From Fallacy to Fable? Reading the Currie Diary against the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend.

The story of the farming life of the Currie family can be placed within two larger narratives of Victorian farming and rural life. The first is the yeoman small independent farmer ideal championed by the land reformers of the 1850s and 1860s. This was not just an agricultural ideal designed to foster a strong rural economy, but also a social and political agenda dedicated to some democratic principles and the opportunity for many to share in land and the status it could bring.

The yeoman ideal was a vision of the new Victorian society that would be created in the ensuing decades. Indeed, we shall see from our reading of the Currie diary that this new class of farmers would be active in creating and maintaining their communities.

But not only was the yeoman ideal a vision of the future, it was also rooted in the past. It was linked to romantic notions of a similar class of English farmers and to political philosophy which argued the moral, social and political benefits of property ownership in land. It was a political reaction to the ‘squattocracy’ and their control of vast tracts of land.

But just as the land reformers cast their eyes backward when creating land policy for the yeoman ideal, so too has Australian history and sentimentalism cast its eyes back to the selectors and created from their experience the pioneering bush legend. The story of the young man with his family carving a farm and prosperity out of the bush with nothing but his labour and an axe. It was pioneers, we are told, who made this country.

This view has been justly criticized in recent decades as simplifying and excluding the complexity of rural Victoria, but there is an underlying current of truth in relation to the resourcefulness, courage and achievement demonstrated by many selectors.

But while there are those who look to this period and to the pioneer for the formation of our national character, the result will be an homogenous European male character. The Currie diary can provide evidence that might simultaneously embrace and confound the pioneer legend.

We can use the Currie diary to test each of these narratives, if not to explode them, then at least to concede their limitations and attempt to colour a richer picture of rural life in the latter half of nineteenth century Victoria.

In this way, we can not only think critically about an historic political issue such as land reform, but also a modern one; one that is tied up with issues of heritage, values and identity.

The following quote from Charles Daley seems particularly pertinent when reading the Currie diary following the relocation of the family to Gippsland. Daley writes,

There was a curiously naïve idea, very prevalent at this time, that the more heavily timbered the country was, the more productive it would be, and so the fledgling pioneers rushed to peg the densest scrub, thus serving themselves a maximum sentence of back-breaking work and unremitting poverty.[1]

The diary shows, that for John Currie, clearing was practically a daily ritual. The notion of heavily timbered land holding the most productive soil is also referred to by Dingle, in that selectors had little else to judge land by other than the vegetation growing upon it.[2] But did the move from Ballan to Lardner bring ‘unremitting poverty’ to the Curries? If so, was this caused specifically by the labour of clearing, or as a result of being further from a large local market for their produce, such as Ballarat had been. The diary can help to answer these questions and test the assumptions prevalent in the historiography.

Daley reserves most of his attention to the nature of work performed by the men. He mentions techniques used for clearing, and the tools and clothing used and worn. He describes a McCubbin-like transition from the selection being little more than a tent in the scrub to shelter the men, to eventually comprising of a log house in a clearing suitable for the arrival of wife and family. But the hauntingly lonely image inspired by Frederick McCubbin’s ‘The Pioneer’ is at odds with the social and community life that even the perhaps somewhat anti-social Anne Currie describes and participates in.

Russel Ward in ‘The Australian Legend’ argues that the pioneers of the bush had a disproportionate influence on the shaping of the Australian mystique.[3] Indeed, can we truthfully assert that a national character and spirit can be defined by a group who were a minority both socially and economically? This disproportionate influence is the link between the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend, and the success or failure of a family like the Curries as documented by their diary is where it can be tested.

Daley accounts for the eventual abandonment of a third of the selected hill country of Gippsland being due to the 320 acre allotments being too large for a single family to manage, and laid out with a regularity that did not allow for variations of terrain and soil quality.[4] This perspective is clearly different to the view that, in other areas of Victoria, 320 acre allotments were much too small for a family to make a successful living from. John Currie selected 110 acres in Gippsland, so the diary might prove able to test Daley’s thesis, however we also know that John spent much time working James Currie’s selection.

In ‘The Tyranny of Distance’, Geoffrey Blainey continues this theme of small acreages and high land prices, when compared with North America

Dear land cursed farmers. One of Australia’s tragedies in the second half of the nineteenth century was the failure of tens of thousands of farmers and their families to make a living from small farms after slaving for years.[5]

But even if the land prices made Australia unattractive for new migrants, for John Currie the arduous move to Gippsland was in search of better quality land. The squatters had used many nefarious means to preserve their runs, or cherry-pick the best land on it. The heavily forested land in Gippsland was of little interest to pastoralists.

Michael Cannon in ‘Life in the Country’ argues

Much of the deplorable state of political morality in the eastern colonies during the remainder of the century, and the evil flowering of the urban land boom, had their origin in the corruption encouraged by evasion of the land acts.[6]

He is referring to the corruption of the squatters and elements of the Lands Department and the surveyors. It is cautionary to note that the legislation designed to create a conservative, democratic and respectable rural class initially had the opposite effect of encouraging corrupt behaviour and consolidating the power of the squatters.

John McQuilton in his chapter on selection from ‘The Kelly Outbreak’ also links this yeoman ideal with the ideals of the Chartist movement. Land reform undertaken on these principles could allow the ‘democratic’ diggers to take up land and create a rural class to rival the squatters. But he describes this as an initial failure, as the established squatters were able to make conniving and illegal use of their resources as a means to select the best land. This paints a corrupt image of the squatters who otherwise have been considered to embody part of the pioneering legend.[7]

For Cannon, the yeoman selector as a new class was doomed to fail;

The old ideal of a huge self-sufficient ‘yeoman’ population covering the nation always was a fallacy under Australian conditions, and led to wide-spread unnecessary hardship for as long as the dream persisted.[8]

Selectors often required large families to succeed on their small allotments, indeed a large family was sometimes seen as a substitute for sufficient capital. But the children of large families raised on selections had little choice but to eventually leave to find employment or new land. A 320 acre selection could not be divided between several children with any hope of it supporting all their families.

John Hirst argues that the pioneer legend is an empty myth, which although democratic in its pretense is fundamentally conservative, and does little to reveal the complex nature of social and economic life in rural Victoria in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [9] We can read the Currie diary with this criticism in mind, and use it to highlight the complexities of life as experienced by the Currie family.

For Dingle as well as Hirst, the yeoman farmer ideal was also a conservative notion that romanticized a particular class of farmers in English history that had been threatened by the industrial revolution. They were seen as the backbone of a rural and pre-capitalist England that was quickly disappearing.

Dingle concurs with McQuilton that the initial experience of the Land Acts and selection was one of failure. The land reformers and many of the selectors were inexperienced when it came to farming in Victorian conditions, and, Dingle argues, the attempt to plant families on the land was both daring and foolhardy, but would eventually succeed.[10] But this success would always be limited by the number of viable small farms and the limit to how many families they could support.

It is worth considering then the difference between viewing the selectors as a pioneering class that created or served as the basis for the pioneer legend, and considering them as a created class that was based upon a social idea that was at once both radical and conservative.

When looking at the wider history of rural settlement in Victoria, observing the changing trend from pastoralism to agriculture, the yeoman ideal must be considered. Certainly, by historians writing of the land reform movements which followed the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s, it seldom is ignored. The yeoman ideal was a vision of a rural landscape dominated by small landowners. These small farmers would be free of the corrupting vices of the cities, living a simpler and more virtuous agricultural life. Owning property would give them a vested interest in the state and create a stable, dependable and conservative political class.

Furthermore, land in Europe was a cornerstone of status and wealth, and almost totally inaccessible to those without significant means. Settler colonialism in both North America and Australia was fuelled by the promise of land for all. In his chapter in Greenwood’s ‘Australia: a Social and Political History’, McNaughtan argues

The spectacle of Australia as a “vast sheepwalk” was distasteful to the overwhelming majority of settlers who had not been bred in the Colony and who carried with them from the old country an unvarying picture of a proper rural landscape. It is curious that the ideal of an Australia peopled by a “sturdy peasantry” or “industrious yeomanry” should have made such an irresistible appeal among all classes of people which, in the British Isles, had long since extinguished its own peasant class and was even then in process of reducing its yeomen to beggary.[11]

The yeoman ideal then, similarly to Australia’s conservative notion of the pioneer legend, was thus also part of a romantic view of the English past. But what is interesting is that this romanticized view of England’s rural past was not revived in Australia by immigrants from conservative land-owning families, but rather from those who in England were both urban and radical. Williams argues that the Chartist Movement in Britain cannot be ignored when considering the theoretical underpinnings of the debate and anxieties over land reform in Australia.[12]

Is it a paradox then, that the yeoman ideal in Victoria was composed and enacted as a mixture of radicalism and conservatism? Not exactly, because although land reform as a way of further democratizing the ‘old societies’ threatened longstanding and powerful interests, the same sorts of reform in Australia had to contend with the only recently established squatters and pastoralists. In this case, the evocation of the yeoman ideal could be used to prevent the further entrenchment of a landed elite in Australia; as F.G. Clarke argues

one of the greatest stimulants to electoral reform and universal manhood suffrage in all colonies stemmed from the realisation by liberals and radicals that the pastoralists’ grip on the lands of Australia could only be broken once their control over the colonial legislatures was also reduced.[13]

Ultimately, the image of the yeoman farmer was an idealistic rather than practical approach which focused on an abstract creation of an orderly system rather than any tangible reality. It was as much about politics as it was about farming.

But why might it be important when studying the Currie diary and the fortunes of that family? The almost universal appeal in Victoria of the yeoman farmer ideal is what later made selection possible for the Currie’s. Without this mythic ideal, and the Land Acts which embraced it, the family would not have been farmers at either Ballan or Lardner. It is important to consider the yeoman ideal when reading the Currie diary because it reminds us of the pattern of ideas behind the forming of legislation, which in turn has influence on the behaviour of people. As Williams suggests

rural settlement was seen as a vehicle for influencing the type of society that the colonies   wanted, or at least, thought that they wanted; it was an early example of a type of social engineering.[14]

The Curries then, were a living part of that particular rural vision of Victoria, but they were by no means passive participants. There were many other factors which would influence the fortunes of the Currie family; personal and environmental factors. It is however, important to remember that in some respects, their course had been charted by the aspirations of an earlier generation.

The pioneer legend is one of the many narratives of Australian history. For Russel Ward, it is part of the search to find what is unique in the Australian character and identity, and he argues that it developed first amongst the workers employed by squatters and pastoralists.[15] The pioneer legend assumes that unique Australian character was both the product and the requirement for settling the frontier, or at least that they developed mutually. Donley argues that

Whether they succeeded or not depended on their personal qualities. Good judgement,       perseverance and the ability to withstand loneliness and hardship – with the aid of good fortune – decided whether a squatter made or broke himself in the outback.[16]

Broadly, the pioneer legend embraces groups as varied as the first squatters and pastoralists, and the labourers they employed, to the stockmen who worked the cattle stations, shearers, and the bullock drivers who were relied on for the transport of goods before the railway networks spread. It celebrates a male-dominated world of hard work and self-sufficiency, both of which are considered impeccable conservative values.

It is curious that the life of the itinerant rural labourers like the shearers or the swagmen venerated by the pioneer legend was in some ways an impediment to the success of selection. Furthermore, that many selectors had to resort to this life was also a demonstration of the short-comings of the Selection Acts. As Bessant argues

Legislation alone was seen to be all that was required to establish this yeomanry. Hard work and sacrifice which it was assumed every selector would enjoy, would do the rest. It was taken for granted that the selector and his family would be on the farm for life. Yet the Australian rural worker was notoriously nomadic, quite out of character with the demands of the Land Acts.[17]

At its most superficial, the pioneer legend implies a homogenous class of men, white and of European origin. Frederick McCubbin’s most famous work is titled ‘The Pioneer’, referring singularly to the man in the painting and not his wife. The Currie diary is useful here, in that it gives a voice to the sort of woman depicted in this painting. The bleak, lonely image inspired by ‘The Pioneer’ is contradicted in the Currie diary by the almost daily recording of visitors to the farm, whether they be social calls or visits to borrow equipment or goods

Part of the mystique of the pioneer legend is not just in the character of the pioneers, but also in the landscape they went into. The Australian bush could be a dangerous place. Peter Pierce writes of the ‘lost child’ in Australian mythology who gets lost in the Australian bush

the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia. More profoundly though, the lost child is the symbol of essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country.[18]

In some ways this tragic mythology is also experienced by the Currie’s in 1880 when their young daughter drowns in the waterhole after wandering away from the house

I had no heart to fill up my book since we lost our wee pet on the 24^th of the last month, it was oh so sudden… I carried her to the hole to dip a bucket of water. I stood her down and dipped it and she had a drink out the bucket, I led her by the hand to the door and said to her come in…I   feel sure she came in and went back to see where I got the water… I then ran to the water hole. The first thing I saw was a little foam on the water. My heart told me what that was oh shall I ever forget it, I looked under the sticks and saw my wee pet, but oh dear I never thought I was too late, as she was such a short time in… I’ve lost her my heart is breaking and I feel frightened to grieve for fear I am punished even more severely for it must have been as a punishment that she was taken from us like that. I can’t help blaming myself for letting her out of my mind… but she was so clever. There was never one so knowing of her age.[19]

In his book ‘The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety’, Pierce discusses the contemporary illustrations, literature and paintings which showed or described lost children in nineteenth century Australia as ‘asleep’. The viewer, like perhaps the rescuer when they first come upon the child, cannot be sure if the child is sleeping or dead. Likewise Catherine Currie thought it might not be too late.

Writing about Frederick McCubbin’s ‘What the Little Girl Saw in the Bush’ and ‘Childhood Fancies’, Pierce argues McCubbin “made visible… that nameless force which had for so long attracted children across boundaries, so that they wonder and wander, then become lost. This innocent attraction to the bush can be fatal.”[20] Was Catherine’s daughter perhaps attracted by her prior view of the waterhole to return for another look?

Almost three weeks passes before Catherine resumes her almost infallible daily journal entry. There is a strangely selfish sensation in reading this series of entries of Catherine having held back on this significant event, as though the information was being kept from the reader. It makes one wonder if the diary was a largely personal task, or whether it had been intended as a simple chronicle which from time to time happened to expand to include her thoughts, anxieties and feelings. We can perhaps surmise from the fact that no entry whatsoever was written on the fatal day of 24 November 1880 that diary entries may have been generally a task reserved for the evening, despite Catherine’s immediate writing style which often reads like it has been set down as events were occurring.

When Catherine Currie does resume making entries on 14 December 1880, she initially talks about John’s work and other comings and goings before mentioning her child dying. Had she not intended to write about it when she first sat down to make her next entry? Perhaps the process of writing brought forth the feelings and emotions which cover the rest of the page and a large part of the next one.

After the Curries along with many of their neighbours moved from Ballan to take up their new selections at Lardner, the task of building a new community existed alongside the building of new farms. John Currie was regularly involved in these processes. Catherine records in her entry for 15 January 1876, “John away to Brandy Creek to attend a meeting to get a Shire Council.”[21]

Several years later on 7 September 1879, and 15 September 1879, the diary records John organizing and collecting signatures from neighbours for a petition, which he then presents to the Council about clearing the road running near or past Rintel’s store. A later entry on 13 October 1879 records that this petition is read at a Council meeting, and it is decided to take action about “our road.”[22]

These are just some of the many occasions that John attends meetings, or is active in community business. The selector did not farm his selection in isolation. Support and links with neighbours and the community were essential to selection life. Although land reforms enacted in the spirit of the yeoman ideal may have envisioned a certain sort of rural society, it remained that it was up to families like the Curries and their neighbours to build their own community.

Catherine Currie may have rarely mentioned her own attendance at church after the family had moved to Lardner, but her diary entries reveal interest in the members of her family attending, and who they met there. She also often recorded who gave the service, which early on would often be John Currie. Sometimes the quality or punctuality of the minister would be worthy of being  recorded. For example on 20 April 1879 and 27 April 1879 the family went to church, but both times the minister did not attend; “the minister did not attend again”, wrote Catherine, “he must not be [of] much account.”[23]

Catherine also very regularly mentions the attendance of the children at school and Sunday school, and also occasions when either Katie or Tom might be home from school to help John or if the schoolmaster had given them holidays.

Whether the minister was on time for church on Sunday, or indeed whether he showed up at all, were not the most serious sorts of incidents which occurred in the new community. The hardships endured by the selectors and their families may have created a higher level of social tension than might otherwise have been experienced. We might never know the precise circumstances behind the incident which Catherine records in her entry of 26 September 1878, and it is of limited use to speculate whether it was due to personal differences, or an argument over borrowed money or equipment. But we can learn something from the various responses to the incident which Catherine records

we are all upset… we were called up at about 12 o’clock last night by Hamilton and Gregory. They told us that Syme had nearly killed McKay on Monday evening and they wanted John to go over at once to see him… John got a great fright when they told him as we never expected anything to happen old Mac he was such a quiet old fellow. John has taken him to Drouin today, he lent the poor old man £2-16/ and paid other expenses for him. I am afraid it will be all lost as John thinks he will not get better.[24]

This entry shows that beneath the rhythms of farm life recorded in the diary there were similar tensions and violence which have always occurred in human society. Also interesting are the circumstances in which John is called upon to go and see McKay. Was he perhaps an older man looked up to by the others? We might also surmise something of John possessing a generous and charitable nature by his lending of money to McKay, especially considering John thought he would not recover. It shows also that the Curries could spare money at this time, whereas almost a decade later this may not have been so. Even so, it is difficult to escape how valuable money was to the selectors. Two days later on 28 September 1878, when Catherine records that McKay had died, as much on her mind as what might be Syme’s fate because of the incident, is whether Syme will pay them the money he owes; “McKay… died yesterday morning. I wonder how it will be for Syme now and if we will get the money he owed us.”[25]

From the diary, it appears that not much in the way of consequences befell Syme, although it is possible that the Currie’s opinion of him had diminished. The following year there is an entry mentioning Syme “John… saw Syme, and he say the post office has been robbed last night, we don’t think it, there has been something else behind the scene that we do not understand.”[26] The suggestion that the Currie’s don’t trust Syme’s account of the robbery is intriguing.

In ‘The Land Hunger’, Bessant argues that “the most common picture of the lives of the selectors painted by historians and writers is one of poverty, hardship, ignorance, struggle against the wicked squatter, desperation and defeat in the end.”[27] Indeed, Bessant also includes excerpts from the works of Steele Rudd and Henry Lawson to illustrate the hardships of the selectors.[28]

These sources, along with some of the mentioned works of McCubbin, provide much of the imagery for imagining what life looked like, and how people experienced it. But we must remember that these are all produced for an audience in a very different way to what the Currie diary is. Still, we should take note where parallels in subject matter occur. For example, the anxiety produced by the use of fire to clear scrub and bush is described by Steele Rudd in ‘On Our Selection’

It was a delightful topic before we started, but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illuminated the whooping bush in the night and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry.[29]

The enormous task of clearing, and the fears of falling trees and fires are echoed in the Currie diary in a series of entries in January and February of 1880. On 30 January 1880, Catherine writes “James’ new hut was burned down sometime yesterday, and everything in it, we never saw anything of it”,[30] and a week later in February she records, “I am so afraid of the fires that I am wishing for rain.”[31] To be effective in clearing the land, the burn required hot dry weather. Although rain would bring greater safety, it might also undo much of the hard labour of clearing.

As the decade progresses, farm life on the Currie selection and in the surrounding area seems to become more precarious. Catherine Currie’s diary shows how setbacks such as the one described 10 October 1887 could take a heavy emotional toll on the morale of the family

I feel quite unhappy this morning. I suppose Judy and all her pigs being dead has something to do with it. I don’t seem to see how we are going to manage to get through at all if something don’t turn up and I don’t know of any possibility of a turn for the better.[32]

These hard times continued throughout October of that year. Catherine makes an entry on 21 October 1887 recording Mr. George’s selection being sold; “I should be very sorry to leave it if it was mine,” she writes, “I suppose they all are it is one of the signs of the hard times as I am sure they would not leave it if they could help it.”[33]

The summer of 1887-88 must have brought no respite to this trend, but there is not a sense of defeat comparable to this stanza of Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Past Carin’’, which Bessant includes in full to illustrate the despair experienced by some selectors

            My eyes are dry, I cannot cry,

I’ve got no heart for breakin’,

But where it was, in days gone by,

A dull and empty achin’.

My last boy ran away from me –

I know my temper’s wearin’ –

But now I only wish to be

Beyond all signs of carin’.[34]

When Catherine’s son Tom leaves in January 1888 to find work her entry is not despairing like Lawson’s poem, nor like her entry describing the dead pigs. Rather, there is a sort of wry irony to the tone; “Tom went off this morn I am so sorry he has to go… of course it must be for the best, how can we make anything farming the grasshoppers.”[35]

The Currie diary lets us explore notions like the pioneer legend and the yeoman ideal against the experience of the people that each of these meta-narratives encompasses. It allows us to see that there could be both good times and bad times, and successes and failures. It removes the temptation to generalize judgements of success, failure, hardship or happy times on the story of selection. Success varied from district to district, family to family, and from year to year. The diary demonstrates that although the larger narrative stories are important and useful for conceptualizing history, they can have a tendency to be both mythic and shallow.

Yet it is also somewhat reassuring to find in the Catherine Currie’s diary a very small hint of the sort of humour the likes of which Steele Rudd and others have given to selection life. The Australian landscape and its wildlife brought many hardships and difficulties to the selectors, especially the wallabies and parrots getting into the crops, but as Catherine’s entry of 8 November 1879 shows, the Currie’s had the resourcefulness and endurance to meet them: “we catched a King Parrot in the trap, we tied it to a stick to frighten the rest, and it laid an egg.”[36]

Bibliography

Bessant, B., The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980.

McNaughtan, I.D., ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.) Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, pp. 98-144.

Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966.

Cannon, Michael, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973.

Clarke, F. G., Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992.

Daley, Charles, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960.

Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Dingle, A.E., The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984.

Donley, R.J.R., Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979.

Hirst, John in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008.

McQuilton, John, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979.

Pierce, P., The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Williams, M.,  ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 61-103.

---

[1] Charles Daley, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960, p. 96.

[2]A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 64.

[3] Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

[4] Daley, p. 101.

[5] Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966, p. 166.

[6] Michael Cannon, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973, p. 139.

[7] John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp. 25-60.

[8] Cannon, p. 176.

[9] John Hirst in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, South Melbourne, Thomson, 2008, p. 139.

[10] A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 74.

[11] I.D., McNaughtan, ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.)  Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, p. 115.

[12] M. Williams, ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 72.

[13] F. G. Clarke, Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992, p. 128.

[14] Williams, p. 61.

[15] Ward, p. v.

[16] R.J.R. Donley, Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979, p. 8.

[17] B. Bessant, The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980, p. 51.

[18] Peter Pierce, The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xi.

[19] Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, 14 December 1880.

[20] Pierce, p. 58.

[21] Currie, ‘Diary 15 January 1876’.

[22] Currie, ‘Diary 7 September 1879’, ‘Diary 15 September 1879’, ‘Diary 13 October 1879’.

[23] Currie, ‘Diary 20 April 1879’, ‘Diary 27 April 1879’.

[24] Currie, ‘Diary 26 September 1878’.

[25] Currie, ‘Diary 28 September 1878’.

[26] Currie, ‘Diary 18 July 1879’.

[27] Bessant, pp. 58-9.

[28] Bessant,  pp. 58-62.

[29] Steele Rudd, in Bessant, p. 58.

[30] Currie, ‘Diary 30 January 1880’.

[31] Currie, ‘Diary 7 February 1880’.

[32] Currie, ‘Diary 10 October 1887’.

[33] Currie, ‘Diary 21 October 1887’.

[34] Henry Lawson, in Bessant, p. 66.

[35] Currie, ‘Diary 3 January 1888’.

[36] Currie, ‘Diary 8 November 1879’.

Heritage and Identity

The heritage of a group or community plays a major role in establishing and maintaining a sense of identity, pride and self-worth. Recognition of heritage and group morale often go hand in hand. Excluding or marginalizing a group’s heritage can have the effect of marginalizing the group, and reducing their sense of pride and identity. The heritage of any nation, as it is defined and regulated, and at least partially managed and financed by the national government, should be inclusive.[1]

The position which Graeme Aplin takes on the issue of minority heritage and marginalisation in the conclusion to his 2002 work  Heritage: Identification, Conservation, and Management is commendable, even if its expression carries problematic terms. If we are to achieve a sound theoretical basis for the application of heritage management then it is important to understand and be wary of the complexity of the terms we use, and the values or meanings often implicitly associated with them.

To this end, the following discussion shall consider the nature of heritage and how it plays a role in the formation of identity and pride within a group. What exactly is heritage and what difficulties does it present? An answer to this question shall be explored through a reflection on the Port Arthur Historic Site (PAHS), as within this example can be observed changing ideas about what constitutes heritage, the ability to openly confront a dark past, and the difficulties created when the present left a violent and indelible mark in 1996, in a place that otherwise was carefully frozen in time.

In turn, this will allow a greater appreciation of the importance of heritage to minority groups, especially those that perceive themselves as being threatened by assimilation into a dominant culture. This part of the discussion will focus on the issue of indigenous heritage in Australia, and indentify the many challenges that must be faced in order for it to be managed sensitively.

It is tempting to consider history and heritage as having a relationship as simple as perhaps ‘two sides of the same coin’. Yet while both deal with the past, the differences are much stronger and more complicated than saying that history has to do with recording and understanding the past, and that heritage is the objects and buildings that have survived from the past. While it is true that these things can be considered heritage, just as important is the understanding that ‘a people’s cultural heritage is also reflected in non-physical forms such as music, dance, drama, folklife, unwritten languages, scriptures, prose, poetry.’[2]

With these more nebulous aspects in mind, it is relatively easy to appreciate the difficulties that surround managing or making policy for these forms of heritage. Some, for example like language, might only be kept alive through practice, in which case they are just as much a part of living culture as they are heritage. [3]

Graham et al see the origins of heritage ‘in the tastes and values of a nineteenth-century educated elite’.[4] The nineteenth century was a time of rapid and dramatic changes and upheavals. Changing modes of production and social relationships gave rise to a yearning for a simpler and romantic past and a need to preserve its grander elements. Often heritage in this sense was valued for its aesthetic qualities rather than its role in an objective history of the past. An Australian example of this can be seen at the PAHS, in that

fifty years ago Australia’s convict past was not celebrated, nor were the sites associated with it. The name ‘Port Arthur’ was actually expunged in the late nineteenth century, and the town was renamed Carnarvon in the hope that its convict past would similarly disappear.[5]

Rather the site had become a sort of Arcadian parkland by the sea, with some of the original cottages converted for holiday-makers. If, as Trotter argues, ‘history is about knowing the past, warts and all, while heritage is about celebrating the past’,[6] early visitors to the PAHS may have found little in its past to celebrate. This in itself illustrates that there is little in the concept of heritage which is objective. From a physical manifestation of Australia’s ‘convict stain’ and shameful history (at this time a shameful history that still did not include acknowledgement of the poor treatment of minority groups or indigenous peoples), the site has since become one of Australia’s top ten most visited attractions, and attended by 90 per cent of tourists who visit Tasmania.[7]

This number of tourists demonstrates both the importance of heritage to tourism, and the importance of tourism to heritage. Heritage can be seen as a resource that takes several forms; economic, social and political. It can be exploited for financial gain or simply to sustain its management. It can provide educational and social experiences. And it can contain implicit political messages. It is for all of these reasons that Aplin insists that ‘heritage is both contested and culturally constructed, which inevitably makes it a highly political topic and one with a scarcity of clear-cut definitions or answers.’[8]

When Aplin uses the term ‘culturally constructed’,[9] he is referring to the fact that although heritage is concerned with the past, it is created in the present. Every decision that is made with regard its management – such as what to preserve, how to preserve and interpret it, and why – are all answered with reference to the values of the individuals and groups who must make these decisions. These values might almost always reflect the values, self-perceptions and preoccupations of the wider society. ‘Heritage… says a lot about who we think we are, as the things we save from change make certain ideals real and reinforce our identity.’[10]

Heritage is concerned with the preservation of a past that is no longer directly accessible and at best may still only continue in the memories of some individuals. Yet I would argue that heritage can tell us more about where we have come from than it can tell us about who we are, or where we might be going – although admittedly this may reflect the relative youth of European settlement in Australia. We might believe that as a society Australia has inherited the values of its early colonisers and immigrants – mate-ship, self-sufficiency, a fair-go – and we hear this often. There is however a tendency to only remember those values that are still acceptable today. Our collective memories are a part of heritage, a part that is shaped by the stories we tell.

Andrew Newman argues that museums and galleries (often the repositories of heritage) play a role in individual and community identity and that ‘this contribution appears to go beyond simple validation of identity and plays a role in its construction. How this occurs is a complex process that may be related to memory.’[11]

Heritage professionals then, need to approach the interpretation and display of objects and stories carefully and with sensitivity to their audiences, particularly when it comes to difficult events or periods in the past. ‘Individuals use museums and galleries in ways that respond to their own and their group’s needs. The stories that curators want to tell might not be those that the visitor or participant in a project takes away.’[12]

Are we, for example, able to display the PAHS with pride because we have as a society accepted this dark and inhumane aspect of European settlement, or is it because we do not feel a direct link between ourselves and the society that produced the convict penal system? If it is the latter, and we accept the argument of Graham et al that ‘preservation and restoration freezes artifacts in time whereas previously they had been constantly changing’,[13] does the act of preserving the PAHS help to make it recede into an ever more distant past? How does the 1996 massacre at the Broad Arrow Café fit into the story of the PAHS? Is it connected to the earlier history or is it an aberration, and at what point does it become part of the history and heritage of the site?

Heritage is not so much a window to the past in that it allows us access, but rather a still image constructed from an imagined past, however objective that imagining purports to be.

When an indigenous people is colonised by a foreign power that wishes to create a settler society in the ‘new’ land, a rift is created between the indigenous people and the new arrivals. I perceive a deep and potentially irresolvable conflict with regard to the history and heritage of European settlement in Australia and the indigenous experience of this. Is there a single story that could be told that would satisfy the role of heritage in creating identity, pride and a sense of self-worth for both groups?

Aplin argues that ‘while heritage of all groups should be sensitively dealt with, indigenous heritage is often the form that is most removed from dominant groups and governments and also most under threat.’[14] If so, must it be the majority who tells the more humbling story?

I would argue that in Australia’s case the dominant culture must be just as prepared to humbly face its dark past as it must be to include indigenous culture in its wider story. We may not be content with telling two separate and seemingly conflicting stories, but we must recognise difference in valid readings of history, or risk forsaking the potential of history and heritage as means of critical enquiry in helping us to understand how our identities have developed.

One means of Australia including Aboriginal heritage is through tourism, through both indigenous initiatives and partnerships with non-indigenous tourism operators. Trotter explains that ‘some Aboriginal people are critical of tourism because tourism programs focus on traditional culture, tend to ignore cultural differences and construct a pan-Aboriginality in place of cultural diversity as well as acting as a form of exploitation.’[15]

This sentiment is echoed by Aplin, when discussing how  ‘minority heritage gains its significance from being part of a living culture and way of life.’[16] There is a danger here of constructing an image of indigenous heritage and culture as something antiquated and needing preservation for it to survive, when in actuality it is one of the oldest surviving living cultures. As such, it does not so much need protection from the passage of time as it requires the freedom to exist and continue to develop.

Thus, according to Aplin, ‘even when the majority government is keen to officially recognise minority heritage as part of the national heritage, this can only be successfully achieved with the full cooperation of the primary owners of that heritage.’[17] There are many examples of cooperation, joint management and consultation in Australia with regards Aboriginal tourism and heritage, and this is something that needs to continue in order to avoid the danger identified by Linda Richter, that ‘in some cases, it may be more infuriating to be included if one finds the interpretation unacceptable.’[18]

The idea of including minorities in a national heritage can be celebratory, but also potentially assimilative. There is a suggestion of a need for wariness of this when Aplin argues that ‘national heritage is sometimes used by a government or dominant group in society as a concept to legitimise the state, to help define it, and to advance individuals’ identification with it.’[19] This can be observed in Australia’s use of a citizenship test requiring applicants to answer questions considered important for Australians to know. This sort of civic nationalism can be inclusive, but only to the extent that individuals are willing to subscribe to the values therein. Does it also mean that those who are born into Australian citizenship implicitly support these values?

How do we pin down the values of a nation? Are they manifest in those differences that some tourists travel to experience? The values that heritage can represent are generally the values of those making the decisions about the preservation, interpretation and managing of heritage. If the presentation of heritage is seen to be inclusive and sensitive it indicates that those responsible for its management share those values.

All this suggests that it is not possible to attempt to manage heritage objectively or dispassionately, but perhaps only to present it from several subjectivities at once. There is as much danger in concentrating too much on the negative and shameful aspects of a group’s history and heritage as there is in glossing over it entirely.

Bibliography

Aplin, Graeme,  Heritage: Identification, conservation, and management, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Graham et al., ‘The uses and abuses of heritage’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 26-37.

Newman, Andrew, ‘‘Social exclusion zone’ and ‘The feelgood factor’’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 325-32.

Pearson, M., and Sullivan, S., Looking After Heritage Places: The basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1996.

Richter, Linda, ‘The politics of heritage tourism development’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 257-71.

Trotter, Robin, ‘Heritage Tourism’, in Norman Douglas et al (eds.), Special Interest Tourism, Brisbane, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2001, pp. 140-63.

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[1] Graeme Aplin, Heritage: Identification, conservation, and management, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 352.

[2] Makaminan Makagiansar, The Work of UNESCO: Protection or Plunder? Safeguarding the future of our cultural heritage , p. 9, quoted in Robin Trotter, ‘Heritage Tourism’, in Norman Douglas et al (eds.), Special Interest Tourism, Brisbane, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2001, p. 143.

[3] Trotter, p. 148.

[4] Brian Graham et al., ‘The uses and abuses of heritage’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 29.

[5] Michael Pearson and Sharon Sullivan, Looking After Heritage Places: The basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1996, p. 170.

[6] Trotter, p. 154.

[7] Pearson and Sullivan, p. 170.

[8] Aplin, pp. 27-8.

[9] Aplin, pp. 27-8.

[10]Aplin, p. 15.

[11] Andrew Newman, ‘‘Social exclusion zone’ and ‘The feelgood factor’’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 331.

[12] Newman, p. 332.

[13] Graham et al., p. 31.

[14] Aplin, p. 140.

[15] Trotter, p. 156.

[16] Aplin, p. 142.

[17] Aplin, p. 143.

[18] Linda K. Richter, ‘The politics of heritage tourism development’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 264.

[19] Aplin, p. 16.

Conflict in the Cultural Landscape

Discuss the Kulin people’s mode of utilizing and culturally constituting the landscape of the region. Compare it to that of the European invaders. How did these differences shape the struggle for control of that landscape?

Many years ago on the open plains of Victoria two very different and internally diverse societies and cultures met with one another and reached an inevitable nexus of conflict. To understand the reasons for this we need to examine the different ways the Kulin people and the European settlers used and culturally understood and identified with the landscape. The exploration of these differences will show how the conflict on the frontier and the struggle for control of the landscape would fall inevitably in favour of the European settlers. However, I hope that it will also show that this conflict was much deeper than a fight for the resources of the land. On the frontier were found to be social and cultural imperatives and incompatibilities which could not be resolved and were not able to coexist.

The Kulin people, that nation who occupied southern and central Victoria, like most Aborigines, were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.[1] They relied on a number of different food sources and great care was taken not to exhaust any of these. Food it seems was plentiful. At the time of settlement, Richard Broome advises us that “[e]arly European observations of Aboriginal eeling, fishing, vegetable gathering or possum hunting, reveal that a family could be fed with less than five hours of work.”[2] This was certainly remarkable to Europeans, and may well have helped give credence to both dubious myths that Australia was a land of plenty, and that the Aborigines were lazy. W.B. Kimberly, in the passage titled ‘A Retrospect’ in Bendigo and Vicinity describes the Aborigine’s labour as “simple, and needed no great exercise of ingenuity”[3], with Aborigines “living as did the people of the days of Nimrod”.[4] This we shall see, was a condescending over-simplification.

There is perhaps a much darker side to this early impression of plentiful food sources for Aborigines and the perceived ease of their acquiring food. Heather Goodall reminds us of the impact of diseases, both before and after the First Fleet, when she writes that it “may have been that in the aftermath of the 1789 epidemic, Aboriginal population numbers had not recovered sufficiently to exhaust the alternative sources of subsistence”.[5] Plagues of this nature were ‘imagined’ among the Kulin people as being spread by the Myndie, a snake-like creature that could stretch out it’s body from a tree to reach the farthest tribes and spread disease.[6] It is also likely that disease arrived in the region later than the outbreak of 1789, but occurred with similar effect.[7]

More sympathetic contemporary observers, such as Major Thomas Mitchell, were more aware of the unique skills and knowledge of the landscape that the Aborigines possessed, and found their guidance on his expeditions invaluable.[8] How was it then, that Europeans very quickly managed to fish out waterholes and creeks and decimate wildlife populations through their hunting?

It may be that the indigenous population reduced significantly in number by introduced diseases meant that for a time there were larger than usual stocks of wildlife food sources. Yet this also would be a shallow analysis. Before beginning the next section on specific practices, there are two ideas which should be reflected upon. Firstly, that “[t]he efficiency of Aboriginal occupation of the whole landscape and the exploitation of its resources rested on the network of Dreaming connections and kinship links”.[9] Secondly, that “[t]hroughout 1500 generations, ten times the gestation of the agricultural mode of production, Aboriginal Victorians shaped their relationship to the land”.[10] Clearly, to achieve subsistence for this length of time required the development of a refined, cautious and balanced approach to the practices of survival. We shall now investigate these practices in closer detail.

The use of a form of proto-agriculture known as ‘fire-stick farming’ was practiced by Aborigines across almost the whole of the continent. It served often multiple purposes and had a direct effect on early European perceptions of Australia. A primary purpose was to open up the country to travel and game species that like to feed on new grasses. In this way indigenous hunters were able to encourage kangaroos and other species to feed in certain areas suited to hunting. It also encouraged the growth of particular species of edible plants, whilst ash provided nutrients for the soil. The processes of burning and hunting were also excluded from certain areas for cultural and spiritual reasons. “Aboriginal people believe that their resources will decline through any lack of observance towards rituals set down in the Dreaming.”[11]

Although he is writing of the area around Adelaide and not that of our specific interest, the sentiment is accurately transferable to this region when Philip Clarke writes “[i]t is ironic that the open landscape that Aboriginal action created was undoubtedly a major attraction of the Adelaide Plains for European colonisers.”[12] In many cases Europeans interpreted this as a natural feature of a landscape destined for their needs.

When Major Mitchell was surveying the region on September 21, 1836, he recorded

[c]ertainly a land more favourable for colonization could not be found. Flocks might be turned out upon its hills, or the plough at once set to work in the plains. No primeval forests required to be first rooted out, although there was enough wood for all purposes of utility, and as much also for embellishment as even a painter could wish.[13]

There are a number of interesting ideas in this passage. Mitchell is trying to sell the landscape to his eventual readers, pastoralists and squatters. We have learned that a landscape like this is the product of Aboriginal burning, but we know that Mitchell was not exaggerating when he claimed it was perfect for sheep, despite the considerable degradation they would eventually cause to the landscape.

According to Broome, pastoralism in the four years between 1836 and 1840 saw the economic life of central and south-western Victoria change forever.[14] It was a time of confusion, contradiction and ultimately conflict. The sheep drove out the kangaroos and the emus, and ate out the murnong (daisy yam), which were a staple of Aboriginal diets in the region within a few seasons.[15] The Aboriginal response to this incursion was not passive, but the active responses to the invaders were anything but consistent.

Ann McGrath writes that the “Kulin were active agents who negotiated and permitted temporary access to their land in exchange for reciprocal rights to European resources.”[16] Being aware of this notion of reciprocity and willingness to share resources is essential to understanding aboriginal/settler relations. Assistant Protector Parker recorded in his Journal in February 1841 of an instance where “lower down the Loddon, 200 sheep had died from severe dressing since 1^st January, and this had given the men ample means of alluring the Aborigines around them.”[17] This sort of encouragement is a contradiction to the later attitude of the holders of the pastoral leases, who, according to Protector George Augustus Robinson, seem to “think it a hardship if a native appears on their run, imagining that a ₤10 licence gives them a legal right to expel the blacks.”[18]

This hypocrisy, on the one hand showing the Kulin they were welcome to injured sheep, or to share in the resources in exchange for the settler’s use of the land; and on the other driving them off their traditional lands. It is also likely that women would have been offered, in an increasingly complicating network of social relations and responsibilities. These sorts of contradictory exchanges created, in an atmosphere of tension, situations that caused Aborigines to respond with actions against Europeans “in the traditional mode of feud, and the upholding of traditional Aboriginal law over ritual or social transgressions.”[19]

We can find this sense of contradiction at the level of personality within Major Mitchell himself. On the one hand he is the surveyor, mapping the country, describing it and naming it in such a way to sell it to the pastoralists and agriculturalists. But on the other hand there is a sense of lament, because Mitchell knows the devastating effect that the spread of settlement is having on the Aboriginal populations. His time spent with them on his expeditions fostered a measured respect for the Aborigines. Baker argues that

Mitchell believed, it would be an act merely of justice, not generosity, to prohibit white men from killing kangaroos and emus which were as essential to Aborigines as sheep and cattle were to Europeans.[20]

This of course would be an insufficient measure and probably reflects sentiment rather than a practical suggestion. It was the herds of sheep and cattle that were more efficient in marginalizing these game animals than European hunters. To add further to the impracticality, it would have been impossible to police. One can feel the palpable sense of frustration in the journals of Robinson and Parker trying to bring those guilty even of murder before the courts. Robinson writes in his journal of a conversation between Assistant Protector Parker and the squatter Hutton in January 1840

Mr Parker was talking about the rights of the natives to the soil. Mr Hutton said he could not give in to that – it was never intended that a few miserable savages were to have this fine country. This is a prevailing opinion of the squatters.[21]

The language suggests Hutton was being asked to make unfair concessions to the land. The imperatives of colonization, it seems, allowed for no compromise.

Although Mitchell was anxious to be known and regarded for opening up the country, there is much evidence even in his own accounts of the cultural artifacts of European colonization preceding him. This was a third tier in the ultimate disruption of a way of life that had developed for tens of thousands of years, and also clear testament to the mobility of the Aboriginal people. In Baker’s book studying Mitchell’s experiences with Aborigines in ‘Australia Felix’ he recounts the time Piper discovered a razor in a deserted camp near Heathcote marked ‘Old English’.[22] Earlier in the expedition they had met with Aborigines whom Piper could not at once understand as they called out to him in Irish.[23]

With the European settlers came an abundance of cheap handmade tools, in many cases superior to those used by the Kulin people. Mitchell would frequently reward helpful Aborigines with ‘tomahawks’ on his expeditions.[24] These without doubt were much more effective and durable than the stone hatchets fashioned from the greenstone quarried at Mount William. The preparation of axe blanks at Mount William was the responsibility of a clan known as the Wurundjeri-willam, who traded these for possum-skin cloaks and other valuable items. Other clans traveled significant distances to obtain these important tools.[25] The proliferation of cheap European tools however, put the economic life of this particular clan in jeopardy, and it is thought the quarry at Mount William was abandoned within only a few years of settlement in the region.

As we have seen, the arrival of Europeans in the Kulin lands proved devastating to their way of life. Their resources were destroyed or made redundant, and their lives were considered by many to be worthless. It is difficult to interpret how the Kulin people would have made sense of what was happening around them. Clarke writes

According to early colonists, in Victoria people believed that in the farthest reaches of their known landscape there were wooden props which held up the Skyworld. Apparently the eastern prop, where British expansion was gaining, had rotted and unless gifts of possum skins and stone hatchet heads were sent straight away to the old man who looked after it, everyone would be crushed by the falling vault of the heavens… There was fear that the divide between the lands of the living and the dead would be permanently ruptured.[26]

To unfairly translate this into a ‘western’ worldview, the coming of the Europeans to Australia could be compared to the coming of the apocalypse.

Thus long before Cook landed at Sydney Cove, and long before Major Thomas Mitchell published his survey of ‘Australia Felix’ elucidating and confirming (if not the reality then certainly the expectation of) the rich prospects of this new land, the machine of British society had been geared to the purpose of colonizing a land such as this. It was both powerful and relentless. It would offer disease, displacement and ultimately a form of cultural redundancy to the Aborigines.

Conflict then with the indigenous population of Australia was inevitable, as the only thing they possessed of value to the invaders was the land itself. Their knowledge of the landscape may have been valuable to men like Mitchell, but it was scorned by the squatters. If the law lacked the will and capability to uphold the rights of Aborigines being as they were considered British subjects of Empire, then the squatters and frontiersmen seldom recognised that these rights even existed.

References:

Baker, D. W. A., The Civilised Surveyor, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1997.

Broome, Richard, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 121-167.

Brough-Smyth, R., Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne, John Currey, O’Neil.

Clarke, Philip, ‘Adelaide as an Aboriginal Landscape’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 69-93.

Clarke, Philip,  Where the Ancestors Walked, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2003.

Goodall, Heather, ‘Land in our own country’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 167-201.

Kimberly, W. B., Bendigo and Vicinity, Melbourne, F. W. Niven and CO., 1895.

McGrath, Ann, ‘A National Story’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 1-54.

Mitchell, T. L., Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, London, T. & W. Boone.

Mulvaney, J. and Kaminga, J., Prehistory of Australia, . Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999.

Parker, Journal of Assistant Protector Parker, month of February 1841.

Robinson, G. A., Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998.

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[1] John Mulvaney and Johan Kaminga, Prehistory of Australia, . Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 79.

[2] Richard Broome, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, p. 123.

[3] W. B. Kimberly, Bendigo and Vicinity, Melbourne, F. W. Niven and CO., 1895, p. 5.

[4] Ibid.,.

[5] Heather Goodall, ‘Land in our own country’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. 169.

[6] R. Brough-Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne, John Currey, O’Neil, p. 445.

[7] Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2003, pp. 192-3.

[8] D. W. A. Baker, The Civilised Surveyor, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp. 106-147.

[9] Clarke, p. 21.

[10] Broome, p. 123.

[11] Clarke, p. 64.

[12] Philip Clarke, ‘Adelaide as an Aboriginal Landscape’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. 76.

[13] T. L. Mitchell, Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, London, T. & W. Boone,  p. 271.

[14] Broome, p. 129.

[15] Ibid.,.

[16] Ann McGrath, ‘A National Story’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, p. 14.

[17] Journal of Assistant Protector Parker, month of February, 1841.

[18] Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998, pp. 127-8.

[19] Broome, pp. 127-8.

[20] Baker, p. 146.

[21] Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 25 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998, p. 139.

[22] Baker, p. 139.

[23] Ibid., p. 117.

[24] Ibid., pp. 106-147.

[25] Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked, p. 111.

[26] Ibid., p. 194.