Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Legacy

Barry Golding

24 October 2022

These notes are in two parts. The first 2,000 words, headed ‘1840s Aboriginal Protectorate Walk Notes’ provide interpretive notes for walkers who register for the Great Dividing Trail Association’s (GDTA) Members or Public Walks around the Franklinford Township during November 2022. They will also be also useful for anyone embarking on the ‘1840s Aboriginal Protectorate’ self-guided Walk Number 11, pp.34-35, published in 2021 GDTA ‘Walk and Ride Circuits’ guide. Localities marked on the map in the Circuits guide (p.35) are shown in bold.

The second part headed ‘The Evidence Base: Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate History’ (8,000 words) includes the lesser known back story of the foundation of Neereman Aboriginal Protectorate on the Loddon River in 1840, which preceded its relocation to the Franklinford site by mid 1841, operating on its new site until Protectorates were abolished in late 1849.

As with all of my work, I look forward to critical comment, including telling me what I may have got wrong.

1840s Aboriginal Protectorate Walk Notes

Whilst the GDTA guided walks on November 12 & 13 in 2022 follow the marked 6.2 km route in this guide, the longer member’s walk route on 12 November adds a 5 km (approx.) extension incorporating access (with one off permission) across Eric and Joy Sartori’s private property, ‘Truro’ including along part of Larnibarramul yaluk (formerly Jim Crow Creek) with an historic weir from the 1930s. The interpretive notes for this additional loop beyond the Franklinford Cemetery (which cuts out the section along Ligar Street) follow the main notes.

Clarkes Pool on Larni barramul yaluk is a delightful and picturesque pool on a tight bend of a billabong in the creek within the Franklinford Streamside Reserve. It was formally surveyed in the 1990s as an important Aboriginal site. The late Frank Powell from Mount Franklin wrote in the late 1960s that this ‘billabong on Jim Crow Creek at Franklinford … was a known corroboree site’. There is a detailed account of an Aboriginal Corroboree held in Franklinford in November 1843 though its exact location is not specified.

The bitumen access road down to the Streamside Reserve is via Clarkes Road, which heads SW from the main Franklinford intersection until it veers south, becoming gravel as it crosses the top of the very tight meander, with steep drops to the creek on either side, before ending at a parking area beside the billabong pool under the ancient River Red Gums short of a disused road bridge. 

In summer, if the water is flowing gently this is a delightful, popular and safe place to picnic and swim. Platypus have been sighed in the pool. Clarke’s Pool has been featured as the backdrop to several videos produced by Hepburn Shire with the Dja Dja Wurrung traditional owners as part of the community consultation process leading to the creek’s formal renaming during 2022.

The first part of the walk leads back along Clarke’s Road. Franklin Ford, marked in the GDTA guide to the south of the gravel road, was the original crossing point on the creek for an 1840s road that originally led from the Protectorate station south west through the forest via a bridle track to John Hepburn’s run. The ford is visible as a basalt pavement in the creek off the road easement.

The walk route turns left into the Franklinford Cemetery along Cemetery Road. Immediately to the left there is a grassy track that leads down to Thomas’ Spring. The fact that this public freshwater spring runs all year round and fills the pool in even the driest seasons was one of several features which made the Franklinford site attractive as an alternative Protectorate site in 1841. You will notice the grey basalt rocks around the pool are stained with a white precipitate, indicative of high calcium carbonate levels in the water and some possible association with a mineral spring at depth. The pool is often fringed with the floating aquatic plant, Water Cress (Nasturtium officinale), one of the oldest known edible leaf vegetables native to Europe and Asia, with a distinctive piquant taste.

Cemetery Road cuts out at the Franklinford Cemetery. If you walk into the Cemetery along the paths between the old and more recent graves towards the back of the cemetery, you will come across a much older cemetery on a different alignment enclosed within the larger and more recently surveyed cemetery. The boundaries of the older rectangular Protectorate era cemetery (first surveyed in 1843, but where several burials took place earlier) are marked by a low ditch. The four corners of the older cemetery are marked with wrought iron corner posts and native trees, thoughtfully selected by the late local historian Edgar Morrison during the late 1970s and planted ‘by four visiting Aborigines’. The most prominent marked gravestones in this area commemorate Assistant Protector Edward Parker, his first wife Mary, his second wife Hannah, some of their children and their extended family. PRACTICAL NOTE: This picturesque and historic public cemetery is the only place along the walk route with a (basic) toilet.

The original cemetery records and the mostly wooden original grave markers were lost long ago in a bush fire. As a consequence, it is impossible to know how many people were buried here inclusive of the Aboriginal Protectorate, Aboriginal Station and Aboriginal School eras between 1841 and 1864. Given the hundreds of Aboriginal people and White who lived and died in the area during that interval, the actual number of unmarked burials in this historically significant site is likely to be large. Because the area has been fenced from stock and also regularly and lightly burnt, the cemetery area retains many significant volcanic grassland and woodland species otherwise missing in the surrounding privately owned and intensively grazed paddocks.

The self-guided walk route in the booklet heads back to Cemetery Road and up the grassy and largely disused Ligar Street, named after surveyor, soldier and grazier Charles Whybrow Ligar (1811-1881). Whybrow Street to the east is similarly ‘a nod ‘to Ligar, who became surveyor general in Victoria in 1858 following 15 years working as New Zealand surveyor general. At one time, Ligar and his family invested heavily in livestock. With partners, at one stage Ligar was lessee of three million acres (1,214,070 ha) in the Riverina.

If you to the south from the top of Ligar Street you will get a good view over the paddock south of Clarke’s Road (which includes the marked ‘Aboriginal School Site’. This paddock was the epicentre of the Franklinford Protectorate settlement for over two decades from 1841. If you look towards the southern horizon towards Wombat Hill above Daylesford, and the western horizon you will get some sense that the relatively fertile volcanic soils of the inner main Protectorate area set aside for cultivation (radius one mile) was then conveniently protected, surrounded and bounded (as now) on most sides of the five mile (8km) Protectorate radius by forested land on the older shales. This forested area then deemed  as ‘unsuitable for stations’ by Parker, was nominally preserved for Aboriginal hunting within the Protectorate.

TAKE CARE turning right into the relatively busy Hepburn-Newstead Road. For safety, walk well off the road edge before walking east along Stuart Street *** to the marked ‘Former Franklinford Store’ on the street corner, now a private house. Mary Parker’s sister, Charlotte, was in transit to Australia when Mary died. Charlotte stayed on and married Mr W. Bumstead, later operating the Franklinford Store. A Post Office operated in Franklinford for 110 years from 1859 to 1969.

Walk to the marked stone ‘Monument’ southeast of the intersection, acknowledging Edward Parker’s contribution to the Aboriginal Protectorate. An explanation from Edgar Morrison of the symbolism he built into the Parker Memorial Cairn (unveiled in 1965) incorporating carefully chosen rocks was published in Morrison’s Frontier Life (1967, p.v) booklet, as summarised below. 

The base of the monument incorporates rocks taken from an early settlers home, which Morrison took to symbolise ‘the sturdy endurance of the district pioneers’. The body of the cairn comprises ‘volcanic boulders from the site of the Aboriginal Station’ as well as some ‘dressed pumice which formed part of the chimney of Mr Parker’s later station homestead on the western slope of Mount Franklin’, embodying what Parker took to be ‘the influences of hearth and home and [Parker’s] devotion to aboriginal welfare and education’. 

Morrison symbolically incorporated stones of ‘special significance’ into the three sides of the cairn. To the south, are hand-made bricks in the form of a cross, symbolising Parker’s ‘spiritual aspirations’. On the west are stones from the old Tarrengower Station founded by Lauchlan McKinnon, frequently visited by Parker, perceived to symbolise Parker’s ‘cordial relationships with neighbouring settlers’. The eastern aspect incorporates a white quartz rock whose whiteness ‘may remind us of the high reputation’ which Morrison suggested Parker ‘earned in every situation’.

Behind the monument you will see a sign with ‘Larnebarramul: Home of the Emu’ supported by an axle erected by the late Edgar Morrison. This and several similar metal signs and markers we see on this walk were officially opened at a celebratory Field Day in 1968. First Nations people invited included Ivy Sampson, daughter of Thomas Dunolly (a former schoolboy at the Aboriginal School) and the late Pastor Doug Nichols.

Standing at the Monument intersection, if you were to take a ‘helicopter view’ you are at the centre of a township laid out in the shape of a Union Jack. Early survey maps of Franklinford township included not only the main existing cross roads which run on the diagonals, but also a network of back streets running east-west and north-south, bounded by South, East and North Streets. Many of these named suburban streets, some lined by stone fences, are now disused or incorporated into surrounding properties.

The marked walk includes a ‘dog leg’, SE down (and back) Powell Connection Road towards the ‘Seat Under Pines’ opposite Larnebarramul Lagoon. This is a busy road: walk well off the road with care. In the 1840s this was the main road to Melbourne to the north of Mount Franklin via present day Glenlyon.

On the south side of Powell Connection Road, look out for a metal sign erected to mark where Edgar Morrison believed the Aboriginal Protectorate Station buildings were located. David Rhodes’ 1997 survey and report confirms that while the sign overlooks the actual site below in the far distance, it does not mark the site itself. If you look over the forest to the west, in the distance you will see the outline of the now bald Mount Kooroocheang.

The paddock that includes the lagoon opposite the roadside seat is private property. Do not enter the paddock. The late Frank Powell noted that what he called ‘Strawhorn Lagoon’ in 1967 was a ‘known corroboree site’. David Rhodes’ survey identified and recorded several significant pre- and post-contact Aboriginal sites around this lagoon. Several of the huge Red Gum trees nearby include evidence of ancient strap grafting preserved in their upper branches, as well as pre- and pos- contact habitation spaces within their burnt out trunks.

Walk back along the side of Powell Connection Road, then walk down a steep minor road that trends west before the marked ‘Former Church’, then head south with care along the side of busy Hepburn Newstead Road, turning right (west) along South Street to the marked ‘Aboriginal School Site’. The sign including the outline of a symbolic school bell reads ‘Aboriginal School Site 1849/1864’. The paddock behind the sign is where most of the original Protectorate buildings were clustered including what became the Aboriginal School. The foundations on main site and school approximates a clump of ancient Robinia (Black Locust) trees approximately 100 metres inside the paddock. Do not enter the paddock.

Additional GDTA Member’s Walk Notes (NB: private property, no entry without permission)

Beyond the Franklinford Cemetery on the GDTA members walk on 12 Nov 2022 (see notes above ***), we walk west following a disused (and sometimes boggy) gated laneway across private grazing property. The laneway is lined in places by collapsing historic stone walls. This was one of the early, once busy goldfields-era roads which would have provided access to and beyond Larni barramul yaluk to the German Gully goldfields to the south west and on through the bush to Kooroocheang.

At the creek we turn north along the east bank, initially following a combination of cattle tracks and goldfields era water races. After a few hundred metres we come to a still intact Weir across the creek. The weir and an associated large channel heading north along the eastern bank were constructed with Sustenance (‘Susso’) labour during the 1930s Depression, taking water all the way north to Newstead. The water system was abandoned by 1980s.

Heading north we pass an outcrop of columnar basalt. The vertical columns run perpendicular to the upper and bottom horizontal cooling surfaces, formed by shrinkage as the basalt flow slowly cooled. Nearby are the eroding mullock heap of a deep lead mine, which originally included tunnels that would have tapped into the gold bearing gravels beneath the basalt flow.

The farm road leaves the creek and heads east up the hill past Eric and Joy Sartori’s orchard and farmhouse along a steep gravel road. Please respect their privacy. As you walk up the hill you get excellent views back down the creek valley. From the top of the hill several peaks come into view including nearby Larnebarramul / Mount Franklin to the east, and in the distance to the north, Tarrengower and Leanganook / Mount Alexander.

Where Sartori Road meets the marked, busy, bitumen Hepburn – Newstead Road, turn right and walk safely on the roadside, NOT going south down marked Ligar Street as in the GDTA booklet, but rejoining the marked walk, interpreted by the notes, above ***, by heading east along Stuart Street.

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The Evidence Base: Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate History

The history of first contact in southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country has traditionally tended to focus either on a heroic narrative about a small number of White male ‘explorers’ and squatters conquering and ‘settling’ a hostile environment, or the frenetic pace of change during the many gold rushes from the 1850s. 

This account of what happened before 1850 is more unsettling. It focuses on a government intervention that sought to coerce and remove First Nations peoples from Country in the Port Philip Colony during the 1840s and concentrate them in small ‘Aboriginal Protectorates’ for their own safety. The plan was to create four Aboriginal enclaves five miles in radius, not only for Aboriginal peoples’ own protection away from widespread squatter violence, but also as a way of expediting the White ‘settlement’ process.

Unbeknown to many present day residents, present day Neereman (north of Baringhup, in the Mount Alexander Shire) and Franklinford (north of Daylesford, in the Hepburn Shire) were epicentres of an Aboriginal Protectorate ostensibly designed to cover what is now north western Victoria during the 1840s,then defined as ‘the Mount Macedon area and country northwards’.

What follows relies heavily on candid accounts from the personal diaries of the ‘Chief Protector’ George Augustus Robinson, as well from ‘Assistant Protector’ Edward Stone Parker, who was responsible for the establishment of Protectorates on both sites. It is supplemented by other information from Edgar Morrison’s three booklets, David Rhodes’ 1995 on ground historical and archaeological investigation, supplemented by original Protectorate records. 

In brief, Parker initially set up his Protectorate at Neura Mong (literally ‘hide here’ in Dja Dja Wurrung language, today’s Neereman) on the Loddon River 6 km north of Baringhup in October 1840. He relocated it to the better known Protectorate west of Mount Franklin on Larnibarramul yaluk (previously known as ‘Jim Crow Creek’) in June 1841.

This section focuses mainly on the evidence and back stories behind Parker’s establishment of both the initial Neura Mong / Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate and the relocated Mount Franklin Protectorate that operated in the area within a 5 mile (8km) radius circle of present day Franklinford from June 1841 to the end of 1849. 

This account includes only brief mention of the later temporary Aboriginal Reserve, the Mount Franklin Aboriginal Station of 640 acres established at the foot of Mount Franklin in 1852 where Edward Parker acted as a Guardian of Aborigines, built a house and where several Aboriginal people farmed. In 1864 the Aboriginal School operating on the former Protectorate site at Franklinford was closed and the remaining Aboriginal people living on the Station were removed to the Aboriginal Station at Coranderrk near Healesville. When it also in closed in 1924, many Dja Dja Wurrung descendants were moved on to Lake Tyers Mission.

The Back Story of the Aboriginal Protectorate System

Turning the clock back to 1837, a British Committee of Inquiry into the Condition of Aboriginal Peoples set up in the wake of the previous shameful treatment of and armed resistance from First Nations peoples in Van Diemen’s Land, recommended a Protectorate System be attempted in mainland Australia, confined initially to the Port Philip District. The system was premised on the refusal of the British Government to recognise prior ownership of Australia by First Nations peoples.

Four Assistant Protectors were recruited from England and appointed in December 1837. None had been to Australia before, all had previously been schoolmasters and none had ever met Aboriginal people. Edward Parker had been earlier been apprenticed as a printer, then had to give up candidacy as a Methodist Minister when he violated the condition for ministerial candidates by marrying. The Assistant Protectors arrived in Sydney in August 1838, but because of administrative delays did not reach Melbourne until 3 January 1839. For the first few weeks they were camping in tents with their families (including their wives and a total of 22 children) on the Yarra River a mile out of Melbourne with no definite instructions. 

On 27 Feb 1839 they met the Chief Protector, George Augustus Robinson, appointed on the basis of his ‘success’, previously employed to cajole, deceive, remove and concentrate most First Nations Tasmanians to Flinders Island during the 1830s. Robinson appears, from his frank and critical diary entries, to have been instantly underwhelmed by and intolerant of the four men that were to be in his charge. His particular and ongoing dislike of Assistant Protector Edward Parker, who by March 1839 had been allocated to ‘the area around Mount Macedon … and the country to the northward and eastward’, saturates many of the accounts cited in this account taken from Robinson’s personal diaries.

For context, by March 1839, John Hepburn and family had been on southern Dja Dja Wurrung country for almost a year and had established a sheep station at the foot of Mount Kooroocheang to the west of the Larni barramul (‘home of the emu’) crater, today’s Mount Franklin. Mollison was by then firmly established in the Kyneton area and Ebden was at Carlsruhe north of Woodend. Many other ‘unsettlers’ had come overland from Sydney following Major Mitchell’s 1836 ‘Line’. By 1839 they had ‘taken up’ (forcefully and violently seized) much of southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country, and other squatters had pushed north through Wadawurrung Country over the Great Dividing Range into some of the most fertile and densely settled inland First Nations estates in Australia.

Understandably, there was resistance to forced removal from Country by the traditional owners in the process of setting up ‘runs’, including by John Hepburn on the Smeaton Hill run. George Robinson first mentions ‘Captain Hepburn’ in his diary whilst in Melbourne on 15 March 1839, writing that Reverend Gill, the first Anglican Minister in Melbourne, had told him that Hepburn said that ‘… the blacks had frequently attacked his station, generally in his absence. Said the natives had guns with them’. By the time Robinson first met John Hepburn in Melbourne six months later, Robinson recorded Hepburn saying (on 25 September 1839) that ‘… the blacks are very numerous in his neighbourhood. They had killed his sheep and all but strangled a shepherd. Believes they were Port Phillip natives. … Said the native women and children fled to his station for protection.’ In the same diary entry, Robinson writes that Hepburn also mentioned that the ‘Names of settlers beside him were Pettit [W. H. Petit managing ‘Dowling Forest’ run north of Ballarat for W. J. T. Clarke], Coggle (sic.) [the Coghill Brothers at ‘Glendonald’ run near Clunes], and Birch [on the ‘Seven Hills’ run near present day Kingston]’.

In 1839, the government instructions as to how the Aboriginal Protectorate system might work in practice were rather vague. Given the extent to which the best country had been so quickly carved up for sheep stations by this time, Edward Parker’s prospect of selecting a Protectorate site which ticked all the boxes was almost impossible. Robinson suggested that the four Assistant Protectors should do what he had done in Tasmania during the 1830s, and begin to move with the Aboriginal groups in order to learn their languages and culture, in the process devising the best means of civilising and protecting them. By March 1839, this suggestion had become a direction from Robinson.

All four Assistant Protectors were ill equipped, with very limited resources, support or budgets and were understandably reluctant to move far away from Melbourne, each with wives and large families. In Parker’s case, his wife Mary already had six children and was pregnant with their seventh. By mid 1839 Parker had begun to comprehend the impossibility of his task in the face of concerted pastoralist and press opposition to the Protectorate idea. As the failure to prosecute those responsible for the murder of 28 unarmed Aboriginal men, women and children in the infamous Myall Creek Massacre (near present day Bingara in northern NSW) in June 1838 had shown, the Aborigines then had no rights to give evidence in court and the many well documented cases of pastoralist murders of Aboriginal people pursued by the Assistant Protectors were unable to be prosecuted.

To make matters worse, by the late 1830s, desperate and starving Aboriginal people on the pastoral frontier in the Port Phillip District had most contact with convict shepherds and hutkeepers in the virtual absence of police or of the rule of law. Many were moving desperately between the early settlements that had taken their most productive land and food resources, now grazed by sheep. Some had resorted to coming to town, particularly Melbourne, some involved in begging, prostitution and the use of force against the invaders.

It was Parker who believed that the Assistant Protectors needed some inducement to encourage Aborigines to be concentrated on the proposed Protectorate Stations, in the form of clothing, food and shelter, quite apart from the medals and trinkets which Robinson often employed. Like Robinson and the other Assistant Protectors, Parker also fervently believed that his responsibilities included civilising Aboriginal people and that this was best achieved by Christianising them.

By September 1839 Parker and his family had moved out of the small town of Melbourne but only as far as Jacksons Creek near Sunbury. Not far from the current Emu Bottom’ property, he erected a wattle and daub hut for his family. Parker’s request that the Protectors be allowed to form Protectorate Stations was finally approved by Governor Gipps in April 1840. The idea was to have an inner reserve of one square mile for cultivation, and an outer reserve with a five-mile radius for hunting and gathering. This proposal meant that 25 large and diverse Aboriginal Nations and peoples in the Port Phillip District, including the Dja Dja Wurrung, were to be concentrated into four arbitrary areas comprising a total of only 200 square kilometres, representing only 0.08 per cent of the land area of Victoria. In modern terms it might have been called a concentration or refugee camp.

Whilst the four Assistant Protectors had been awaiting Gipps’ approval to form Protectorate Stations, they undertook reconnaissance for where the four Protectorate stations should actually be located. With this task in mind, Robinson travelled extensively including to ‘the Loddon District’ with Parker between 9 January and 11 March 1840. Robinson’s extensive diary records whilst in southern Dja Dja Wurrung country on this reconnaissance trip with Edward Parker provide one of the best first hand, written records of many aspects of the southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country and people in the landscape at that time. Gary Presland’s timely self-published book, ‘Riding with Robinson’ (2022), provides a detailed, annotated account of Robinson’s personal diaries during this trip.

Robinson’s diary entries relating to this reconnaissance indicate that Robinson and Parker’s journey approximated the current Western Highway through the Pentland Hills between Melbourne and Ballan, then diverging west to travel in an arc close to present day Mount Edgerton, Scotsburn, Buninyong, Yuile’s Swamp (Lake Wendouree) and Mount Hollowback (which they climbed). At this point they were on the edge of southerd Dja Dja Wurrung country. Thence, on 13 February 1840 they passed through ‘fine open downs’ surrounded by ‘numerous ball topped hills crowned with grass and below grassy plains and open forest, passing Pettit’s [Dowling Forest] and Birch’s ‘comfortable house’ [near present day Kingston] before arriving at John Hepburn’s Smeaton Hill station.

The initial Protectorate site at Neereman 1840-41

One of the main reasons for Robinson and Parker’s eight week trip was to identify a site for Parker’s Protectorate station. Climbing in 14 February 1840 to the top of Mount Kooroocheang just behind Hepburn’s station gave them a splendid view. According to Robinson, John Hepburn: ‘Pointed out the [proposed] place for Parker’s station distant 9 miles NE by N. on the Major’s Line and where he encamped.’ This would have placed it on the Loddon River in the vicinity of present day Newstead.

Robinson continued:

There are large water holes here and plenty of fish, and kangaroos in abundance. And its (sic.) on the border. Nor will it be required. Hence a better site for an establishment could not be selected for the district. It is accessible from Melbourne, 90 miles by the road through the ranges, and could easily be found, being on the Major’s Line. There is a hill Mr Hepburn calls Salus [Mount Tarrengower] N and E to the right of Major’s Line. It’s a good object for travellers. Also a hill Mr Hepburn calls Jem Crow [Mount Franklin] because of the numerous small hollows around it.

The next day Robinson had clearly talked about their options with Hepburn and Parker, noting that Hepburn had offered every assistance in showing him the way over the ranges to the proposed Protectorate site, shortening the route from the 120 miles via Geelong to 80 miles via Mollison’s (near Malmsbury) and Mount Alexander. By then Hepburn had also identified a shorter road from his station to Steiglitz’s (today in the Ballan area) on an ‘almost level road’ impeded only by large fallen timber. This route described was likely past the current Clarke’s Hill and south through the former Bullarook Forest, now prime potato country on the well-watered Great Dividing Range.

On 20 February 1840 Robinson and Parker headed north from Hepburn’s station at the foot of Kooroocheang towards the Loddon River, by following what is now known as Joyces Creek. Robinson wrote that day in his diary that:

This is certainly a good situation for the head station of the Macedon district. It is guarded from the encroachment of squatters, provided the government do not assign them any country, and is accessible at all points. The Major’s Line runs through the centre and it is open at the N and S end and can be approached by the natives without interference. Its length, extreme, is four miles and average breadth one mile. The two ponds are nearly united; by opening up the reeds course of the [Loddon] river runs through. The average length of these ponds is 400 yards, breadth 100 feet. The natives have made Mitchell’s highroad their road. Their track is well beaten upon it.

In reality it was the other way around. Mitchell had been following a well-trodden, ancient Dja Dja Wurrung highways through intensively managed  aboriginal grasslands and along the rich Polodyul / Loddon River Valley. On their reconnaissance expedition along present day Joyces Creek, Robinson (on 20 Feb 1840) was at first ‘at a loss to account for the wheel [tracks] and immense number of cattle tracks we now met with’. Later he realised they had crossed Mitchell’s now well-worn ‘Line’. The ‘encroachment of squatters’ alluded to above was already well underway.

Parker returned on 12 March 1840 to his home base near Sunbury, after this tour of reconnaissance with Robinson. This tour ‘into the interior’ of his allocated north west area led Parker to write to Robinson on 18 March 1840 that ‘I wish to station myself and family immediately in a central situation about the Loddon River’, seeking permission ‘to occupy a suitable tract of country in the situation I have indicated’. 

Parker’s rough sketch shows an extensive area between the Pyrenees (‘Pilawin’) to the west, and Mount Macedon (‘Terrawait’) to the east, bounded on the south by ‘Bunninyong’, ‘Warrneip’ (Mount Warrenheip)andMurniyong (Mount Blackwood) and to the north by the granite range comprising Leanganook (Mount Alexander) and Mount Byngh (Mount Tarrengower). By that time in March 1840, there were already nine named squatters marked on his map north of the Great Dividing Range. Elmes, Lynot, Coghill and Hepburn were towards the west, and Ebden, Mollison, Thornloe, Monro and Hutton were towards the west. 

The forested country now comprising the then conjoined Creswick, Wombat Upper Loddon and Lerderderg forests plus the then ‘Bullarook Forest’ on the Great Divide around Dean and Mollongghip were marked as ‘Broken Forest Country unavailable for stations’. Parker’s map suggests that the Loddon River valley north of the forest between Mollison and Hepburn’s stations in the vicinity of what is marked as ‘Mitchell’s Line’ had in March 1840 apparently not been taken up. It was this area that Parker set out to return to and examine more closely in mid 1840.

Edgar Morrison (1966, p.16) cites Parker writing (no date given) that he had narrowed down his choice ‘to a particular section of the river in the vicinity of the hill called by the natives Tarrengower’, where he had found a site ‘which seemed to be particularly eligible for the aboriginal establishment’. Parker was clear about his motives and asserted Aboriginal rights not otherwise established until the Mabo decision over 150 years later in 1992. He noted in 1840 that: ‘I deem it my duty respectfully but firmly to assert the right of Aborigines to the soil and its indigenous productions, until suitable compensation be made for occupation by reserving and cultivating a sufficient portion for their maintenance’.

The Neereman Protectorate site on the Loddon River actually chosen by Parker had, unbeknown to Parker, recently been occupied by squatters Dutton, Darlot and Simson, who challenged its establishment. Despite strident public opposition for the Protectorate’s establishment during 1840, aired in the pages of the Port Phillip Herald (which was co-owned by Dutton), by February 1840 twelve Aboriginal dwellings had been built at Neereman. Parker returned to Melbourne from Nerreman on Christmas Eve, 1840 and arrived at Robinson’s office on Christmas Day, 25 Dec. By then Parker had compiled a list of hundreds of named individuals in twelve Dja Dja Wurrung clans, then called ‘Jajowrong sections’ also listed in Robinson’s 25 December diary. The number of people in each clan was also estimated, ranging from ‘about 50’ Galgalbulluk to ‘only two survive’ of the Wonangabulluk.

Aside from the squatter resistance, the less than ideal sandy site and the poor timing of its establishment in a hot summer of an extremely dry year had by then become obvious. The many problems Parker faced during this period are comprehensively covered in Bain Attwood’s The Good Country (pp.100-101). By 5 January 1841 Parker was writing to Robinson seeking permission to relocate the North West Protectorate site. By then an inspection of the Neereman site by overseer, Robert Bazeley , confirmed that the cultivation proposed as part of the civilizing and Christianising project at the Neereman site was not feasible. Bazeley identified a preferred alternative site ‘about three miles above the point where Major Mitchell’s Line crosses the Loddon’. Edgar Morrison in 1966 concluded that this would have placed it ‘on the river flats in the vicinity of the Strangways Railway siding’. However Lachlan McKinnon, then owner of the nearby Tarrangower run wrote on 7 Jan 1841 to Governor La Trobe strongly objecting also to the Strangways site.

As an aside, overseer Bazeley’s daughter died at the Franklinford Protectorate site in June 1842. Being one of the first recorded white settler deaths she was buried, in Parker’s words (cited in Morrison, 1971, p.43) at a ‘suitable place for a burial ground’. This burial preceded the formal survey of the Franklinford Protectorate Cemetery by approximately 18 months, likely on the same site, as Parker’s first wife, Mary was later buried there in October 1842.

Parker called on Robinson in Melbourne several times in early January 1841. On 14 January 1841, Robinson wrote that ‘Mr Parker called p.m., brought a letter explanatory in reference to his proceedings in reference to the native locality on the Loddon River’. However from early February to mid-August 1841, Robinson was distracted by his insatiable travel bug and conveniently distracted from the impossible task of managing all four Associate Protectors. From 4 Feb to 23 Feb Robinson was away on a tour to the Ovens River district. From 21 March to 14 August Robinson 1841 was on tour again, this time undertaking reconnaissance for the southwestern district Protectorate station briefly based at Mount Rouse. By the time Robinson returned, the Protectorate had already been relocated.

The move to Larnenebarramul in 1841

Robinson first visited Parker’s new station site centred on present day Franklinford on 19 Nov 1841, that he described as being:

… on one of the sources of the Lodden (sic.), at a place called Willam.be.par.re.mal [‘place of the emu’], a short distance from Lal.gam.book. The appearance of the place on approaching is rather pleasing; it is however surrounded by broken forest ranges containing abundance of game.

Robinson observed that Mrs Parker was ‘in general dirty’ in appearance, and he ‘first rode around the station to give Mrs Parker an opportunity of cleaning’. Robinson stayed there only one night, sleeping in Parker’s office but did not actually meet Edward Parker. Robinson also reported that ‘few natives’ were present, before heading off instead towards Le Soeuf’s Protectorate Station on the Goulburn River via Mollison’s station, close to present day Malmsbury (where he did finally meet Mr Parker).

Robinson’s explanation for the absence of ‘blacks’ at the Franklinford Protectorate, was that the day he had arrived, ‘… the blacks went off to the north for more blacks’. The next day, 20 November 1841 he suggested another explanation, when he wrote that ‘Nearly all the natives were leaving the station. The natives say too much sick[ness] at the station at Willam.be.parramul’, that he later (23 Nov) calls ‘Jem Crow Hill’. That day Robinson included a tally of the fluctuating number of Aborigines at the station between 8-19 November, from a peak of 79 men to a low of 29 men when he arrived. On 9 November 1841 there were 132 Aboriginal people present: 60 men, 24 women, 30 boys and 18 girls.

Robinson noted that ‘The Aboriginal station here commenced June 1841’ and listed all of the buildings, paddocks and crops. The buildings included Parker’s four-room slab house and the overseer’s split slab, two room hut. Robinson, in his typically critical fashion, also painted a fairly grim but perhaps honest scene in his personal diary on 20 Nov 1841. Such scenes were deliberately missing from the gilded descriptions both Robinson and Parker provided which were incorporated into government reports of the time.

I saw no signs of a school. … The natives much diseased. … It may be considered an establishment for prostitution. … Natives described how poor men, i.e. settler’s servants drove them away when their masters come. The hill at Loddon station is called Wil.lam.be.par.ra.mal (emu house). The creek or branch of the Lodden is called Lulgambook.

Robinson noted in his diary two months later, on 20 January 1842, on his way to what he described in detail and referred to as a distressing and tragic hanging of two condemned Aboriginal (Tasmanian) men, that on the previous day in Melbourne, he gave ‘Mr Parker medals for the Lodden station and appointed Boardman to his station’. Boardman was employed as a carpenter.

There were many goon reasons why being taught discipline and punctuality and voluntarily tilling the soil alongside paid White overseers, bullock drivers and farm hands on Protectorate Stations was never going to work, aside from the First Nations need to fulfil ongoing obligations to Nation, Clan, family and Country. The main ‘carrot’ to come to the Protectorate and stay was the provision of food and medical help, which by then was desperately needed. By late 1841 Parker estimated that 90 per cent of Dja Dja Wurrung people in his Larnibarramul census were debilitated by syphilis. A more complete account of the many reasons why the Protectorate also failed on this new site is found in Bain Attwood’s The Good Country, Chapter 6.

Momentous family pressures during these first five years also began to surface publicly for the Parker family. Mary Parker had spent almost five years raising a large family on the frontier swelled by many apparently ‘orphaned’ children they had ‘taken in’, much of the time whilst her husband, Edward was absent for long periods. On 2 Sept 1842 Robinson wrote in his diary that Assistant Protector Dredge had made an affidavit that he saw Assistant Protector Sievwright kiss Mrs Parker (Edward Parker’s wife) and had gone ‘into her cabin at all hours of the night’. Parker arrived in Melbourne on 24 Sept 1842, meeting with Robinson on 26 Sept to provide Robinson with another shocking revelation. Robinson in his diary of 29 Sept 1842 wrote that Parker had told him ‘that they saw Sievwright, fastened the tent and have connection with [Sievwright’s] daughter that the latter struggled but that he effected his purpose.’ In effect Parker was alleging Seivwright had committed incest.

Evidence from other sources confirms that colonial authorities and squatters already had a hatred of Sievwright because of his dogged attempts to try and bring the many murderers of Aborigines in the western district that he was responsible for to justice. They then judged him to be ‘of dubious moral character’ with claims [alluded to above that] he had committed adultery with a fellow Assistant Protector’s wife, and most serious of all, that he had committed incest with his 16 year old, eldest daughter, which promptly ended Sievwright’s commission.

It is highly pertinent to note here that Parker’s first wife, Mary, died tragically and ‘unexpectedly’ (age 35 years) less than a fortnight after the last of these diary records of Robinson which mention this conversation with Edward Parker on 11 October 1842. What happened and what was said in the Parker household in that fortnight can only be guessed at. Morrison suggested in Early days in the Loddon Valley (1966, p.64) that Mrs Parker’s life in the previous four years before her suicide had:

… been one of privation, hardship and solitude. So acute was her feeling of loneliness, occasioned by her husband’s frequent and prolonged absences on official duties, and by the dearth of female friends and companions, that she pleaded with her younger sister Charlotte to join her [which she did, but arrived after Mary Parker’s death].

Edward Parker was away in Melbourne the night his wife, Mary died at the Franklinford Protectorate site. The six young Parker boys were then in the household, age between six and 14 years, had actually been in the home at the time and were left without a mother. One of Parker’s children, writing years later recalled, ‘a distressing noise in mother’s room’ at ‘the midnight hour’ the evening she died. 

A young convict at the station, a constant companion of Parker’s on many of his expeditions, volunteered to ride the 80 miles (130 km) to Melbourne in the dark to fetch Parker, which he did on a series of horses in only six hours. Remarkably, he was back at the station by 9pm the next evening with Parker, despite taking two hours to finally locate him once he got to Melbourne.

Robinson next visited the Loddon Aboriginal Station for a few days in late November 1842. When he arrived on 26 Nov 1842, Robinson was unusually upbeat, recording:

Natives present 47 men, 33 women, 41 youths and boys, 22 girls, total 143. But as they kept coming in I should suppose there were 200. There was a good church and school and much fencing done since I was there last [almost exactly one year before]. Crops looked well. Gave the natives a treat. The Ma.le.conedeets [literally ‘men of the Mallee country’] were there.

As an aside, a detailed and independent 1883 recollection of a corroboree that included the visitors from the Mallee appeared in the Daylesford Advocate, held in ‘a camp … close to the station’, recalled as involving 300 participants in November 1843. 

In late November 1942 Robinson write that he ‘gave [the natives] a blanket to two chiefs and a meddal (sic) each’. On 27 Nov Robinson noted that:

‘All the natives and whites attended [church] service a.m. and were very attentive. Mr Parker spoke to them, part in native dialect and part English. I also addressed them … Mr Parker had service to persons in his own house and prayers morning and evening.’

On the day before he headed back to Melbourne, Robinson wrote on 28 November 1842 that he:

… visited the crater at the mount called Willum-parramul, otherwise Jem Crow. It is an ancient crater of large dimension. … Had a fine view. This morning visited the spring at the establishment a mile and a half distant [presumably the ‘Old Mill Stream’ towards Shepherds Flat]. In the evening attended corrobery (sic) of Malle condeets … At the conclusion both men and women singing together … After viewing … I went to the house. The Jajowrong had remained to a late hour.

In early 1843 Parker filed a Loddon Protectorate census dated 5 January 1843 of Jajowrong (Dja Dja Wurrung) Tribal Groups by clan. Twelve clans were listed with a total of 251 people, including 53 Galgalbulluk people and 37 Wornarra-gerrar people. By then, some clans listed had only two or three living individuals.

On an extended trip between 18 March and 29 April 1843 to the north east, northwest and Western Districts, Robinson again explored parts of the northern Dja Dja Wurrung country including parts of the northern Loddon River, along parts of Mitchell’s ‘northern’ Line. On his way back from this six week trip via the western district in late April, Robinson again entered southern Dja Dja Wurrung country. On 24 April Robinson makes mention of passing the cattle station at Mount Misery, lunching at McCallum’s station at Mount Greenock (where Campbell was visiting), being ‘well entertained’ at ‘Cameron’s out station 10 miles west of Hepburn’. The next day, 25 April 1843, Robinson wrote that he:

… proceeded to Hepburn [at Kooroocheang] and then to Wilam.e.parramul, over the range and by a bridle path. Natives at the station. Men 59, Women 46, Boys 35, Girls 28, [Total] 168. A large barn completed and 800 bushels wheat. … Mr Parker is building a pisa [pise: rammed earth] house.’

On 26 April 1843 Robinson wrote ‘No school at Parkers’, before leaving the next day for Melbourne.

There is evidence here and elsewhere that by this time in 1843, despite Robinson’s optimistic report, the Protectorate system generally was in disarray: hampered by colonial bureaucracy, a legal system which gave Indigenous people minimal legal rights and hostility from both squatters and Aborigines. It was, in part, Parker’s favourable reports on the Loddon River Protectorate Station in 1843 (and later in 1845), which saved the Protectorate system, at least until a NSW Parliamentary Select Committee recommended it be abolished in 1849.

Parker next visited Robinson in Melbourne on both 6 and 8 June 1843. From June 1843 Parker was also given ‘surveillance’ responsibility for the Goulburn (NE) District of the Protectorate. Parker was still in Melbourne visiting Governor La Trobe on 26 June in a dispute about Le Soeuf’s bullocks at the Goulburn station, irritating Robinson because he thought Parker had already returned to his station. 

On 1 Nov 1843 Robinson again visited the Loddon station on the way back from the Goulburn. ‘Powlet and Hunter’ were at the station and not all was in order. Robinson records that:

One black prisoner Buckly (sic.) stealing sheep all the natives absent. A little boy present. Mt Parker’s natives out marauding in Pyrenees. Mr Parker 30 pigs … a little fencing done, barn unfinished. Plenty wheat left, Carpenter not wanted. … Slab building unsightly. Four white prisoners with Powlet (sic.) are women.

Robinson headed west, staying with the Hepburn family on 7 Nov 1843, noting he had seen ‘a Mill at Bitches [Birch’s]’, presumably Hepburn’s flour mill then powered by water from Hepburn Lagoon on Birch’s Creek.

As an aside here, it is pertinent to note that a few weeks after this diary entry by Robinson, Edward Parker remarried in Melbourne on 27 Dec 1843. His second wife was Hannah Edwards. Hannah had previously been employed as a seamstress on the Aboriginal station. When they married, Edward Parker was 41, and Hannah was 25. They went on to have six more children, three boys and three girls, but two of their daughters died in infancy. Their youngest son, George Alfred Parker, was born in 1858.

By Nov 1844 Robinson was facing calls to do away with the Goulburn station, noting that there were reports via Governor La Trobe of no natives being there or at the Loddon station. During 1845 the NSW Legislative Council appointed a select committee to assess the Protectorate system which heard highly critical accounts from its witnesses, but did not publish what would likely have been a damning report, as its Chairman died and it ceased its work. Increasingly, flocks from neighbouring pastoralists had impinged on the poorly defined and unfenced Protectorate boundaries, and Parker’s priorities progressively shifted towards advancing his own interests.

Robinson next visited the station at Franklinford for a week from 21-28 March 1845, this time travelling via Mollison’s outstation and Kangaroo Hills. Whilst he found ‘Parker at home’, Robinson wrote: ‘Few natives, Establishment an unsightly appearance’. Robinson attended a Sunday service in the chapel, noting on Monday 24 March that ‘Mr and Mrs Edwards [Hannah Parker’s parents] at Parker’s’. On 25 March two drays came to station, carrier from ‘Moone Ponds’ (sic.). Robinson left the Loddon Protectorate station on 28 March 1845 ’accompanied by Dr Campbell and Native Police’, staying overnight with John Hepburn’s family that night and with McCallum at Mount Greenock the next night on his way north.

It seems Robinson next visited the Protectorate in mid-November 1845. Arriving before sundown, Robinson wrote: ‘Mr Parker there. Ellen Edwards, Bricknell. Mrs Parker’s family away. Some fine natives’, on 13 Nov also noting Parker’s census for that day: there were 30 men, 31 women, 15 boys, 12 girls, total 88 at the Protectorate.

Robinson became bored with the Protectorate administrivia and life in Melbourne as the Protectorates slowly disintegrated. He went on a long and totally unauthorised grand tour between 26 March 1846 and 8 Aug 1846, which included parts of South Australia, stopping off briefly on the way at the Loddon Protectorate. Robinson wrote on 29 March 1846 that ‘Mr Parker at home, unwell, had intended to go to Goulburn, said got to me with 30 blacks, station dilapidated.’ Robinson stayed at the Franklinford Protectorate for almost two weeks but recorded less than two pages of diary in total, with some unusually brief, single sentence entries. Clearly, he had totally lost his interest in the inevitable decline of the Protectorates and was anxious to get away.

In that fortnight, some of very few highlights he wrote in his diary as he impatiently waited to move on included: ‘Mr Birch called’ (3 April 1846), ’Forty natives on station when I arrived. Forbes writing against Protectorate in March newspaper’ (4 April), ‘attended morning and evening service. Building and fences all dilapidated’ (Sunday, 5 April), ‘I am anxious to go already, all ready’ (6 April), On 7 April ‘Mr Coghil (sic.), Miss Hepburn, Thom and Mr [blank] teacher’, played ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ in the evening, dismissing Edward Parker as ‘an old worrier’. Of all the scenes which epitomise this pitiful colonial scene and which I would like to be ‘fly on the wall’ for, Robinson being totally bored enough to play Blind Man’s Bluff with Edward Parker’s family and John Hepburn’s young daughter and the Protectorate teacher as the decaying and dilapidated Protectorate system unravels around them just five years after it was established at Franklinford sits right up there.

On 9 April 1846 Robinson wrote ‘Parker going home, is in a fright about going, quite alarmed’. Presumably Robinson had pressured Parker into coming along for Robinson’s intended and extended junket, a pressure that Parker had come to detest and understandably resist. The evening before Robinson left the Protectorate and headed further north into Dja Dja Wurrung country, Robinson bitterly recorded that that ‘Parker never came, a liar’.

On his return from his 18 week interstate ‘tour’, Robinson was chastised by Governor La Trobe and ordered not to travel away again, other than to the Port Phillip Protectorates. On 10 August 1846 Robinson was again railing in his diary, that Mr Parker ‘wants to take stock on terms I won’t listen to … I seen what it will result in. The mission is all a farce’. Parker visited Robinson in Melbourne next on 16 Oct 1846 and again on 18 Dec 1846. Robinson was losing patience with Parker, who claimed he had come to town and lost his horse:

Fudge! [‘Rubbish!’] As usual he was full of complaints, would not attend to much, had two stations to manage &c. and has work to do. Saved government this and that advanced moneys … yet cannot carry on impossible.’ 

Robinson went on to suggest that his own interstate jaunt had cost the government very little compared to what resources Parker had wasted.

When Robinson next visited Parker at his Mount Franklin station, again for just a few days between 21-24 Sept 1847, it was a very mixed report. He wrote during that interval that there were:

30 natives on station … expecting Mr La Trobe. Mr Parker at Goulburn last [between 15-19 Jan 1847]. Wheat sown, Footrot in sheep … [flour] mill out of order and wheat sent to Hepburn’s to grind. … 2,560 sheep Lodden (sic.), Parker got 1,1000 sheep with Bicknell on the station. Miserable place … orphan children. Parker plenty pig, geese and cattle … Parker sells stone instead of lime. Parker to account for money for lime …. The first Presbyterian church at the Lodden is a barn and shearing shed.

This mention of ‘lime’ refers to private lime kiln business Parker was evidently conducting on the side, mining and roasting lime from the limestone deposit within the Protectorate boundaries at what would later become Gilmore’s Spring, and which by the would become 1970s Coca Cola’s eponymous ‘Mount Franklin Spring’.

As he left the Protectorate in September 1847, Robinson cuttingly wrote:

Parker tells of what might have been and might be a school, why the mission as the Barwin (sic) has no school !!! Mr Parker all in prospect or else, the time is past [sic.] by, the government have lost the opportunity &c.

Robinson was in new offices in Melbourne in a room in John Batman’s old house at the junction of Spencer and Flinders Streets by June 1848. Soon after, on 11 August 1848, Robinson’s wife, Maria died after becoming chronically ill and in severe pain. George and Maria had grown apart during the Port Phillip years after frequent prolonged absences, and Robinson had also developed very strained relationships with his children.

By 19 Oct 1848, Robinson wrote that Parker had written to Governor La Trobe about ‘Hunter’s encroachments. Said he had approved of a fence for burying ground. Said Parker if he wanted a school should have employed his family. We had no business to keep his family’. Hunter was likely William Morrison Hunter, who had been on the Tarrrengower run on the Loddon River adjoining Newstead since 1842, previously run by Lauchlan Mackinnon 1839-41, and the encroachments referred to Hunter’s stock encroaching on the Loddon Protectorate boundaries. Some of these issues about the Protectorate boundaries and encroachment by Hunter are dealt with in C. C. Culvenor’s (1992) The boundaries of the Mount Franklin Aboriginal Reserve that includes excellent maps.

On 12 March 1849 Parker visited Robinson’s relocated office on Queen Street in Melbourne, having previously visited Governor La Trobe and convincing him to ‘have a schoolmaster &c.’ at Franklinford. Robinson noted in his dairy that day that Parker ‘is in a bad state of health.’

Closure of all Port Phillip Protectorates, December 1849

By 1849 the government authorities including Governor La Trobe were unable to ignore the abject failure of the Protectorate project, and an official investigation was ordered. A decade before a similar inquiry into Robinson’s work on Flinders Island had, in Vivienne Rae-Ellis’ (1988) Black Robinson book (p.226) judgement, exposed Robinson as ‘a failure, liar and cheat’. However as for the Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) inquiry, neither the personal roles of Robinson nor the Port Phillip Assistant Protectors roles were critically examined.

The Select Committee concluded that whilst the Protectorate system had failed totally, it was unable to recommend a substitute for it. In Parker’s prophetic words, the Aborigines had been ‘restrained but not reclaimed’. The Protectorate system in the Colony of Port Phillip was formally abolished in December 1849. Unfortunately Robinson’s candid personal diaries between 10 June 1849 (when he opened the official letter confirming the closure) and 31 Dec 1849 have not survived.

As an aside, in 1851 Robinson returned briefly to VDL and visited the 20 remaining VDL Aborigines at Oyster Cove south of Hobart, where they had been transferred from the Flinders Island’s similarly failed and deadly resettlement ‘experiment’. Within 20 years most were dead. With Truganina’s death in 1876.

Following abolition of the Protectorate in late 1849, Parker applied for and was granted a Pastoral License to the Protectorate Reserve under an arrangement with Governor La Trobe. Parker was allowed to depasture his own stock and cultivate sections of the land for his own use and that of the Aboriginal School, subject to him ‘giving employment, both pastoral and agricultural, as far as possible, to the Aboriginal natives.’

Joseph Parker sometime after Parker’s death (in Morrison, 1971, p.51) summarised his perception of the way his father managed to secure more than a golden handshake.

When the Aboriginal Station was abolished, Father was offered a licence for the reserve (sixty two square miles), which he accepted. We then moved our quarters to the foot of Mount Franklin, where we established our homestead, and commenced farming and grazing. We got on fairly well for about three years, but the discovery of gold on the Run brought a number of bad characters into the district and then our trouble began. 

Robinson next visited the Loddon station on a hot day in 27 Jan 1850 noting, ‘Parker at home. Is to remain at station Jem Crow to be called Mt Franklin and station Franklinham (sic.). Parker to run 8,000 sheep.’

The next day Robinson covered a lot of ground in his diary entry of 28 Jan 1850, reproduced in full to give some idea of what Robinson was seeing on the former Protectorate, as well as what he was most interested in and thinking about. Robinson wrote:

Hot day. At station, some natives there getting in wheat. Benevolent Society. Paddock is full of drakes. A black named [blank] died at the Loddon and the Loddon natives went and killed some Murry (sic.) natives in revenge and mustering at Simson’s [at Charlotte Plains, near Carisbrook] to fight it out, it is to be a grand affair the natives say.

The natives should be treated [as] men, they work as men and should be treated as men, a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s labor but this is never accorded them. It is thought if they get food it is enough for blacks.

The natives have a feeling that they are men and they evince that [they are] higher beings. The settlers all abuse them, men great scoundrels &c.

Loddon: Mrs Judkin [Mrs Margaret Judkins, with her husband Charles were teachers at the Aboriginal School with Parker] said her girls would not read before the men, what men I asked, oh sir, the native men they are all men and so it turned out and the four native females I saw one married woman and one elderly lubra had a child with her.

The run and compensation would be equivalent to 3000 [pound], ewes cost 4/1 licence run 10, difference for run 6/1. Look in the map of Ireland for unpronounceable names, so much for sarcasm. Wool left Loddon on Wednesday p.m. Buildings dilapidated. His Honor [Governor La Trobe] stopped three hours at the station.

The next day it rained, and Robinson wrote that in the afternoon ‘Capt. Hepburn returned from Melbourne, Called at station. Mrs H[epburn]. at Mr Budds for three months. John H. gone to VDL then to England to meet Sir J. Franklin’. On 30 January 1850 Robinson wrote: ‘Could not get the natives to attend school until the dogs was at work. Mrs Judkins [the school teacher] said girls travelled with them would only come when they choose.’

Robinson wrote down the names of 14 males and four females at Franklinford on that date in 1850, one of whom was recorded as ‘Eliza, Babine, Dicky’s lubra, one child with her’. Eliza, born around 1833 was a Daung Wurrung woman and would have been approximately 18 years old. The unnamed child was very likely Ellen, born in 1849, after whom ‘Ellen’s Walk for Reconciliation’ was named as part of the July 2018 NIADOC week celebrations. Ellen’s father ‘Dicky, Yerrebulluk’ was amongst the men listed, a Dja Dja Wurrung man likely then aged approximately 24 years. Robinson indicates in his diary that eight of the Aboriginal children at Franklinford were requested to read, five of whom ‘Attempted’, Three of whom ‘Read’.

Robinson completed the 30 January 1850 diary entry with ‘Bates said the total number of [blank] were 20’. Likely this refers to 20 Aboriginal people then at the station. William Bates had been employed at the station since January 1848, having previously worked as an overseer at the Goulburn Protectorate from Oct 1845.

The European rediscovery of gold in the Port Phillip District (that would certainly have been found in nugget form by Aboriginal Australians across goldfields Country for millennia) took place in Clunes in 1851 and at many other sites in the years and decades that followed. It is notable that during this time almost nothing was done officially by colonial governments to intervene on behalf of First Nations people during this second and much bigger invasion, until the ‘Mission and Central Station era’ policies and programs during the 1860s and 1870’s.

History of the Aboriginal Protectorate on the Loddon River at Neereman: 

Review and transcription of original documentary evidence

Protectorate established November 1840, abandoned June 1841

Barry Golding, 26 May 2022: b.golding@federation.edu.au

What is new in this account?

This extended account provides:

• new information as to where the Neereman Protectorate was located
• new and comprehensive transcription of original 1840/41 Protectorate documents
• new insights as to how and why the site was selected and why it was abandoned
• a new evidence as to why it was called ‘Neereman’ by the Dja Dja Wurrung and the ‘fishponds on the plains’ by squatter, John Hepburn in 1840
• a case for closer attention from authorities concerned about acknowledging, protecting and accurately interpreting the site.

Remarkably, very little of this story has been told before. If the 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic has one upside for me, it has provided the opportunity to write and publish off the back of much of what I’ve collected. As with all histories, this is just some of the story based on partial evidence. I look forward to being told what I might have missed and got wrong.

I have deliberately left in most of the detail in my transcripts of original documents so the information is available for summary and analysis by others in the future. I am 72 year old as I write this and am concerned that what I have learnt is not forgotten again and passed on to future generations. In future I hope that this remarkable and important site will become better recognised, interpreted and protected with the involvement and support of the Dja Dja Wurrung traditional owners and the local landholders.

Context for this historical account

In June 1841, just one hundred and eighty years ago, an attempt by the Colonial government to create what might today be called ‘a concentration camp’ for several hundred First Nations people in the ‘northwest’ of the then Colony of Port Philip on the Loddon River at present day Neereman was abandoned. 

Established in November 1840 in the heart of the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Nation downstream of present day Cairn Curran Reservoir, only a handful of people know where this former, pre-Franklinford, 1840-41 ‘Aboriginal Protectorate’ site is or what actually happened here. In brief, several hundred Aboriginal people were forced by the Colonial government to seek refuge on and beyond their own Country in the face of a brutal and deadly squatter invasion, organised resistance from the colonial newspapers, raging pandemics, a harsh summer, protracted El Nino and hunger. 

The huge penalty for the relative safety briefly provided to Dja Dja Wurrung and people from other First Nations by the Protectorate was the loss of Country, language and culture. Promised permanent solace and safely at Neereman, the families who reluctantly ‘took the bait’ were moved six months later to a new ‘permanent’ site at Franklinford (north of Daylesford), itself abolished in late 1849, and by 1864 to the Coranderrk Mission near Healesville until it too was closed. In the process the people were deliberately exposed to a warped form of missionary Christianity, that as historian Robert Kenny wrote in The lamb enters the dreaming, placed suffering at its core, and sought to console people living amongst sickness and death.

Almost every part of this tragic story about Neereman, one of the oldest Aboriginal Protectorate sites in south eastern Australia had been lost. Using original documents and maps, this blog, for the first time in 180 years, confidently identifies the original 1840-41 ‘Neereman’ site. It sits on a high sandy bank above a stunningly beautiful but rarely visited, wide and deep section of the Loddon River 6 km north of Baringhup. 

This account reveals why this section of the Loddon River was tantalisingly described to Chief Protector George Robinson by John Hepburn in February 1840 as the ‘fishponds on the plains’. It also provides a new and alternative explanation as to why it might have been called ‘Nirriman’ ‘by the Dja Dja Wurrung, other than Edward Parker’s son, Joseph’s, 1916 translation of ‘Neura Mong’ as a ‘place to hide’. Dja Dja Wurrung descendant and linguist Harley Dunolly-Lee confimed in 2022 that ‘nyura mang’ indeed means ‘hide here’.

As Harley Dunolly-Lee explained in 2022, ‘one of the Protector’s main roles was to learn the language for the purpose of concentration. Renaming the place was part of delivering that message to the Dja Dja Wurrung ancestors. Robinson records in his journal in 1841 that he made contact with he Dja Dja Wurrung and told the Burung Balak and Gal Gal Balak clans that Parker was going to “sit down amongst them”. So naming the place reconfirmed this because many Aboriginal people who arrived there already knew who Parker was (see Attwood 2019, 117)‘.

It was here on a flat and sandy area north of the river still known as ‘Parker’s Plains’ by some local old timers, that Aboriginal people were being encouraged by Edward Parker to plant English seeds in the middle of the scorching El Nino summer of February 1841. The river banks show no sign of the many wood and bark huts that were constructed for over one hundred Aboriginal people, Protectorate staff and families during the eight months of 1840/41 that the Protectorate operated, nor any evidence of the former 1840 Protectorate ‘cultivation paddock’.

The banks close to the waterline on this wide and deep section of the Loddon River today are lined with huge and ancient River red gums. On the elevated sandy banks are a few remnant Buloke trees and there is an old peppercorn tree on a sandy ridge where a Protectorate homestead might have been. 

Readers should note that the site is in 2022 on private land south of the Baringhup-Eddington Road. The public road that crosses the Loddon River downstream of the site are at Hamilton’s Crossing, today an attractive streamside reserve on the Baringhup–West Eastville Road. Until steps are taken to protect the site, visitation to the area is discouraged other than on public roads, river bank easements or Hamilton’s Crossing Crown Reserve.

Neereman: The Big picture

The Neereman area, according to Parker in 1840 was particularly important to Dja Dja Wurrung people. This section seeks to ascertain why this might be so. If one takes a helicopter view of Dja Dja Wurrung Country it is close to central. The site is ecotonal in that provided access to a range of pre-contact ecosystems and therefore food resources within relatively close proximity. The Myrniong-rich Moolort volcanic grasslands and Casuarina woodland are immediately to the south. A geological map of surrounding area, below (Dyson, 2010, extracted from the Bells Swamp Management Plan, 2015: the westward ‘kink’ in Loddon River close to the Protectorate site is just north of what is marked as ‘Chalk Lead’ towards the southern edge of the map) shows that much of the surrounding area is weathered ancient bedrock, with quite different woodland vegetation associations. To the east is the very different granite country and vegetation west of the Tarrengower range. The green hashing delineating the Loddon Deep Lead is inclusive of the thick clay layer which the Loddon cuts through at the Neereman site. The riverine plain sediments in the area marked as white are relatively fertile. Then there is nearby Bells Swamp itself, an important ephemeral wetland.

Identifying exactly where the site is took some effort, as Yandoit local historian Edgar Morrison found in the 1960s. Morrison left some useful clues after locating the approximate site in Early days in the Loddon Valley (1966).

Morrison noted in 1966 that the site was ‘a mile or so upstream’ of the current ‘Hamilton’s Crossing Crown Reserve’ on the Baringhup-West Eastville Road. In 1966 it was then on a property owned by the ‘Jennings Brothers’ (Morrison, 1966, page 23). Morrison was guided to the site by Claude Jennings’ oral history about ‘Parker’s Plains’ as well as descriptions of the locality and the width and length of the deep pools in the Loddon River written by Edward Parker’s son, Joseph Parker, in 1916. These notes were recalled from Joseph’s early childhood over 70 years before whilst living at the original Protectorate site for over six months in 1840/1.

My initial search for the site focussed on the relatively wide section of the Loddon River, within the northern border of the Parish of Baringhup and the southern part of the Neereman Parish. It was assisted by the excellent aerial view available of the huge pools, see my photo below, along the Loddon River provided by Google Map.

The aerial images confirmed that the land north of a distinctive, long and wide east west section of the Loddon was today being irrigated by three huge ‘centre pivots’ on land that turned out to be still owned and farmed by the Jennings family. Paul Jennings and family still live nearby in 2022. Given Paul’s father only bought the nearby ‘Red Banks’ property in 1943, all Paul knew about the Protectorate site was contained in Geoff Morrison’s A successful failure, a trilogy: The Aborigines and early settlers, consolidating Edgar Morrison’s previously (1966) published works in 2002. 

I met the landowner and have since made several trips to the site during 2019-22 with the land owners advance permission. I have subsequently located new documents and maps to confidently locate the site and better inform this story.

Background to creation of Aboriginal Protectorates in the Port Phillip Colony

The contact history of Indigenous people in Australia was from the earliest times of colonisation until relatively recently, strongly shaped by Christian missions and government reserves, the breaking up of families and removal of children from their parents. Christian missionaries played a prominent role in modelling and managing such regimes. Unsurprisingly, the history of Aboriginal Missions and the Aboriginal Protectorates that preceded them in the footprint of present day Victoria is conveniently forgotten.

While the Aboriginal Protectorates in the Colony of Port Phillip during the 1840s provided some government sponsored protection and shelter from the worst settler violence, they were totally missionary in terms of their intent, staffing and operation. It was about Christian preaching and teaching, with the aim of civilizing and Christianising First Nations peoples.

Two Aboriginal Protectorate Stations were established in the Port Phillip Colony north of the Great Dividing Range. The ‘north east’ one on the Goulburn River near present day Mitchelton (later relocated to near present day Murchison) was established by James Dredge and overseen by him in incredibly difficult circumstances between May 1839 and June 1840. The other, ‘north west’ Protectorate was at what has sometimes been called ‘Neura Mong’ on the present day Neereman site.

The brief story is that the site, with Assistant Protector Edward Parker in charge, was quickly deemed as unsatisfactory for the agricultural purposes originally intended as an important part of the perceived ‘civilizing’ process. It was relocated to what was deemed a more suitable site adjacent to Mount Franklin close to present day Franklinford, operating there from June 1841 for the rest of the decade until 1849.

Some aspects of the foundation and operation of the site at Neereman and the reasons for its relocation by Parker were first examined by Edgar Morrison in Early days in the Loddon Valley (1966, pp.16-32), and again quite (recently 50 years later) in Bain Attwood’s (2017) book, The Good Country (2017, pp.110-114). 

Where did the Protectorate idea come from?

The Protectorate system in the Port Philip Colony of New South Wales was a poorly planned, hopelessly managed and dreadfully executed experiment. The rules and plans were created by the Colonial government ‘on the run’ and were amended in response to rapidly changing circumstances and feedback on the ground from the Aboriginal Protectors. The original ideas came top-down from afar in London (the UK) and its Colonies in Sydney (NSW) and Port Phillip (now Melbourne). It was in part informed by experience of the then recent experience of missionary failure dating back to the 1820s in the Wellington Valley (east of present day Dubbo) 350km inland from Newcastle. 

Harley Dunolly-Lee generously provided the following useful background in 2022 as to where the idea originated.

A report was dispatched in 1837 among the colonies that about the mistreatment towards Indigenous people such as the unfair seizure of land, settler violence and murder and the introduction of alcohol, disease and prostitution (Christie 1979, 85; Edmonds & Laidlaw 2020; Elbourne 2003).  

The report came in three editions. The initial report was the official Parliamentary Papers sent to the British Parliament. The second report was published and printed by the Society of Friends (Quakers). Lastly, the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) published Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements) reprinted with comments by the Aborigines Protection Society. However, it was the APS report that had influenced the British and its colonies (Edmonds & Laidlaw 2020).

The report emphasized that Indigenous people were subjects of the Crown and needed protection under the British law. The report made suggestions to the Imperial Government for Protectors to be placed in each colony (Attwood 2017, 79).^[1] It pointed out that in order for Indigenous people to cope with the forthcoming effects of colonization, they needed to be ‘civilized’ and convert to Christianity. They viewed this as a way of reparation for the British who were committing sins against the Indigenous people (Elbourne 2003). 

The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg had carried this through to the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps. However, only five Protectors were to be appointed within the Port Phillip District (Attwood 2017, 79-80). The Protector’s main duties drawn from the report were: 

1. To guard and protect the rights of Aboriginal people from further settler invasion and violence. 

• To represent the requirements and complaints of Aboriginal people reported to the government

• To Christianise Aboriginal people. 

• To convince Aboriginal people to relocate to one area. 

• Once relocated; Aboriginal people would be civilized, educated and learn to cultivate the land.

• To learn the language of the Aboriginal people for the purpose of communication. (Attwood 2017, 79; Cannon 1983, 374-375). 

The protectors needed to learn an understanding of the language in order to have make duties 1-5 possible.

The four Assistant Protectors including Edward Parker and family had arrived in Australia from the UK in late 1838. It was an almost impossible task trying to select a site and implement the Colonial government’s poorly-defined plans in practice, interpreted through their own largely missionary lenses, in a landscape in which the best land and water had already been seized by squatters.

On 4 June 1840 Chief Protector Robinson communicated the Governor’s directions in relation to the Protectorates to his four Assistant Protectors. They were required to select a suitable site for:

‘… a reserve of one square mile of land for a homestead, for each of the Assistant Protectors. [There will be] no stations within five miles of the Assistant Protector’s residences. … The square mile or 640 acres forming the inner reserve is intended for cultivation, and the outer reserve of five miles radius (or a circle of ten miles in diameter) for the hunting grounds of the natives, but as every effort is to be made to induce them to engage in Agriculture or regular industry, the extent of their hunting grounds is to be gradually curtailed instead of increased, and it is for this reason that his Excellency intends to make the inner reserve Permanent and the outer only a Temporary one’.

It is of some interest 180 years later that the word ‘permanent’ was underlined given the very temporary nature of what transpired.

The Governor’s plan in the Port Phillip Colonies, while based ‘… on the same principle for those provided for the Wesleyan Missionaries in the County of Grant’ (in the Wellington Valley, NSW, near present day Dubbo), stressed prophetically that:

‘Great care however is to be observed in selecting the site; which especially is to be remote from the settled Districts, otherwise similar difficulties to which the Missionaries as Wellington Valley have had to contend with may again recur.’

Here Robinson was referring to the Wellington Valley Mission, initiated by Wesleyan missionaries in 1824, and later taken over by the Anglican Church Missionary Society in 1832 with the financial support of the NSW Colonial Government, to later become the first of many missions in Australia to employ ordained Germans. 

The rush to take up country in New South Wales in the early 1800s had previously resulted in deadly clashes with the local people. In the Bathurst area, after seven shepherds were killed, Governor Brisbane declared martial law in 1824 for all land west of Mount York (in the Katoomba area 150 km west of Sydney). The subsequent ‘dispersal’ (often brutal murders and massacres) of Indigenous people by soldiers and settlers became standard practice and resulted in many deaths.

Meanwhile calls were mounting for renewed efforts to ‘civilise and Christianise’ those whose lands were being rapidly expropriated. Since early ventures such as Governor Macquarie’s Native Institution at Parramatta and Blacktown had had very limited success, it was felt that new missions should be founded as far as possible from settled areas.

Two Wesleyan missionaries, William Walker and John Harper, had suggested the Wellington Valley as a possible site, because of its then relative isolation at the limits of legal settlement. Harper travelled to Wellington Valley in 1824 and stayed there for almost two years while he waited for the government to make the Wesleyans a land grant of 10,000 acres (40 square kilometres) for a mission.

The information cited about the Wellington Valley experience (1832-43) that follows is quoted from research on German missionaries in Australia undertaken between 2011 and 2015 by Professor Regina Ganter of Griffith University.

In summary the Wellington Valley Mission’s success was zero, based on the targeted number of Christian conversions, as below:

… history was marred by internal strife, first between the Englishman William Watson and his co-labourer Johann Handt, and then between Watson and Handt’s successor, Jakob (James) Günther. After Watson was dismissed from Wellington Valley in 1840, he and his wife began a new, rival mission nearby, known as Apsley. The original mission closed in 1843 and is generally considered to have been a complete failure, since it made no lasting conversions.’

Fast forward to September 1840, by which time the Colonial Office in Port Phillip had agreed to appoint ‘Agricultural overseers’ as part of the Protectorate plan, again with the caveat that the perceived mistakes in the Wellington Valley would not be repeated.

‘Assistant Protectors of the Goulburn and Mount Macedon districts [including Parker will] be allowed to make a choice of Agricultural or Government Overseers to Superintend the Agricultural Establishment to set on foot for the benefit of the aborigines, with Governor’s concurrence … with salary at the rate of one hundred pounds a year cash, with an allowance of one shilling a day in lieu of rations. …

I am however to remark that in sanctioning these appointments the Governor cannot but feel apprehensive that results may follow similar to those which at Wellington Valley have rendered the Missionary Institution nearly, if not altogether useless. His Excellency also desires me to request that you will earnestly caution the Chief Protector, and also his Assistants, that the Establishment of a Homestead for each of Assistant is not intended to exempt him from the duty of itinerating amongst the Tribes under his protection: and also that the whole of the produce raised at each Homestead or Establishment is to be for the exclusive use of the aborigines, and that any appropriation of the same to the use or for the advantage of the Protectors, or any white persons, will be considered an abuse, calling for the Governor’s instant and most effective interference.’

The missionaries in the Wellington Valley had experienced many difficulties in their work with the local Wiradjuri people. At the end of his first official report for the years 1832 and 1833, former schoolmaster Watson who was dedicated to the teaching part of the Mission’s ‘preaching and teaching’ function, made an enumerated list of these difficulties as follows. Most if not all of these difficulties, summarised below, would later be experienced by Edward Parker and the Dja Dja Wurrung people on the Loddon River Neereman site in 1840-1.

1. The prevalence of Wiradjuri women living with European men. [Watson commented that women in this situation were kept away from the influence of the mission, and their minds were ‘poisoned and prejudiced against the motives, persons and labours of Christian missionaries’. He also believed that their unwanted children were often murdered, although proof was hard to obtain].
2. The Wiradjuri’s ‘avoidance rules’ such as the refusal of young Indigenous men to be in the same room as an Indigenous woman. This added to the difficulties of conducting church services and a school.
3. The Wiradjuri’s unwillingness to settle down in one place.
4. The Wiradjuri’s ‘remarkable aversion to labour’.
5. The cost of purchasing provisions, and the difficulty of growing crops.
6. The Wiradjuri’s ongoing prejudice against missionaries, for which Watson blamed the settlers’ tales mentioned previously.

How Edward Parker selected the Neereman site

Edward Parker had arrived in Australia in September 1838 with his young family from England to take up the task of Assistant Protector of Aborigines, never having been outside of England and never having seen an Aborigine. He was subordinate to a much more experienced (and arguably duplicitous) Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson, who had done such a ‘good job’ rounding up Aboriginal Tasmanians and having them all removed to be concentrated on Flinders Island by the 1830s. 

On this basis, the Colonial government gave Robinson the task of managing the four Assistant Protectors and concentrating people from more than 20 Aboriginal Nations across the present state of Victoria into just four relatively small Protectorate stations roughly on the four compass Directions, NW, NE, SW and SE.

The map reproduced, below, from ‘Victorian squatters’ compiled by Robert Spreadborough and Hugh Anderson. in 1983 indicates in black shading the position of three of the four 1840s Protectorates: the SW one at Mount Rouse, Mount Franklin towards the ‘NW’ and the Michelton Protectorate towards the NE. The map usefully shows ‘Mitchell’s Line’, his track from Portland back towards Sydney. The key confirms that these three Protectorates and the land taken up earliest (by 1840) approximately coincided. The Protectorate not shown is the one in the SW at Narre Warren.

If they were created today, Protectorates might be properly be called refugee or concentration camps. Aborigines were to be coerced and encouraged to leave their traditional lands, to be herded together regardless of language and culture to be protected from the violence and removal associated with squatting, to settle down, convert to Christianity and practice agriculture. On top of all other indignities, there was a belief that removing people from Country, preventing people from practising their traditional cultures, speaking their own languages and removing their children would make this transition (and their eventual demise) quicker and more efficient. This process would today be called genocide.

Parker was given responsibility for the ‘north west’ area, then called the Mount Macedon District, as this prominent landmark was close to the limits of colonial inland settlement north west of early Melbourne at the time of his arrival in Australia. Nearby Jackson’s Creek near present day Sunbury became the Parker family’s temporary base while Edward tried to work out where his Protectorate might be most effectively based. 

Parker’s protracted excursion with George Robinson in early 1840 north of the Great Dividing Range into Dja Dja Wurrung country in present day north central Victoria was intended to help identify where that site might be. The trip included a four-night stay by Parker and Robinson with Captain John Hepburn on his Smeaton Hill run from 13-17 February 1840 and an exploratory trip with Hepburn’s cart north to the Loddon River in the vicinity of present day Newstead from 18-22 February and as far north as present day Gough’s Range, today north of Cairn Curran Reservoir. Where they actually went on this five day trip is documented here for the first time.

On 14 February 1840 Robinson accompanied Hepburn and Parker to the summit of what Robinson wrote as Korertanger (Mount Kooroocheang). He noted in his private daily journal, that from the peak ‘Mr Hepburn pointed out the place for Parker’s Station, distant 9 miles NE and by N on the Major’s [Mitchell’s] Line where he encamped’. This description corresponds approximately to the Loddon River close to the site of present day Newstead. The detailed description of the site alluding to its attractiveness as a Protectorate site that follows was presumably suggested by Hepburn, since neither Robinson nor Parker had previously visited it when it was written in Robinson’s diary. 

‘There are large water holes there and plenty of fish, and kangaroos in abundance. And it’s on the border. Nor will it be required. Hence, a better site for an establishment could not be selected for the district. It is accessible from Melbourne, 90 miles by road through the ranges and would be easily found, being on the Major’s [Mitchell’s] Line.’

Robinson’s description of it being ‘on the border’ and ‘not being required’ presumably refers to it being close to the then northern edge of the extent of pastoral stations in the Port Phillip District and not being required for existing stations. The next day Robinson learned from Hepburn that the ‘90 mile road through the ranges’ to Melbourne [from Smeaton via Mollison’s run near present day Kyneton] could be considerably shortened to 80 miles by going via Stieglitz’s [near present day Ballan] ‘instead of 120 [miles] by Geelong’. 

Robinson also recorded that Mr Hepburn had pointed to a hill he ‘calls Jem Crow [Mount Franklin], because of the numerous small hollows about it’. Each of these sites feature prominently in the landscape and subsequent Aboriginal Protectorate history. Fortuitously, while later camping on the Loddon River near present day Newstead, Robinson met two Dja Dja Wurrung men who identified Jem Crow as Lul.gam.book, Mitchell’s ‘Salus’ as Tarengower and the Loddon River near present day Newstead as Pul.ler.gil yal.oke.

On 18 February 1840 Robinson diarised that while he was ‘undecided whether to go to Jem Crow Hill [Mt Franklin] or the fish ponds [on the Loddon River] on the plains’, they nevertheless took the latter option and headed north across the plains towards the Loddon River. My careful examination of Robinson’s diary shows they went over the Stoney Rises near the present Tuki Trout Farm, close to present day Campbelltown and north along Joyce’s Creek to the series of large ponds in the Loddon River immediately downstream of present day Newstead. 

On 21 February Robinson’s detailed description of climbing up onto on ‘an eminence SW and by S of Tarengower’, including his description of the rocks and other peaks visible in the landscape, placed them on the metamorphosed stony ridge on the edge of the western edge of present day Gough’s Range, owned by Duncan and Julie McGinty in 2022. This was as far north as they ventured on this trip. At this point they were still approximately 15 km from the soon to be selected Neereman Protectorate site, but the site would have been visible from Gough’s Range.

By mid-1840 Parker, having returned to his temporary base near Mount Macedon, had seen and heard enough evidence of what was happening to Aborigines in Melbourne and on the relatively lawless frontier into which he was required to somehow embed himself, to come to some firm, strong and evidence-based conclusions. 

Parker’s Periodical (six monthly) Report for 1 March to 31 August 1840 was informed by his time consuming and impossible work within and beyond the current site of Melbourne unsuccessfully seeking justice for the many Aboriginal deaths and indignities regularly being reported to his office. What follows is verbatim, in full, taken from his written report. The words replaced by ‘XXX’ in this and the other transcripts in this account were unclear to me or uncertain in the handwritten original.

‘During the months of October, December, January and February [1840] I was in contact communication with various parties of aborigines of the Jajowrong, Taoungurong and Witowrong and XXX tribes. These tribes either partially or entirely range the District under my charge. From them I have obtained much information illustrative of the aboriginal statistics of the district. This information, when properly matured and confirmed will be remitted in a district communication.

Several important facts materially affecting the condition and prospects of the aboriginal population, as well as the security of the persons and property of the colonists have been forcibly brought under my notice. I beg most respectfully to submit them to the consideration if Her Majesty’s Colonial government.

1. The first is the rapid occupation of the entire country by settlers and the consequent attempts made to deprive the aborigines of the natural products of the country and to exclude them from their native soil. The entire country of the Waverong and Witowrong tribes, with scarcely any exceptions is now sold or occupied by squatters. A considerable portion of the country XXX by the Jajowong and Taoungurong tribes is also taken up by sheep or cattle runs. The very spots most valuable to the aborigines for their productiveness – the creeks, water courses and rivers – are the first to be occupied. It is a common opinion among the settlers that with the possession of a squatting licence entitles them to the exclusion of the aborigines from their runs. Lately Mr Monro, having pushed his stations on both sides of the Coloband [Coliban River] and up the tributary creeks to Mount Alexander [Leanganook] complained in a public journal that “the blacks are still lurking around the creeks – that they seem determined to act as lords of the soil”, etc. etc. The plain fact is their ordinary place of resort, as furnishing them with the most abundant supplies of food. Precisely similar is the relative situation of the native and colonial population in other parts of the district – both parties mutually regarding each other as intruders. Are the territorial rights of to aborigines to be set aside by violence? Appointed as I have been by Her Majesty’s Government specially to “watch over the rights and interests of the natives” and to “protect their property and from acts of cruelty, oppression and injustice”, (vide Letter of Instructions from Sir G. Grey, Feb 12^th 1838) I deem it my duty respectfully but firmly to assert the right of the aborigines to the soil and its indigenous productions, until suitable compensation be made for its occupation by reserving and cultivating a sufficient portion for their maintenance.

• Another fact consequential upon the foregoing is the diminution of the natural food of the aborigines. Having in a formal communication asserted to this (vide Letter dated June 20^th 1839), I need only now state that the facts then asserted have been fully corroborated by subsequent observation and enquiry, and that I am prepared with ample evidence to substantiate these assertions. The common result of this is that the natives resort to the outstations to procure bread, and too frequently under the excitement of hunger or cupidity, to take by force denied to their importunity. They have acquired universally a taste for the whiteman’s food – they tell me invariably they prefer it to their own wild productions. This acquired taste might and ought to be employed as a secondary means of their civilization.

• I have seen in my recent intercourse with the aborigines considerable numbers of children and I invariably find among them a great quickness of apprehension and evident XXX for instruction. It is my duty therefore respectfully to urge the necessity and importance of having the children as much as possible concentrated and at once brought under Christian instruction. Every moment lost in this matter is a postponement of the hope of their ultimate civilization. Then old may be restrained, but the young will certainly be reclaimed if suitable means be at once employed.

• It is my duty also to assert to the fact that I find it impossible to attach myself to entire tribes, from the circumstances that the tribes are most usually broken into small parties often ranging widely from each other in search of food. The only occasion when they assemble in any considerable numbers is when they resort to particular spots where some kinds of food may be abundant for a season, as to places abounding in fish or the mernon [Myrniong] root; and when different tribes meet to settle disputes by conflict or otherwise; this appears to be almost invariably in the vicinity of Melbourne. As these occasions are not of frequent recurrence, it is becoming daily more necessary that the Protector should possess some point of concentration – some fixed station to which he may invite and bring the aborigines.

• Although indolence and dislike of constrained labour are, in common with all savages, characteristic vices of the aborigines I am connected with, I am happy to state that many instances have come to my knowledge where they have employed themselves to the satisfaction of the settlers and to their own advantage. I have found a man and boy, natives of an adjoining District, employed by Mr Piper as shepherds; they are both described as faithful and efficient servants. Several others have been named to me as occasionally employed in shepherding, washing sheep, packing wool etc. I have not found among those who have visited my station any insurmountable repugnance to cook, when properly encouraged and rewarded, and not barely commanded, but having no permanent station, no means of cultivation, and indeed up to the present time no direct authority to issue provisions as a reward for labour, I am not in a situation to employ this method of promoting their civilization.

In conclusion, I beg respectfully to express my solemn ands deliberate conviction that the present relative position of the aboriginal and colonial population must undergo a decided and speedy change, to prevent the increase of predatory attacks on colonial property on the one hand, and the continuance of a system of illegal punishment and indiscriminate slaughter on the other. While I find it next to impossible, from the desultory [meaning: lack of plan, purpose or enthusiasm] nature of my present official duties to employ the only official means of permanent civilization, i.e. Christian instruction, I am painfully conscious that the wandering aborigines are sinking to a lower degree of moral degradation by the promiscuous intercourse which they have with the vitiated portion of the lower classes in the colony. I cannot persuade the younger females to resist the importunities of the white man while I am unable to offer a counter-inducement in the shape of food, clothing or shelter. I cannot draw away the men from the stations when they can obtain more liberal supplies than I can furnish, by pandering to the lusts of those who occupy them. The results of this vicious intercourse, disease, jealousy, brutal quarrels both with whites and blacks, are rendering the condition of the natives more deplorable, and the property of the colonists more insecure. Unless prompt and efficient measures are taken to concentrate and provide for the aborigines, I look forward to the approaching winter as a period of aggravated outrage on both sides. It is universally acknowledged to be a time of privation to the natives – that privation must increase with every successive season. Concentrated and their wants provided for, they might soon be brought under such restraints as would guard them against injury, and secure the property of the colonists from deprivation. But left in their present state to be beaten back by “the white men’s foot”, to be excluded, perforce, from lands which they unquestionably regard as their own property, and from scenes as dear to them as our own native homes to us – despoiled, denied the rights of humanity classified with and treated as wild dogs, I can entertain no other expectation but that they will be driven to more frequent depredation, and exposed to more rapid and certain destruction.

Despite the understandable frustration evident in Parker’s above report, after his return to his Jackson’s Creek home base after his tour with Robinson, Parker had written to Robinson on 18 March 1840 confirming that he wished ‘to station myself and my family immediately in a central situation I have indicated’. It is unclear as to which if any map or more detailed description was appended.

Until September 1840, Parker’s attempt to set up his Protectorate was further delayed by his need to respond to even more ‘outrages’ against Aboriginal people, this time on the Upper Werribee in Watharung country. 

Insights from Parker’s Quarterly Journals, late 1840 to mid 1841

Much of what follows is detailed verbatim transcription of online records housed in the Public Records Office in North Melbourne. It relies very heavily on extracts from Parker’s Quarterly official Journal. While I have provided some other evidence to help establish context and place, I have attempted to leave most of the rich detail in with minimal commentary. My purpose is to allow Parker to give a firsthand account of what he was thinking and doing: first by identifying a likely Protectorate site during mid-1840, then moving onto the Neereman site by November 1840, attempting to ‘make it work’ over a scorching El Nino summer, and finally moving the Protectorate back to near Mount Franklin in mid-1841 when the original site proved to be totally unsuitable.

In his Quarterly Journal (September 1-November 30, 1840), Parker wrote that he was, on 1 September 1840:

‘… at the station, Yeerip Hills near Mount Macedon preparing to proceed to the Loddon to select a site for a homestead and aboriginal reserve. A small party of aborigines are camped close to my hut.

Received this evening from Melbourne the Port Phillip Herald of the previous day in which I found a report of no less than six outrages said to have been perpetrated by the aborigines at different stations on the Upper Weirabee [Werribee River] in the course of three days last week. I have lately received intimations from some of the aborigines who have been staying with me that the tribes were greatly irritated by the violent measures taken to exclude them from Melbourne as well as the treatment they receive from many of the settlers. I have been plainly told that the natives would “by and bye” take to the mountains and try to drive the “white fellows” from their country. I have done all in my power to appease this feeling and show them the danger and folly of such a step; and at the same time convince them that their exclusion from Melbourne was for their good. With those I have had access to, I believe I have succeeded. But fearing that these reported outrages on the Weirabee might be the first outbreaking of this general hostility. I deem it my first duty then before proceeding to the Loddon. 

On September 4, 5 & 6^th Parker proceeded on to:

‘Bacchus’s, Clarkes’, Campbell XXX’s, Steiglitz’s and Grays’ stations [squatters in the vicinity of present day Bacchus Marsh and Ballan] and took further depositions from squatters and their employees. All of this activity investigating outrages, though urgent and necessary, encouraged and sanctioned by Robinson, took Parker away from his primary role of establishing his Protectorate station somewhere ‘in the northwest’.

Robinson was nevertheless losing patience with what he perceived as Parker’s delaying tactics. Robinson wrote to Parker on 21 September 1840 requesting that Parker:

‘… transmit to this office with the least possible delay a clear description of the locality selected for the homestead and Agricultural Establishment for the exclusive benefit of the Aboriginal natives of your district in order that instructions may be immediately furnished to the Crown Commissioner to carry into effect His Excellency’s commands in prohibiting all Squatters within the prescribed limits.’

Parker’s Quarterly Journal (September 1- November 30, 1840) confirms that as a result he returned to Dja Dja Wurrung country on 22 September, proceeding:

‘… to Mollison’s outstation near Lalgambook or “Jim Crow Hill” [Mount Franklin] to examine the country with reference to its fitness for the proposed aboriginal homestead and reserve, also to investigate alleged robbery of some articles from a watchbox by the aborigines of which I had received information at the head station.

[On 23 Sept Parker] Continued the examination of the country up the creek and around the hills Lalgambook [Mount Franklin] and Moorootah [present day Mount Stewart, 3 km NW of Mount Franklin]. I obtained also much valuable information from my native attendant Yerrebulluk.

On 24 Sept I proceeded this day down the Loddon to [Lauchlan] Mackinnon’s station [south of Mount Tarrengower] having heard that one of their outstations had been attacked and robbed by the aborigines. In the evening I took the depositions of two men in reference to this transaction.

25^th & 26 Sept I continued the examination of the banks of the Loddon from Mackinnon’s [downstream] to a spot some miles below the Tarrengower mountain where I found a site which seemed to be peculiarly eligible for the aboriginal establishment, but finding that the whole vicinity to have been recently occupied by Messrs Dutton & Darlot I deemed it advisable to postpone taking possession till I had received the sanction of his Honour the Superintendent. Returned therefore to Mackinnons.’

For context, James Monckton Darlot had arrived in Sydney in 1834 from Portsmouth in England. By September 1840 he was in partnership with William Hampden Dutton and Donald Campbell Simson, later called ‘Dutton, Darlot & Simson Bros.’ Darlot and Dutton had set off from Sydney in early 1840 with sheep and cattle, originally intending to take up country at Portland Bay. The overlanders had problems with sheep dying of ‘catarrh’, so they drove them around the north end of Mount Alexander to ‘avoid stations’, setting up ‘boughyards’ for their sheep on the Loddon and Deep Creek north of Simson’s Charlotte Plains run.

Lauchlan Mackinnon (1817-88) was the first owner of the Tarrangower pastoral run from 1839-42. In 1840 the run of 61,209 acres extended from Mount Tarrengower to Mount Franklin including a southern outstation at present day Yandoit Creek. A stone shepherd’s hut still inhabited in 2022 by Duncan McKinnon on Cockatoo Gully in Yandoit Creek is one of the few outstation buildings still standing from this era.

The Tarrangower run was sold in 1842 to another Scotsman, William Hunter. Mackinnon had migrated to Tasmania in 1838 from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, later moving to Sydney, before overlanding stock to Adelaide for Campbell & Co, and then with more stock from Sydney to Port Phillip. Mackinnon later became co-editor of the Argus newspaper. 

Yerrebulluk, who Parker mentions above, was described as his ‘native attendant’, was then approximately 15 years old. He was a Dja Dja Wurring  man from the Wurn Balug Clan centred on present day Talbot, according to Parker orphaned age eight in 1833. He recalled hiding in the bushes in 1836 as Major Mitchell passed through, likely in the vicinity of Mount Greenock (see monument, below). He adopted the European name ‘Dicky’ and later became a bullock driver ferrying supplies from Melbourne to Parker’s Protectorates at the Neereman and Franklinford sites. When the Franklinford Protectorate closed in 1850, Yerrebulluk obtained land and became a farmer. He died on 16 October 1862. The pace of change in Victoria in the 26 years of his life between sighting Major Mitchell and his death was massive. Six months before Yerrebulluk died, the Geelong-Ballarat railway was officially opened.

Parker had stumbled into a veritable newspaper ‘hornet’s nest’ by attempting to set up an Aboriginal establishment on the Loddon. Aside from being a squatter, Dutton was a co-owner of the Port Phillip Herald newspaper, one of the principal organs of the critics of the Aboriginal Protectorate, along with the Sydney Herald. Part of Bain Attwood’s account of the founding of the Neereman Protectorate in his The Good Country book draws on correspondence and editorials critical of Parker published in the Port Phillip Herald during December 1840 and January 1841. In its pages, fellow squatter Darlot threatened to sue Parker for serious loss as a consequence of what Darlot ironically saw as illegal occupation by the Protector and the Aborigines.

Returning to Parker’s late 1840’s Quarterly Journal, he recorded that on:

‘29^th & 30^th (Sept) Leaving the articles I had brought up at Messrs Mackinnon’s, who had kindly engaged to store them till my return, I proceeded this day with the drays to Major Mitchell’s Line to “Expedition Pass” [close to present day Chewton]’

The articles Parker actually left at Mackinnon’s station (on the southern slopes of Tarrengower) were likely to have included most of the agricultural materials detailed in the Protectorate 1840 schedule. The hand written list of what was procured by Parker on 16 July 1840, with cost in Pounds (£) shillings (s) and pence (p), is fully transcribed in Table 1 below. It is reproduced to confirm the intention was inclusive of working with wood and gardening, including the ‘seed potatoes’ and the ‘English seeds’.

The supplementary articles procured for ‘sewing’ at the base of the table were obtained just before finally Parker set off for the Neereman site in late October 1840. The medical equipment obtained in late December 1840 when Parker returned to Melbourne for Christmas would have been required for the medical officer on the site.

Table 1 Goods procured in Melbourne for the Neereman Protectorate, 1840

Date in 1840	Articles	Amount (£.s.d)
July 16	Blankets, Red Shirts, Woollen Shirts
	6 Bullocks @ 20 Pound and Commission	126.00
	1 Plough	10.00
	2 Harrows @ 70 shillings	7.00
	24 Spades @ 5 shillings	6.00
	6 garden Rakes @ 2/6	6.15
	12 Garden Hoes @ 4/3	2.11
	12 Grubbing hoes @ 6 shillings	3.12
	1 Dray and Tarpaulin 35 Pounds, (commission 5 per cent 1.15)	36.15
	3 grind stones, handles and spindles @ 20 shillings	3.00
	2 mortice (= mortise] axes @ 4 shillings	0.8
	12 falling axes @ 5/6	3.6
	2 American Augurs @ 7/6	0.15
	1 pair maul rings 7 ½ pounds @ 8 pence	0.5
	1 set wedges 15lbs@ 8 pence	0.10
	2 Cross cut saws, 12 ½ foot @ 5/3	3.5.7
	2 Hand Saws @7/6	0.15
	2 Wheel Barrows @ 45 shillings	4.10
	1 Steel Mill	5.15
	1 Ton seed potatoes	17.00
	1 Paling knife	0.7
	3 spoke shaves assorted @ 3/9	0.11.3
	6 pair files assorted @ 8 pence	0.4
	2 saw setts @ 2/9	0.5.6
	12 XXX assorted @ 9 pence	9 shillings
	28 pounds bottom nails @ 9 pence	1.1.0
	3 pounds shingle nails @ ¼	0.4
	14 pounds two shilling nails @ 8d
	14 pounds twenty shilling nails @ 1 shillings	0.14
	1 Vice	2.0
	3 iron tripods 99 pounds @ 6 pence	2.9.6
	1 claw hammer	0.5
	2 pick axes @ 5/6	0.11
	3 Morticing Chisels @ 2/9	0.8.3
	2 Pails @ 7/7	0.15
	3 assorted Augurs @ 10 shillings	1.10
	A Lot English seeds	3.10
	6 Sets Bows & Yokes	5.8
	Government duty on 6 bullocks 1½%	1.16
	1 Dray Chain 15 pound	0.10
	1 Bullock chain 30 pounds	1.00
October 29	100 needles
	2 pair scissors
	4 combs
	6 razors
	1¼ pound of thread
December 24	2 oz Alum
	4 oz Tincture of Camphor [for skin rashes]
	3 pounds Epsom salts
	2 pounds Senna leaves [= a laxative]
	1 oz Comp Extracts of Colycynth [a herb for diabetes]
	4 oz Mercurial ointments
	1 oz Sulphate zinc
	4 oz Emplasture Cantharides [burn agent]
	2 Sponges
	1 Old linen sheet
	1 Pestle & Mortar
	1 Graduate glass measure
	1 Syringe

On 1 October 1840 Parker ‘sent the [presumably empty] dray homeward … directing the men to proceed with the cart across the country to the Campaspe near Monros’. He then returned home to his temporary family base at Yeerip Hills.

The list of food supplies provided to Parker for the calendar year 1840, also reproduced in the Table 2 below, includes a large quantity obtained a few days later on 5 October, presumably for carting up to the planned Neereman station, as well as for the large number of Aborigines then camped at his temporary home and station at Yeerip Hills. The even bigger extra quantity of food (in pounds: lbs) was obtained to bring back to the Neereman station on 21 December 1840, since the crops planted in the sand of the ‘cultivation paddock’ in mid-summer during the severe El Nino had, understandably, not produced the food Parker had anticipated, and starvation had set in.

Table 2: List of supplies provided to Parker for the calendar year 1840

Date 1840	Flour lbs	Meatlbs	Tea lbs	Soap lbs	Sugar lbs	Tobacco lbs	Ricelbs	Saltlbs
April 10	400	300	14	7
Oct 5	2,000	1,400	28	14	400			100
Dec 21	4,000	2,000			56	28	500

As an important aside, for much of October 1840, Parker had been stymied from getting out of Melbourne to Neereman, this time by his desperate need to intervene when several hundred Aborigines were locked up in a stockade in Melbourne in an incident generally referred to as the ‘Lettsom Raid’. At dawn on Sunday 11 October 1840, Major Samuel Lettsom, accompanied by 58 soldiers and police, rounded up 400 Aboriginal people who were camped near Melbourne and marched them to town, ‘pricking them with their bayonets and beating them with the butt end of their muskets’. Two Aboriginal men were killed in the process and others were wounded.

Major Lettsom had been dispatched from Sydney to apprehend Aboriginal leaders alleged to be responsible for attacks against settlers on the Goulburn River, but followed them to Melbourne after learning that they had gone there for a ceremonial gathering. Lettsom demanded that Assistant Protector William Thomas hand over the Goulburn ‘troublemakers’ ,but he refused, arguing that there were no warrants for their arrest. Lettsom then gained permission from Superintendent La Trobe to make the raid.

Edward Parker finally managed to free all but 30 of the Goulburn men, ten of whom were put on trial on 6 December 1840. They were tried without the benefit of a defence lawyer or interpreter and nine were sentenced to ten years transportation for theft. 

On 15 October 1840, amongst all of the above chaos, Parker found time to write to Robinson in response to his request for a report on possible Protectorate sites in the Mount Macedon (north west) district, confirming that during September 1840 he had:

‘… carefully examined the country on both sides of the River Loddon for above 25 miles along its course and am of the opinion that the most eligible locality for the aboriginal reserve is that indicated in my letter of July, viz. in the vicinity of the hill Tarrengower. The neighbourhood contains at present much game – is abundantly watered by the lagoons of the river in which there are plenty of fish – and is evidently a favourite place of resort with the natives with the almost innumerable indications of their occasional presence which I have observed. It is in the Learkabulluk [Clan of the Dja Dja Wurrung]. The land has been recently occupied by Messrs Dutton …[XXX last words not readable in original].

The most eligible situation for the homestead appears to me to be an alluvial tract about 3½ [5.6 km] miles WNW of the peak of Tarrengower, and about 12 miles [19 km] down the Loddon from Major Mitchell’s crossing place. The country to the westward is mostly an arid plain. To the eastward it is open forest. It would much enhance the value of the location as an aboriginal reserve if its westernmost limit were made three miles and its eastern seven miles from the central station or homestead. The distance from Melbourne by the present line of road is 105 to 110 miles.’

The description of the preferred homestead station described by Parker to Robinson would place it on the Loddon River close to the present day 2022 township of Baringhup. While the final site actually chosen at Neereman later in 1840 is around 6km further north and downstream of Baringhup, Parker’s distances are necessarily estimates in a then formally unmapped landscape.

Moving to the Neereman site

Parker records his activities in moving to the Loddon River site in detail in his Quarterly reports. In this section, most of the detailed history of the approximately eight months in total spent on the Neereman site is retained in Parker’s own words.

Between 1 to 14 November 1840 Parker was:

‘Travelling with my family and the aboriginal establishment under my charge to the locality on the Loddon approved by His Honour the Superintendent. Five orphan children and seven other aborigines accompanied me. We were detained on the 5^th by one of the drays getting bogged and breaking the pole [on the dray]. On the 8^th the pole of another dray … snapped in two, and it became necessary to cut and fit a pole. This, as there was no timber at hand caused the loss of the whole of the next day. On the 14^th I camped on the Loddon one mile above Dutton and Darlot’s station.’

On 15^th November 1840 Parker:

‘Proceeded with [Agricultural] Overseer Bazeley to the spot for a homestead four miles lower down the river. Found the aspect of the country entirely XXX since the end of Sept. The ground was parched – the grass mostly dried up. Bazeley looked over the whole of the ground in the vicinity and pronounced it an unfavourable spot of for agricultural purposes.’

The photo below taken in mid summer 2019 confirms how dry the country and sandy soil might have been in the extreme El Nino summer of 1840. The Loddon River course is where the trees protrude over the mid horizon. This is precisely where the Neereman Protectorate briefly and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a garden and produce food for as many as 200 people.

On 17 November Parker ‘removed to [selected] the site for the homestead’. The next day, 18 November, Parker:

‘Sent Overseer Bazeley to look at the ground between McKinnon’s and Lalgambook – as I felt some uncertainty as to the course I should pursue in the faithful discharge of my duty to the government. On his return he reported that the soil above Mackinnon’s was much superior to that conveyed yesterday. Still, as I had obtained the sanction of His Honour the Superintendent expressly for the lower station, as it was desirable that the station should be as low down the river as possible, as in every respect the lower station was more eligible, and the overseer thought that crops might be raised if there were sufficient falls of rain – I determined on placing the establishment on that [Neereman] site and fairly testing its capabilities.

Having learned, somewhat to my surprise that Dutton & Darlot had received no notice from the Crown Commissioner as to the occupation of the establishment of the aboriginal station, I sent this day a forma, notice of my arrival to the head station.’

On 19 November, Parker ‘Commenced the erection of a bark store for the goods under my charge’. Between 19-30November 1840, Parker:

‘… was occupied in building temporary huts for my family and the establishment, and the various labours usually connected with the formation of a new station in the bush. On the 23^rd a party of aborigines of the Jajawrong tribe, numbering 41 men, women and children came to my station. Two other men came in on the 27^th making with those who have travelled up with me a total of 55. They appear to welcome my arrival in their country with great warmth. The men immediately proceed to strip bark for the store and huts we were then building. Most of them were previously known to me.’

Parker’s separate, detailed list of Aborigines at the Protectorate on the Loddon during November 1840 confirms five ‘orphans’ and seven other children had travelled with him to the Neereman site, to be joined on 22 November by 43 Dja Dja Wurrung people in family Clan groups. One of the ‘orphaned male’ youths listed was previously mentioned Yeerebulluk. Parker’s census shows that most of the Dja Dja Wurrung people were either from the local Liarga bulluk Clan (including Dja Dja Wurrung ‘leader’ Manangabum and his family), or from Clans to the east of the Protectorate site. 

On 2 December (1840):

‘A party of 3 men and two boys came to the station this morning from the northwestward. As they appeared to march in with some degree of ceremony I received them in a similar manner. They spontaneously separated themselves into their respective sections [Clans] and were formally introduced by some of their number who reminded me that I had met them in different places on former occasions.’

From 3 to 12 December Parker reports that he:

‘… was employed among the aborigines congregated at my station in the collection of statistical information, the direction of their labour and the various arrangements XXX to the formation of a new station. The number of aborigines assembled continued to increase till XXX the 14^th. They numbered about 170 men, women and children. There are many circumstances connected with this tribe worthy of special note. They have no firearms, nor can I learn that they ever possessed any. They are miserably destitute of clothing, a few very old, ragged garments being all they possessed of European attire. They appear to be generally peaceable and willing to work and I learn from neighbouring settlers that in many instances made themselves very useful. Nor can I learn that any charge of robbery against any of those now concentrated at my station. It is universally acknowledged that they have never attempted life. They have not been, however, without provocation. One man was shot by some of Dutton’s people four months time – if the aborigines are to be believed – almost wantonly. The perpetrator is not now to be found. Other lives have been sacrificed within the last two years by white people. A very large portion of their country was simultaneously occupied with stock last winter [i.e. mid-1840] and they are now ordered away from places where they have been accustomed most frequently to XXX for food. On the whole, the character and condition of this tribe present more hopeful circumstances than most others I have met in this colony, They are by no means inveterate [= ingrained] beggars as some of their neighbours. Nearly 80 children are now at the station.

For the week of 14-21 December, Parker:

‘… was variously occupied among the aborigines. It is the subject of great regret with me that I have not a school master on the station as an excellent opportunity is now furnished for the communication of the benefits of Christian Education to these people. My multifarious occupations connected with my office give me no XXX for the work and there is no person on the establishment who can be employed in this way. Another subject of regret is that I cannot fully employ the people for their own advantage, as it is now evident that the site is unfavourable for an agricultural establishment and permission must be obtained to occupy another situation.’

Between 22-24 December, Parker travelled back to Melbourne for Christmas and New Year. On 20 January 1841, Parker left Melbourne to return to his station. The 1841 list of extra stores, in Table 3 below, includes a large amount of clothing and other provisions collected on 12 January ‘required for barter, not intended to be given way unless in cases of sickness or old age’, as well as extra hardware procured for the Neereman station the day before his departure, on 19 January 1841.

Table 3 Stores procured in Melbourne by Parker for the Protectorate, January 1841

Dates 1841	Articles
January 12	30 tin plates
	30 tin pannikins
	50 blankets
	50 blue shirts
	36 tomahawks
	24 pocket knives
	25 combs
January 19	1 steel mill [for grinding flour]
	2 adzes
	2 dressing sieves
	2 sickles
	Ration scales & weights, 7 oz and upwards
	1 Box lock for store
	3 pair XXX hinges
	6 pair butt hinges
	2 butcher knives
	1 butcher steel
	2 Branding Irons C.P. XXX

On 22 January 1841, Parker diarised that:

‘I found this morning at Mr Mollison’s station a party of the Jajowrong tribe numbering about 30 who had left my station about a XXX. I endeavoured to induce them to return. I regret to observe that disease is spreading amongst them.’

On 23 January Parker notes that he returned to his station at Neereman: 

‘I find still a large body of aborigines assembled. They have generally conducted themselves well during my absence, A few individual quarrels have occurred but they have been appeased by the overseer without any serious result. One of these quarrels was occasioned by an individual named Mokilte (Wertunarramin) who was accused by the other blacks of having attempted to carry off sheep from a station of Darlot’s. Most of the tribe evinced great indignation and threatened to XXX him.’

On 25 January:

‘The Crown Commissioner visited the station this day to consult with me respecting the most suitable [alternative] site for the aboriginal reserve. He suggested the vicinity of Lalgambook [Mt Franklin]- to which on behalf of the aborigines I concurred. I took the opportunity of complaining to Mr Darlot who accompanied him of the conduct of his men in decoying the native women and girls for the basest of purposes. The remainder of the week [26-30 January] was occupied with official correspondence and returns, and the ordinary duties of the establishment. The overseer proceeded with the drays to Melbourne on the 27^th.

Many of the men attended Divine service in the morning [of Sunday 31 January]. Feeling deeply anxious for the communication of some kind of instruction for the aboriginal youth now about the station, I commenced this day a kind of Sunday School attended by 20 boys who seem ready and willing enough to learn. Being without any school paraphernalia I have had recourse to the moveable letters of a child’s toy, known under the name of “Wallis’s Spelling Games” [NOTE: E. Wallis produced a number of popular board games, published in London in the early 1800s, including ‘The Wonders of Nature’].

Parker continues on February 2 as things were getting increasingly desperate at Neereman:

‘A number of the aborigines left the station this day – stating that as my flour was nearly gone and there was too many of them there, they would go away and return in 10 days. The means of conveyance at my disposal have not been sufficient to enable me to bring up supplies fast enough to meet even the limited XXX I make. I had only two or three days supply on hand and could not expect the drays up in less than 10 days. I did not therefore oppose their temporary absence particularly as some serious personal quarrels had occurred during the last two days, in one of which a man and in another woman were badly speared. I warned them as earnestly as possible against hanging about the sheep station. As, however great numbers of sheep are dying at one of Darlot’s stations, I fear they will be induced to remain about there till my supplies come up. Between 40 and 50 remain at the station. Among those who have left are four men from the Goulburn who arrived on the 30^th [January].’

On 3-6 February 1841 Parker:

‘… was chiefly occupied in completing a census of the Jajowrong tribe, which has engaged my attention for some time past. A number of youth who have been at the station have within the last few days built themselves permanent habitation of saplings and reeds. They commenced them of their own accord in imitation of one of them built by the government men.

In the latter part of this [6 February] one of the men who left the station on Tuesday returned and informed me with great concern that one of the Goulburn blacks had speared a sheep. I immediately rode over to Mr Darlot’s head station of the overseer [to see] if a thing of this kind had occurred at any of his outstations. He said he did not think any depredations had been committed – that it was possible or likely sheep might have strayed the flocks and had been picked up by the aborigines. He wished to keep the natives [away] from the stations, but the men (and one in particular) encouraged them to come, and constantly had the women about them. At the lower station 200 sheep had died from XXX XXX since the 1^stof January, and had given the men ample means as of alluring the aborigines around them. I subsequently ascertained that the sheep was speared at a new station belonging to a Mr Cato lower down the river by a Tanne-bullar black named Maitegurra. The shepherd being asleep, did not observe the theft, but was immediately apprised of it by Moorin-weila, a remarkable well-conducted Borum-bulluk black who took charge of the sheep while the shepherd got his gun, and afterwards assisted in endeavouring to trace the thief, and recover the sheep.

[On the morning of Sunday 7 February] I sent a black on whom I could rely on to bring all the blacks back to the station. In the evening he returned with a few of them and brought information that Darlot’s people at the same outstation to which they had so frequently been decoyed had fired on them, that one (Gou-du-wurmin) was dying and another (Mu-nang-abum) very badly wounded.’

For context, Manangabum (also called ‘Abraham’) was then regarded as the most important Elder of the Dja Dja Wurrung and a man possessing great spiritual power. Parker later gave him the title of ‘Abraham ‘in recognition of him being a father of the nation’. George Robinson first met him in January 1840. Manangabum had been attacked by squatter Munro, after seven of his men and three mounted troopers had accused several Aboriginal men of sheep stealing. Munro brutally murdered several of them on the Campaspe River and arrested Manangabum, who was arrested on a sheep stealing charge and locked up in the Melbourne Gaol from late January 1840. He was eventually released in March 1840 after strong petitions from many Aboriginal people via the Aboriginal Protectors. Manangabum accompanied by other Dja Dja Wurrung people returned to Country via Parker’s Jackson’s Creek Station on 11 April 1840. 

Manangabum and 42 other Dja Dja Wurrung had arrived at the Neereman Protectorate station soon after it was established and stayed there until November 1840. They had moved away to Bet Bet Creek (near present day Wareek) as the Protectorate rations ran out. By February 1840, Donald Simson at Charlotte Plains had placed James Darlot as his manager on his nearby Fourteen Mile Creek run, whose heavy handedness with Aboriginal people was then well known. Manangabum’s wounding took place in an altercation between Darlot’s convict shepherds.

Parker continued in his 1841 diary:

‘[On the morning of 8 Feb] … more of the aborigines returned. Their version of the affair of yesterday was that a number of armed men came to the station – that they enquired for the Goulburn blacks – that they accused the two blacks who were shot of sending them away, that Mu-nang-abum fearing from their threats that they intended to shoot him, clasped the shepherd round the body, and cried out to the foremost of the white men “Borack shoot Nenne-nenne” (Neddy Neddy) – that they then fired at him and Gou-du-wurmin was then dead. They gave me the names of nine blacks from the Goulburn who were at the station. Four of them had been at my station on the 31^st of January. I went over to the station expecting in my way to find the dead body which had been placed in a tree; the boys who accompanied me, however, could not find it. On arriving at the station the convict hutkeepers were at first disposed to be very indolent. I took their depositions and afterwards in search of the shepherd whose deposition I also succeeded in obtaining before he could have any communication with the others.

Returning to my station in the evening I found Munangabum had been brought in with a large wound in his shoulder evidently inflicted by a gun or pistol fired close to his body.’

Edward Parker’s son, Joseph Parker, writing in the Mount Alexander Mail (21 June 1891, p.2) vividly and independently recollected during his childhood that two Aboriginal people with gunshot wounds were brought in to the Protectorate. He recounts, below, fifty years later his recollection of an intimidating, heavily armed posse of mounted men challenging his father about protecting them.

One fine morning, early in 1841, a party of men— nine in all— mounted, and armed to the teeth came, expecting to find us all killed and eaten, but their surprise was great when, they found us all safe and happy, save and except the result of their own actions. The leader of the party, in addressing my father, wondered how he and his family survived in the midst of so many savages, as he termed them. My father replied by saying that he resorted to acts of kindness and proper treatment. I may state that while this con- versation was going on, there were a large number of natives crowding behind my father foremost among them being one with a charge of slug shot in his back, and another with a broken arm — the result of a bullet wound. I use, said my father, weapons more convincing than those carbines which you are carrying, and with which you have been shooting these unfortunate creatures pointing to the wounds of the men at his feet. Here is my ammunition, said my father, drawing from his pocket a small bible. There is my “convincing element,” and up to date it has not failed me. The heroes of manslaughter retired convinced they had called at the wrong shop for sympathy. A recent traveller speaking of his inability to find the dusky skin of the original inhabitant of the soil, gives us the assuring homily that the cause is not hard to explain, for, he says we as a progressive and Christianising public, have fed them with whisky and clothed them with bullets.

The above account very likely relates to this incident documented above involving Darlot in February 1841.

On 9 February 1841, Parker:

‘Went over to another station of Mr Darlot’s 8 miles distant with the overseer and took the depositions of four men.’

On 10 February, Parker: 

‘Sent a policeman and one of my men with two aborigines to search for and try and identify the body of Gou-du-wurmin. They returned in the afternoon having found the body, but in such a state from the heat of the weather as to preclude further identification.’

On 12^th & 13^th Parker wrote that 

‘… having carefully collated the evidence I had obtained I signed warrants for the apprehension of Edwin Collins & Robert Morrison who were brought up on the 12^th, and the evidence being repeated I committed them for trial in Melbourne. At the same time I went for further police aid to apprehend three other men implicated in the affair.

[Feb 14^th-28^th] During this period I was occupied principally in preparing Returns – copies of the aboriginal Census – copies of the depositions and proceedings in the late affair with Darlot’s people. … On the 19^th two policemen arrived, and on the 20^th the XXX  Martin and Jenkins were apprehended, examined and committed for trial.

During this month several of the natives, seeing the improved dwellings erected by the boys, constructed good seed tents for tomatoes under the direction of one of my men, so that the station now [Feb 28^th] XXX 12 permanent aboriginal dwellings affording comparatively comfortable accommodation for about 50 people.

On the two last Sabbaths of the month nearly all the natives on the station attended Divine Service. Their deportment was serious and orderly; they spontaneously followed the example of the whites in standing up, kneeling, etc. They appear ready to acknowledge the existence of a Great and Good Being, but say that black fellows know nothing about him.

On March 1 to 6,

‘[Parker] remained on the station. The number of aboriginal assembled was about eighty. Since the fatal encounter at Darlot’s on the 7^th Feb they have remained generally quiet. A very strong impression has been made upon them by the prompt apprehension and committal of the men who first decoyed them to their huts, and then, when they became XXX,  fired on them.

On the 8^th I proceed to the Pyrenees to investigate the circumstances connected with the slaughter of several aborigines by a Mr Francis. On the 9^th and 10^th I fell in with different parties of natives. From the last of them I obtained some distressing statements as to the slaughter of the blacks. They have me the names of several individuals shot by Mr Francis within the last six months. I found, however, no legal evidence attainable. The only persons present in the last and most serious affair with the aborigines, which took place in December last year, were Francis, a person named Downes and a stockkeeper, all of whom were concerned in the slaughter. Downes is in another part of the colony, Francis absent at Portland and the stockkeeper in Melbourne. No other admissible evidence  of the death of these poor people can be obtained than what Francis’s written statement conveys. In that he reports that he and the persons before named in consequence of seeing the bush on fire, and fell in suddenly with some natives, on whom they fired and killed four. The natives say six were slain and the information as to that it is more to be depended on. Owing to the legal disabilities of the aborigines cannot be added to the many others which have passed without judicial notice. I cannot, however, but wish that squatting licences were withheld from persons who manifest such utter disregard of human life as Mr Francis, even on his own thievings have done.

March 12^th I returned to my station.

March 15^th One of the Jajowrong natives came in this day from Melbourne. He proved to be a messenger from the Port Phillip aborigines sent to bring the natives now at this station to Melbourne. Several attempts had previously been made to get them there, but hitherto I had successfully opposed their going: a few only had strayed away about three weeks time. They now, however, appeared determined to go. For the persons have imposed on a story that another governor had arrived, and wished to see all black fellows in Melbourne to give them blankets and other things. Nothing I could say would convince them of the contrary. “White gentlemen” in Melbourne had had told the blacks and therefore they had sent a letter to their Jajowrong friends to come and see them. The “letter” which was treated with great respect and shown to all was merely a dirty piece of an old copy book. This was accompanied with two or three knives and handkerchiefs and other items of good will.

March 16^th This morning all the men with the exception of three left the station to proceed to Melbourne. I succeeded in inducing them to leave their women and children. I warned them that I should follow them and watch their conduct.

On the 19^th I left my station to proceed to Melbourne and next day came up with the aborigines at Messrs Cumming and Smyth’s station. They were joined here by another party. They stated it to be their intention to proceed to Karkanamoom (late Howie’s cattle station) and there await the arrival of their Port Phillip friends to have a great Yepene (corrobory) and then return to Nirriman.

On the 29^th I received information that Mr Oliphant’s station in the Pyrenees had been attacked on the 19^th instant, the hut keeper killed, and the hut nearly stripped. From what I had previously heard of the character of some of the natives on the Western side of the Pyrenees, belonging to the Nilangboum tribe I concluded that the trouble had been committed by them.

On the 1^st April the Jajowrong natives came to Melbourne and a very formal kind of meeting took place between them and the Port Phillip aborigines. On this and the following days they danced their corrobory. Only two or three of my people who had been in Melbourne went into the town, the remaining on the south side of the river. They had provided me before leaving the station they would only remain two days with the Melbourne blacks. In fulfilment of this promise, on the morning of the 3^rd they expressed their willingness to return, at the same time their wish to see “the Governor”. His Honour the Superintendent was pleased to gratify this wish and had an interview with them near the signal station. After receiving a supply of flour they proceeded on their journey.

On the 6^th I came up with the aborigines at the Police Station. They had been retarded, like myself, by the heavy rains. I found that a few of them had strayed back with Tolloorabulluk and Marpeanbulluk people to Melbourne.

On the 8^th [April] I returned to my station. I found that a number of natives from the lower parts of the river Loddon had come in making the number at the homestead upwards of 100. Between this date and the 12^th the men who had visited Melbourne returned in small parties.

On the 21^st visiting Mr Mackinnon’s station I received information of a dreadful outrage by the aborigines on the person and property of Mr Grice of Mount Alexander on the 15^th instant. Mr G was reported to be so badly speared, as to be near death, and 500 of his sheep were said to be missing.

On the 22^nd I proceeded to Mr Grice’s station about 12 miles North-West of Mount Alexander. Found Mr Grice received three spear wounds and two of his men had been severely wounded. A large body of natives suddenly rushed upon Mr Grice and one of his men while they were getting a flock into the fold. Their intention was evidently to kill them, but Mr Grice succeeded in forcing his way through them and getting to the hut he took out a gun on which they ran away. In the meanwhile another party intercepted one of his shepherds returning with his flock, speared him in the arm and took away the sheep: the next day a horse was found dead with many spears sticking in him. The sheep were recovered two days after, with the exception of about 50. Most of them were in possession of the blacks at a spot about 20 miles east of the station. This outrage appears to have been of a more determined and hostile character than any that has come within my observation. As I can account for most of the people belonging to the Jajowrong tribe on the day this was committed, I can readily acquit them of any participation in it. It has doubtless been perpetrated by some of the “Goulburn” blacks as they are usually termed – the people occupying the country between the lower parts of that river and the Yerrin or Campaspe. Their periodical visits to the neighbourhood of Mount Alexander are frequently attended by depredation and outrage.

On the 24^th [April 1841] I returned to the station. I found there two blacks belonging to the Taongerongs named Jille jille and Neraboop. An earnest request was made by the other aborigines that they might be allowed to remain. These men spontaneously stated that the Moonoom goodeet, Netterackbulluk, Nerabulluk and other Taoungurong blacks had been “spearing white fellows and stealing sheep”: and that in consequence they had left them.

On the 26^th [April] I proceeded to Melbourne in expectation that the trial of Darlot’s men would come on. While in Melbourne I received information of another dreadful outrage, doubtless by the same people at Mr Bennett’s on the Campaspe. A shepherd had been killed and his flock had been taken away, but subsequently the sheep had been recovered.

I was detained in Melbourne some days to attend the examination of two mounted policemen charged with having caused the death of “Harlequin”, a native black who was apprehended in December last on the Murray. He had been made to travel on foot about 220 miles in seven consecutive days. When brought into Melbourne he had a chain around his neck, and in this manner had been compelled to walk or run by the side of the trooper’s horses – and this in the hottest season of the year. He died on the second day after arrival of a violent fever. The men were committed to trial.

On the 5^th May [1841] I returned to Nirriman where I remained till the 13^th. During this interval I found among the natives some blankets from the marks I inspected came from Mr Oliphant’s. This led to further enquiry and at length I obtained the following statement from some of the aborigines who had been with me in Melbourne and were much concerned by the attack on Mr Oliphant’s. After the slaughter of Gondu-urmin by Darlot’s people, his immediate relatives the Galgalgoondeet roved around the country in a state of great irritation, Coming unexpectedly upon Mr Oliphant’s station, which had been recently formed, and finding the hut open and the hutkeeper at a little distance shifting the hurdles, they determined on revenging the death of their companion and attached the poor man as he was coming up to the hut, after killing him they took all the provisions, clothing and guns. The murder was committed by Wowingnap and Beristgoodeet, brother of the deceased Gondu-urmin and Maitejurra, a Larnebullar black. These men are now at the station. I find they are in great alarm for the consequences of their wild revenge, my two native policemen having threatened that they would fetch the “white fellow policeman” to take them away. The blankets bearing Mr Oliphant’s marks had passed through many hands before I had discovered them and were in possession of people who I knew to be in Melbourne at the time of the outrage was committed. No legal evidence of their having been in the possession of the murderers could be obtained. Two of the three guns taken from the hut were left in the bush (these men not knowing how to use them) and two men at my request went out and brought them to me. They were absent on the journey three days.

On the 13^th May I proceeded to Melbourne to attend the sitting of the Supreme Court.

On the 18^th five men were put on their trial for shooting at Munangabum with intent to kill. The Crown Prosecutor deemed the evidence insufficient to put them on their trial for killing Gondoo-urmin, The first witness, one of their companions, swore that there were 150 blacks throwing spears at them and the men were immediately acquitted. The witness had stated in his disposition of the first investigation of the case that no spears had been thrown. Thus there is no chance of justice being obtained for these unfortunate people, while their evidence is rejected. The witnesses are sure to be hostile and have only to swear hard enough, as in the present case, and the cause of the aborigines is put out of court,

On the 22^nd [May] Tarrick-munnin one of the nine aborigines convicted of the robbery at the last January XXX, and the only one of the number who was recaptured when they made their escape from a lighter in the river, was discharged from prison, and by the judges order given over to my charge, the whole of the convictions having been illegal, and the prisoners therefore pardoned. The remaining three days with the Rev McXXX and then joined his tribe.

On the 2^7th [May] I returned to my station at Nirriman where I found still about 130 aborigines. Three infants have died within the last six weeks. One apparently from carelessness on the part of the mother, combined with the severity of the weather. The second was a half caste belonging to Yeepburneen, one of Manangabum’s women and reported by all the blacks to be the offspring of Clarke, one of Darlot’s assigned servants. Fearing this child might have been killed, I made very minute inquiries into the circumstances of its death, but found no reason to conclude that it died form other than natural causes. The third was the child of Boongarrapurneen and according to the concurrent testimony of all the women was killed by the mother the morning after its birth. It is said to be the third child she had murdered. The reason assigned is that by suckling their children they become old looking and wrinkled and therefore disagreeable to their men. The event took place in my absence. I spoke to the people strongly of the wickedness of the action and as the woman became dangerously ill I took occasion from that circumstance to warn them of the certainty that the “Great Father” would be angry with them and punish them. I do not think the crime of infanticide is common amongst them. One other woman only was spoken of as having done the like. But it is deeply painful to observe the callousness with which this atrocious deed is regarded.

[On Sunday 30^th] The Aborigines continue to attend Divine service with scarcely any exception. Having however no place large enough to contain even half of them, considerable difficulty occurs in bringing them together. This is greatly advanced by the singular custom designated the “Knalloin”. By this the mother of the female child is interdicted from even looking upon the person to whom the child was betrothed; and this betrothing frequently takes place as soon as the child is born, the women who have children are almost always under the influence of this custom.’

Moving to the new Station

Unfortunately the first part of Parker’s detailed next Quarterly Journal, June 1, 1841, to August 31, 1841, is missing. It resumes with the final pages in mid-July 1841. A ‘Precis of Journal, March 1, 1841- August 31st, 1841’ confirms that during the missing interval, in June 1841, Parker spent ‘Five days travelling between the new and old stations, removing the to the permanent situation [at Franklinford]. The rest of the month [he was] occupied in the laborious duties of my station’. 

Under the heading ‘General results’, Parker summarises the six months ending 31 August 1841 as below. From March to May 1841 just the Neereman site was operating. During July and August 1841, the new station at Mount Franklin was in operation. Parker reported: 

‘I have been in contact communication with the aborigines. The average number daily at the homestead was 100. Of those several have remained for the whole period. Many others have continued at the station from three to five months.

With the single exception of the revengeful attack on Oliphant’s station by a small party, no charge has been made against the Jajowrong people who are not less than 300 in number. Two other outrages which have occurred have been distinctly traced to another tribe.

During the last three months of the half year a new station has been formed at Willam-e-barramul [place of the emu]on the river Loddon [in fact this was on a major Loddon tributary, to 2021 called ‘Jim Crow Creek’]. About 35 acres of land have been enclosed and 13 acres prepared for cultivation, and five acres sown with wheat. A dwelling house, store and two cultivation huts have been put up. In these operations the aborigines have fully participated. Amongst other work done by them they have furnished the establishment within the last 2 months with 300 sheets of bark & 350 trees and saplings for building materials, have broken up [cultivated] 250 perches [= 1.56 acres] of ground, felled 100 trees and completed 150 rods [approx. 750 metres] of fencing.

Partial instruction has been afforded on the average to about 20 boys. The unsettled state of the establishment has unavoidably interfered with this department of the work but the clear continuance of a number of aboriginal youths at the homestead and their increasing alienation from the habits of the tribe authorize a hope permanent good will result from future efforts of this kind.

Eight orphan children have been maintained during the half year, and the average number of XXX daily attended to during the same period has been about twelve.’

Post script from the Protectors

In leaving this detailed account from Parker on the upper Loddon in August 1841, it is useful to briefly consider Chief Protector Robinson’s understanding of what was happening in 1841, when he observed that the squatters were not allowing Aborigines to stop at their home or outstation. Robinson posed the valid question in his personal journal, ‘Where are the natives to go?’ His response is as follows.

‘As many squatters claim from 2, 3 or 400 square miles of country, the home station and out stations, in many instances in a bad water country, secure all the water and the sheep and cattle graze the intermediate space. Then where are the natives to go?  … are they to throw themselves in the mercy of other tribes because no British humanity exists in the hearts of British Australian squatters towards the original occupants of the soil?’

It is of some interest as a postscript to note that the Chief Protector George Robinson apparently never visited the Neereman Protectorate site during its operation. His daily Journal confirms he was in Melbourne from November 1840 when the Protectorate was established until early February 1841, aside from a two day visit to Narre Warren from 19-20 December 1840. Robinson was in the Ovens River district for much of February and was in the Western District for almost five months between March 21 and August 14 1841, by which time Parker’s Protectorate had been relocated back to near Mount Franklin.

Robinson makes only several brief mentions of Parker in his Journal during late October 1841 as Parker was readying to move to the Neereman site. On 29 October 1840, he writes that Le Seuf (sic.) ‘is to send his cart for the invalid Aboriginal natives at Parker’s station’, and agrees that Parker can have a loan of Le Souef’s cart for two weeks. Robinson also notes that he had bought some articles ‘for the blacks of Parker’ including shirts and flour. On 11 December 1840 Robinson wrote: ‘Noland gone to Parker’s Loddon. Papers complain of Parker at Loddon’. [Note: Noland was an ex-employee of overlander and pastoralist Peter Snodgrass: the depression of the 1840s had led Snodgrass into insolvency. It is not clear what Nolan’s role was]. The next time Parker is mentioned by Robinson is when Parker returned to Melbourne on 24 December 1840, providing Robinson with his requested Dja Dja Wurrung census. On 15 January 1841, Robinson wrote about La Trobe’s annoyance at Parker for writing to the newspapers in defence of his Protectorate. 

Several brief mentions are made of in the official records of Parker’s agricultural overseer, Robert Bazeley. On 30 October 1840 he writes that ‘Parker’s overseer Bazeley started on Sievwrights’s cart’, presumably referring to his overseer borrowing Protector Seivwright’s cart to set begin the journey up to Neereman. Another mention is when Bazeley returns to Melbourne from ‘the Loddon’ (Neereman) on 2 Feb 1841. As a relevant aside, Bazeley would later employed by squatter Rostron, initially at Holcomb near Daylesford (inclusive of the recently opened ‘Manna Gums Frontier Wars ‘site) and later at Tottington homestead near Stuart Mill. A Bazeley descendant, Richard Bazeley, lives in St Arnaud in 2022.

How did Parker reflect on this era?

It is illuminating to reflect on what Edward Parker said four years later about this tumultuous time on the Loddon River frontier. His written perception was that ‘a very considerable expenditure of the public money’ had led to ‘but little real improvement in the condition of the condition of the aborigines’. This led to a Select Committee of the Legislative Council being appointed in 1845 ‘to consider the condition of the aborigines, and the best means of promoting their welfare’. 

The Maitland Mercury (27 December 1845) reported the following testimony of Edward Parker to the inquiry, as he reflected on ‘the results of his five years’ labour among the aborigines’.

‘When I took charge of the first district assigned to my care, I found everything in a state of the greatest confusion; aboriginal outrages, involving extensive loss of property, and in some instances, of life, were of frequent occurrence; the most deadly feelings of hostility existing on the part of the Europeans, which in all probability would have led to a war of extermination on both sides. A respectable settler (now a magistrate of the colony), told me in the latter end of 1840 that he considered the existence of two races in the same country incompatible. Another (also a magistrate), about the same time, avowed it as his opinion that one-half of the aboriginal population must be shot, before we could subdue and keep in order the other half. On the other hand, after the measures adopted by the police authorities under Major Lettsom, in October 1840, some of the most influential men among the aboriginal tribes frequenting Melbourne declared to me their intention of retiring to the mountain and forest ranges, and killing every white man they could find unprotected; and it is my firm belief that this threat would have been executed, so far as lay in their power, but for the efforts and officers of this department. ‘

It is pertinent to note that Parker, by 1845, was battling to save the Protectorate system including his own relocated Protectorate station, at Larnebarramul below Lalgambook (Mount Franklin), from being wound up. For this reason, he concluded with the most optimistic Christian gloss in the face of evidence of a fairly comprehensive failure, concluding that any shortcomings were for the want of adequate religious instruction.

‘Yet now, without any such exterminating measures, the whole of the eastern and central parts of this district are at peace, life and property are considered to be secure, remedial measures are applied for the improvement of their condition; and if more marked results have not been obtained in the improvement of their condition, it has been from the want of additional agency in carrying on the work of religious instruction.’

Why does all this matter?

What happened on now comprehensively ‘settled’ land in Dja Dja Wurrung country on the frontier in conflict with our colonial ancestors in 1840-41 remains both unsettling tand also unsettled over 180 years on. Though I’ve added some brief commentary to the shocking official record, I sense that Edward Parker has perhaps, amongst the inevitable government self-censorship, said it all, though I acknowledge that there are almost no Aboriginal voices here.

The question I ask as an Australian citizen in 2022 about what British humanity could have done differently is not only an historical question, but a current moral one. As Inga Clendinnen wrote the following in her Quarterly Essay in 2006, ‘Who owns the past?

‘Daily we enjoy the fruits of what those hard men did. Our present comforts drive from their past actions.  … [S]urely it is a crucial part of the historian’s duty to uncover how it was that some settlers were killers and some were not? It is only by establishing the span of choices open to these men that we can hope to understand why individuals made the choices they did.’

I am motivated to research and write about these things as a person who has lived within and enjoyed the fruits of Dja Dja Wurrung country, from my home town of Donald in the north west to Daylesford to Kingston in the south east for over 40 years, in total spanning much of my seven decades to 2022. As Clendinnen so eloquently put it:

‘I do feel a connection to the country and what has happened here, which manifests as an intensifying impulse to acknowledge and redress past injustices, and to attempt restitution.’

But I have to ask, how will history judge our own generation for locking up innocent refugees, including children, for many years on Pacific islands, to deter others from arriving on boats? But I forget, as John Howard recently confirmed in a television interview, Australia and Australians are not racist.

The Neereman Protectorate site today

Edward Parker came to what was to become the Neereman Protectorate site with his family of seven in November 1840. In the next eight months, around 200 Dja Dja wurrung and other First Nations people came to the Protectorate Station there to seek his protection. The records I have transcribed in detail above give just a small flavour of a highly contested, deadly and dangerous frontier, particularly for Aboriginal people on their own Country.

There are few signs of what happened ‘on the ground’ after 1840. Some of the scarred and strap grafted trees remain, but there is no contemporary signage, memorial, buildings or post contact artefacts to mark the site of this first failed attempt at a Protectorate on the Loddon River. Neereman’s existence and history has been erased almost as completely as that of the Dja Dja Wurrung traditional owners. 

What does remain is its presence and natural beauty. Its still massive river pools on the Loddon River run much of summer from environmental and irrigation flows from Cairn Curran Reservoir above Baringhup. Its elevated aspect, and the huge remnant river red gums and straggly remnant Buloke trees remain on its high northern bank. One ancient peppercorn tree and the possible fragment of a granite fireplace are all that might have been there since the 1840s. Seasonal floods and fires, the sludge and sand from mining and dredging, shifting sands of drought and erosion combined with intensive agriculture and grazing down to the river’s edge leave the privately owned site in a degraded and vulnerable state. The farm access road along the river’s edge cuts into an extensive stone scatter site. Some of the deep erosion scars on the sandy northern bank are filled with domestic and farm rubbish, rolls of wire and tyres in an attempt to slow this erosion. Sheep have access to the steep and eroding cliffs. Indeed, extensive bite marks towards the base of the cliff confirm that sheep are actively eating the likely saline horizon of clay wherever it is in reach. The site urgently warrants proper acknowledgement and care.

I have recently found two early maps that together accurately and definitively confirm where the Protectorate site actually was. The first map I found was an early (1856) Parish Plan map (Country lands, Parish of Baringhup on the river Loddon [cartographic material] / Thomas Couchman, Assist. Surveyor; lithographed at the Surveyor General’s Office, Melbourne, Oct 9, 1856, (by James B. Philp)).The 1856 subdivision plan is superimposed over the dotted outline of some of the pre-1856 survey (likely 1848) features, including an original track along the north bank of the Loddon River, and tantalisingly, an ‘Old Cultivation Paddock’ is marked with a ‘hut’ to the west of the paddock on a ‘sandy bluff’. It seemed possible, indeed likely, that this former cultivated paddock area, and perhaps the former hut dated back to the 1840s. 

I later found the ‘smoking gun’ above on an obscure microform map in the State Library, Victoria, simply titled ‘Loddon 66’. In microform it was very small and white on black and the north point had been placed unconventionally towards the north east. The version above has been reoriented, greatly enlarged and converted to black on white.

The map was almost certainly made by Surveyor Urquhart in 1848. On the same, distinctive bend high north bank of the Loddon River, are the words ‘Parker’s original site for the Protect. Estab. NEREMAN’. The surveyor describes the northern bank as ‘light grassy land, lightly timbered’. Just downstream on the opposite bank, ‘D. C. Simpson’s Hut’ is marked.

In 2022 the area north of the Loddon River is on Paul Jennings’ family property, seasonally cultivated with lucerne watered by large pivot irrigators north of the Loddon River. An area under the westernmost pivot irrigator seems very likely to have been included with the ‘one square mile’ within the ‘permanent core’ of the briefly cultivated ‘Cultivation Paddock’ area of the then Protectorate in 1840-1. This area formally known as Neereman came to be referred to as ‘Parker’s Plains’ in oral history within the Jennings family, but to 2022 is still not marked on any map.

The 1848 survey of the Loddon River confirms that by that time, the northern part of the original Neereman Protectorate site had become part of Donald Campbell Simson’s Charlotte Plains run. The extended Protectorate south and east of the Loddon River had become part of E. Bryant’s Cairn Curran run. By 1848 the land to south of the site had become part of smaller runs operated by Hunter (Tarrengower), Joyce (Plaistow), Bucknall (Rodborough), McCallum (Dunach) as well as McNeil and Hall (Glenmona).

Approximately 50 years after the Neereman Protectorate site was abandoned, an area to the north of the river is clearly labeled ‘Parkers Flat’ on an unpublished geological map of the Parish of Baringhup (below). The area south of the Loddon River where it bifurcates is labelled as ‘Bryant’s Island’. [NOTE: I only became aware of the existence of this map via Castlemaine friend and geologist, Clive Willman during the 2022 GDTA NAIDOC Week Neereman Walk].

This geological map also helps explain why the cliffs are so high at the Neereman Protectorate site. South of the site, the Loddon River approximates the eroded pre-volcanic course of the former Loddon River, labelled on the map as the probable course of the Loddon Deep Lead (outcrops coloured in pink or orange). The Loddon’s course then trends west as it cuts through the ancient (Ordovician) bedrock (coloured in blue) downstream of Hamilton’s Crossing before trending north in the eroded pre-volcanic course of the probable Deep Creek Deep Lead.

Returning to detail evident in the 1848 map, the area east of the Loddon near present day Baringhup was in 1848 ‘timbered with box eucalypts’. To the west of Baringhup towards Carisbrook were ‘open grassy plains’. To the south on the Loddon near present day Baringhup ‘E. Bryant’s Homestead’ is marked. Edmund Bryant had previously farmed and operated businesses in Hobart and the Tasmanian Midlands from 1824 but arrived in Melbourne on 31 October 1845. He was first at ‘Charlotte Plains’ station with H. N. Simson (who later married Bryant’s daughter, Janet) before acquiring ‘Cairn Curran’ in 1848. It was there that he died on 21 April 1849. 

The Cairn Curran Reservoir has since inundated the original Bryant homestead. Two closely adjacent pointed (granite) hills are named to the south and just east of the river as ‘Baringup’ and ‘Goomit’, with E. Bryant’s [Cairn Curran] Hut and D. C. Simpson’s [Charlotte Plains] Hut located nearby.  The Loddon River upstream marks W. M. Hunter’s ‘Tarrengowar’ homestead near where Joyce’s Creek then flowed into the Loddon, now also inundated.

As an aside to be explored by me elsewhere, it seems very likely that the present day township of ‘Carisbook’ within the Charlotte Plains station footprint may be named after the ‘Carisbrook Pen’ Simson family slave colony by that same name and spelling in Jamaica, which had produced sugar and rum. In the 1830s the Simson family, like several other squatter families (such as Mollison, Ebden, Barkly and Scott) had been handsomely paid out by the British government for releasing their slaves.

The more common belief from a 1950 source (Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal & Proceedings, 36(6), p. 358) is that the Caribrook township (Surveyed June 26 1851) ‘… is named after Caroline Bucknall (1834-1898, later Caroline Joyce), daughter of Edward G. Bucknall of Rodborough Vale (Mrs Alfred Joyce). Part of Charlotte Plains run, held by Donald C. Simson 1841)’. A report about the first election to the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1843 appears in the same journal above, noting (pp.347-48) that ‘the Carisbrooke Creek’ was then the dividing line between the counties and the Loddon District. Given the 1843 election necessarily took place in its own district, it was held ‘just outside the solitary hut in the place, occupied by a local constable and used, where required, as a court house’. Electors present in 1843 included candidate William Campbell of Strathloddon, Alfred Joyce of Plaistow (later Caroline’s husband, engaged to Caroline August 1851 when she was age 17) & his father, William Joyce, as well as Edward Gittins Bucknall of Rodborough Vale (Caroline’s father).

On site where the former cultivation paddock was marked on the 1856 map is an exceptionally high northern bank. An online search for ‘Neereman’ revealed very little, but I found an entry to the word, spelt the same way, in an Aboriginal dictionary list from Coranderrk. Coranderrk was a government Aboriginal mission that operated in the post Aboriginal Protectorate era from 1863 and 1924, and to which several Dja Dja Wurrung people were forcibly taken from the Mount Franklin Aboriginal Station in the 1860s. The entry read: 

‘Neereman (high bank; bend in river), Coranderrk, Vic.’

 [Science of man and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia, 1909, p.140].

This and Edwards Parker’s spelling of ‘Nirriman’ in April 1841 suggests to me that Neura Mong almost certainly refers to the site with the distinctive high bank.

Joseph Parker, Edward Parker’s son, writing in the Mount Alexander Mail (22-24 June 1916) left some other clues confirming this site as the Protectorate station’s location, picked up on by Edgar Morrison in the 1960s. Joseph Parker recollected that in January 1840, his family had moved to ‘the large waterhole’ on the Loddon at ‘Neura Mong’, that he understood to be ‘the Aboriginal word for ‘hide here’, which also ‘proved to be the home of codfish’. Joseph noted in 1916 that ‘The locality is called Parker’s Plains to this day and is north of Baringhup about four miles’.

The ‘codfish’ refers to the huge Murray Cod and Macquarie Perch that were once plentiful in the deep pools along this stretch of the Loddon River that John Hepburn had described to Robinson as ‘the fishponds on the plains’.

Joseph Parker, writing in the Mount Alexander Mail (1 Sept 1910, p.2) six years previously had noted that the Parker family,

After nine months in tents at Melbourne … moved to Jackson’s Creek
(now Sunbury), and erected a wattle and daub hut, with a thatched roof,
and mother earth for a floor. After eleven months here, we moved to Neereman, on the Loddon, north of Baringhup. We were the farthest north of any homestead at that time. A bark hut was erected. After residing there for ten months, we left Neereman, which was the aboriginal name for a large and permanent waterhole on the Loddon, which abounded with cod fish a dried ton of which we took with us. This locality bears the name of Parker’s Plains to this day.

Some possible insights into the Aboriginal context for siting the Protectorate

Aborigines of Central Victoria (2015) by John Tully provides some possibly insightful data into the likely Dja Dja Wurrung context in which the 1840 Aboriginal Protectorate was sited and established at Neereman.

The map of Dja Dja Wurrung Clan areas in Tully’s book suggest that the Loddon River at the Neereman site was the Clan boundary between the Liarga balug Clan (to the north of the river) and the Bane bane balug Clan (south of the river). The river in the vicinity of the early Protectorate station later also formed the boundary between the Charlotte Plains run and the Cairn Curran run. To the south of the river, the rich flat, open country comprising the Bane bane balug Clan home range had by November 1840 been invaded and totally overrun by a least four squatter runs: Hepburn on Smeaton Hill, McLachlan on Glengower, McKinnon on Tarrengower and Campbell on Clunes.

Whilst the Neereman Protectorate Station was operating, Parker made careful notes of who visited and when, as well as their age, gender and Clan associations. Tully has separately prepared a list of Aborigines at Neura Mong Protectorate, Loddon River, November 1840 to June 1840. In total, the list includes 193 named Dja Dja Wurrung individuals. It is striking that whilst 31 Liarga balug men, women and children as well as diverse groups of people from five other Clan groups visited the station, no Bane Bane bulluk people are recorded as visiting the Station in the 1840-1 Census. In Tully’s opinion, the rich plains that comprised Bane ban balug Clan country:

‘… were their downfall, not having hills or thick undergrowth to hide in they suffered appallingly on the arrival of the Europeans. By 1840 there were only two members left of this clan, a young man and a girl [who] could not survive on their own and so crossed the Loddon and joined with their neighbours, the Liarga balug clan.’

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples as the traditional owners of the lands on which I live, write and research. I sincerely thank Gib Wettenhall for his advice and assistance with this research. I am astounded and ashamed that what happened on the Neereman Protectorate site is so poorly known or understood 180 years later.

I acknowledge that while the Neereman site and its epic failures have been conveniently forgotten by the victors, they have not been forgotten by the vanquished.

I acknowledge the ‘hard yards’ done by countless previous historians and archivists in helping make this material accessible and visible. In relation to the Neereman site, these particularly include the late Edgar Morrison from Yandoit, the late Wendy French from Maldon, Vic Say and the late Felicity Say from Castlemaine, as well as to present day historians Bain Attwood and John Tully. I am indebted to Vic Say of Castlemaine for the generous loan of materials from his document and book collection. I acknowledge and thank the late and charismatic Uncle Brien Nelson and his son Uncle Ricky Nelson for their generosity of time, insight and spirit in sharing what they know and have inherited. Most recently, I am indebted in 2022 to Dja Dja Wurrung descendant and linguist Harley Dunolly-Lee for unravelling some of the complexity in terms of Dja Dja Wurrung language and also clarifying the roles of the Aboriginal Protectors, as included in this account.

Countless landholders across Dja Dja Wurrung country have in recent years, almost without exception, showed an increasing willingness to share what they know and open their hearts and properties for closer examination. Paul Jennings whose family owns the former Neereman Protectorate site has been very generous and trusting, and more recently also Mark Cossar who owns the property to the south and west towards Hamilton’s Crossing.

I urge others to respect that the core of the original Neereman site is privately owned. Until the site is properly surveyed and secure for its heritage value, it is best to acknowledge where it is and anticipate that in the future an appropriate plan of management and signage will be developed with the traditional Dja Dja Wurrung owners.

The 3 July 2022 Great Dividing Trail walk ‘The Forgotten Fishponds on the Plain’ coinciding with 2022 NADOC Week provides a one-off opportunity, with landholder Paul Jennings and Mark Cossar’s generous permission, to lightly walk on Country inclusive of the Neereman site.

The best way meantime to get a taste of the area with all weather access is on public land, by visiting the Hamilton Crossing Crown Reserve approximately 2 km downstream of the original Neereman site on the Loddon River. It is possible to walk upstream along the northern river bank to visit the huge, sprawling strap grafted River red gum tree several hundred metres upstream of the river crossing on the Loddon’s northern banks. All of this short walk (as far as the electric fence beyond the huge tree) is on public land.

I acknowledge it is time in this country for these stories to be told. The Hepburn Shire Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), its Community Reference Group members and staff, particularly Reconciliation Officer, Donna Spiller have provided invaluable advice and support. All of these people have combined to provide an incentive and opportunity to finally synthesise and make sense of material and insights that I have been collecting in my mind and in filing cabinets for several decades. I admit to feeling sort of like a bowerbird, making visible a nest to share from all I have collected, seen in the landscape, gleaned from oral histories and sought out in public records across a lifetime. 

I acknowledge that as with all histories, if I was not writing this as an old ‘pale, stale male’, if I’d picked up other documents, arranged it in a different way or viewed it though a different theoretical, historical or moral lens, it would be a different story to the one I tell here.

GEOLOGY AND GEOMORPHOLOGY OF MOUNT BUNINYONG

Prepared for: Great Dividing Trail Association, Mount Buninyong Walk, 25^th October, 2020

Author: Stephen Carey, Federation University, Ballarat; Additional Notes: Barry Golding

Context

These notes were prepared for an 11km Great Dividing Trail Walk from Buninyong Botanical Gardens to the Mount Buninyong summit and return. They are being shared more widely for anyone interested in undertaking a similar walk independently. We strongly recommend you obtain a copy of ‘Goldfields Track: Walk or Ride Guide’ published by GDTA. Please note that the alternative route to the summit via the ‘South Walk’ is not marked on the GDTA Guide but is reasonably well signposted.

Mt Buninyong is one of the largest volcanic edifices in the Newer Volcanic Province of western Victoria and south-eastern South Australia. Occurring in the Central Highlands, it is a landmark that is visible from the Grampians to the west and from a substantial portion of the Victorian Volcanic Plains (VVP) in the Otway Basin. The Peak Finder app identifies more than 250 (theoretically) visible peaks from the Mount Buninyong, 745 metre summit including Mount Baw Baw in Gippsland.

The shape of Mt Buninyong in the landscape is referred to as its geomorphology. The discipline of geomorphology encompasses the landscape processes that modify Mt Buninyong’s shape, such as soil development and slope failure. The formation of Mt Buninyong was by a variety of volcanic processes, whose study is a branch of geology called volcanology. To understand Mt Buninyong as a feature of the landscape, we need to consider its volcanology and geomorphology.

Geomorphology

Mt Buninyong is known as a composite lava and scoria cone. This is because it consists of both lava and scoria. The scoriaceous component is built up into a volcanic cone which is breached on the north-western side. The cone rises to a height of 745 m above sea level and has local relief of over 200 m. The flanks of the cone slope at angles up to about 35°. This is the angle of repose of loose scoria at which the latter could be supported without collapse at the time of eruption.

Covering a much larger area than the scoria cone are lava flows that emanated from the same site. One flow that is older than the cone extends to the south-east to Clarendon while another is younger than the cone and reaches westward to Buninyong township. It was the eruption of this younger flow that was responsible for the breaching of the scoria cone and opening of the cone to the north-west.

The Clarendon flow, meanwhile, had a profound effect on the geomorphology of the area it covers. The lave flowed down the valley of a forerunner of Williamsons Creek and blocked the drainage. The newly formed basalt (bluestone) was much more resistant to erosion by water than the older rocks and sediments on either side. Accordingly, new drainage lines, called lateral streams, were eroded into the older material to right and left of the basalt flow, with the modern Williamsons Creek and Back Creek being the result. Lateral streams are associated with many lava flows in the Central Highlands.

Volcanology

The scoria cone of Mt Buninyong was produced by an explosive eruption, whereas its associated lava flows are the result of much quieter, effusive eruptions. The difference between an explosive eruption and an effusive one is commonly the proportion of gas in the erupting magma (molten rock). The Clarendon and Buninyong flows had little gas – except for the initial stage of the Buninyong flow’s eruption which breached the scoria cone – and cooled to form coherent bluestone. Similar bluestone is a common material in early colonial buildings and gutters.

A large component of gas in magma increases the pressure that drives eruptions. A modest amount of gas may result in the formation of vesicular basalt (bluestone with numerous gas bubbles), but more commonly causes the magma to “fragment”, that is, the magma separates into blebs that are supported by the gas. When fragmented magma is erupted, the gas pressure sends it skyward in an eruption plume. As the plume mixes with cool air, the magma blebs may cool rapidly to form products called tephra. Tephra can be classified according to the size of the volcanic fragments, as follows: ash, <2 mm; lapilli, 2-64 mm; blocks and bombs, >64 mm. Mt Buninyong’s tephra is dominated by lapilli, as is evident from exposures in road cuttings below the fire tower.

Rapid cooling of the tephra means that most particles are themselves made of very fine crystals. In fact, in some cases, cooling may have been so fast as to preclude formation of a crystal structure, and natural glass is the result. A small proportion of the tephra is derived from the fracturing of rocks far below the surface of the earth, including from the mantle, below the Earth’s crust. At Mt Buninyong, mantle-rock fragments dominated by the green mineral, olivine, are sometimes found. Such fragments, especially from tephras of the VVP, have been critical in deducing the nature of the upper mantle.

Geology is an historical science, and it is important to determine the relative age of geological materials and events. Geochronology is the branch of geology that seeks to assign numerical ages to materials and, by inference, events. The variety of techniques that may serve to date particular materials is now immense, with very sophisticated methods and equally sophisticated instrumentation now enabling dating of materials that could not be dated before. In the case of Mt Buninyong, recent work proposes an age of about 200,000 years (200 ka). This most likely makes Mt Buninyong the youngest volcano in the Central Highlands other than Mt Franklin (Larnebarramul), near Daylesford (≤130 ka). It also means that Mt Buninyong is one of a number of cones and craters in the Central Highlands and the VVP that testify to an increase in volcanic activity in the Newer Volcanic Province between about 200 ka and 100 ka.

References

MATCHAN E., L., PHILLIPS, D., TRAINE, E., & ZHU, D. (2018) ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages of alkali feldspar xenocrysts constrain the timing of intraplate basaltic volcanism. Quaternary Geochronology 47, 14-28.

OOSTINGH, K. F., JOURDAN, F., MATCHAN, E. L., & PHILLIPS, D. (2017) ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar geochronology reveals rapid change from plume-assisted to stress-dependent volcanism in the Newer Volcanic Province, SE Australia. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 18, 1065-1089, doi: 10.1002/2016GC006610.

ROSENGREN, N. (1994) Eruption points of the Newer Volcanics Province of Victoria: An inventory and evaluation of scientific significance. National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and Geological Society of Australia (Victorian Division).

Track Notes

Most of our 11km walk route is up and back to the summit on the southern end of the ‘Eureka Track’ section of Goldfields Track. Map 2 in the Goldfields Track: Walk or Ride Guide published by GDTA, (pages 34-35) covers and interprets our walk route starting from the Buninyong Botanical Gardens, within the eastern Buninyong township area past Gong Reservoir (created in 1850) and over Hastie’s Hill. Map 1 (pages 32-33) covers and interprets our walk route from the edge of Buninyong township to the summit, but does not include the ‘South Walk’, which we take to walk south of the peak before climbing up to the fire tower from the east. Our descent and return is mostly back via the walk route shown in the Goldfields Track Guide along many dry stone wall lanes, aside from part of the ‘Crater Walk’ including Blackberry Lane (which is marked in the Guide). 

Vegetation & Land Status

The Mount Buninyong Scenic Area (90 hectare) retains excellent examples of tall, relatively mature, messmate stringybark forest and tussock ground cover with a very limited understorey. The Wathawurrung traditional owners called it ‘Buninyong’, alluding to its shape from a distance similar to a ‘bent knee’. The area was set aside as a Public Park in 1866, the same year the Buninyong Botanical Gardens were gazetted. The road to the top was completed in 1926. The current four level, steel fire observation tower, with public viewing platform on Level 3 was built in 1979.

Franklinford’s 1840s Aboriginal Protectorate: failed and forgotten

Barry Golding & Gib Wettenhall

 It comes as some surprise to most tourists, as well as to some Daylesford locals, that an historic early ‘Aboriginal Protectorate’ operated for a decade before gold was discovered just a few kilometres north of Hepburn Springs around present-day Franklinford.

This post provides a very brief summary of what the Protectorate was about. The Great Dividing Trail Association has designed a self-guided walk around the streets of Franklinford that will be published  later in 2020 as Walk 14 in a set of other interpretative local walks.

With the establishment of the Port Phillip colony in the late 1830s, the British colonial government sought to avoid the prolonged bloodshed that had already occurred in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) between the Palawa people and the colonists.

The idea was to divide the Colony of Victoria into four, appointing ‘Aboriginal Protectors’ in each division, who would make contact with Aboriginal people and encourage them to leave their land and seek refuge for their own safety. They were to be coerced and concentrated to live in four small areas (near present day Mount Rouse, Narre Warren, Murchison and Franklinford) where they could be managed, civilised, settled, Christianised and encouraged to work the land for agriculture. Today we might call them refugee or concentration camps.

Overseen by Assistant Protector Edward Parker, the ‘civilising mission’ of the northwest Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate was set up within a five mile radius of present day Franklinford to the west of present day Mt Franklin (Larnebarramul, then called ‘Jim Crow’ by the squatters) in 1841. At its peak, the Protectorate had a population of 300 Dja Dja Wurrung and Aboriginal people from elsewhere. It consisted of a school, church, administrative centre, workshops, farm, medical outpost, flour mill and lime kiln. What is signposted as the Aboriginal School today was the site of most of the 1840s Protectorate-era buildings. The sign  erected by Edgar Morrison higher up the slope below the Powell Connection Road overlooks (but does no coincide with) the station site/school site.

 

By 1849 this first experiment in the taming of other people who the settlers regarded as ‘heathens’ and ‘savages’ had failed and was abandoned. Dja Dja Wurrung people from diverse clans over a huge area from the Loddon to Avoca rivers were brought together in close proximity off Country. They were not only broken and dispirited, but also prone to disease, conflict and starvation. The Protectorate’s five miles radius was minuscule in terms of the expectation that hundreds of people could somehow eke subsistence from farming, hunting and fishing. Pressure to close down the Protectorate was relentless from politicians and white squatters, who owned the newspapers.

The only present-day memorials to the Protectorate are to be found in rustic wrought iron roadside signs and a symbolic stone cairn erected by local historian Edgar Morrison in the 1960s and 1970. While the current Franklinford cemetery encloses the older Protectorate era cemetery dating back to 1842, no-one knows where the Dja Dja Wurrung bodies are buried. There is an upstanding obelisk and fenced grave site for the Parker family.

As a sobering postscript, after forced removal to government reserves and missions elsewhere, only 14 apical ancestors of the Dja Dja Wurrung Nation could be traced by 1870. In a token gesture of reparation in 2013, the government handed back to traditional owners just one hectare containing a few foundation stones from the former Aboriginal School Site at Franklinford.

Two Dja Dja Wurrung sites of significance stand nearby, one a large swamp on private land with huge remnant red gums, now trampled by livestock; the other being Mt Franklin, a Crown Reserve fully planted out with exotic pine trees. While the cycle of acknowledgement of past wrongs, renewed respect for Indigenous heritage and meaningful reconciliation with First Nation descendants has begun, it is still a long way from closing.

Not such a Saint-Arnaud

9 August 2020 (An earlier version of this blog was published in the ‘North Central News’, in St Arnaud, 29 August 2020)

This article is about a genocidal French Crimean War hero, after whom the Victorian township of St Arnaud was named. Jaques Leroy De Saint-Arnaud, the man, is a something of a large ‘elephant’ in the bigger ‘Black Lives Matter’ reconciliation ‘room’.

None of what follows diminishes my fondness for and deep family associations with the town of St Arnaud. The suggested renaming and reconciliation options I tease out, would if implemented, only serve to enhance to the national status of this proud and vibrant town and community.

Until recently I knew very little about the origin of the St Arnaud township name. Most people might also have thought it was something to do with a French Saint. Those who stop in St Arnaud and read the present inscription on the statue erected in the Botanical Gardens in 2005 will learn that Jaques Leroy De Saint-Arnaud (b.1796, d.1854), Marshal of France:

… although ill, commanded the French Army, combined with the British forces and a Turkish contingent against Russia in the Crimean War. In 1854, seven days after leading the victorious Battle of Alma, he was stricken by fever and died three days later on a vessel taking him home to France. This was around the time of the New Bendigo gold rush when the national spirit was running high.

 This heroic narrative that lionizes the ailing Marshall and the less than decisive Battle of Alma. It goes on to claim that by 1856, ‘the residents of the goldfield had already decided on both the site and the name for a village along the St Arnaud Creek’. The inscription is at best a half or partial truth. The Battle of Alma occurred in Crimea late September 1854. Dispatches about the Battle arrived in Australia at the time of Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat two months later in December 1854. The miners at that time were actually revolting against the colonial authority and reach of the United Kingdom, including in Australia.

Saint-Arnaud, as the North Central News Editor, Sue Hynes recently revealed in the paper’s brave and timely Editorial, was no Saint. Indeed, he was a genocidal, multiple mass murderer who had absolutely nothing to do with Australia or the town. The French General Saint-Arnaud ordered the massacre of approximately 800 Moslem women, children and older people in Algeria in 1845. He boasted about herding them into a cave and asphyxiating them. He was also involved in several other later, dreadful genocidal and ethnic cleansing atrocities including burning entire villages. In the face of this evidence, the State member for Ripon, Louse Staley recently suggested that we retain the name Saint Arnaud and “learn from history, not erase it”.

My view is quite different. It is impossible to erase the past, but it is possible to learn from and acknowledge the past in order to reconcile the future. I ask whether our descendants have to live with scars like this irrelevant mass murderer (and a monument to him) in our town and landscape?

We have many options. At the very least, we need to better learn and understand who this man was and decide via enlightened and informed debate as a community what we might do about it. Closing our eyes and hoping it will go away is not an option. Might we first add the honest truth to a new inscription on the colonial-inspired brass monument in the Botanical Gardens?

Might we also approach the descendants of those massacred by Saint-Arnaud in Algeria, for example via the Northern Grampians Shire through the Algerian consulate, and apologise to the Algerian nation that we had no idea who this man was? Might we commission an appropriate memorial to those who were his victims in both Algeria and St Arnaud?

In my view, this dreadful man played no part in founding Australia or the town. His name is an obvious, unnecessary, accidental blight on our community and landscape. Changing a name does not change history, but it does change the prospects for the future.

As essential historical background, the French invaded Algeria (in north Africa) in 1830. Its brutal colonial conquest and occupation lasted over 160 years until the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. During the initial conquest, the French troops, including those led by Saint-Arnaud, were known to have looted, raped and massacred entire villages, desecrated mosques and destroyed cemeteries. In recent years this systematic organised French violence, chiefly in the form of massacres known as ‘razzias’ have come to be acknowledged not as warfare but as genocide.

My previous travels have taken me to many countries including Vietnam where Australian troops were deployed alongside US troops less than 50 years ago. Most recently in 2019 I spent one month in Iran, a proud Islamic nation demonized for its many decades of Islamic resistance to US covert military and political violence. When being unconditionally welcomed into a mosque in Shiraz in Iran, I was asked, “Why does America and Trump hate us?” All I could do was weep with shame and wonder whether Iranian Moslems would be similarly welcomed into an Australian Christian church.

In both Vietnam and Iran, I have been incredibly warmly welcomed as an Australian. Both countries respectively have had a long and deep history of enlightened Buddhist and Islamic learning and scholarship that goes back hundreds of years, well before the European enlightenment of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Because these colonized nations and their and associated religious cultures are respectively primarily Buddhist and Islamic, and their people are largely non-white and non-Christian, they have, like Algeria, both been subject to centuries of colonial (including French) invasion, occupation, brutalization and subjugation. It is into these and other Asian and Middle Eastern wars seeking liberation and independence from colonial occupation that Australia has sometimes blundered and become hopelessly enmeshed within my lifetime.

The very recent ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ is a moment in history where a global realization of the brutalization of non-white people has finally come to the surface. I was heartened on 11 June 2020 see the AFL football players respectfully take a knee and acknowledge that ‘Black Lives also Matter’ in Australia, particularly in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. I could never have imagined any of this would have been possible even a decade ago. We can learn and reconcile from history.

Way beyond the brutal police murder of George Floyd in the US, Australians have also come to realise that all is still not right in Australia in terms of equity and justice. St Arnaud the township may be a long way from Algeria, but it is increasingly uncomfortable to deny the Marshall’s genocide and to retain such an odious name for the town. Closing our hearts and minds and hoping it will all go away denies that black (including Moslem) lives also matter.

Might we instead find an acceptable, alternative local name for the township used by the traditional owners going back one thousand generations? For example, Kara Kara, whose local and town associations are more appropriately with gold and quartz, and whose name subsumed the local government area including the St Arnaud township from 1861 to 1994. If an acceptable name change was negotiated with the traditional Dja Dja Wurrung owners, this would also be one appropriate and very generous act towards local and national Aboriginal reconciliation. It would be an incredible win-win.

In changing the name, we would acknowledge that some genocidal deeds against humanity, and the naming of places commemorating the people responsible, whether it be Hitler in Germany, Pol Pot in Cambodia or Saint Arnaud in Algeria, are unnecessary scars on the community and the Australian landscape. Saint-Arnaud’s now well-documented act of genocide is so abominable that at the very least, there needs to be a public reexamination and reconsideration of the name, and ideally a process leading to a suitable renaming.

It is not possible to erase history. But it is possible to learn about, reconcile and change the many things that clearly need changing. Future generations will thank us for our wisdom and bravery by acknowledging that black lives do matter, including here and in Algeria. In thinking globally and acting locally, our sustainability and lives in this violently inherited Australian Dja Dja Wurrung landscape will be further reconciled and greatly enhanced.

Early Lime Kilns and Spring on Limestone Creek:

The forgotten story behind ‘Mount Franklin’ Mineral Water

Barry Golding*, Andrew Shugg & Stephen Carey*

*Federation University, Australia

A tantalising line in squatter, John Hepburn’s diary on 5 March 1848, cited in a biography of Hepburn (Quinlan 1968, p. 145) provoked Barry Golding’s interest several decades ago. It read simply, ‘Sent Harry to Jim Crow for a load of lime’. Jim Crow in the 1840s was the name of the district around present-day Mount Franklin in central Victoria north of Daylesford. The mountain was likely Lalgambook to Dja Dja Wurrung people, but before 1843 was widely referred to as ‘Jim Crow Hill’. Given there were likely only very limited limestone bands within the Lower Ordovician bedrock, it led to questions about whether, where and how the lime used to help build Hepburn’s mansion in 1848 was manufactured locally during the 1840s, and from which local limestone deposits.

Our article seeks to bring together all that is known to answer these questions and draw some conclusions about ‘what next’ for the site. We tease out the fascinating history of the mineral spring that quite recently lends its name to the best-known bottled water in Australia, now branded ‘Mount Franklin’ and owned by Coca Cola Amatil. It also chronicles the history of the adjacent former Lime Kilns located within the footprint of the former Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate (1841-49). We also identify how the associated deposits of limestone were likely formed, mined and turned into lime for building until the 1870s.

Given Mount Franklin’s stated commitment to ‘do the right thing’, we identify an opportunity for  the site’s unique history and heritage to be acknowledged and for a publicly accessible mineral spring to be restored on the site.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the advice and assistance of local historians, Eric Sartori, Gary Lawrence, David Bannear and David Endacott. We thank the current owners of the spring and Lime Kiln site, Frank and Linda Carroll, for giving us permission to access the privately owned site. This is a work in progress and we welcome new information and advice about any of the many gaps in our account.

Location and land status

The Limestone Creek Spring, also called ‘Gilmores/ Gilmour’s’ and more recently ‘Mount Franklin’, is one of many previously recorded mineral springs, most of which occur within 50 km of the Daylesford and Hepburn Springs region, that is promoted as the ‘Spa capital of Australia’.

The Limestone Spring and what we now confirm as the adjacent Lime Kiln site and limestone tufa deposit are in 2020 located immediately south-west of the present junction between the Midland Highway and Limestone Track in the Parish of Yandoit, within the northern part of the Hepburn Shire. The privately owned site fronts onto the west side of the Midland Highway and the east bank of Limestone Creek, 17 km north of Daylesford and 10 km south of Guildford.

Limestone Track to the east historically continued to the north west of the site, approximately paralleling Limestone Creek for several kilometres until it merged with Whitlock’s Road. The former northerly continuation of the Limestone Track is clearly visible in contemporary aerial photos. The current bitumen ‘Limestone Road’ connects Yandoit and the Midland Highway south of Guildford.

In the 1970s the mineral spring was in a privately owned paddock just west of the Midland Highway .The mineral water flowed out of a large pipe close to ground level with occasional large and audible gas bubbles, therefore also called ‘The Bullfrog’ by some locals. Locals then suggested that some of the rubble amongst the blackberries on the site was derived from the former Lime Kilns.

The Lime Kilns appear on several survey and geological maps produced between the late 1840s and the 1860s. The Lime Kilns were marked on Crown Allotment 3, Section 6A (previously section 6) of an 1862 survey map, but the mineral spring was not located. Thomas Fleming was the Crown Grantee in 1862 via purchase at a Crown Land Sale. The site was purchased by the current owners on 20 October 1987. In 2020, the site includes a  shallow, hummocky depression, where the original lime tufa deposits have been mined, and the stone foundations of several former Lime Kilns. An adjacent area to the south enclosed by a high wire fence includes former mineral water tanks and associated shedding from the 1980s. This was the former site of the mineral spring.

The historical evidence base from the 1840s

John Hepburn’s 1848 diary entry about lime being obtained from Jim Crow suggested that the Lime Kilns were operating during the late 1840s. The Jim Crow district of the 1840s referred to the area around Mount Franklin, including the 50 square mile Aboriginal Protectorate that operated from 1841-49 within an approximate 5 mile (8km) radius centred on present day Franklinford.

Detailed mapping of The boundaries of the Mount Franklin Aboriginal Reserve by Claude Culvenor in 1992 confirmed that the Mineral Spring and adjacent Lime Kilns were well within the Aboriginal Protectorate when its boundaries were surveyed in 1849. This being the case, it seemed likely there would be some mention of the Lime Kilns in the voluminous correspondence of the Aboriginal Protectorate.

The ‘smoking gun’ as to how, why, when and by whom the Lime Kiln was commenced and operated during the 1840s has not yet been located in the official Protectorate records. However, when Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Robinson visited Assistant Protector Edward Parker at his Mount Franklin Protectorate Station between 21-24 Sept 1847, he expressed a frank and negative opinion of what he saw on the Station in his personal diary. In the process, Robinson alluded to Parker personally profiting from lime produced on the Protectorate.

Robinson’s diary extract, below, provides a broader context for Robinson’s general irritation, and his specific suspicion that Parker was selling but not properly accounting for the sale of stone and/or lime produced. Robinson reported in September 1847 that there were:

… 30 natives on [Protectorate] station. … Wheat sown, Footrot in sheep … [flour] mill out of order and wheat sent to Hepburn’s [flour mill near Kingston on Birches Creek] to grind. Miserable place … orphan children. Parker [has] plenty pig, geese and cattle … Parker sells stone instead of lime. Parker to account for money for lime …. The first Presbyterian [actually Church of England] church at the Lodden (sic.) is a barn and shearing shed.

A full account of the Loddon Protectorate Era Flour mill alluded to in this quotation has been separately and recently posted as a blog by Barry Golding at https://wp.me/p3nVDL-tw. It would seem that Parker was operating several ‘small businesses’ aside from the flour mill and lime kiln and was in receipt of the profits of the wool and meat produced on the expansive Protectorate and Aboriginal Station.

By 1853, not only were there were perceptions that Parker was benefiting financially in this way, but there also existed concerns that the Aboriginal Station of the 1850s was too large, given the diminishing number of Aboriginal people at the station. The pressure for land from gold-mining families in the district led by 1853 to a flurry of government surveys that divided part of the Aboriginal station area, including the Lime Kiln site, into small Crown Allotments.

An 1853 ‘Plan of Allotments Laid out at the Lime Kilns at the Aboriginal Station Mount Franklin’ (CPO E74, 1853) is reproduced in David Rhodes’ 1995 study, An historical and Archaeological investigation of the Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Station and Aboriginal Reserve (p. 101). The plan shows two, long rectangular ‘Lime Kilns’ at the western edge of one small allotment on the eastern edge of Limestone Creek. It also confirms that the Lime Kilns, at least to 1853, were still regarded as being within the bounds of the Mount Franklin Aboriginal Station, which operated in the same area for some years after the Aboriginal Protectorate system was disestablished in late 1849.

Rhodes (1995, p. 65) reported that he had made an attempt to locate the site of the Lime Kilns by comparing the positions of the structures, the creek and road alignments on historic plans with the [1995] course of Limestone Creek and existing road alignments. Rhodes concluded that:

Although the alignments of the adjacent roads have been altered, the course of Limestone Creek has not changed significantly, making it possible to pinpoint the kiln site in relation to the creek. Limestone can be seen outcropping in the creek banks at this point, but the surrounding area has been ploughed over, obliterating any trace of the kilns. (p. 65)

Rhodes (1995) also noted that the Lime Kilns were not listed in the official Protectorate building returns. In contradiction to Rhodes, our observations show that the surrounding area has not ‘been ploughed over’, evidence of foundations of the Lime Kilns remains, and that the lime tufa crops out in the adjacent paddock and also in the base of the shallow quarry. The creek was so overgrown with blackberries in 2020 it was not possible for us to see the limestone outcropping in the creek banks though Andy Shugg recalls it in outcrop there several decades ago.

Madden’s (1976) La Trobe University Honours Thesis, The Loddon District Aboriginal Protectorate (p. 33) suggests that the Lime Kilns in question were operating as early as 1842 but were not necessarily being operated directly by the Station. Rhodes (1995, p. 33) cites correspondence from Parker to Governor La Trobe (7 February 1851: VPRS 1851/341) who stated that the Lime Kilns were, by 1851, being operated by a contractor, who was at that time applying to build another two kilns.

If the Lime Kilns were operated as a semi-private business by Parker or a contractor, they would probably not have been established earlier than 1842 and were certainly operating by 1847.

The historical evidence base from the 1850s

A ‘Plan of Country between Guildford and Mount Franklin’ dated 15 October1856 appears to show two lime kilns. A ‘Map Allotments of Land on the Jim Crow Creek near the Lime-Kiln and North of the Proposed Township, Parish of Yandoit’, dated 5 May 1855, shows an oval-shaped body of limestone then outcropping on the junction between Limestone Creek and a tributary coming in from the south-east.

A very detailed ‘Plan of Allotments Laid out at the Lime Kilns North of Section XII of Lands Laid out at the Aboriginal Station Mount Franklin’, dated 20 June 1855, shows five allotments each of about one acre, all of which extended west to Limestone Creek. Four of these allotments are rectangular and extend east onto the main north-south road. There is a hut marked on allotment 1. Two adjacent lime kilns are close to Limestone Creek on Allotment 2. No structures are marked on allotments 3, 4 or 5. Allotment 5 is roughly triangular with its north-eastern boundary forming the edge of the original Limestone Road.

An 1856 survey, ‘Country lots on the Limestone Creek, Parish of Yandoit County of Talbot’ (MAP NK 2456/258, Surveyor General’s Office, 25 April 1856, on line through Trove), clearly shows four rectangular blocks each of approximately one acre in an area marked ‘Lime Kilns’. Each allotment fronted onto Limestone Creek as well as the main Castlemaine – Daylesford Road (now the Midland Highway). These blocks are very similar to those shown in the 1853 survey, though the position of the Lime Kilns was not marked on the 1856 map.

What is known about the adjacent mineral spring?

Unlike the limestone deposit and the Lime Kilns, what became known as ‘Gilmore’s Mineral Spring’ at Limestone Creek was rarely mentioned or mapped. It is mentioned as an aside as a ‘spring’ associated with the limestone in Ulrich’s (1866) geological report. The name ‘Gilmore’ comes from a farmer who lived near the Lime Kilns before selling up and moving from the area in 1877. Exactly where the spring was located before or after 1877 in relation to the lime tufa deposit is not known.

Most of the over 100 mineral springs now recorded in Victoria were discovered and later systematically documented during an era of extensive mining activity within 50 km of the best-known cluster around Hepburn Springs beginning in the mid-1850s. Many springs were renovated from the 1920s when bores were put down and pumps were added to some springs that did not issue to the surface naturally. Beginning during the early 1900s, a list of registered mineral springs in Victoria was created, all mapped and ascribed a unique MS (Mineral Spring) number to avoid confusion about names. Gilmore’s / Limestone Creek / Mount Franklin Mineral Spring is numbered MS 009.

 

Until the late 1860s, what is now widely known as ‘Mineral Water’ in Australia had not been popularised or bottled in Victoria. Maund’s paper on ‘The Mineral Waters of Victoria’ (5 April 1855) noted that he had received two specimens of ‘acidulous water’, ‘one from Hepburn near Castlemaine and another from the banks of the Merri Creek’ [in 2020 the Donnybrook Mineral Spring, 1 km north of the Donnybrook railway station in the Shire of Whittlesea]. A third spring, Maund had been told, existed at Ballan.

Contrary to popular folklore, what are in 2020 collectively known as ‘Hepburn Mineral Springs’ were not the first mineral springs to be discovered, popularised and commercialised. Many, including those which bubbled naturally into creeks, such as still occurs at Deep Creek near Eganstown, would have been known and used by Aboriginal traditional owners. The first pastoralists arriving on the Bellarine Peninsula in 1837 reported the existence of mineral springs at Clifton Springs. In 1864 the ‘Clifton Mineral Springs Company, Drysdale Limited’ was set up to collect mineral water and erect baths.

A chemical analysis of water that was later bottled and marketed in Melbourne as ‘Ballan Seltzer’ is reported in The Argus (14 Sept 1867, p. 5), as taken ‘from a spring near Ballan’. The Bacchus March Express (21 Sept 1867, p. 4) noted that the spring was situated ‘… in a somewhat wild and inaccessible locality a little off the track of the old Daylesford road … 100 yards from the Moorabool River’. This ‘Ballan spring’ water was probably taken from a third spring mentioned by Maund, now called Gunsser’s Mineral Spring MS 070.

The 1867 Bacchus March Express article records that while the ‘Ballan spring’ had only very recently been ‘introduced to the public’, its existence had been known for several years. The article noted that ‘The proprietor of an adjoining station has been in the habit of bottling it in large quantities for his own use and that of his friends, and that occasional parties have visited the spring‘.

… to drink its waters, with more or less admixtures of stronger potations. Like a good many other local treasures, it has been ignored, simply because it is local. … Messrs Joske and Morton have already commenced the erection of premises suitable for bottling the water, and in the course of a week or two it will have become a recognised beverage in Melbourne.

Several of the early Geological Survey of Victoria reports including those by Taylor and Newbery refer to the existence of mounds associated in central Victoria with several mineral springs. In 1930 Foster mapped some of these mounds and undertook analyses of the tufa. Mounds associated with mineral springs were mapped on some of the Geological Map Sheets including Korweinguboora. Baragwanath’s (1947) ‘Special Report, Gold & Minerals’ (G83) also mentions ‘mounds’, called ‘lime tufa mounds’ in Shugg’s (2004) PhD thesis, which analysed and discussed these mounds in considerable detail.

Baragwanath noted in his 1947 report that:

In the neighbourhoods of Glenluce, Lyonville, Glenlyon and Spargo Creek the remains of former springs can be seen. These comprise mounds sometimes a few feet above the general level of the surrounding country. The mounds are composed of travertine [a form of limestone deposited by mineral springs, sometimes hot springs], deposited over countless ages while springs discharged normally. Eventually the springs became sealed off. In a number of cases bores were put down, and at comparatively shallow depths travertine was passed through and supplies of mineral water were available for pumping.

Baragwanath’s explanation would appear to apply also to Gilmore’s (Limestone Creek) Spring. The relatively large (approximately 100 metre) but thin (perhaps 3 metre thick) lens of lime tufa which was mined on the site was undoubtedly deposited in situ from calcium-rich waters over a considerable interval. The spring that caused the deposit may have still been seeping through the deposit or into nearby Limestone Creek before the 1840s. It is possible that locals may have used the mineral water, if a spring discharged at the Limestone Creek site during Gilmore’s time in the district (i.e. before 1877), as the Spargo Creek Spring was used prior to 1867.

Evidence of the mineral spring from the past four decades

Gilmore’s (Limestone Creek) Mineral Spring is comprehensively described by Andrew Shugg (2004) in a report to the Victorian Mineral Water Committee, along with a description of what he calls its associated ‘calc-tufa mound’. Tufa is a variety of limestone formed when carbonate minerals precipitate from discharging groundwater. Tufa can contain fossils including shells, wood, leaves and their imprints. Though no such fossils were visible in hand specimens collected from the Limestone Creek site from the limited accessible outcrop in 2020, leaf and grass impressions have been noted by Shugg (2004) from other, similar mounds. Many of the hand specimens collected from the base and margins of the quarry comprise alluvial gravel cemented with carbonate. Keppel, Clarke, Halihan et al. (2011) studied tufa-mound springs in the Lake Eyre area. They noted that despite similar formations being found worldwide, few intensive studies of the formation and ongoing evolution of these structures exist.

Andy Shugg (1996) had undertaken a comprehensive study of Mineral Spring Water in Victoria. Table 2 in Shugg’s report lists ‘Victorian commercial mineral water, the sources, location, owner, licensed and authorised extraction rates (1993)’. Spring MS 009 located within the Hepburn Shire at ‘Limestone’ then had ‘Coca Cola APD’ listed as the owner and extractor. APD, Australian Property Developments, appears to be an Adelaide-based development and construction organization.

The year of last extraction of water was 1985/6 despite 35Ml/day being the authorised extraction volume from bores on the site. For laypeople, 35 megalitres is a lot of water: equivalent to 14 Olympic-sized (50-metre) pools.

Appendix D in Shugg (1996) listing all registered Mineral Springs in Victoria confirms that seven registered groundwater bores, six of them Mineral Water (MW) bores, had then been sunk at the Limestone Creek Spring (MS 009) site to extract the water. The seventh was the number of the previous mineral spring on the site in the groundwater database.

Shugg (2004, p. 4) provides detailed hydrogeological information about the mineral water from the Limestone Creek mineral spring. He observes that:

The mineral water is a sodium bicarbonate type … although the cations calcium and magnesium also occur in significant quantities. The water has around 3000 mg/L bicarbonate, 300-600 mg/l chloride, and with a total dissolved salts concentration of 4,000-4,500 mg/l, it is one of the more saline of the mineral waters from the Daylesford area.

The gas in the mineral water was, unsurprisingly, 98 per cent carbon dioxide.

Eric Sartori contends that ‘A unique mineral water spring flowed up through the limestone to the surface, near the present Midland Highway. In the late 1980s a water bottling company purchased the land, put down a bore into a saline aquifer and ruined the spring. This was environmental vandalism’.

Sartori’s contention is supported by the evidence. It appears that during the 1970s a casing was placed in the hole of the previous mineral spring, which would have previously been flowing out naturally into a hollow or ditch. An unsuccessful later attempt was made to clear the bore and enlarge the hole. In the process, it appears that all that was achieved was enabling drainage of reflux from the evapotranspiration of the area on the mound. The deep drilling subsequently undertaken by Scalex and later by Coca Cola sealed the fate of the previous mineral spring.

Precisely what happened to destroy the spring aquifer and/or lead to its abandonment as a pumping source is beyond the scope of the present paper. However, it might be a story worth investigating and telling in the future. One possible brief explanation is that as consumer tastes changed, the relatively high salinity as well as calcium and magnesium in the Limestone Creek mineral water was less desirable, less palatable or less commercial than that of other mineral water, and particularly freshwater bores that were being developed by Coca Cola as well as Pepsi after the 1980s. It likely became more profitable to bottle tankered still water, which involved less treatment and less inconsistency in comparison to natural mineral water.

The geology of the spring

Alluvium and travertine occur at the surface overlying Ordovician bedrock at the Limestone Creek site. The travertine was formerly burnt for lime, and remains of the kilns may be seen on the alluvial flats. The existence of the spring and its accompanying limestone sinter mound was noted by Newbery (1867), while Ulrich (1866) included the lime kilns on the Geological] Quarter Sheet. The spring is located around 22 km from recharge areas at the crest of the Dividing Range.

 A portion of Ulrich’s (1866) geological map shows that the general area around the Lime Kilns consists of approximately north (340 degree) trending Ordovician bedrock, with north trending quartz reefs exposed on the ridges. The Lime Kilns in 1866 are shown as a sizeable rectangle located on the alluvium on a consolidated allotment, though no mineral spring is marked. The deposits that were quarried to produce the lime are not marked on Ulrich’s map. However, a note on the map reads, ‘Small patch of freshwater limestone, its margin consists of a breccia of slate and quartz cemented by lime.’

‘Breccia’ is a rock containing angular fragments. The lime tufa at Limestone Creek incorporates  variable proportions of mostly water-worn sandstone pebbles in the limestone and would not be called a breccia.

Eric Sartori notes in an unpublished report (pers. comm.) that Brough Smyth briefly mentions a limestone deposit north-east of Franklinford in his The goldmines of in 1882-3 Victoria report. It is possible that this might instead refer to ‘Murph’s Spring’ also NE of Franklinford and reportedly with a tufa mound. A geological plan of Ferguson (1911) had three kiln sites marked between the creek and the mound.

 Andy Shugg (2004) summarised the known geology, hydrogeology and recent use of the Limestone Spring as follows (lightly edited).

Ulrich (1864) drew attention to the lime kilns at the mineral springs on the Geological Quarter sheet 15 SE with the note that about 70 metres around the spring there was about 3 metres of travertine consisting of fragments of slate, sandstone and quartz in a calcareous matrix with some iron oxide.

Newbery (1867) also drew attention to the spring and noted the carbonate mound deposited from the alkaline earths, and its similarity with several other spring mounds exist such as at Spargo Creek, then referred to as one of the Ballan springs. Later, Ferguson (April 1911) noted that there was a white scum on the water suggesting active deposition of travertine. Near the small alluvial flat were the remnants of old lime kilns. The tuffaceous limestone originating from the spring covered an area of 0.5 hectare and had an average a thickness of 3 metres. Ferguson (1911) considered that the spring had been flowing for about 5,000 years based on the thickness of travertine deposits.

At some stage the spring was improved, and a bore was established from which the mineral water flowed. Local people used to fill bottles from the spring.

In 1976, Scanex Minerals cleaned out the existing bore, drilled 6 further bores and conducted a testing program. [Bores] Yandoit 10003 and 10004 were sampled in between June and December 1979. Further bores Yandoit 10005, 10006, 10007 and 10008 were drilled at the site of the spring for Associated Products and Distributors P/L. Analysis of pumping tests carried out on the test bores indicated transmissivities between 10 – 110 m²/d and storativity values from 0.002 – 0.011 (Szabo, for Scanex Minerals Pty Ltd, 1979). Later AGC (Australian Groundwater Consultants) conducted further testing at the site for the Coca Cola bottling company.

The private bores … drilled at the spring … penetrated around 35 – 50 m of deeply weathered rock, before entering a sequence of hard Ordovician sandstones and graphitic shales. Later deep bores to 150 m were proposed to develop the mineral water in 1980. In May 1980, consultants to the Coca Cola Company requested a permit to extract mineral water at a rate of 100 m3/d (36.5 ML/annum). In response, the Victorian Geological Survey recommended that extraction be subject to the following conditions;

• The licence should be reviewed after two years,
• Three observation bores should be constructed and monitored and,
• That the interference with flow in Limestone Creek be ascertained.

Landowners downstream of the spring development complained to the Department that there was a possibility of diminished creek base flow resulting from pumping from mineral water extraction from the bedrock and this would impact on their stock and domestic entitlements and environmental flow in the stream.

Mineral water from Gilmore’s (Limestone Creek) Mineral Spring was at one stage extracted and bottled by Coca Cola. The name of the spring was changed to ‘Mount Franklin’ as part of a re-branding exercise. The last water extraction occurred in the fiscal year 1985/1986. The label “Mount Franklin” has the best-known bottled water brand in Australia.

Despite the name, the product ‘Mount Franklin’ water or mineral water has no current relation to nor contains and water from the Gilmores / Limestone Creek / Mount Franklin mineral spring. Sadly, the mineral spring that used to be used by locals on the roadside until 40 years ago has been destroyed. The area where the mineral spring was and where the holding tanks and associated shedding were constructed has been fenced off.

 Shugg (2004) summarised the then ‘Status’ of the Limestone Creek Spring, as below.

The spring was improved, and mineral water flows from a 150 mm bore casing. The bore was deepened and improved by Scanex Minerals (Szabo) in 1978. The bore was used for commercial purposes for only a short period till 1986. The site is no longer used for the commercial extraction of mineral water and is not developed for other purposes. In June 2004, the site [had] not been used as a mineral water source for nearly two decades. Two water storage tanks still exist, and the bores and several sheds are still maintained on site. Large amounts of spring tufa still exist at the site. It is comprised of hard dense light yellow – grey earthy or clayey calc-sinter and white porous calc-sinter with remnant structures after vegetable material.

Local knowledge suggests that during the process of ‘improving’ and deepening the spring for commercial extraction of mineral water, improper use of casing and/or pumping led the water to become contaminated by salt.

How was the ‘lime’ actually produced?

 All of the above does not explain to a layperson what calcium-rich rocks were actually used to manufacture the lime on the Limestone Creek site, how the lime might have been made and how and where it might have been used.

What follows uses a number of online and published sources from other lime kilns in Victoria and elsewhere to try to address these topics. A deeper understanding may follow more detailed field work, including a proposed subsequent survey for the Victorian Heritage Register.

Much of the general information below has been gleaned from two reports.

• A hand-edited, unpublished document from a talk given by Joanna McClellan in 1986 to the Royal Historical Society titled Lime burning: An Early industry in Victoria.
• A 50+ page report published by Heritage Victoria in 2000 titled An archaeological and historical overview of limeburning in Victoria, by Jane Harrington.

Insights from McClellan (1986)

McClellan identifies four main sites of ‘early’ lime-burning installations in Victoria: Limeburner’s Point, Geelong; Walkerville; Coimadai and Fossil Beach near Mornington. Most of the earliest sites were on the coast where shells or shell-rich sediments provided the calcium carbonate-rich raw materials.

Coimadai north-east of Bacchus Marsh (along with the Limestone Creek Lime Kiln) being inland sites developed on deposits from freshwater springs, are exceptions. Both had lime kilns operating by the 1850s. A post with original words by Anders Hjorth, available on line via the Federation University Industrial Heritage site, suggests a possible connection between the Coimadai site and the Lime Kilns near Mount Franklin, as Coimadia’s early (1850s) lime kilns were operated by a ‘Mr Brown’ while the Lime Kilns near Mount Franklin were known as ‘Brown’s lime kilns’ in 1858. Additional interest in the Coimadai deposit derives from its associated mineral spring and reported presence of large megafauna bones within the limestone. Some of what Hjorth is included below since it identifies the context for lime making on similar, though larger, deposits during the same era the Limestone Creek deposits were being worked.

“In 1861 I had occasion to call at Coimadai, for a couple of bags of lime. Shortly after leaving Toolern I entered on a very devious track, through primeval but not dense forest; found the kilns, in the front of which there was a small cleared space, but looking west, towards Coimadai flats, the vision was interrupted by a forest of gum and box trees, undergrowth, and reeds. I have often tried to form a theory accounting for the presence of fossilised bones embedded in the rocks of the limestone quarries at Coimadai.

Through the kindness of my son-in-law (Mr. A. Allen) who has been working in the limestone quarries at Coimadai, I have obtained several fossilised bones of various dimensions, some of them being very large—big enough to have belonged to some gigantic dinosaur of the past.

From what can learn, the first white man to make Coimadai his domicile was a Mr. John Hopgood, who lived in a hut on the left bank of the creek, opposite to what is now known as the sodawater spring. That was somewhere in the [18]fifties. Mr. Hopgood was also the discoverer of the lime deposits which were at first worked in a small way by him and his sons. After a while, the Messrs. Browne, Gamble and Munroe got possession of the deposits, and worked them on a larger scale, supplying the Messrs. Cornish and Bruce, contractors for the construction of Mt. Alexander railway, which was then building, with a large quantity of lime; that would be about 1860.

Between 1860 and 1863, about 50 men were employed, in the various vocations connected with the burning of and carting away of the lime. A local squatter, (Mr. Brown) [dissolved the partnership] and Gamble sold out to his partners for £1000. Immediately after he opened up a lime deposit on a hill opposite, which is now known as Mr. Burnip’s. Mr. Gamble did not seem to have stayed long here, but meeting Mr. Burnip at Bendigo he informed him of the existence of the deposit, which, with the block it was on, was secured by Mr. Burnip. It seems that, about the middle [18]sixties, Brown and Munroe, abandoned their interest in the lime kilns, which were afterwards for some time worked spasmodically by F. Gulliver, sen., and his sons, as well as by Mr. T. Hopgood’s sons.

The output mostly went to supply local demands. In the [18]seventies, a Mr. Blair, owner of limekilns near the Heads, on the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, got possession of Coimadai lime deposits, but from what I can learn, he did not display much activity by increasing the output. In the [18]eighties, Mr. P. Alkemade, a native of Holland, who had a good deal of experience as a builder and contractor, as well as of opening up lime deposits in other parts of the State, obtained possession of part of the quarries.

At that time things were commencing to boom in Melbourne, through the influx of borrowed money; a number of ramshackle buildings were demolished, to be replaced by palatial structures. Mr. Alkemade, being an active, energetic, man with insight to the future, managed to get capital by floating a company, increasing the number of kilns, and fronting them by what was, for the locality, an imposing structure of rubble masonry. The company was floated under the name of The Alkemade Hydraulic Lime Company and inaugurated in bumpers of champagne and other joy conducers.

As Mr. Alkemade had only got possession of part of the deposits, a Mr. Debly took up the other part about the same time, and also fronted his kilns with rubble masonry, and porches where the burned lime could be drawn in all weathers. Those porches, in after years, when Mr. Debly had abandoned his portion of the quarries, often became the abode of non-residential employees of the Alkemade’s, who were, by “Rambler,” in one of the local papers, designated as “cave-dwellers.” During the building boom in Melbourne, things were correspondingly booming at Coimadai, and a considerable number of men found employment in the various vocations required for the production of and getting away the lime, which, after being carted to Bacchus Marsh, was railed to Melbourne.

In 1892, the boom collapsed, and the output at the kilns gradually declined, and ceased altogether as far as the Melbourne supply was concerned, a few bags went weekly to Bacchus Marsh, mostly carted by Mr. P. Alkemade, sen.. … [After his accidental death] the output having now almost become nil, with no immediate prospect of mending, Mr. Alkemade’s four sons (Cornelius, Robert, Peter and John) bought all the company’s interests, price I do not know. They managed gradually to increase the output, by supplying other parts of the State, as well as Melbourne with lime, which had by this time got a good reputation. Year by year the business kept extending; production having also been cheapened by the introduction of various labor saving appliances, and the turning out of a first-class article suitable to builders.

I understand that the weekly output now averages from 600 to 700 bags. Mr. Debly abandoned his part of the quarry when the boom burst. In the quarry today, consisting of a great pit, I am informed there is yet any quantity of stone to be obtained. The first settlers to obtain land on Coimadai flats … were attracted by the opening up of the lime deposits, as, in 1861, Mr. Bennett, before he got his block, had a small store, with a wine licence, a little below where the hotel now stands. … Mr. Bower was of an energetic, if somewhat sanguine, disposition, and assisted in furthering and developing the resources of Coimadai. He opened up a mineral spring on his property, erected machinery, for the treatment and bottling of its water, and forwarded the product to Melbourne, but did not seem to have taken too well with the public, and the attempt to establish a trade in that direction was abandoned.”

Returning to the coast, before 1840, McClellan suggests most of the lime around the shores of Port Phillip was manufactured in ‘bush type’ kilns. They employed a shallow pit filled with fuel on which the broken stone (typically coastal deposits of shells or dune limestone) was placed. The whole thing was covered with sod or bricks to retain the heat, and the fuel was fired perhaps through a channel. Though the process was inefficient and the product was contaminated with ash and unburned material, it was ‘good enough’ for early use in the building industry.

According to McClellan, ‘properly constructed’ kilns, exemplified by one built at Geelong around 1847, consisted of a vertical brick -lined shaft, a vaulted tunnel and long retaining wall. The stone and fuel were laid in alternate layers and fired from below as the lime was calcined. effectively being roasted by strong heat. The lime was raked out the bottom through the draw hole at the back of the vaulted tunnel. Theoretically such a kiln could be operated continuously by adding more layers of fuel and stone, thus creating a ‘running kiln’. By the mid-1840s sufficient lime was being produced in the Geelong area for a shipping trade to develop that took lime to Launceston.

By 1841 there were ten lime kilns on the Mornington Peninsula, at least some of which were likely to have been ‘properly constructed’. By 1849 there was a special wharf for the approximately 25 lime boats on the Yarra. Despite all this activity the output of the Victorian lime burners was not sufficient to meet the huge boom in the construction industry of the 1840s and particularly the 1850s. Overseas lime however was three times as expensive as the local product.

By 1858, McClellan (p.30) notes, half of the 47 state-registered lime kilns in Victoria were around Geelong and Mornington, with ‘the rest at Mt Franklin, Coimadai, Port Fairy, Portland, Sale and Hamilton’.

In 1860 a report on the lime resources of Victoria (Victorian History Pamphlets, Vol. 16, p. 18, cited by McClellan, p. 11) ‘a team of experts’ stated that ‘new sources of lime have recently opened up inland one at Mt Franklin and the other at Coimadai’.

Insights from Harrington (2000)

Harrington systematically lists the main lime production methods and kiln types. They are summarised, below, from the simplest to the most advanced. Particular attention is given to the method we might anticipate was used at the Limestone Creek site. Given the era, the position of the lime tufa deposit ‘on the flat’ and the possible stretched rectangular form of the kilns, as suggested on one of the early survey maps, the ‘pit burning’ method seems the most likely means of manufacture at the Limestone Creek kilns.

1. Heap burning: burnt in a heap or pile of alternating layers of stone and wood on the ground
2. Pit burning: as above but in a ground pit. Typical pits are around 2.75m X 2.5m, sometimes with a trench to provide a draft for the fire. Sometimes the edge of the pit is reinforced by flanking stone. Extended versions of the simple pit excavation, called ‘pye’ or ‘clamp’ kilns in Britain, were longitudinal pits (up to 20m long) with channels in the bottom. They had the advantage of being easier than shaft kilns to construct, and more expedient if the need was temporary and more efficient in terms of fuel consumption per load of lime. Kilns of this type from the 1840s in Scotland were referred to as ‘clamp or horseshoe’ kilns, in an online article, ‘Lime burning in clamp kilns in Scotland’s Western Central Belt: Primitive industry or simple but perfectly adequate technology.
3. Intermittent kilns: either Flare kilns which involve burning lime over a grate or mixed-feed kilns.
4. Continuous kilns.

The location map and list of lime kilns in Victoria in Harrington does not include the Mount Franklin site, thought it does show the Coimadai site and another at the 1870s Ebenezer Aboriginal Mission site near Dimboola. Maps from other sources as well as oral histories suggest that possible other lime kilns may have existed north of Limestone Creek in the Carisbrook, Talbot and Joyce’s Creek areas.

Who operated the lime kilns and lived in the Limestone vicinity from the 1850s?

Several early references in newspapers dating from the 1850s make mention of the locality ‘Limestone’, the Limestone Creek kiln site and the sale of lime from the Lime Kilns, on what is sometimes referred to as the Mount Franklin (Jim Crow or Mount Franklyn) site. Several of these articles during the 1850s make reference to ‘Brown’s lime kiln’ and to ‘C. Brown’ as the lime kiln owner or operator, but later (until 1877) the kilns was apparently owned by Mr Gilmour / Gilmore.

Christopher Brown was referred to in 1864 (Farmer’s Journal and Garden Chronicle, 1 July 1864, p. 8) as ‘… an old and respected inhabitant of the [Loddon District, Mount Franklin]’. Brown was at that time leaving the district, having ‘lived on the summit of the hill above the township reserve’ in ‘Kildare Lodge’.

This following information from primary sources is placed in chronological order.

• Advertisement: 28 Dec 1855: ‘Lime: Fresh from the Mount Franklyn Lime Kilns, Jim Crow, and free from either sand, loam or other deleterious matter. The undersigned will have a constant supply of the above from this date. Price nine shillings per bag of three bushels for quantities over ten bushels’ [NOTE: 1 bushel approx. 25kg] (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 1).
• 10 May 1858: ‘The telegraph party are at work to connect Jim Crow to the main lines, they have got as far as Brown’s lime kiln, near the Mount Franklyn’. (Mount Alexander Mail, 15 May, p. 3).
• Advertisement 12 July 1858: ‘Roche Lime 8s per bag of three bushels or 6 pound per ton, Slaked [ditto]. 5 shillings [ditto]. Or 4 pounds per ton at the Mount Franklin Lime Kilns’ (more costs listed in delivered in Castlemaine)’. (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 4).
• 9 May 1859: ‘Transfer licence of No. 3 and No. 4 allotments of the Mount Franklin Lime Stone Quarry’. Also ‘for sale’ advertisement: ‘The Quarry, known as the Upper Lime Stone, together with four substantial kilns, stone built shed, tools and tramway for conveyance of wood and stone and every other convenience for carrying on the extensive trade already established, apply to Newcombe and Laver Timber Merchants , Castlemaine or to C. Browne Esq. , Mount Franklin 599c’ (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 1).
• 19 Aug 1859: ‘Mr Honey obtained a publican’s licence for the Lime Kiln Hotel on the Ballarat Road from Castlemaine. This house will, if well conducted, prove a boon to travellers between Castlemaine and Daylesford’. (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 4).
• 9 Sept 1859: ‘John Honey, landlord of the Mount Franklin Lime Kiln Hotel.’ (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 2)
• 27 June 1863: at a meeting of ratepayers of the parishes of Yandoit and Mount Franklin chaired by E. S. Parker Esq., J. P. ‘Mr Christopher Brown read the first resolution’. (Mount Alexander Mail)
• 7 Dec 1874: A ‘terrible accident … on the road between Franklinford and The Lime Kilns’. Death of a boy aged 11, son of My James Gilmore ‘ … a famer residing near the Lime kiln’. (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 2).
• 8 Dec 1877: Sale of the ‘property of Mr Gilmour of Limestone near Franklinford which consists of freehold lands with crops of wheat and oats, the limestone quarry, house, livestock farming implements, etc.’ (Mount Alexander Mail, p. 2).

In summary, the 1850s appear to have been a time of considerable activity in the Limestone area, including output from the lime kilns and the building of a hotel.

A separate ‘Clearing out sale notice’ (found on Trove) records that the sale was scheduled for 10 Dec 1877 as ‘Mr Gilmore of Limestone is leaving the district in consequence of ill health’. It included the whole farm, including ‘4 blocks of 1 acre each, known as the ‘Lime Kiln Lot’’. The improvements listed include ‘The Lime Kilns, Quarry etc’, noting that ‘its value [as a farm] is enhanced by the lime deposits and its never failing stream of water’.

 What is on the site in 2020?

An of the site in May 2020 confirms that whilst much of the higher-quality limestone has been mined, there are significant, scattered outcrops of poorer-quality lime tufa within the area mostly covered by spiny rush and blackberries. There are also broken and overgrown foundations of rock walls toward the north western edge of the site which were probably part of the original lime kilns. A boundary fence separates the depressed, quarried out area from the elevated grazing land to the north. Several small outcrops of solid grey limestone crop out in the paddock. The spiny rush (Juncus acutus) on the quarry site is indicative of waterlogged and saline ground conditions.

Stephen Carey made the following geological notes after a May 2020 site inspection.

The modern expression of the limestone deposit consists of the quarry, now overgrown with spiny rush and briars, and scattered outcrops in the adjacent paddock to the north. No exposures were observed in the paddock to the south. The quarry is very shallow, being  ̴1 m deep. In the quarry, limestone crops out in the walls on the northern and eastern sides, while elsewhere limestone is present as low mounds of spoil. In the northern paddock, small, low outcrops, generally <1 m across, occur across a broadly horizontal surface with numerous metre-scale depressions which stretches from the fence at the northern edge of the quarry about 60 m further north to a shallow grassy gully. At the head of the gully are the ruins of a small stone building.

The limestone is highly variable. The following descriptions are based on field examination only. The purest occurrence observed is an essentially two-dimensional exposure in the northern paddock halfway along the fence and 1.5 m into the paddock. It appears to be massive, except for common centimetre-scale pits on the surface, though the lack of vertical exposure makes this uncertain. It is a grey lime mudstone, according to the classification of Dunham (1962). Where vertical exposure is available, that is, in the quarry walls, as well as in some discarded blocks, a distinct to diffuse, centimetre-scale, horizontal stratification is present. Many of the quarry occurrences, including spoil, have a component of rounded terrigenous gravel, mostly small-pebble-sized. At the extreme, the rock is a terrigenous conglomerate cemented by lime micrite.

Conclusion

All of the above points to a poorly known geological deposit that is unusual for Central Victoria. It occurs together with the overgrown remains of several historic, very early Lime Kilns dating from the Aboriginal Protectorate era of the 1840s. The Lime Kilns were most likely established between 1842 and 1848, and initially operated to the likely benefit of Edward Parker. The Lime Kiln business operated by Brown and later Gilmour appears to have boomed during the early Gold Rush years. The site to the south in 2020 includes an abandoned mineral spring, associated bores and pumping infrastructure.

The lime kilns operated on a busy intersection under several owners or operators at least until the 1860s that at one stage included a small settlement and hotel. The formerly reasonably large but shallow, lenticular, lime tufa deposit on the Limestone Creek site was developed in situ from the surface expression of a calcium-rich mineral spring. Though the deposit has largely been mined out and the former quarry area is in 2020 overgrown with spiny rush, briars and blackberry, the remains of the several original lime kilns on the site are important historically and worthy of closer survey and formal recording.

The associated, formerly delightful mineral spring may have been destroyed by apparently botched boring and pumping associated with 1980s commercial groundwater extraction by commercial operators including the Coca Cola Company. The historic mineral spring previously called ‘Gilmours’ on the site, was renamed ‘Mount Franklin’ by the company just prior to its destruction, when pumping and water extraction ceased.

While the water associated with ‘Mount Franklin’ brand lives on under the ownership of Coca Cola Amatil and has become nationally iconic and incredibly profitable to the Coca Cola company, no water has been extracted from the original site for approximately 35 years. The ‘Mount Franklin’  mineral spring is no more and the area has  become an overgrown and forgotten eyesore on the side of the Midland Highway. There is no signage on the site.

No one would know that the registered, arguably vandalised and now abandoned natural mineral spring on the site is the one today originally associated with the ‘Mount Franklin’ water brand. There is some irony that the Mount Franklin water web site in 2020 stresses it wants to do ‘… the right thing for the Australian environment now and for future generations … While we celebrate our great land, we do our part to protect it to. … We’ll stay determined to keep finding ways to lighten our touch on the environment, to protect the land dearest to our hearts.’

In our opinion, there is a case here beyond our historical narrative and anticipated heritage survey of this unique and important historic site, for a long-term recovery and site management plan. The recovery plan might involve removal of weeds and replanting of the Limestone Creek-side precinct, removal of unused or unnecessary modern infrastructure, some sensitive on-site historical and geological interpretation of the spring, the lime tufa deposit and the Lime Kilns, and reinstatement of a publicly accessible, roadside mineral spring.

Given the ‘Mount Franklin’ commitment to do the right thing, such a plan might be developed with support from Coca Cola Amatil as the most recent commercial operator on the site, in consultation with the Dja Dja Wurrung traditional owners, current land owners, the Hepburn Shire, other local landholders and community stakeholders.

 

Preamble to a discussion about invasion  in 2020

Major Thomas Mitchell is widely acknowledged for his journeys of exploration and discovery of ‘new lands’ in inland Australia, albeit ones that had already been named, mapped and cultured by First Nations peoples for tens of thousands of years.

Critically interrogating Major Sir Thomas Mitchell’s achievement as inland Victoria’s preeminent colonial explorer including calling it and what followed an invasion is sort of like putting your favourite dog down or burning the family photos. Denying and destroying something inherited and passed down through generations is simply not done.

This account deliberately restricts itself to Mitchell’s 1836 expedition across Dja Dja Wurrung country. The Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Nation was one of around 250 separate and different Nations at contact. In outline it is located in central Victoria encompassing the southern catchments of the Loddon and Avoca Rivers.

For those unfamiliar with the area referred to in this narrative, Dja Dja Wurrung country is bounded in the south by the Great Dividing Range and extends all the way to the southern Mallee. It roughly encloses an expansive oval area bounded (clockwise) by present day Creswick, Lexton, Navarre, Donald, Charlton, Boort, Marong, Malmsbury and Bullarto. Larger former gold towns included within its footprint include Maryborough, Daylesford, Castlemaine, St Arnaud and Wedderburn.

So why is it important and why does it matter? 

Truth telling is an important part of any process of reconciliation. During the era of colonial exploration there was huge public interest and uncritical admiration for explorers and their deeds. One only has to see the huge monument erected on the top of the hill above Castlemaine to the ill conceived and clumsily executed Burke and Wills expedition, to understand how much the public cared for explorers, even after abject failure and death.

It is salient to recall that all of the dozens of those who followed Mitchell’s expedition’s wagon wheel tracks into and across Dja Dja Wurrung country to Mitchell’s promised land, Australia Felix, had a copy of Mitchell’s itinerary with them. Indeed Hepburn, Gardner and Hawdon’s overlanding party were fully briefed on their route south towards Melbourne by Stapylton on the Murrumbidgee near Gundagai as Stapylton was heading home and north with the expedition’s wagons.

A century after Mitchell and those that followed in his footsteps there was a rush to erect new monuments and re enact their achievements and heroism. The monuments on the top of Mount Greenock above Talbot in 1936 and to Hepburn in Smeaton in 1938 are good examples. Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons spoke to the three thousand assembled in Smeaton for the centenary celebrations in 1838. He used words that made the invasion of Dja Dja Wurrung lands and Australia more generally sound like a benign, bloodless coup.

Captain Hepburn, who, with his flock of sheep, his cattle, and his horses, crossed from New South Wales to the fertile land round Smeaton, where no white man had been before. … Compared with most other countries, Australia was young in actual years, it was old in experience. It was something to be thankful for that our history had been written not in blood but in the pioneering achievements of our forefathers.

A song was composed about the Dreaming Hills of Smeaton to acknowledge those pioneers who transformed ‘the pristine wilderness’ where ‘joy and peace together reign’.

The uneasy part for me, as an older white male who lives in an inherited invaded landscape of southern Dja Dja Wurrung country just five kilometres down the road from Smeaton (recently adorned by a suitably wooden statue of John Hepburn that the birds have roosted above), is to go beyond the now standard and important recognition of First Nations ancestors and Elders past and present.

My point is that we need to interrogate and recognise what actually happened here, what is officially and inappropriately acknowledged and commemorated, and also what is not. The next steps aside, from evidence-based truth telling, public education and some strategic renaming in the landscape, include one or more belated Treaties and restitution with Australia’s First Nations people.

Monuments are almost always erected to and by the victors and directed to the universally male expedition leaders, and also those first men to come behind them and seize Aboriginal land, including John Hepburn. There are almost no monuments to Aboriginal people who played often unrecognised but heroic roles leading, guiding, supporting and mediating such expeditions, and certainly none to those who were killed bravely resisting and defending their lands, families and clans.

There are few monuments to those who were typically forcefully and brutally moved off Country, killed and vanquished. Thus the use of the gentler term ‘settlement’ and the convenient fiction that people did not live on the lands we inherited or simply faded away. In fact some miraculously and heroically survived. The recent move by Hepburn Shire to support Erica Higgin’s idea of a memorial avenue of trees honouring  the tens of thousands of Aboriginal people who died in this way on Country is a welcome move in the right direction.

The gravesite of Yuranigh, another of Mitchell’s Aboriginal assistants in the countryside of his ancestors northwest of Orange I visited a few years ago is a notable exception to these generalities. It the only known site in Australia where Aboriginal and European burial practices coexist and one of the few where acknowledgement is respectfully commemorated. Yuranigh joined Mitchell’s fourth expedition in inland Queensland in 1845. The tombstone, placed with Mitchell’s support after the great man’s  death in 1850 acknowledges Yuranigh’s ‘courage, honesty and fidelity’.

There are virtually no monuments to the Aboriginal peoples and identities whose lives and Country were taken in the typically violent and brutal process of exploration, conquest and seizure of their lands. My hope is that the few people who read this account will share my view that even after 184 years, it is important as part of Indigenous reconciliation to honestly document what happened and to acknowledge that descendants of the losers and wounded in the battle for Country in our community are still suffering, hurting and grieving and owed dignity, respect and understanding.

My account was penned on 29 April 2020, exactly 250 years since Captain James Cook planted the British flag on the shores of Botany Bay. The celebrations planned and funded by the Australian government in 2020 to commemorate Cook’s arrival and mapping of Eastern Australia have fortunately been dealt a serious blow by the COVID19 epidemic.

Unbeknown then to the people of the Dja Dja Wurrung Nation in central Victoria, 66 years before Major Mitchell’s 1836 triumphant tramps across their country, Captain James Cook had already declared the continent legally empty and had claimed it for the British.

These expensive and jingoistic national celebrations ignore the fact that Cook actually landed in Australia several years earlier in 1777, first on Bruny Island off Tasmania’s south east coast. By 1780 when the British flag was finally hoisted near present day Sydney to ward of the French colonial intentions there had been around 60 other European landings all around the Australian coastline.

As a precursor to the first physical invasion of their lands locally, the Dja Dja Wurrung people in central Victoria had experienced several waves of a deadly smallpox pandemic that the invaders had somehow introduced to the continent.

It was far deadlier than the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and perhaps also arrived in one of their less well appointed overseas convict ‘cruise ships’. Smallpox was the first of many introduced deadly pandemics that decimated Australian First nations peoples. Smallpox alone is likely to have killed as many as one half of the Aboriginal people living on the Murray-Darling River system of southeastern Australia between 1789 and 1820.

Mitchell’s two transits through Dja Dja Wurrung Country in 1836

This account is based mainly around insights from original transcripts from Thomas Mitchell’s 1836 diary as well as those of Granville Stapylton, Mitchell’s second in command, published in 1986 in Stapylton with Major Mitchell’s Australia Felix Expedition 1836  edited by Alan Andrews. Mitchell’s huge exploring party plus wagons loaded with two huge boats destined for an elusive (and non-existent) inland sea lumbered twice through their country.

If one imagines Dja Dja Wurrung country to be a rough oval, Mitchell’s expedition made two roughly parallel transits of approximately 80km across the oval around 80km apart. These transits crossed the upper and middle parts of river catchments now known as the Avoca and Loddon.

Mitchell’s total entourage of 23 European men became the first of dozens of troupes of invading explorers, then ‘overstraiters’  (from Van Diemen’s Land via Corio and Melbourne) and ‘overlanders’ (from Sydney) to set foot on,  transit and  ‘take up’ (seize) Dja Dja Wurrung country during the next five years.

Mitchell’s first transit, essentially southwest across the Wimmera, began after they crossed the Loddon River south west of Pyramid Hill in early July 1836. They exited west of present day Paradise on their way to the southern coast via the Glenelg River to Portland. Their second transit in October 1836 went approximately northeast from Lexton  to Sutton Grange in the central east.

During both transits a poorly known and tragic drama was playing out within Mitchell’s 1836 expedition. The drama does not make for easy or comfortable reading. Even though my narrative is restricted to sanitised evidence in the diaries of Mitchell and Stapylton as the two lead invaders, their own words paint a disturbing and self-incriminating picture.

Their second transit was on their journey back to Sydney. By then the expedition had actually split into two, with Mitchell’s lighter party heading home as fast as possible to break the news about the potential pastoral wealth of Australia Felix.

The rest of the party led by the second in charge, Granton Stapylton followed up with the wagons with an increasing distance between the parties, and also with his growing resentment and distrust of Mitchell and his motives. He actually called himself ‘Man Friday’ and rightly anticipated that all the credit would go to Tarzan, Mitchell.

The current narrative provides only brief contextual information from original expedition records about the country they travelled through. Instead ,it particularly focuses on the way two Aboriginal women (referred to in the original diaries as ‘gins’) and particularly one of their daughters, Balandella, were treated. Kitty was mainly referred to as ‘Pipers gin’, Piper being Mitchell’s invaluable Aboriginal guide.

came to the expedition as Piper’s wife. She joined the expedition at Lake Cargelligo after the lead Aboriginal man, Piper, temporarily left to ‘marry’  her. Kitty and Turandurey’s contribution to the expedition was huge, a fact finally acknowledged during the celebration of NAIDOC week in 2019, as below.

Kitty proved a wonderful guide, both on her own and also with Piper. She knew where to locate water and negotiated with the People they met on their way. It was she who she was tall and strong, but had a blind eye (opaque and white), likely from surviving smallpox.  … Kitty and Turandurey showed Mitchell where Oxley’s earlier survey and exploration party reached the Lachlan River and pointed out that they rescued one of Oxley’s men who nearly drowned there. They also mentioned three early white men on horseback and their boats on the Murrumbidgee. This advice by Kitty and Turandurey reminded the white explorers how keenly ‘strangers’ were observed on country. It also asserted their knowledge and ownership of place. Both Kitty and Turandurey frequently went ahead to negotiate. They answered Mitchell’s questions, providing cultural explanations: for example, as to graves and birthplaces. Kitty became an important scout for gossip and intelligence, faithfully reporting back to Mitchell.

Turandurey was a Wiradjuri woman with a totally blind young daughter, Balandella, mainly referred to as the ‘Picaninny’. The records and this narrative confirm that both women were being shamefully treated before, during and after both transits.

The term ‘gin’, ‘Jin’ (or djin) retained in the original documents as it refers to Aboriginal women is now acknowledged as an offensive term pertaining to ‘having sex’.

‘Pickaninny’ is a word applied originally by people of the West Indies to their babies and more widely referring to small children. It is a pidgin word form, derived from the Portuguese pequenino and subsequently used in Canada and the US as a racial slur referring to a dark-skinned child of African descent. In Australia it tended to be used in colonial texts to refer to Aboriginal children.

A fuller account of the abduction and later separation and kidnapping of The widow and the child was published by Jack Brook in 1988. It helped me tease out some of the missing contextual detail. It is important to note that Brook was more forgiving of Mitchell’s explanation of what I regard as a shameful abduction and unconscionable child stealing in my own narrative.

The first transit, May 1836

‘Kitty’ had, by the time this narrative begins, as the expedition crossed the Loddon River north east of present day Wedderburn, become a wife to John Piper, the unpaid Aboriginal guide and mentor to Mitchell. Both women and Piper played invaluable roles safely guiding the party out and back.

All three are conspicuously missing from the officially listed party of white male expeditioners. Turandurey and her daughter, Balandella had been ‘picked up’ on the Lachlan River north east of Booligal around two months beforehand on 2 May as teased out in more detail below.

We have no record of what actually transpired from a Wiradjuri perspective. Only Mitchell and Stapylton record the circumstances in which Turandurey and her daughter had originally been abducted.

Stapylton records that while travelling down the then deep, wide but dry Lachlan River in present day western New South Wales they arrived at water, where they : … much alarmed and put to flight a small family of wild Blacks. A remarkable instance of courage and true affection was displayed on this occasion by a little girl, who while the others fled, hesitated to stay behind by the side of her sister who was totally blind’.

Mitchell’s diary on 2 May 1836 neatly flick-passes the responsibility for the abduction to an ‘old Aboriginal man: ’ … having found two ponds of water we encamped beside them. … A fire was burning near the water, and at it sat a black child about seven or eight years old, quite blind. All the other natives had fled save one poor little girl still younger, who, notwithstanding the appearance of such strange beings, as we must have seemed to her, and the terror of those who fled, nevertheless lingered about the bushes, and at length took her seat beside the blind boy … a dog so lean as scarcely to be able to stand, drew his feeble body close up beside the two children, as if desirous to defend them. They formed indeed a miserable group, exhibiting, nevertheless, instances of affection and fidelity, creditable both to the human and canine species. An old man came up to the fire afterwards, with other children. He told us the name of the water-holes between that place and the Murrumbidgee, but he could not be prevailed on to be our guide. Subsequently, however, a gin who was a widow, with the little girl above-mentioned, whose age might be about four years, was persuaded by him to accompany us’.

Three weeks later the mother and child (who Mitchell also referred to as ‘the widow’  were still accompanying the expedition. When Mitchell departed for the Darling River on 23 May he directed Stapylton, who was to stay at the depot camp, to ensure ‘the widow had rations and that every care should be taken of the child’. Furthermore, Turandurey was to be prevented from ‘going back’, for in Mitchell’s words, to move the child could prove ‘injurious’ to her.

Stapylton records that the child was soon after seriously injured when she became ‘entangled in the bullock team and was thrown down the draywheel passing over and fracturing the creature’s thigh in two places.’ Stapylton saw a ‘providential’ upside of the accident, writing that he sensed it would prevent:

… collusion between the mother and some wild tribes of which there was evident signs of commencement, with what views it would be difficult to say except to our disadvantage. The mother is now at all events now a feature and it shall be my province to keep off the Black Gentry.

The ‘Black Gentry’ perhaps refers to two young Aboriginal (Wiradjuri) men who also joined Mitchell’s party. Because both were called ‘Tommy’, to distinguish between them, Mitchell gave them chronometrical surnames: ‘Tommy Came- First’ and ‘Tommy Came-Last’.

Arrival on the Loddon River

There are only occasional brief mentions of what Stapylton calls ‘the two black gins and the picaninny’ until they absconded on the night they camped on the stream they called the ‘Yarrayne’, now known as the Loddon River.

Stapylton was actually pleased they had ‘boulted (sic) so much the better’, but noted that Mitchell ‘… seems vexed about it. Why I am utterly at a loss to conceive. They were utterly useless to us and moreover a severe tax upon the flour bag [their food reserves]’.

In the same diary entry, Stapylton waxes lyrical of the then unnamed Australia Felix. He writes that: ‘The country promises well. Distant Hills to the southward [towards Dunolly] and westward [towards Charlton] … and fine rising level land up to the base of them’.

Anticipating that a future survey of the southern Australian coast would provide ‘fine outlets to the ocean’, Stapylton prophetically sensed they had:

… discovered a paradise unequalled in New Holland, and for as much as I know superiar (sic) in point of extent and fertility of any in the world. Pyramid Hill will perpetuate the discovery it is a land mark on a vast plain that can never be mistaken and must always convey and association of ideas which will improve on the memory, the circumstance of this expedition and the name of its leader. His Man Friday will not share the same good luck.

Mitchell records that the party ‘… crossed a deep but narrow stream flowing between high grassy banks … the plains beyond it were five miles in breadth, and of the best description’. Later to be known as the Loddon River, then dubbed the Yarrayne by Mitchell, it was a name he somehow understood that the Aborigines associated with the river.

As he approached the Loddon Mitchell wrote about the ‘Black-butted gum and Casuarinae [that] extended back to the mountains and forests’. He also noted the reappearance of Xanthonia (= Danthonia: a Wallaby grass) and was particularly impressed by the appearance of Anthisteria (= Themeda, Kangaroo grass). As in much of his diary, he was more interested in the plants in the landscape than the people.

While the deliberately fire-managed native grasses were dancing alongside the Loddon, Mitchell and Stapylton’s minds were turning to Greek literature and legend to put their mark on what they saw and sought to name through Greek classical and colonial lenses.

The  names he chose locally, most that are still used, commemorate a mix of Greek classical  heroes (such as Macedon, Alexander, & Campaspe), Scottish places ( e.g. Grampians) and military heroes from his time serving in the war on the Iberian Peninsula  in Europe (e.g. Beckwith & Greenock).

Mitchell hinted to Stapylton that he might appropriately call  ‘… this beautiful little [Loddon] river Ilyssus‘. His choice  was in reference to an ancient Greek narrative about Queen Dedo’s [=Dido’s]  forming a new colony in Africa. Michell was well aware that as he was the first European to venture into these ‘new lands’ shortly to be colonised that had re-naming rights over the already named mountains and rivers.

Ilissos  was Dido’s other name and also the name of a former stream in Athens. A fourth Century BC text refers to  the Illisos as a ‘little stream delightfully clear and bright; I can fancy that there might be maidens playing near’.

Mitchell’s allusion to the Greek story of Dido refers to her flight from her father, King Pygmalion in Phoenician Tyre (today in Lebanon). Dido founded a new colony which became the city of Carthage in North Africa (today’s Tunis) around 825 BC. The back story goes that Dido’s party of exiles travelled via Cyprus and seized about eighty young women who were prostituting themselves on the shore in order to provide wives for the men in the party.

I’ve added this detail to try and illustrate how Mitchell justified the violence that was being perpetrated. Winners in war and colonisation tended to take it all, including the women . He  knew the Dja Dja Wurrung  people and their rich grassland would soon colonised for king and country. It was for him and his party to do what he perceived as necessary to create and mark a path for others to follow. Picking up and discarding Aboriginal guides along the way was seen as essential and de rigeur for many Australian explorers.

Back in the real world the exploring party continued their journey southward, moving well south of Turandurey’s home Country and camping on  the Loddon Rivers north east of present day Wedderburn. The planned the next day to cross the river and move west into Dja Dja Wurrung country. Unsurprisingly, the mother and child figured it was time to made a break for home. Assisted by Kitty, they stealthily left camp in the middle of the night.

Mitchell and his party’s attempt to easily cross the Loddon River via a log bridge the next day  were thwarted by a remarkable overnight rise in the Loddon River. Meantime Piper had been missing for a day and ‘brought back one of the Jins and the Picaninny having tracked them to our last encampment’.

Mitchell was relieved, as according to Stapylton, Mitchell sensed ‘they might have made the wild blacks acquainted with our camp arrangement and that at night an attack might be made of the most serious consequences to us’. Stapylton noted that:

These Jins took their measure [of escape] very cunningly having left in the middle of the night during a very severe frost aware … that it would prove almost impossible to track them. They are shockingly frost bitten however in the feet and the mother [Balandella] would not come up tonight. There she is alone without a fire in the bush, and her feet described as being in a most dreadful state I think she will die the poor devil. What then shall we do with the Picaninny? It would have been much wiser to let them go when they desired it and damn their collusion with the tribes. The other Jin (Kitty] returned this morning with her feet in a deplorable state. Thus we are saddled with two useless devils who must be carried on the drays.

The next day on 6 July Stapylton noted that at ‘9PM Jin and the child again joined us this is a fixture now. I suppose she must have crawled about 15 miles on her hands and knees’. Putting aside the offensive language, the lack of compassion evident in their actions leaves me gobsmacked.

By 8 July they were camped on the Avoca River just west of Logan. Mitchell was impressed by the fitness of the land (for’ taking up’) and foresaw that it would ‘eventually become part of a great empire’. The country he was crossing would by Spring 1836 on his way home, be named for its perceived fertility, a land he considered was blessed by fortune, Australia Felix.

The ‘gin’ (Turandurey) is next mentioned briefly, again in very derogatory terms by Stapylton on 17 July having passed west out of Dja Dja Wurrung country. Stapylton writes while crossing broken country near present day Callawadda, the ‘Jin capsized from the top of the dray not hurt but she truly is an unfortunate bitch. Picanniny held on well.’

During the following month the expedition headed south west including down the Glenelg River and along the  coast to Portland. To Mitchell’s complete surprise the Hentys had arrived there as overstraiting pastoralists two years before and had already built houses. William Dutton had been living nearby, sealing with his Aboriginal wife for eight years since 1828.

Having resupplied, they started to head back towards Sydney, jettisoning the big boat near Mount Napier, increasing the mobility of the boat carriage and smaller boat across the swampy Western District volcanic plains.

The second homeward transit, October 1836

By 12 September 1836 whilst camping on the Wannon River towards the southern end of the Grampians, Stapylton writes that Mitchell as expedition leader had ‘resolved upon making a start home [towards Sydney] with pack horses and leaving me behind to bring up the expedition to the settlement’. By this stage the bullocks hauling the heavy wagons were starting to show the strain.

The revised plan was for Stapylton and the rest of the party to remain there ‘for one fortnight in order to give time for the bullocks to refresh then to proceed on his track’. Stapylton angrily noted he found Mitchell impenetrable in terms of his communication and guessed he might have been ‘meditating [him] mischief’.

Indeed Mitchell had decided to cruelly separate the mother and child and set off ahead with Turandurey’s daughter. Stapylton records Mitchell’s advice that ‘The Mother Jin stays with me [Stapylton] until I receive further directions respecting her’.

Mitchell writes of his arguably dubious rationalisation of the child’s abduction and separation a week later on 19 September.

When about to set out I observed that the widow ‘Turandurey’, who was to remain with Mr Stapylton’s party and the carts, was marked with white round the eyes (the natives’ fashion of mourning), and that the face of her child Ballandella was whitened also. This poor woman, who had cheerfully carried the child on her back, when we offered to carry both on the carts, and who was as careful and affectionate as any mother could be, had at length determined to entrust to me the care of this infant. I was gratified with such a proof of the mother’s confidence in us, but I should have been less willing to take charge of her child, had I not been aware of the wretched state of slavery to which native females are doomed. I felt additional interest in this poor child, from the circumstance of her having suffered so much by the accident, that befell her while with our party, and which had not prevented her from now preferring our mode of living so much, that I believe the mother at length despaired of being ever able to initiate her thoroughly in the mysteries of killing and eating snakes, lizards, rats and similar food. The widow had been long enough with us to be sensible, how much more her sex was respected by civilized men than savages, and, as I conceived, it was with such sentiments that she committed her child to my charge, under the immediate care, however, of Piper’s gin.

By the time Stapylton’s party including Turandurey re-entered Dja Dja Wurrung country near present day Lexton on 8 October, Mitchell’s advance party with her daughter Balandella in tow were approaching the Goulburn River north of Seymour. One can only guess at the likely heartbreak involved in this tragic separation as both mother and daughter mourned their separation. The brave explorer diaries are curiously both silent during the rest of the trip towards home.

The route home for both parties was something of a route march on a bearing of approximately 60 degrees magnetic. Their journey through the already densely populated, well watered and fertile volcanic country of the Dja Dja Wurrung in the upper Avoca and Loddon River catchments took them past Mount Greenock (near Talbot) into the Mammeloid Hills beyond Mount Beckworth and on to recross the Loddon River near present day Newstead.

Stapylton wrongly understood the Loddon to be a tributary of the Wimmera, but accurately described, then as now in the vicinity and downstream of Newstead, as:

A considerable stream … running between high rocky (grass) banks bare of timber forming a cavity for a river the size of the Murray. … The river frontage and the luxuriant flats on its banks and the splendid Downs to the South and Eastwards with the forest ground immediately adjoining would render in a most desirable spot for a grant [presumably for himself after the success of the expedition, which neither he nor Mitchell received].

Beyond Newstead the traverse towards present day Castlemaine took both parties over ‘a stoney barren range’ before crossing ‘a good stream running south [Campbells Creek] good forest hills and valleys’. Mitchell’s advance party found a way over the range through Expedition Pass past the southern end of Mount Alexander. They had time to take a southern detour beyond Dja Dja Wurrung country to climb and rename Mount Macedon, the ‘Mount Wentworth’ of Hume, though not marked as such on Hume’s map.

From Macedon’s summit Mitchell was again very surprised to see that the southern coast of the Port Phillip Colony was already being settled: there were white sails of ships at harbour on the north end of Port Phillip Bay. The embryonic settlement of ‘Batmania / Bearbrass’ that was renamed Melbourne a year later had again got under Mitchell’s radar.

Mitchell realised then that it was likely that  overstraiters would advance north into his fertile icon, Australia Felix from the southern coast even without news of his discovery. It was therefore timely for him to head straight home on a track largely identified by Hume and Hovell in 1824.

The back end to this tragic abduction

The next time the mother or daughter are mentioned in Stapylton’s diary is on 12 November when back in (squatter) settled country beyond the Murrumbidgee. He notes that ‘Turandurey has grown enormously fat which should speak well of the care we have taken of her & to the best on my recollection no improprieties with her as a female have ever taken place. She was married the night before to King Joey and she proceeds … to the Lachlan. The picaninny is kidnapped away to a station ten miles distant’.

Though he actually uses the term ‘kidnapping’ Stapylton seeks to distance himself from any responsibility for Turandurey’s evident pregnancy, adding, ‘With this I have nothing to do or much to say nor will I let those who projected this measure and carried it into execution be responsible to themselves and members of the public’.

In Mitchell’s later memoirs he obscures the reality of the abduction and his later action of separation, child stealing and dealing. Mitchell does not actually state that Turandurey ran away. Instead he wrote that ‘the widow was inclined to go back’ for she was ‘far beyond her own country’. He continues with an explanation that confirms that the mother, Turandurey knew all along of Mitchell’s wicked  intention to abduct her child.

I intended to put her on a more direct and safe way home after we should pass the heads of the Murrumbidgee on our return, I could not detain her longer than she wished …[She] seemed uneasy under an apprehension, that I wanted to deprive her of this child. I certainly had always been willing to take back with me to Sydney an aboriginal (sic) child, with the intention of ascertaining, what might be the effect of education upon one of that race. This little savage, who at first would prefer a snake or lizard to a piece of bread, had become so far civilised at length, as to prefer bread; and it began to cry bitterly on leaving us.

For Mitchell, this abominable act that was played out over six months was capped off by this dreadful, cruel and primitive social experiment. Mitchell records that he ‘took the little picaninny’ to Sydney and ‘introduced her to his home’.

Mitchell gushed that Balandella ‘was a welcome stranger to my children, among whom she remained, and seemed to adopt the habits of domestic life … con amore’, an Italian expression meaning ‘with love, tender enthusiasm or zeal’.

Nevertheless Mitchell soon tired of the experiment and palmed Balandella off to a ‘Dr Charles Nicholson’ when he and his family returned to England on 9 May 1837. There, Thomas Mitchell waited for the accolades to flow in and wrote and published his heroic opus about finding a new and happy land Australia Felix, ripe for the taking. There is no mention of her again by Mitchell.

Major Mitchell is seldom remembered for any of the above. Instead he is comprehensively lionised and commemorated by means of countless monuments in the Australian landscape along with several peaks and a high Plateau in the Grampians. A well known Australia cockatoo (Lophochroa leadbeateri) and a lesser known rodent, Mitchell’s Hopping Mouse (Notomys mitchellii, the latter currently ironically thteatened by habitat destruction associated with European settlement in Australia, also takes his name.

Angus McMillan also named the Mitchell River in Victoria in Mitchell’s honour in 1839. McMillan went on to lead many well-documented massacres of Kurnai people in Gippsland between 1840-1845. The former electorate of McMillan named in McMillan’s honour was therefore renamed ‘Monash’ in 2018. It is never too late to remove inappropriate names. The community consultation process seeking to remove the racist Creek name ‘Jim Crow’  is underway in 2020.

Balandella later ‘fell into service’ (= became a domestic slave) as a nurse to Nicholson family members, had a daughter to a labourer in 1846, and afterwards married an Aboriginal (Darkinjung, South Coast NSW) man, John Barber in the late 1840s. Some of her descendants are still living in the Hawkesbury area.

Ballendella is a tiny rural locality near Rochester in Victoria that likely takes its name from Ballandella. Her mother Turandurey is acknowledged by one street name in Balranald, NSW and a remote surveyed locality in the County of Lowan in the western Wimmera. John Piper was rewarded for his contribution with ‘certain material possessions’. Mitchell later got a Knighthood, while Piper got a brass plate inscribed ‘John Piper, Conqueror of the Interior’.

Stapylton is acknowledged in the landscape he surveyed with a Gold Coast suburb and several mountains (one near Brisbane and another in the Grampians). He was was fatally speared by Aborigines almost five years later on 31 May 1840 while surveying in the vicinity of the Border Loop on the present New South Wales Queensland border. Two of the perpetrators, who were effectively resisting the survey and acquisition of their lands, were hung in Brisbane in July 1841.

When anyone drives around northern and western Victoria in Dja Dja Wurrung country and sees the prominent stone Major Mitchell monuments with their brass arrows pointing to the way the Major went, it would be well to remember that Mitchell was also a self confessed Aboriginal child stealer. Mitchell was also officially sanctioned for his unnecessary dispersion (massacre) of Aborigines during this same expedition on the Murray.

State-sanctioned Aboriginal child stealing and domestic slavery continued in Australia for another 150 years until the 2008 National Apology to the many Stolen Generations. Few people in 2020 know that Kitty or John Piper, along with Turanduray and Balandella  also passed through this country.

 

Narrative for ‘Reading the Country at Contact Tour’

Hepburn Shire, NAIDOC Week Activity, 26 May 2019

Feedback and suggestions are welcome via b.golding@federation.edu.au

What these notes contain

These notes have been prepared by Barry Golding for tour participants to access later as a post at www.barrygoanna.com.  Further insights are provided on the site’s ‘Beyond Contact’ page and other posts.

These notes tease out Barry Golding’s tour narrative at the seven stops on the tour. There is also some narrative about places and sites we passed by between stops on the tour. Uncle Ricky’s important and complementary verbal narrative is not included in these notes.

Tour Rationale

  ‘to learn about our shared histories … [as an approach towards] reconciliation … grounded in truth’.

Tour invitation

…. to experience a range of important sites in the Dja Dja Wurrung landscape where there is evidence of contact from the late 1830s between the peoples of the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Nation and the invading pastoralists, including John Hepburn.

Tour Maps

The two base maps mentioned below, included separately in the tour notes, illustrate how quickly white invader knowledge of the ‘lay of the land’ in the footprint of the current (2019) Hepburn and Mount Alexander Shires improved between 1840 and 1847, as well as how quickly stations were created and new boundaries were established.

Map 1 (p.3 of participant notes): Parker’s March 1840 Sketch Map taken from E. Morrison, Frontier Life in the Loddon Protectorate, 1967, p.19, includes Hepburn’s (1838) run as well as earlier runs on the Campaspe and Coliban: including Mollison (1837), Orr, M[u]nro (1838-43), Thorn[e]loe & Ebden.

Parker Sketch Map 1840

MAP 2 (p.4 of participant notes) Main 1847 Base Map: copied from inside cover of ‘A Homestead History’(Reminiscences of Alfred Joyce 1843-64, Ed. G. James, 1942), redrawn from an 1847 Upper Loddon survey Map,

Upper Loddon Map 1847 (annotated 2019)

• Our tour route is marked in pink; present day ‘towns’ in green; 2019 creek, river and mountain names have been added.
• RUNS: Smeaton Hill (John Hepburn, from 1838); Glengower (Dugald McLachlan, from 1839); Plaistow (Alfred Joyce from 1843); Tarringower (Lauchlan McKinnon, 1839-41); Rodborough Vale (Thomas Chirnside 1839, Donald McKinnon then E. G. Bucknall from 1844); Boughyards (Alexander Mollison from 1837, Alexander Kennedy from 1840); Holcombe.

Travel towards Castlemaine

PASS Mt Franklin (Lalgambook) & Larnebarramul  (Mt Franklin crater) to right; PASS later Protectorate site, to left).

The main ‘Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate’ site was centred to the left of the road around present day Franklinford from June 1841-Dec 1848. Edward Parker was the Assistant Protector for the NW part of then Colony of Port Phillip. Hundreds of Aboriginal people (max 200 at any one time) lived or came here for safety, food and shelter whilst the Protectorate operated.

The central Aboriginal Protectorate area, radius ‘1 mile’, was for cultivation. A ‘larger 5 mile ‘radius (that went NS from approx. Hepburn Springs to Strangways, EW approx. to Glenlyon to Werona) was anticipated to be for traditional food gathering including hunting and fishing.

At the time the Loddon Protectorate closed only 30-40 Aboriginal people were living there. From April 1850 Parker was permitted to operate the Loddon station as a pastoral lease on the one square mile of land between Franklinford and the foot of Mount Franklin.  [often called the ‘Loddon’ protectorate (a) because the earlier (1840-1 Protectorate) was on the Loddon River (Polodyul or Pul-er-gil yal-loke) 30km to the NW, at Neereman 6km North of Baringhup, and (b) because the current ‘Jim Crow Creek’ catchments was sometimes called the ‘Loddon’, being part of the Loddon catchment).

The last of the Aboriginal people living at the ‘Loddon Aboriginal Station’ in 1863 were forcibly removed to Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve near Healesville, which operated until 1924. In 2019 there are approx. 2,000 Dja Dja Wurrung descendants from around 20 apical ancestors who survived to the 1860s. Henry Harmony Nelson is Uncle Ricky Nelson’s apical ancestor.

To the right is Mount Franklin. Its peak was likely called Lalgambook. Its crater was usually referred to as Lar–ne-barramul, literally ‘place of the emu’, likely on account of the shape of its nest shaped crater. The original names are far from certain.

George Robinson first visited Edward Parker’s new Protectorate station site here (in June 1841) on 19 Nov 1841. He described it as being:

… on one of the sources of the Lodden (sic.), at a place called Willam.be.par.re.mal, a short distance from Lal.gam.book. The appearance of the place on approaching is rather pleasing; it is however surrounded by broken forest ranges containing abundance of game.

Robinson provides several variations of the Aboriginal name in his diary that same week. On 21 Nov 1841 he wrote that: ‘The hill at Loddon station is called Wil.lam.be.par.ra.mal(emu house). The creek or branch of the Lodden (sic) is called Lulgambook’.Robinson wrote on 28 November 1841 that he had:

… visited the crater at the mount called Willum-parramul, otherwise Jem Crow. It is an ancient crater of large dimension. … Had a fine view.

Hepburn climbed its peak soon after his arrival in April 1838 to get a better sense of the local topography. Called (and likely dubbed) ‘Jem Crow Hill’ by Hepburn, most likely because of a popular 1830s Poem, and 1830s minstrel song that referred to it as ‘Jem Crown’ and ‘Jim Crow’ respectively. It became Mount Franklin following a visit by former Van Diemen’s Land Governor, John Franklin in December 1843. The very negative, racist historic connotations of the term ‘Jim Crow’ arguably call for the original name of the Creek and the later name of the mountain (once clarified) to be restored.

PASS the Lime Kiln (on left),operating on the northern edge Aboriginal Protectorate of during the 1840s. It supplied lime via the ‘Limestone Road’ for John Hepburn’s mansion built in 1848-9. Likely the deposit was accumulated from as carbonate rich water from a mineral spring, colloquially referred to as ‘Limestone Spring’ or ‘The Bullfrog’ until it was tapped for spa water tanks built on the site in the 1980s.

STOP 1: The ‘Big Tree’, Guildford

 John Hepburn and family passed through here on the way to Kooroocheang, April 1838.

‘The Big Tree’: one of the largest Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) in Victoria (height 32 metres; basal diameter 3m: age at least 500 years). It has a large branch graft on its northern side. The brass plaque records Burke and Wills camping here on their ill-fated northern expedition.

It is listed as a tree of State significance on the National Trust’s Register of Significant Trees of Victoria for its “outstanding size, curious fusion of branches, as an outstanding example of the species and as an important landmark“. The National Trust regards its conservation as vital to the local community and the State as a whole.

Due to its great age, numerous hollows have formed within the tree, providing habitat for many creatures. This tree is an eco-system which sustains a vast range of bird and animal life including magpies, rosellas, lorikeets, parrots, kookaburras, wood ducks, boobook owls, honey eaters, numerous species of insects, native bees and possums.

Already an ancient giant when the first white invaders arrived in the late 1830s, the Big Tree has played an important part in the cultural and social life of the Guildford community. This tree survives as an important symbol and a link between our community and its traditional owners, the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal people.

John Hepburn likely camped nearby on his way to ‘take up his run’ around Kooroocheang in April 1838.

Welcome to Country & Smoking Ceremony, Dja Dja Wurrung Elder Uncle Ricky Nelson; Welcome by Hepburn Shire Mayor, Don Henderson.

STOP 2: The Loddon Valley at Strangways

This site was considered but rejected as a second Protectorate site in early 1841.

At this point we are on the fertile Loddon River flats. This was a former, important Aboriginal highway. To the south up the ‘Jim Crow Creek’ is a small amount of reasonably good volcanic soil that later became the centre of the former Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate. Opposite is the Guildford plateau, an elevated volcanic plain, which was grassland at the time of contact.

The current road between Newstead and Franklinford followed a narrow tongue of volcanic grassland that would also have been an Aboriginal highway between patches of forest on the older shales and slates.  These river flats are on the same highway that Thomas Mitchell crossed and camped at near present day Newstead in October 1836, later be referred to as ‘Mitchell’s Line’.

During 1837 several pastoralists used this river highway in to explore for new country to invade beyond already ‘taken up areas’. One group including Aitken (at Mount Aitken) swung up past Mount Macedon (Terawait) and Mount Alexander (Leanganook), along the Loddon and back to Corio via Ercildoune. Another group including Thomas Learmonth explored north from Buninyong, via Dowling Forest along the Loddon and back to Melbourne via Kyneton.

The huge quartz pebble to the right of the road came out of the gold bearing gravels on the edge of the Guildford plateau, an indication of how much bigger the stream buried by the basalt was several million years ago.

This area near the former Strangways railway yards (behind Don Hepburn’s house, perhaps a distant relation) became important in the early 1841 as Edward Parker looked for a Plan B right here as the original site at Neereman proved unsuitable. Lyon Campbell and other local squatters strongly objected. The objection was mainly because this area was already taken up by stations and was too close to what had become the main ‘overlanding’ highway on Mitchell’s Line between Sydney and Portland.

Uncle Ricky talks about the big picture of Dja Dja Wurrung people, the Clans, Moieties. Language and Kulin Confederations.

STOP 3: The ‘Major’s Line’

Thomas Mitchell’s October 1836 crossing on the Loddon at Newstead (later the Gold Escort route to Adelaide): Roadside stop opposite Mount Tarrengower.

View north towards Gough’s Range (Robinson & Parker reconnaissance trip, Feb 1840 and Neereman (Nov 1840-June 1841 Protectorate Site) 6km beyond Cairn Curran Reservoir & Baringhup.

We are now pretty much on the ‘Major’s Line’, one marked by the wheel ruts of the huge wagons as they headed back from Portland to Sydney in October 1936. A few days before he had climbed and named Mount Greenock near Talbot. Once of the volcanic plains he took a compass bearing to bring him out south of Mount Alexander, which took him north of Mount Cameron, through Strathlea to Newstead then through Expedition Pass near Chewton.

We know a lot about this area in 1840 because of the incredibly detailed (and accurate) diary records of George Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines (1839-1850) who came here through with Edward Parker in Feb 1840. They were loaned a cart by John Hepburn and ventured down from Hepburn’s Station via the Smeaton Plain, the Stony Rises (near ‘Tuki Trout Farm’), Campbelltown, and Joyce’s Creek to where it joins the Loddon (now beneath Cairn Curran Reservoir) and to Newstead. Below Newstead they described the still massive pools downstream that John Hepburn referred to in February 1840 as ‘the fishponds on the plains’ on account of the huge Murray cod and Macquarie perch in the big water holes downstream of Newstead.

They climbed to the western edge of a rocky range (now Gough’s Range) between Mount Tarrengower and the Loddon, ’20 miles north of Koretanger’ giving them a vantage point, Robinson describes the scene in detail on 21 Feb 1840:

Near to where we stood was the last of the Mameloid [breast-like] hills … red gums, sho oak [Allocasuarina], white gum, honey suckle (Banksia) trees. The low plains were mottled or carpeted with flowers in full blossom, patches from 1 to 2 acres of white everlasting flowers and then patches of an acre or more of yellow … or the beautiful blue flower with clumps of honey suckle and gums, and the pea green reeds of the Lodden (sic), like a broad green ribbon running in a tortuous line among the varigold and beautiful landscape, the glassy surface of the water shining between the branches of the trees.

To the north is Mount Tarrengower, (called ‘Salus’ by Mitchell), thankfully retaining its original name. Where there were no trees there was lots of Kangaroo grass. (Themeda). In many places on this Feb 1840 journey, typically on the edge between the woodland and the plain, Robinson noted many ‘bark huts of the natives’ and ‘ovens’. Just to the north of Cairn Curran Reservoir is Lauchlan McKinnon’s ‘Tarrengower’ Homestead.

Uncle Ricky talks about the relations between the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples, the explorers and the pastoralists.

STOP 4: Roadside stop above Joyce’s Creek (Knee-rarp) opposite Moolort Plains.

This stop is near remnant Buloke (Casuarina) trees, where we discuss the nature and importance of humans living in places where many different ecosystems intersect.

For the next 10 km we drive south along the eastern edge of Joyce’s Creek, a ‘lateral stream between the edge of the Moolort (volcanic) Plains and the Campbelltown Forest (on the old, rocky and relatively infertile Ordovician bedrock). Joyce’s Creek like the Loddon River, was then a well-travelled and settled Aboriginal highway. Robinson reported many camp, huts and ovens ‘where the natives had been’, with many freshwater mussel and emu shells. Robinson was ‘at a loss to account for the [immense number of] wheel and cattle tracks we now met with’ near Strathlea until he realised he was actually on the Major’s Line.

Uncle Ricky talks more about the food resources here.

This area was an ecotone: teeming with food resources in every direction: Emu, Kangaroo and Yam Daisy on the Moolort Plains; Murray cod and Macquarie perch in the massive pools in the Loddon downstream of Newstead to the north; possums and small mammals in the river red gums along Joyce’s Creek and forests to the east; rich fauna and flora in the Banksia and Buloke woodlands Blackfish and freshwater mussels in the creek; 30 large wetlands on the Moolort plains with a whole range of aquatic plants, birds, yabbies.

ON the way south the bald volcanic hills gradually come into view, Powlett Hill to right, then Moorooklye, Stony Rises and Kooroocheang to far left.

STOP 5: Graves associated with the 1840 Middle Creek Massacre

This stop is 1 km north of Campbelltown on the Strathlea Road.

The memorial grave is to the left of the road on private property. On the opposite (west) side of the road verge opposite the graves is a stand of unusual and inedible Osage oranges (Maclura pomifera)

A brass plaque on the grave displays the following text:

HERE LIE THREE UNKNOWN PIONEERS OF THIS DISTRICT.

A COOK ON GLENGOWER STATIONKILLED BY THE ABORIGINES IN 1840.

A TRAVELLER KILLED BY MIS-ADVENTURE BY THE STATION DOGS IN 1841.

AND A YOUNG EMPLOYEE,

DIED FROM NATURAL CAUSES IN 1841.

MAY THEY REST IN PEACE.

The three European people buried in the Pioneer Memorial Graves were all associated with the Glengower run. This spot was first used as a burial ground following an initial disturbing incident and burial by Dugald McLachlan in winter or spring of 1840, and again in 1841.

The third burial, unrelated to the violence associated with the first and second burials, is the grave of the young son of the original informant about the massacre story, Donald (‘Rhu’) McDonnell.

The first burial is that of a cook at the Glengower station who was killed by a band of Jadwajali Aborigines returning to the Grampians after obtaining greenstone axe blanks from Mt William, near Lancefield. The Aborigines are said to have called at the station for food when McLachlan and the stockmen were away mustering sheep for shearing, and only the cook was present in the cookhouse. The cook is alleged to have added Plaster of Paris to a damper he had cooked for the Aborigines, which once ingested would have caused a horrible and painful death. An altercation allegedly followed and the Aborigines are alleged to have murdered the cook, hanging his body in the cookhouse on a meat hook. When McLachlan returned he immediately organised a punitive expedition comprised of Glengower and neighbouring Smeaton Hill stockmen.

McLachlan buried the cook, whose name is not known, at the present gravesite only 800 yards north-east of the homestead. In expectation of a reprisal raid, McLachlan released his savage hunting dogs into the station grounds (he purportedly used for hunting dingo) after nightfall. About a year after the cook’s murder in 1841 the dogs, savaged to death an unnamed visiting itinerant traveller, who was buried beside the murdered cook. The third grave is of George McDonnell, the son of shepherd (and the original informant of the oral history) Donald McDonnell, who died of natural causes in 1841.

McLachlan was well known amongst his contemporaries as very hard and ‘austere’ man. He was very fond of using guns and hunting dogs. He was described as ‘austere’, grasping, ruthless and uncompromising of men and beast even by his contemporaries.

On Middle Creek, Glengower (on private land) is ‘The Bloodhole’, the site of an 1840s Aboriginal massacre that took place approx. 8km to the west.

The Aborigines thought to be those associated with the death of the cook were tracked down with McLachlan’s dogs and they hid in the waterholes on Middle Creek. On seeing the approaching men on horseback with guns, the Aboriginal men jumped into the creek to swim to the other side or hide under water. The mounted men from the station including McLachlan fired on the Aborigines in the water. Some had hollow reeds to breathe through while submerged, which still grow at the site today. By the time the firing stopped at least 12 Aboriginal men were dead and floating in the bloody water. The place (on private property) is still known locally by some residents as ‘The Blood Hole’ or ‘Slaughter Hole’.

STOP 6: Smeaton Plains, Williams Road (do NOT leave the road reserve and enter private land)

  ‘A favourite place for the Aborigines’, described by G. A. Robinson in Feb 1840.

Robinson writes on 14 February 1840 that being a fine and pleasant day, John Hepburn took him to the top of Kooroocheang. Hepburn then:

‘Showed me a plain with some open forest on it, 3 miles [5km] from his house in N [northerly] direction. Said it was a favourite place for the natives. He has seen 30 women on the plains at a time digging murrnong while the men went into the forest to hunt kangaroos, opossums, &c. which are abundant.’

After dinner that same day, being summer the evening would have been light. Robinson:

‘… rode out with Mr Hepburn to the place of the native camp aforementioned. Rode over some beautiful country. The Mameloid [‘breast like’] Hills has a natural appearance when seen from the plains. And so the hills in the distance than when viewed from the top of Koratanger. The trees from Kor.ra.tanger looked diminutive but when we came to them found them large, 2 and 3 feet diameter at the butt, with large umbrageous branches . Well covered with foliage, they stood at a distance of from 20 to 50 to 50 yards and the whole which was about half a mile square, had a park-like appearance.’

Robinson’s use of term ‘park’ to describe what was an Aboriginal Australian woodland was common amongst many British squatters and explorers familiar with parks created in the ‘old country ‘around country houses and estates.

The creators of this deliberately managed Australian park were still living and cooking underneath the trees in this 1840s landscape. Robinson continued:

‘We saw the remains of from 30-40 screens or shelters of boughs where the natives had been. Also several of the native ovens or fireplaces where they baked their murrnong. Some 10 feet in diameter. … Returned through another part of the native camp. Saw some more native huts or screens. Rode round the S end of Koretanger. The dogs killed a native cat, dark color and white spots’.

PASS former Kooroocheang Swamp [private] (on right).

Several oven mounds described by Robinson have been recorded in the vicinity the former Kooroocheang swamp. Jack Sewell recalls plentiful freshwater crayfish in the swamp before it was drained in the 1960s.

There are historic records of the Brolga (Grus rubicunda) nesting around the swamp, indeed the word Kooroocheang is thought to reference the brolga. ‘Turkey Hill Road’ north of Powlett Hill references the former Bustard (Ardeotis australis) common on the local grasslands before the introduction of sheep and cattle as well as  hunting. 

STOP 7: Hepburn Family Private Gravesite

This site must be accessed from a gravel car park on the south side of Estate Lane, below Mount Kooroocheang, Please note that Smeaton House nearby is strictly a private residence.

John Hepburn’s decision to replace his first timber house and commission a huge new, 20 room, double storey mansion was announced in his journal on 2 April 1849. That day his family had shared ‘a pleasure party’ with neighbours on the nearby Kangaroo Hills.

The Smeaton House mansion has for the past 130 years been the private home to the Righetti family. The mansion complete with verandahs on three sides of the lower storey, stables and a coach house was finished by the end of 1850, just before the first discovery of gold at nearby Clunes. Unsurprisingly, the mansion is highly classified by the National Trust but remains private.

The Hepburn family graveyard on a nearby picturesque knoll is now owned and maintained by the National Trust. There is public walking access across privately owned paddocks to the Hepburn Graves via a car park recently constructed south of the cemetery on Estate Lane. John Hepburn was buried here in 1860. The pallbearers at his funeral comprised the men of the Creswick and District Roads Board.

At the time of Hepburn’s death in 1860, just 20 years after Mitchell’s wagons rolled through this Dja Dja Wurrung landscape, the telegraph had arrived and the railway was advancing from Geelong towards Ballarat. The first 1851 gold rush in nearby Clunes was then only nine years old, but by the 1880s had spread for 100km in every direction and totally transformed the landscape and society.

Only three of John Hepburn’s ten children plus his wife Eliza (died 1869) are buried in the family graveyard: including the two children who came overland in 1838, Alice (died 1865) and Thomas (died 1859) as well as George (who was born at the property in 1838 and died 1903). Other Hepburns buried there include the family of John Hepburn’s brother, Benjamin who died in 1888.

Aside from the Hepburn family graves and inscriptions, the exotic trees within the fenced off cemetery as well as the views are sublime (on a fine, sunny day).

One view is towards Mount Moorookyle, another is towards Mount Kooroocheang. A third vista south overlooks the valley of Middle Creek, locally called ‘Captains Creek’, through scattered, remnant, ancient woodland eucalypts.