debate opposing the plans, the property was acquired by the National Trust of Australia in 1972 and after an extensive restoration was opened to the public in 1977.
Joseph Hardey (1804-1875), farmer and Wesleyan layman, was born on 29 April 1804 at Barrow-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, England. He was one of fifteen, educated at home and at a Doncaster boarding school and influenced by Wesleyan teachings, he became a local preacher at 20 and was a committed Methodist for the rest of his life. He acquired a farm, and on 11 August 1829 in the parish church of Hatfield and married Ann Robertson of Levels, Yorkshire, by whom he had six daughters and one son.
Hardey chartered the Tranby in association with Michael and James Clarkson and his brother, John Wall Hardey; they arrived at Swan River in February 1830, bringing with them a number of indentured servants. The Tranby immigrants, all Methodists included a surgeon, bricklayer, blacksmith, shoemaker, surveyor, hatter and expert farmers, settling together on 512 acres (207 ha) which they called the Peninsula, on the Swan River’s banks at Maylands, four miles (6.4 km) east of Perth. In 1830 Hardey built the first Tranby House on his share, Peninsula Farm, cleared land and sowed crops. From his harvest returns he bought three English cows for £115 from Governor (Sir) James Stirling . In 1835 he built for less than £200 a substantial windmill which served to grind his wheat. By 1836 he had some thirty acres (12 ha) under cultivation, as well as cattle, sheep and horses. Next year he selected 16,000 acres (6475 ha) near York on the Avon River.
Although Hardey prospered he did not neglect his religion. Soon after arrival he preached to a congregation in his house at Fremantle, and in June 1830 he was permitted by Stirling to preach under a tree in Hay Street. Regular services were held at the Peninsula, sometimes with visiting preachers, but the Tranby immigrants wanted more than lay preaching, and requested a minister from the Wesleyan Missionary Society in London. Rev. William Longbottom was sent in 1837, but after shipwreck at Encounter Bay he was persuaded to stay in Adelaide. The Western Australian Methodists had to wait until June 1840 for their first minister, Rev. John Smithies. Meanwhile in April 1834 Hardey became a foundation trustee of Wesley Church, Perth, where he was also a local preacher, class leader and Sunday school superintendent. Later he gave £600 for the new Wesley Church opened in 1870.
Hardey was not attracted by politics and his public offices were few: he was appointed commissioner and guardian to immigrant minors in 1839, and a member of the Central Board of Works in 1847, and of the Central Board of Education in 1872-75. Despite his success, his courage and industry in the adversities of early settlement were appreciated by other colonists, and his sympathetic service in visiting the sick, irrespective of their creed, won him admiration. His wife died in May 1874 and his eldest daughter in August 1875. His last exhortation to his family was to ‘stand side to side, shoulder to shoulder, and fight for the Lord’. He died at Perth on 6 September 1875, leaving more than £12,000 to the Methodist Church. His daughter Sarah later gave £800 to Wesley College for two entrance scholarships.
 Harden Sidney Melville was a painter and draughtsman, son of London engraver, Henry Melville. Taught originally by his father, he showed and won medals at the Society of Arts and The Royal Academy Exhibition early in his career. After a provincial sketching tour, he became confirmed in his calling.  During the period 1837 to 1841 he had three paintings accepted by the Academy.
Melville accepted the position of draughtsman on board HMS Fly in 1841. Under the command of Captain Francis Prices Blackwood, the Fly and its tender Bramble, conducted the first official hydrographic survey of the north eastern coast of Australia and its adjacent islands from 1842 to 1846. Melville wrote later that he regretted this time given up from the regular practice of my profession and spent either in countries which rarely offered anything worthy of its exercise, or under circumstances which made that exercise almost impossible!  He found Australia very dreary, writing of the dull matter of fact, dense, unchanging and monotonous forests of the vast and tractless Australian regions obviously comparing them to the lush romantic forests of the Far East. Nevertheless, he produced a volume of work with original onboard sketches in John Sweatman’s journal. In his own book titled The Adventures of a Griffin, there were extensive illustrations including the frontispiece drawn on wood by Melville from his original sketches, then cut by H N Wood. These included many images of Queensland, the Northern Territory, NSW and Tasmania.
Melville returned to London in 1847 and contributed nineteen drawings and 2 maps for Joseph Beete Jukes’s official Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of HMS Fly…in 2 Vols and published in London in 1847. Jukes had been the geologist and naturalist on board during the Fly survey.
Melville published a collection of twenty-five tinted lithographs (hand coloured in the expensive edition), each with a leaf of descriptive notes titled Sketches in Australia and the Adjacent Islands… published in London in 1949. This work included a view of Port Essington, the Queensland and New South Wales coasts, Port Phillip, Van Diemen’s Land, the Swan River, New Guinea, Timo, Java and other places he had visited during his time overseas.
Melville also seems to have provided all but one of the full-page illustrations in Ludwig Leichhardt’s Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington…1844-45 which was published in London in 1847. Some of these sketches were drawn on the Fly and ‘repurposed’ for this edition. (The fact that his father was the lithographer, may explain these additions?) He also provided five illustrations of Australian aborigines and their weapons for James Greenwoods Curiosities of Savage Life published in 1864.
He continued to paint and exhibit extensively with only one painting being of an Australian nature titled Squatters Hut – News from Home which was shown at the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street in 1851. (This original work is now held in the National Gallery of Victoria). This was issued as a Baxter print in 1853 titled Australia, News from Home and became one of the most popular of the well-known collectible Baxter prints.
He died in Camden London in 1894
Australian Dictionary of Biography
Heritage Council of Western Australia
At the time of this publication in 1864 the author wrote of Western Australia:
Though by far the largest colony, and the second in point of date, Western Australia formerly called the Swan River Settlement, is the least important, having through mis management in the early stages of its history encountered a series of disasters which brought it into disrepute, and prevented immigration after the real difficulties had been surmounted. Recently also, or since 1850, it has been made a penal settlement; and this measure cannot fail to restrain the influx of the well-disposed, while a cause of strife between the home-government and the other colonial dependencies. The vast territory embraces the whole country between the meridian of 129 Degrees East and the Indian Ocean, 800 miles from east to west, 1300 miles from north to south, comprehending a coast-lien of 4000 miles. But these gigantic proportions are merely nominal, as the greater part of the surface has never been explored, and the range of settlement is limited to a comparatively small south western section of the Swan River and King George’s Sound, where the entire white population is under 16,000. The settled districts have no high mountains, larger rivers, deep gulfs or good harbours. Though the coastline has many inlets, they are all more or less encumbered with sand banks at their entrances. Grassy downs are prominent in the general surface, occupied as sheep-runs, but some localities have poisonous plants among the herbage which are hostile to pastoral husbandry. The sameness of the downs is broken occasionally by hills of moderate elevation, yet steep and rocky, covered with magnificent woods. Timber is one of the most valuable products. It embraces the fragrant sandal-wood, and the raspberry jam tree, one of the Eucalypti, so called from the similarity of its scent to that article of confectionary. The jarrah-wood, remarkable for its strength and endurance, defies alike the attacks of the white ant and the augur worm, and preserves from corrosion any iron which passes through it. Large quantities are therefore exported to the eastern colonies and to India, to serve for railway-sleepers, piles, and all other purposes demanding special durability under exposure to weather or water. But a considerable extent of land is under cultivation, on which grain crops, grasses, olives and tropical fruits are raised. Over an area of at least 4000 square miles, copper and lead ores are known to be distributed in various places, and mines are successfully worked. Whales abound on the coast, and the whalebone and oil are staple exports. Horses are likewise bred for the Indian cavalry. Perth, the seat of Government, an inconsiderable town, is on the north bank of the Swan River, eleven miles above its port, Freemantle, where the principal convict establishment is situated. Albany, a mere village on King George’s Sound, is the calling station of the Australian mail steamers, having the best harbour in the Colony.
