4
The first time Jardwadjali people encountered the European colonists was probably in 1836, when they would have been alerted to the arrival of Edward Henty at the Muntham station near Casterton and would have witnessed Mitchell and his expedition traversing their country in the colder months. Already, in around 1830, a smallpox epidemic had spread through the Indigenous population of western Victoria.1 The pastoral invasion of the northern extent of their country, around Gariwerd, began properly in 1840, with the arrival of Robert Briggs at Ledcourt. Around Horsham, one colonist reported that, when he arrived in 1841 on the Wimmera River, the Jardwadjali people met there had never seen a white man, and their discovery of Mitchell’s tracks had frightened them. Likewise, the first contact Djab wurrung people had with Europeans was with Mitchell and his men in the spring of 1836, but their relationships with groups to the south make it almost impossible they had not heard of European whalers on the coast and the presence of colonists around Port Phillip Bay from 1835. The initial reaction of both groups to the Europeans was evasion and reconnaissance. As the pastoral invasion commenced soon after Mitchell’s expedition, they came into more direct contact with the Europeans.2
Indigenous knowledge of the country proved indispensable to European colonists coming to grips with an Antipodean environment, and exchanges of this knowledge were not uncommon. Settlers trusted Aboriginal ecological knowledge and understanding of the country. There is evidence that the pastoral invasion of Gariwerd was no different. Writing to his father in May 1845, Richard Bunbury observed that the long, harsh drought in southeastern Australia ‘continued with great severity until the beginning of this month and has done a good deal of mischief in different parts of the country, many thousands of lambs have perished from the want of grass for the ewes; the Blacks say we are going to have three dry seasons and I am inclined to believe them.’3
Apart from the sharing of knowledge, trade and exchange occurred between Aboriginal Australians and Europeans. From as early as 1835, there had been attempts to establish formal trade relationships with Indigenous people in the Port Phillip area, accompanied by the hope that such agreements might improve relations between Europeans and Indigenous people. At Gariwerd in the 1840s, Charles Hall remembered that ‘One old villainous-looking black of my acquaintance used to catch large bundles of quail, which he would barter freely for suet. The kidney fat of a sheep would purchase a dozen brace [of stubbie quail, Coturnix pectoralis]’.4 He also observed how Aboriginal women fished for yabbies (Cherax destructor) ‘with their toes and yam-sticks’, and how they ‘exchanged them for the dainties of civilized life.’ Hall noted that a ‘large tin-dishful might be obtained in barter by a small expenditure of tea and sugar’, and said that the yabbies, ‘when treated with a certain degree of gastronomic science formed a not unwelcome change of diet from mutton chops or salt beef, which in those days was the almost unvaried food of the “cormorant squattocracy”’.5 Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people also came to work on pastoral stations, and lived with Europeans. Much of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour England in 1868 was made up of Jardwadjali men, while marngrook, a probable precursor to Australian Rules football, was played across the Gariwerd area. There were many instances of friendly and amicable relationships between colonists and the people of Gariwerd. Charles Hall said that, despite attacks on livestock, the ‘natives were made useful’ and were ‘generally made welcome at the stations [in and around Gariwerd] for the most part, and they made themselves useful in many ways, as for instance stripping bark, finding lost horses, and in acting as guides and messengers’.6
The broader story is one of dispossession. At Rosebrook, in the north-western Gariwerd ranges adjacent to Wartook, one colonist – Phillip Rose – noted in 1853 that since taking up the station ten years beforehand ‘I have known as many as 400 blacks assembled – different tribes – on this and neighbouring stations at one time’. But he said, ‘few are remaining – about 30 only of one tribe … in 1843, I think there were over 100’.7 This process was undoubtedly violent.
Frontier violence and dispossession
John G. Robertson, who had arrived from Scotland some years after the first Europeans and took a run of land on Jardwadjali country to the west of Gariwerd, described the effects on the Indigenous population to Governor Charles La Trobe in 1856:
In all my rambles I have never seen but five natives in a state of nature. I have never thought them numerous. I am sure I have never seen 500 all put together from the Grampians to the sea. I do not mean to say that there were not more, for if I were to believe what I have heard of as having been killed in different affrays with the settlers, they would amount to more than that number. I have on four different occasions, when [Aboriginal people] committed murders, gone out with others in search of them, and now thank my God I never fell in with them, or there is no doubt I should be like many others, and feel that sting which must always be felt by the most regardless of the deed done to those poor creatures; and in twenty years more there will not be one in the Portland District.8
The coming of European agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century brought settlers and Indigenous Australians into direct competition for the fertile resources of western Victoria, with fatal consequences. Mitchell would write in his journals that the introduction of livestock had been ‘by itself sufficient to produce the extirpation of the native race, by limiting their means of existence; and this must work such extensive changes in Australia as never entered into the contemplation of the local authorities.’ The European colonisation of Australia seemed ‘to involve, as an inevitable result, the extirpation of the aborigines; and it may well be pleaded, in extenuation of any adverse feelings these may show towards the white men, that these consequences, although so little considered by the intruders, must be obvious to the natives, with their usual acuteness, as soon as cattle enter on their territory.’ ‘Silently, but surely,’ wrote Mitchell, ‘that extirpation of aborigines is going forward in grazing districts, even where protectors of aborigines have been most active; and in Van Diemen’s Land, the race has been extirpated, even before that of the kangaroos, under an agency still more destructive.’9 Charles Hall wrote of his time at Gariwerd in the early 1840s that:
At the period of my entrance into the colony of Australia Felix, in almost every part of it the mutual relation of the natives and settlers, at first, was one of distrust and violence. This, it was stated, arose from the attempts of the blacks to steal sheep, or other property of value, from the settlers. These robberies were often accompanied with violence and murder, committed in the treacherous manner common to most savages. Such occurrences naturally led to reprisals, in which the superior arms and energy of the settlers and of their servants told with fatal effect upon the native race. Instances of this deplorable result might often be observed by the explorer in the early days of the settlement of the colony.10
In the Gariwerd region, frontier conflict between settlers and Indigenous Australians was particularly acute in the early 1840s as significant numbers of would-be squatters travelled overland or across Bass Strait with their flocks of sheep, hoping to secure a pastoral claim on the increasingly well-known grasslands of Australia Felix. An ongoing drought in south-east Australia also precipitated growing competition for scarce resources that were becoming divided among an increasingly large population and growing numbers of livestock. When Hall first arrived in the region, he remembered that
a shepherd came up and entered into conversation with me. He held a carbine in the place of a crook, and an old regulation pistol was stuck in his belt, instead of the more classic pastoral pipe – pastoral pursuits in Australia being attended, at this time, with circumstances more calculated to foster a spirit of war than one of music. After some conversation he led me to a waterhole, where the skeleton of a native exposed by the shrinking of the water in the summer heat lay on the mud. There was a bullet-hole through the back of the skull. ‘He was shot in the water,’ the man told me, ‘as he was a-trying to hide himself after a scrimmage! There was a lot more t’other side.’
Hall continued to relate how he was told he ‘might see the bones a-sticking up out of the ground close to the big fallen gum-tree, where they’d been stowed away all of a heap. “A grave good enough”, he took occasion to assure me, for the “sneaking, murdering, black cannibals.”’ He also remembered how, elsewhere in the region, ‘when looking for the horses one morning, after camping out, my black boy came back, his complexion changed to yellow with fright; taking me away to a short distance, he showed me three or four bodies, partially concealed by logs. There were numerous tracks of horses round about. He explained the occurrence in his way “I believe blackfellow bimbulalee sheep all about. Then whitefellow gilbert and put ’em along o’ fire.” Every station had some tragic tale connected with this subject.’11 This pattern – the stealing of livestock by Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung people, which inflicted economic damage on the pastoralists and was followed by violent reprisals – was re-enacted across the region at various scales; Gariwerd was an ideal location to escape with flocks, and therefore also the site of numerous massacres. Rose’s testimony provides a stark account of Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung resistance:
Brodie and Cruikshank. Wonwondah, River Wimmera, taken up in February 1844, with 3,300 sheep. Lost by the blacks, during the first year, 1,800 sheep. The extra expenses while forming the station, guns, extra labour, etc., two shepherds to each flock, and additional hut-keepers, 1,000; added 18,000 sheep during the year. The blacks were exceedingly numerous and troublesome, Mount Arapiles being their headquarters when with stolen stock. Their numbers are now greatly diminished.
Alfred Taddy Thomson. Fiery Creek taken up in 1841, having been five months on the road, with 4,000 sheep; lost 300 under Mount William by the blacks, who were so troublesome as to cause two shepherds to be with each flock, and at times the men refused to shepherd from fear of the blacks.12
Hall had written that the act of stealing sheep seemed to him not to be motivated by criminality, but perhaps by acquisitiveness, or, he said ‘the diplomatists of their tribes may perhaps have pleaded justification – that their kangaroos and emus were driven away by the flocks and herds of the settlers – for reprisals upon an invading enemy, stimulating a sort of guerrilla warfare’.13 Some prospective squatters thus arrived in the region with great apprehension. ‘Both in town and also in my trip up the country I have been making enquiries about the Blacks and their habits and character’, wrote one pastoralist who would eventually run cattle on the plains to the west of Gariwerd. ‘I am convinced that [my brother] is perfectly right in all his warnings and accounts of them, never trust a native & never allow them near your house was his advice to me over & over again,’ he said. But, he would soon learn, ‘No number of blacks in this part of the country will expressly attack even a single armed man.’14 In response to the frequently violent logic of colonialism, the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people of the Gariwerd region nevertheless did resist European agriculturalists throughout the frontier period, by the end of which at least two-thirds of the Port Phillip District’s Aboriginal population had been lost. A quarter of these deaths were attributable to settler violence.
Resistance to the Europeans on Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali country emerged when the invasion began in 1838 and violence, which ranged along a continuum from individual murders to larger-scale guerrilla warfare and planned massacres, was at its peak between 1840 and 1842. Resistance had largely been broken by 1845, but a heavy toll had been exacted.
When the Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, George A. Robinson, toured the Gariwerd area in the winter of 1841, he was told many such stories. On 25 July 1841, for example, Robinson was informed that two Jacalet people – whose country was in the area of the La Rose and Mokepilly stations – had recently been shot and killed by Hall’s cook, a man named Bill, at his outstation near present-day Halls Gap. Robinson wrote in his journal that ‘These reports of natives being murdered, shot by white ruffians is truly distressing. The natives are in grief in consequence … The natives at Hall’s were shot at Hall’s hut; Hall was present. The natives shewed me how they acted, said they told them to be off and pushed them out and then took up musket and shot the two men as they were going away. They took away all their things and put them in the fire.’15
Days later, on 29 July, a Djab wurrung man whose nickname was Good Morning Bill, on account of his habit of greeting the mountain each morning (his real name was Bood bood yarramin, or Poinmoin arrermin), and an unknown Aboriginal woman were shot and killed near Mount William by a white shepherd, Tarenbe, from William Kirk’s Burrumbeep station on the plains to the east of the ranges.16 Tarenbe, also recorded as Tarabe or Tanabe, had a notorious reputation: in June 1841, a Teerel balug (Djab wurrung) man, ‘Old Man Jim’, had been shot at Kirk’s station, and just after the shooting at Hall’s outstation in the mountains, Tarenbe had shot a man, Parringurnin, and two women, Winnowarerermin and Arrerenurnin on 23 July. On 25 July, it was revealed Tarenbe had killed yet another Djab wurrung man, Cowarremin.17 Recorded in Robinson’s journals alone are the deaths of least 32 Aboriginal people killed in violence at Mount Sturgeon, Burrumbeep, Halls Gap, Lexington, La Rose, Mokepilly, and Barton – all in the mountains or their nearby plains – in the space of under two years. He encountered a frontier culture that was frequently ambivalent towards local Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people. At times, the settlers were outwardly hostile and aggressive. On one occasion during his visit to Gariwerd a group of pastoral workers went to Robinson’s camp and began ‘interfering with the natives at my servant’s tent, a short distance from my own.’ He continues:
Their language was extremely offensive … they had set my servants at defiance and treated my messages with ridicule and were endeavouring by every means to incite the natives to outrage … They had come with the avowed purpose of inducing the natives to hostilities, in which case the whites, as there was a large assemblage at the hut, would have had recourse to their arms. There was a large quantity and a massacre of the blacks would have been the result.18
As Chief Protector, Robinson found that many settlers in the Gariwerd area were antagonistic. The men who had attempted to provoke hostilities had turned on him, also, threatening to ‘knock [his] bloody head off’ should he interfere.19 This enmity was likewise expressed by Richard Bunbury, whose station was at the foot of Mount William. He told his father in 1843 how, at a station to the north, ‘a whole flock of sheep was taken [by Aboriginal people]’. He complained that ‘The government neither can nor will do anything for the protection of the settlers, but they are ready to prosecute them if they treat the blacks harshly.’20 European deaths were more thoroughly investigated and documented, however. On Djab wurrung country between 1840 and 1847, seven European settlers were killed in conflicts with Aboriginal people, and fifteen wounded. At the Lexington, La Rose, and Mokepilly station in November 1840, for instance, a shepherd named John Collicot was killed by three Djab wurrung people. Collicot had been ‘a great blackguard’, and Robinson was told by an Aboriginal man, Lingurnin, that the shepherd had ‘killed two natives, one man, one woman, and the natives killed him for it’.21 On 27 January 1842, the Sydney papers reported the death of a pastoral worker at the Mount Sturgeon station:
About three weeks ago, a hutkeeper on the station of Mr Thomas Wooley, at the Grampians, went out from the homestead in charge of some cows, and has not since been heard of, as he was intimately acquainted with the bush in the vicinity, he could not have lost his way, and as he had with him a well-known axe which was afterwards seen in the possession of one of the blacks it is almost certain he has fallen victim to those blood-thirsty savages.22
In response to such violence, or to Jardwadjali or Djab wurrung people stealing sheep, colonists would launch reprisal attacks. When Robinson was in the region, he was told by a ‘native youth’ that Horatio Spencer Wills at the Lexington, La Rose and Mokepilly stations, Alfred Thompson from Mount William, Richard Bunbury at Barton and Robert Briggs from Ledcourt station, had been responsible for the deaths of many Aboriginal men and women.23 Wills had killed three men, Mittecum, Wobberrermin, and Woottecoerrermin, and two women, Coombernin and Inboter. There were more killings at these properties, although their perpetrators were unknown.24 Rumours surrounded Bunbury and his workers, too. Into the 1840s, Robinson was aware that conflict and violence were a problem at Bunbury’s Barton station at the base of Mount William, where Djab wurrung people stole and speared his sheep and reprisal attacks ensued. He had met one of the Barton stock keepers who ‘damned and abused the government’ and threatened to ‘shoot all the bloody blacks in the place’ if Robinson ‘interfered’. Djab wurrung people had told Robinson that two of Bunbury’s men had attended a corroberee, fired at them, and abducted women. One particularly violent worker was ‘Bill the Native’, an Australian-born stock keeper Bunbury kept in his employment. In 1842, Robinson heard that no Aboriginal people ‘were allowed there [at Barton] when Bill the Native was there; he shot them.’25 Wills, Thompson, Bunbury and Briggs – the men who laid claim to vast swathes of land along the eastern slopes of Gariwerd and the plains below – ‘shot natives, plenty natives all gone too much boo white man,’ said a young Aboriginal man at the time.26
In some instances, the violence was on a much greater scale. Many decades later rumours persisted in the region. In 1928, one relative of an early Gariwerd family, the D’Altons, would write in The Australasian:
The run called ‘Barton,’ at the foot of Mount William, was first owned by a man whose name has escaped my memory [Richard Bunbury], but he was instrumental in the almost total destruction of a tribe of aborigines that proved troublesome, spearing sheep and cattle on the station. An old Stawellite, who was an employee on the station, recounted the incident in my hearing. He said that the blacks were enticed into the gully, between the Red man’s Bluff and Mount William, and shot down by station hands, very few escaping. There was no inquiry made into the tragedy at the time, and the sheep-spearing ended.27
The allegations of this significant massacre, wrote a defender of Bunbury, tended to appear in ‘the reckless statements of disgruntled and dismissed employees. What bad treatment of the blacks there was can in all cases be set down to the account of the station employees, who in those early days were of the lowest class, being mainly expirees from Van Diemen’s Land.’ The same individual who came to the defence of Bunbury’s reputation in the pages of The Australasian claimed, inaccurately, that Horatio Wills’ ‘name and fame are also above suspicion’.28
On the western side of the ranges, in Jardwadjali country, a similar war was fought between settlers and Indigenous Australians. A squatter who took up land on what became the Glenisla station told Charles La Trobe later that ‘during my residence at the Glenelg the aboriginal natives were very troublesome, constantly taking sheep in large lots by force from the shepherds or stealing them from the fold at night.’ He recalled that:
I had to follow them three different times driving my sheep away, but each time overtook them, after several days’ harassing tracking, and took from them all the sheep they had not eaten or destroyed; but not without running considerable risk in doing so, and having received several wounds from their spears and boomerangs. The last time in particular they broke the legs of about sixty of my sheep, leaving the poor animals to lie in a heap in a small yard in, of course, the greatest agony; and whilst I was examining them my horse and I were both severely wounded by a discharge of spears from a body of the natives in ambush.29
As elsewhere, economic sabotage was the focus of Jardwadjali strategies of resistance. In early August 1842, a hutkeeper at the Fulham station near Balmoral, west of the Victoria Range, approached his employer, Francis Desailly, and told him that a shepherd by the name of John Hickey had not been seen since the previous evening. He said a flock of sheep was missing, and that another shepherd had found a broken spear on the property. Recognising the tactics of the Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung, Desailly set out in pursuit. He travelled east from his property ‘into the heart of the Grampians’ for about 70 km, finding clothing belonging to the shepherd along the way, until he found a group of about thirty men, women, and children with over a thousand sheep. Desailly reported that he was ‘obliged to fire on them to recover the sheep’ as the Jardwadjali, he said, had a ‘disposition to fight – one of them having thrown a tomahawk at the head of one of the party which he narrowly escaped.’ Typical of the frequently opaque nature of evidence given regarding frontier violence in western Victoria, Desailly told police that he ‘did not see any of the natives killed, but supposed there must have been one or two men shot.’ After returning what sheep he could recover to Fulham, Desailly went in search of the shepherd John Hickey, whose body he found with ‘a large gash in the back of his head inflicted by a tomahawk.’30 The Colonial Observer in Sydney reported that the ‘lifeless body’ of Hickey had been ‘discovered in a state of nudity … the body was much mutilated, being covered with spear wounds, and the back of the head laid open.’31
A year before this, as recalled by John G. Robertson in a letter to Charles La Trobe, the Whyte brothers had slaughtered the Konongwootong gundidj clan of the Jardwadjali in 1841. ‘Three days after the Whytes arrived, the natives of this creek, with some others, made up a plan to rob the new comers, as they had done the Messrs. Henty before,’ he said.
They watched an opportunity, and cut off 50 sheep from Whyte Brothers’ flocks, which were soon missed, and the natives followed; they had taken shelter in an open plain with a long clump of tea-tree, which the Whyte Brothers’ party, seven in number, surrounded, and shot them all but one. Fifty-one men were killed, and the bones of the men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at the Fighting Hill.32
The Whyte brothers’ massacre of this Jardwadjali clan became well known in the Gariwerd district. Bunbury, having only just arrived in the district in 1841, wrote to his father and set out what he knew of the massacre, as if to emphasise the dangerous nature of pastoralism in the region. The details differ, but the outline remains: the Whytes had slaughtered at least an entire Jardwadjali clan. ‘Three brothers of the name Whyte were owners of a large sheep station between Portland Bay and Port Fairy, one night a tribe settled in their neighbourhood & known to most 43 fighting men came down to an outstation, watched till the shepherd drove the flock out in the morning then speared him & carried off the whole flock’, he wrote. The Whytes heard what had happened and ‘assembled their people and pursued the natives … in one of the steep wooded ranges they found them busy cooking some of the sheep they had killed with the other regularly encamped in a bush yard as well arranged as a shepherd could have done it.’ Breathlessly, Bunbury continued to recount to his father what happened next:
a skirmish ensued the blacks were driven back with the loss of several of their number and the sheep carried off toward the station; the blacks however having mustered all their force returned to the attack and the fight was continued for some time the Whytes & their party sheltering themselves behind the trees from the spears and firing with great effect on their less wary assailants. Five times the blacks returned to the attack, one of the Mr Whytes & three or four of their people were wounded, but at the last attack the blacks could only muster nine fighting men, only two of whom escaped, 41 out of 42 had fallen.33
The colonists had pursued their victims into Gariwerd, and the massacre is likely to have taken place in the vicinity of the Chimney Pots in the west. Considering the numbers, it is most probable that the victims belonged to the Ngarum Ngarum balug or the Pellerwin balug groups to the south-east or were Tukallut balug, Whiteburer gundidj or Yaninborer balug Jardwadjali people from the Victoria Range.34
In 1845, eleven pastoralists in the Wimmera wrote to the Governor of the colony, Charles La Trobe. They explained to him that they had ‘brought their stock from the settled districts with intention of quietly and inoffensively locating themselves on the River Wimmera’, but now ‘find from the aggressions of the aborigines (who have in no way been interfered with) that their own and their servants lives are endangered’. The pastoralists claimed that ‘without protection from the Government being afforded them’ they would be ‘ruined’ or forced to relocate, but ‘the settled districts already extending so far they know not where to go if obliged to remove.’ They called on La Trobe to send help: ‘Your memorialists there fore respectfully but strongly call on you as the administrator of the government of this part of the colony and solicit that you will direct Capt. Dana and a strong detachment of the native police to repair without delay to the lower part of the River Wimmera, and remain during the winter.’ Quite remarkably, the pastoralists also hope that La Trobe will call on the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Portland Bay District to ‘permit your memorialists to hold the runs they now occupy free of licence’, and suggest that they might be compensated, ‘although in a very small degree for the losses they have already and will continue to sustain from the thieving propensities of the natives.’35
The so-called Native Police Corps were paramilitary units, usually led by a white officer, deployed across the Australian mainland in the nineteenth century. Mounted Indigenous troops were armed with a range of weapons, including rifles and swords, and were detached to undertake various tasks, from escort missions to punitive attacks on Aboriginal communities. In the Port Phillip District, the Corps was primarily involved in capturing and destroying ‘dissident’ Indigenous groups. To reduce desertion, troops were usually taken from Indigenous nations distant from their place of deployment. The Native Police Corps were cheaper to maintain than the regular police or armed forces, and it is often claimed they possessed a superior ability to track Aboriginal groups through unfamiliar frontier territory, including difficult terrain such as Gariwerd. They were an effective instrument in achieving the colonial goal to divide and conquer Indigenous populations on frontier lands.
By the end of July 1845, La Trobe had dispatched H. E. P. Dana and a ‘strong corps’ of Native Police to the Wimmera, north of Gariwerd. Six men were stationed on the Wimmera River, and four more at the Richardson River; both parties were to patrol the surrounding countryside. Earlier that month, Dana reported that ‘the natives attacked Messrs. Baillie and Hamilton’s station, on a lake about 15 miles from Mt. Arapiles, and succeeded in driving off 600 of their sheep. Mr Baillie immediately proceeded to his station, and sent to me for assistance.’ Dana continued to relate how he and his Native Police tracked those responsible:
After some difficulty we found the track of the sheep that the natives had driven away, and followed a distance of about 30 miles through extensive heath and scrub. At about this distance the advance of my party came up with a number of sheep with their legs broken, and at a distance of a mile found 200 sheep in a bush yard, and a little further up came the natives with a number of sheep in their possession.
Dana wrote of how, upon seeing the Native Police, ‘the natives uttered a yell and commenced threatening us with their spears, and threw several waddies and other missiles at us. Finding my party in some danger, I ordered the men to fire’. Dana’s men shot and killed three people and wounded several others. ‘It is with very great satisfaction I have to report that the conduct of the men merited great praise for their coolness and determination on the occasion,’ Dana told La Trobe, also noting that ‘the ringleader of the natives was cut down, after a long resistance, by Yupton, a corporal of the native police.’36 In an earlier confrontation on Jardwadjali land, Dana and his men had pursued a group of Aboriginal people, who had stolen sheep, for four days through Victoria Valley and into the ranges, up to Mount Zero, where they attacked about 30 people and killed four.37
With the arrival of the Native Police, and continued violence along with the spread of disease and removal of access to hunting grounds and plant food resources, resistance in the Gariwerd area was largely broken by 1845. On Djab wurrung country, it is estimated that at least 70 per cent of the population had died of disease, diet changes, and conflict. Likewise, the figure on Jardwadjali was around 80 per cent. Probably a quarter had been shot by the colonists.38
The final phase of dispossession was characterised less by the guerrilla warfare of the 1840s and more by exploitation and dislocation. During the 1850s and 1860s, survivors could still be found working on and living around stations around Gariwerd, especially in the wake of goldrush-related labour shortages on pastoral land. In 1858, after a Select Committee recommended the formation of a reserve system and the creation of local guardians, the few hundred Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people left in western Victoria were provided with food, clothing and other items by pastoralists in the area. Many were found living on the edges of western Victorian townships and on gold diggings. In the 1870s, the remaining Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people were removed to reserves at Framlingham, Lake Condah and Ebenezer.39
The social and political legacies of Aboriginal dispossession in the Gariwerd region took many decades to re-enter popular historical consciousness, but the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali history and heritage of the ranges would, by the end of the twentieth century, become one of their defining features in the public mind. On the other hand, colonists in the middle of the nineteenth century were quick to observe the ecological transformations that occurred in the wake of such a widespread disruption to the ways in which the land had been managed for generations.
Environmental change in the European era
The Europeans at first were delighted with and deeply curious about the environments of the Gariwerd mountains and their surrounds. Charles Hall took great pleasure in the indigenous flora and fauna of the mountains. He wrote that there was ‘a wonderful charm in exploring country thus uninhabited except by the natives and wild birds and animals’. He recalled how ‘Herds of kangaroo abounded in the forests, and emus grazed over the plains, in some cases so tame as to approach the rider with a strange gaze of curiosity. The creeks were then all fringed with reeds and rushes, undevoured by hungry cows and gaunt working bullocks. These reeds and rushes formed a beautiful edging to the dark solemn pools overhung by the water-loving gum-trees, where wild fowl abounded, as the plains did with quail and turkeys.’ Hall remembered that he
had tame emu chickens performing their strange juvenile antics round my reed mia-mia, yellow-striped and downy little objects, difficult to be recognised as the sources from which future mature emus were to grow. A female kangaroo was a familiar intimate of my hut, and on excellent terms with the dogs that had murdered its poor mother. Wild ducks, geese, and swans were constant visitors upon the water-hole opposite my door, and occasionally a pelican, or spoon-bill, appeared as a rarity.40
Almost a century after the first European colonists, James Cowell lamented how the settlers arrived on Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali country and ‘had entered their domain with his sheep to pillage that which nature had bequeathed to her servants. He laughed and shot at their uncivilization: he shot their food, his sheep ate the glades bare and drove their game to deeper seclusion of the ranges.’ Cowell observed of Gariwerd in The Horsham Times in 1938 that ‘With white man’s sheep came destruction of this verdant growth: wide areas were cleared to permit the growth of grass; tracks were cut through the walls of ti-tree and heath; timber was felled and nature held at bay. The whites brought with them the danger of fire, but this menace was being counteracted by the denuding of the valley.’ Speaking with the old settlers of the region, Cowell argued that ‘From these men of experience we learn that if the squatters’ sheep and cattle are taken from these hills, nature will gladly take the opportunity of restoring the denuded country to its natural state of profusion and wilderness, but will not take into account the carelessness of the white man’s fires. The days when stretches of bush were just so much more than land are gone, and we are beginning to wake to the fact that soon there will be very little virgin territory left.’41
Cowell has left us with a poetic lament for the changes wrought by the colonists, but he also provides a useful outline of the nature of some of these transformations. Their pastoral enterprises left the land denuded, he said, and the squatters hunted local indigenous fauna; to this we might add that, beyond livestock, the Europeans had introduced a range of other plant and animal species to the region. They also, suggests Cowell, interrupted the established fire regime, which in turn had ecological consequences.
The first waves of squatters in the region left the mountains largely untouched. The mountains themselves would, however, be exploited for their natural resources more intensively from the turn of the century. In the early years, the ranges formed natural boundaries for pastoral properties – Glenisla was bounded to the east by the Victoria Range, for example, while Yarram Yarram and Mount William ran up against the Serra and Mount William Ranges to their west, and it was the plains below that were used intensively for sheep and cattle. Although fences were all but absent in the first years, except for small stables and enclosures, squatters used sheets of bark from perhaps hundreds of trees to roof their sheds, stables and houses. Apart from this use of local trees, most of the grazing lands were comparatively open around Gariwerd and generally did not require clearing. The squatters’ interest was in the quality of pasture, which was to provide the food for their grazing stock.
As his expedition party first approached the mountains from the east, Mitchell wrote of ‘the finest tracts of grassy forest land we had ever seen. The whole country recently crossed was good, but this was far better … the country before us was open, sloping and green.’ They had come across ‘huge trees of ironbark and stringybark’ and ‘some fine forest-hills’, which punctuated an otherwise ‘very fine open, dry and grassy flat’. As Mitchell neared the mountains, he crossed ‘hills of trap-rock which were lightly wooded and covered with the finest grass in great abundance’ and ‘a plain of the very finest open forest-land’. From the peaks of Mount William, he looked southward and saw ‘plains clear of timber’, and as his party travelled north along the ranges to Mount Arapiles, he described ‘good firm ground on which there was open forest of box and gumtrees’. From atop Arapiles, looking north, Mitchell saw ‘open forest land and various fine sheets of water’, and the country around the Wimmera ‘appeared to be undulated, open, and grassy’. When the expedition turned south, they travelled through some forested land which ‘opened into grassy and level plains, variegated with belts and clumps of lofty trees giving to the whole the appearance of a park’.42
This thinly-wooded verdure – the product, to some extent, of generations of Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung land management – was precisely the kind of landscape sought after by nineteenth century pastoralists. Prior to their arrival, grasslands in western Victoria were dominated by wallaby (Austrodanthonia caespitosa), spear (Austrostipa spp.), tussock (Poa labillardieri), and kangaroo (Themeda australis) grasses. Small herbs were in abundance as tussocks, mats, rosettes and tubers, and orchids and lilies were also present.43
The region would be grazed so intensively that the pastoral industry began to transform the grasses and soils of the plains within years of its establishment. John Robertson, who would come to lament the violent dispossession of Indigenous Australia, took up land to the west of Gariwerd – on country belonging to Kerrebil gundij people, who were Jardwadjali speakers – in March 1840. A botanist and naturalist from Scotland, he had a keen eye for the landscape he had come to inhabit and for the ecological transformations the Europeans were beginning to set in motion. ‘When I arrived through the thick forest-land from Portland to the edge of the Wannon country, I cannot express the joy I felt at seeing such a splendid country before me where my little all that I was driving before me was to feed’, recalled Robertson, fondly, some years later.
The whole of the Wannon had been swept by a bush fire in December, and there had been a heavy fall of rain in January (which has happened less or more for this last thirteen years), and the grasses were about four inches high, of that lovely dark green; the sheep had no trouble to fill their bellies; all was eatable; nothing had trodden the grass before them. I could neither think nor sleep for admiring this new world to me who was fond of sheep.
The official recorded carrying capacity of Robertson’s 4588 ha was, according to government reports, around 6000 sheep and 40 cattle, but he wrote elsewhere that he usually kept 8000 to 10 000 sheep when fully stocked. In heavily stocked runs and paddocks, especially those with significant water supplies, livestock ate plant cover and compacted and pulverised the soil; their faeces and urine rendered patches of ground unsuitable for plant growth. Nutrients and topsoil, crucial to agricultural productivity, were lost. Within three or four years, Robertson had noticed the impact grazing had had on the land. He described how ‘Many of our herbaceous plants began to disappear from the pasture land; the silk-grass [possibly Vulpia bromoides] began to show itself in the edge of the bush track, and in patches here and there on the hill.’ Robertson continued observe that ‘The patches have grown larger every year; herbaceous plants and grasses give way for the silk-grass and the little annuals, beneath which are annual peas, and die in our deep clay soil with a few hot days in spring, and nothing returns to supply their place until later in the winter following.’ The degradation of the landscape had, for Robertson, become readily apparent by the early 1850s:
the long deep-rooted grasses that held our strong clay hill together have died out; the ground is now exposed to the sun, and it has cracked in all directions, and the clay hills are slipping in all directions; also the sides of precipitous creeks – long slips, taking trees and all with them. When I first came here, I knew of but two landslips, both of which I went to see; now there are hundreds found within the last three years … The clay is left perfectly bare in summer. The strong clay cracks; the winter rain washes out the clay; now mostly every little gully has a deep rut; when rain falls it runs off the hard ground, rushes down these ruts, runs into the larger creeks, and is carrying earth, trees, and all before it. Over Wannon country is now as difficult a ride as if it were fenced. Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with tussocky grass like a land marsh.
Robertson himself lamented that ‘the silk-grass has made over my run, I will not be able to keep the number of sheep the run did three years ago, and as a cattle station it will be still worse,’ and continued to warn that ‘this part of the country will not carry the stock that is in it at present … for pastoral purposes the lands here are getting of less value every day, that is, with the kind of grass that is growing in them, and will carry less sheep and far less cattle.’44 Another pastoralist in western Victoria described how, in the swampy landscapes to the south-west of Gariwerd, ‘Great difficulty was experienced in riding at any pace exceeding … a jog-trot. The untrodden sward … was literally comparable to a bed of sponge; our horses sank to the fetlocks at every step.’ However, he had said, ‘No sooner had the rich native pastures been well fed down and, as a consequence, every square inch of land continually impressed with … little hoofs of sheep, that the whole of the occupied country began to assume a totally different aspect. A two years occupation in most instances rendered a station so firm that horse racing, kangaroo, emu and dingo hunting … formed one of the principal sources of amusement to the light-hearted settlers.’45 Of Ledcourt, in the northern ranges, said a pastoralist, ‘It is doubtful if this run has improved, being of a wet nature, a coarse grass having taken place of the natural grass and herbs. The kangaroo still plentiful at the foot of the mountains.’46 The overall impact on the plains around Gariwerd, especially in the southern areas, was the almost complete loss of kangaroo grass, which disappears with grazing, and reduced densities of wallaby grasses; these were replaced with introduced species, as well as clovers, thistles and cape-weed. One of the few remnant areas of the original grasslands could still be found around Dunkeld by the 1970s (Plate 4.1).47 By the end of the 1840s, the Mount Sturgeon Plains station regularly employed people to seek out, cut down and cook with thistles.48
Elsewhere on the plains, as Cowell suggested, trees were cleared for pasture to grow. Further to the south of Gariwerd, near present-day Hamilton, one person remarked in 1903 of a stretch of countryside that was ‘originally covered with a dense growth of honeysuckles, of which scarcely one remains. The grass has thickened greatly, and is now a fine sheep-pasture.’ He continued:
The change in this part of the country is astonishing to one who knew it in the old squatting days. Fully three-fourths of the timber has disappeared, and where formerly the grass was somewhat sour and thin one now sees a close sward of excellent sheep feed. The country is becoming so open that ere long the landholders will have to set about establishing shelter plantations.49
If evidence of the ways in which the first wave of pastoralism altered the landscape stops us short of applying Cowell’s suggestion that with ‘white man’s sheep came destruction of this verdant growth’ to the entire region, we are on firmer ground with regard to other plant and animal species introduced to the mountains in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some settlers in the Gariwerd region looked upon their adopted country and, enthused though they were, still saw an absence of the creatures they had enjoyed at home. The Highland pursuits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were reported widely in the press in Britain and beyond, and, in the minds and art galleries of the landed gentry, the Scottish hinterlands became synonymous with the hunt. The newly crowned lairds of the Port Phillip District were enthusiastic to follow their example.
In 1869, one local resident wrote the editor of The Australasian that he thought ‘The country in the vicinity of the Grange, as Hamilton was first named by Sir Thomas Mitchell, is admirably adapted for the reception of hares, whilst the Grampian Range seems, by the harbour it would offer to any of the cervine tribe, almost to force itself on the notice of anyone accustomed to the pursuit of deer at home, and acquainted with the habits of that race of animals.’ He said that, when he had suggested the introduction of deer in the 1840s, local squatters thought it might exacerbate the problem of ‘the hordes of wild dogs then occupying the ranges’. Now that the ‘wild dogs’ had been hunted out of existence in and around Gariwerd, ‘there are remote sequestered places which [sheep] do not care to attain to, full of herbage, covert, and springs so admirably adapted for the resort of deer’. The author now ‘frequently wondered [why] the Messrs. Chirnside, who have considerable interest in stations occupying portions of the Victoria Range, have not deported to the Wannon some of the red deer from the Werribee, where, I understand, they possess the nucleus of a herd.’50
In New South Wales and Tasmania from the 1820s and 1830s, Scottish stag hunts had inspired the importation of axis deer, or Bengal spotted deer (Axis axis), and rusa deer (Cervus timorensis) were imported from Ile de France (Mauritius). It was Thomas Chirnside from Mount William who brought Scottish red deer (Cervus elaphus) to the colonies when the Prince Consort gave six to him in 1860. Within two years, there were eleven red deer at the Chirnsides’ property in Werribee; the Victorian Acclimatisation Society hoped that the Chirnside deer would form the basis of a more established population of red deer in the colonies and held off importing the animals until 1888. Many of the deer, having been tamed on the voyage overseas, were of little use for hunting; some were stabled, carefully tended to, and even named, such as the Chirnside stag Highlander. Some were released into the wild, and by the 1870s there was a substantial population of red deer, sambar (Cervus unicolor) and fallow deer (Dama dama) roaming Victoria, providing sport for the gentlemen of the colony. Deer from the Chirnside herd were sent to Western Australia, Queensland and New Zealand, and the Melbourne Hunt – near present-day Deer Park – became a popular sporting event in the region. Crucially, the Chirnsides brought deer to their Mount William property and released them into Gariwerd, and it was here in particular, and in Queensland, that they would live and thrive for a century. By the end of the 1860s, deer had also been released at Samuel Wilson’s Longerenong station. Wilson had been an enthusiast for the efforts of acclimatisation societies to introduce familiar species from home to Australia, himself experimenting with angora goats and ostrich breeding. In 1868 the Ararat Advertiser told readers that
the deer are breeding amongst the hills, there being a great number of young to be seen in the herd. The whole herd … must have been in splendid condition; and as they are very fleet, and becoming chary … they will increase in great numbers. In the rugged places of the hills, which answer as fastness for them, they are safe from pursuit by dogs, the surface being of such a description as to place all the advantages on the side of the deer. It appears the aborigines will have nothing to do with them; when they first saw the flock they were greatly frightened, and they will not willingly stay in a place where they have seen them before. All things considered, Mr. Wilson seems to have shown much judgment in choosing the Grampians for these animals, and its very likely that they will increase much faster than the Acclimatisation Society supposed.51
By 1875, it was reported with some excitement that ‘If the accounts which reach us from time to time concerning the increase of deer in the Grampians be true, these hills will shortly become a regular resort of the sportsman.’ The deer in the ranges ‘are said to divided into small mobs of about twenty, and some ferocious fights have been seen to take place amongst the bucks.’ However, ‘the deer are shy, and not at all easy to surprise, being difficult to follow. Amongst some of the most rugged of the hills they are said to have walks as defined as those of sheep.’52 Soon they were so ‘numerous in the Grampians’ that an open hunting season was suggested, ‘so that sportsmen could enjoy a little deer-stalking’, rather than having them ‘chased and slaughtered by wild dogs indiscriminately’. By 1877, deer had been ‘seen lately on the Dundas ranges, which shows that they must be spreading very fast’ (Fig. 4.1).53
While deer in the mountains now provided sport, of more concern was another species introduced for hunting: rabbits. Rabbits had been introduced near Geelong in 1859 and by the 1880s had spread throughout much of Victoria and into New South Wales. Throughout the Gariwerd region, rabbits grazed on pasture until it was depleted and then turned to woody vegetation, including shrubs, and the leaves and bark of trees. This contributed to land degradation and soil erosion. It was not until the 1950s that effective control measures began to be introduced.54
Besides rabbits and deer, the squatters had also hunted native animal species for both food and sport. The brush-tailed rock wallaby (Petrogale penicillate) was once abundant but was hunted for its skin and fur and for sport. The 1868 Guide Book for Excursionists from Melbourne told readers that ‘the light and graceful Rock Wallaby abound among these hills … Shooting wallaby with the rifle ought to be good sport here.’ The species was thought extinct in the ranges by the 1930s, until a small population was found in 1970.55 The Europeans hunted other macropods, too. Charles Hall remembered how, ‘About the Grampians, in particular, game was most plentiful. My stockman repeatedly brought in young live emu, which he had ridden down; and kangaroo-tail soup, in its abundance, ceased to have any attraction for us.’56 Another recalled how ‘we had a great sport hunting kangaroo, native dogs, emus, &c. In those early days the bush was alive with all sorts of animals and birds … one year I killed two thousand [kangaroos] with my dogs. I used to sometimes get twenty or thirty in a day … we had to keep them down, as they ate a lot of grass’.57
Fig. 4.1. Deer in the Grampians, 1881. The Australasian Sketcher. State Library of Victoria.
Many of the first arrivals hunted the dingoes – or ‘native dogs’ – that had once lived in region. One writer suggested in 1857 that ‘in some of the mountainous parts of Victoria … the dingoes were so very numerous and fierce, and hunted in such large packs that the natives were afraid to venture among them, and often had to take refuge in trees.’58 Alfred Thomson, whose pastoral station was to the east of Gariwerd, wrote that ‘The first operations of taking up a new country, where the hostility of the aborigines was to be apprehended, and the ravages of native dogs to be guarded against, were to provide for the safety of the stock. Great hardships and privations were almost unwittingly endured, for the constant occupation of mind and body, the newly acquired responsibility, the wild independence, and the charm of novelty all conspired to give interest to the pursuit.’59 A squatter to the south said that, on his property in the 1840s, ‘the sheep were yarded every night on account of the native dogs, which were very numerous. They used to follow flocks in the evening, and the yards had to be guarded by tied up dogs to keep the dingoes from rushing in. There was no means of dealing with these pests except running them down, shooting or trapping’.60 Dingoes were, in addition, poisoned with strychnine hidden in meat, which was also consumed by wedge-tailed eagles (Aquila audax) and other raptors. Dingo populations were resilient in the northwest of Victoria until the 1880s and into the twentieth century, but their range is now greatly restricted to the eastern highlands of the state.61
The fossil record of Gariwerd indicates several species that once lived in the mountains but no longer do so. This includes the now coastal-dwelling white-footed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata), eastern barred bandicoot (Perameles gunnii), southern bettong (Bettongia gaimardi), New Holland mouse (Pseudomys novaehollandiae), and plains rat (Pseudomys australis). Eastern and tiger quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus and D. maculatus) fossils have been found in Gariwerd, and the written record indicates that the former, at least, was once abundant and was hunted widely.62
The final environmental change suggested in Cowell’s lament was the disruption of fire regimes. Indigenous use of fire to encourage the growth of tuberous food plants such as the yam daisy was at least partly responsible for creating the open, grassy plains around Gariwerd that Mitchell thought so attractive. Observers believed at the time that the cessation of Indigenous burning had led to noticeable environmental changes. Phillip Rose, at Rosebrook in Gariwerd, thought in 1853 that ‘From my own experience, I think the country greatly improving in grass, but in some districts getting scrubby from fires not being so frequent, principally in box forests’.63 One western Victorian squatter recalled how ‘the country when we took it up was lightly timbered with red and white gum, yellow box, sheoak, and honeysuckle. There were pines on the sand banks, belts of stringy barks, but only a few bulloaks here and there.’ He came to believe that ‘the country remained open until brush fences were started, and the use of wholesale fire given up. This gave the timber a chance of going ahead as it liked,’ he said, describing how, in the absence of burning, ‘honeysuckle started … first on the light sandy soil, and it became a dense scrub … The bulloak sprang up everywhere, taking the best of the country … Red gum also went ahead’. In the Wimmera in 1846, at the time of the arrival of pastoralism in the region, ‘all the country round here … was covered with kangaroo grass – splendid summer feed for stock of all kinds. It was at its best during January, February and March, and remained good up to May, but it lost its colour after that, and gave place to a finer grass – herbs such as yams etc. … The country was like this for some years after 1846, until destroyed by the indiscreet use of fire … There was less loss in those days than now. We were in the habit of burning all rubbishy country in the autumn … we burned the country into comparative safety’.64
In the mountains themselves, Cowell had suggested that in his discussions with squatters he learnt that ‘In those days the tranquillity of the valley was never broken by bushfires: the native knew the danger of allowing his campfire to spread to the scrub, which was then almost impenetrable, except for tracks trodden down by himself or by the animals. In the dry seasons, wide expanses of dried-out river swamps, covered with dry rushes and reeds shoulder high, became potential infernos. The aborigines were aware of this and acted accordingly.’65 A colonist in 1848 noted more generally that burning was applied with care, making sure that fire did not spread into forested areas: ‘It is a strange circumstance, with their many dense forests of huge timber, that the Aborigines seldom, if ever, indulge in large fires, and if you ask them the reason, they tell you that the time is not far distant when wood will be extremely scarce and difficult to procure, and that, therefore, they are desirous of saving it.’66 From the second half of the nineteenth century, fires have raged through the mountains: disastrous bushfires occurred in 1865, 1879 and again in 1898. In the twentieth century, there were major fires in 1909, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1919, 1920, and in 1926. Significant bushfires also occurred in the mountains during 1931, 1932, 1934 and during the 1939 Black Friday fires. After this, further large bushfires in Gariwerd occurred in 1940, 1945 1950, 1951, 1953, 1960 and 1964, not to mention significant bushfires in the ranges since that time. Upon examining the fire history of Gariwerd, the evidence seems to suggest that the most noticeable change in the fire regime of the mountains over the past millennia has been an extraordinary increase in the number and intensity of fires after the Europeans had arrived. Cowell and his informants were right: ‘The whites brought with them the danger of fire’.67
Endnotes
1.Dawson J (1881) Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia. George Robertson, Melbourne, p. 60.
2.Clark ID (1990) Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900. Monash University, Melbourne.
3.Bunbury RH (1845) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 25 May 1845. Papers of Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.
4.Hall CB (1853) in Bride TF (Ed.) (1898 [1969]) Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Heinemann, Melbourne, p. 273.
5.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 272.
6.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 271.
7.Rose PD (n.d.) in Bride TF (1898 [1969]), p. 150.
8.Robertson JG (1856) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 33.
9.Mitchell T (1848) Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London, p. 249.
10.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 217–222.
11.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 269–271.
12.Rose PD (n.d.) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 320–321.
13.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 274.
14.Bunbury RH (1841) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 27 April 1841. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.
15.Robinson (1841) in Clark ID (Ed.) (1998) The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume Two: 1 October 1840 – 31 August 1841. Heritage Matters, Melbourne, p. 327.
16.Robinson (1841), pp. 359–360.
17.Robinson (1841), p. 327.
18.Robinson (1841), p. 323.
19.Robinson (1841), p. 323.
20.Bunbury RH (1843) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 5 June 1843. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.
21.Robinson (1841), p. 328.
22.‘Another suspected murder by the natives’ (1842) The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1 January.
23.Robinson (1841), p. 316.
24.Robinson (1841), p. 325.
25.Clark ID (2016) ‘We Are All of One Blood’: A History of the Djabwurrung Aboriginal People of Western Victoria, 1836–1901, Vol. 2. Createspace Publishing, Scotts Valley, pp. 326–327.
26.Robinson (1841), p. 316.
27.D’Alton SE (1928) ‘Stawell and the Grampians’, No. III. The Australasian, 7 July, p. 56.
28.Kenyon AS (1928) Letter to the Editor. The Australasian, 21 July, p. 54.
29.Simson HN (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 304–305.
30.Desailly F (1842) Deposition of Francis Desailly, 29 August 1842. VA2807 State Coroner’s Office, VPRS 24/P0 Inquest Deposition Files, Unit 476, Item 1884/1404, Public Record Office of Victoria, Melbourne.
31.‘Outrages by the blacks’ (1842) The Colonial Observer, 5 October, p. 518.
32.Robertson JG (1856) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 30–31.
33.Bunbury RH (1841) Letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, 27 April 1841. Papers of the Bunbury Family 1824–1872. National Library of Australia, MS 8098.
34.Gardner PD (2010), pers. comm.
35.Clark (1990), pp. 240–241.
36.Clark (1990), p. 241.
37.Clark (1990).
38.Clark (1990).
39.Wettenhall G (1999) The People of Gariwerd: The Grampians’ Aboriginal Heritage. Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Melbourne.
40.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 269.
41.Cowell J (1938) ‘Pioneers of the Grampians’. The Horsham Times, 1 April, p. 4.
42.Mitchell T (1839) Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol. 2. T & W Boone, London, pp. 172–188.
43.Willis JH (1971) Vegetation of Western Victoria. In The Natural History of Western Victoria. (Eds MH Douglas and L O’Brien) pp. 24–34. Australian Institute of Agricultural Science, Horsham.
44.Robertson JG (1856) in Bride (1898 [1969]), pp. 167–169.
45.Lloyd GT (1862) Thirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria. Houlston and Wright, London, pp. 394–395.
46.Rose PD (n.d.) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 321.
47.Willis (1971).
48.Armytage family, Station records, 1858–1948. State Library of Victoria, MS 7829.
49.‘The Hamilton district’ (1903) The Australasian, 25 April, p. 6.
50.‘Acclimatisation: Distribution of game’ (1869) The Australasian, 1 May, p. 27.
51.‘The deer at the Grampians’ (1868) The Australasian, 12 December, p. 13.
52.‘Country news’ (1876) The Age, 22 April, p. 3.
53.‘Open season for deer’ (1877) The Australasian, 20 January, p. 23.
54.Calder J (1987) The Grampians: A Noble Range. Victorian National Parks Association, Melbourne; Cooke BD (2012) Rabbits: manageable environmental pests or participants in new Australian ecosystems? Wildlife Research 39, 279–289.
55.Calder (1987), p. 63.
56.Hall CB (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 269.
57.Hamilton JC (1912) Pioneering Days in Western Victoria: A Narrative of Early Station Life. Exchange Press, Melbourne, pp. 25–26.
58.Bonwick J (1858) Western Victoria: Its Geography, Geology, and Social Condition. Thomas Brown, Geelong, p. 89.
59.Thomson AT (1853) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 329.
60.Hamilton (1912), p. 26.
61.Hateley R (2010) The Victorian Bush: Its ‘Original and Natural’ Condition. Polybractea Press, Melbourne.
62.Willis (1971); Stevens M, Barber E (2013) The missing fauna of the Grampians. Friends of Grampians Gariwerd, <https://friendsofgrampiansgariwerd.org.au/2013/06/the-missing-fauna-of-the-grampians-quolls-by-mike-stevens-with-eric-barber/>
63.Rose PD (n.d.) in Bride (1898 [1969]), p. 324.
64.Hamilton (1912), pp. 38–39.
65.Cowell (1938).
66.Byrne JC (1848) Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the Bush Colonies from 1835 to 1847. Richard Bentley, London, p. 374.
67.Cowell (1938).