The publication in 1963 of Margaret Kiddle’s book, “Men of Yesterday. A social history of the Western District of Victoria, 1834-1890” was at the time considered a significant milestone in the histography of Victoria. In a laudatory review, the Robert Menzies Institute asserted that the book was “a classic of Australian historiography.” In the last half of the twentieth century, the work enjoyed the status of being the standard academic text regarding pastoralism in the Western District. Margaret Kiddle worked as a tutor in the Department of History at University of Melbourne during the late 1950s. At that time, Melbourne University was widely considered the premier center for the study of Australian History, producing influential historians such as Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey.
Margaret Kiddle’s once lauded text on the social history of the Western District has not aged well. For decades it served to mislead students of the subject in a number of ways. The book reads like a paeon to the squatters of the nineteenth century, who do not deserve the lofty position to which she elevates them. She shows a general disregard for people of the working and serving classes. Her discussion of the role of social class, of national and religious affiliations, and the nature and extent of conflict on the frontier is woefully inadequate.
Kiddle’s friend, the writer Russel Ward, is most famous for his book “The Australian Legend”. In this work he argues that the people of the Australian bush were egalitarian in spirit and that this outlook greatly influenced Australian culture. This myth of an egalitarian bush was very far from the truth. The Australian bush was a very class riven society, with divisions largely imported from Britain and Ireland and exacerbated by the penal system and the pattern of settlement characterised by squatter pastoralism. The reality is that social inequality was of great importance, far greater than any purported ethos of egalitarianism.
Western District squatters were sometimes seen by the elite of Melbourne society as being unsophisticated in their manners and were on occasion disparaged for their social pretensions. Nevertheless, in the Southwest the squatters did enjoy real privilege. They had greater power and prestige than the majority of people. While at one level they were resented for their privileged status and arrogance, there was a considerable degree of formal social deference, especially in the civic sphere.
Successful squatters were often keen to present themselves as being superior to others in district society, and there was a tendency to aggrandize their historic family connections. Their own good breeding and superior education was generally considered very important, especially in comparison to common people, whom they were inclined to disparage as coarse and ignorant. They sought to highlight their family connections to their supposed fine gentry forebears in Scotland, Ireland and England. In the wake of the Eureka rebellion and other populist social movements, squatters generally sought to push back against any advocacy for democratic reform.
Jan Critchett’s groundbreaking “A Distant Field of Murder,” published by Melbourne University Press in 1990, has been the standard account of frontier conflict in the Western District. It covers the period from 1834 till 1848. Overall, it stands in marked contrast to earlier attempts to write about the situation on the frontier. It is a remarkable book, although not a comfortable read. The book concentrates on the conflict that prevailed west of the Hopkins River.
The novelist Thomas Alexander Browne wrote under a ‘nom de plume’ as Rolf Boldrewood. “Old Melbourne Memories Revisited” by Rolf Boldrewood is especially insightful with regard to the squatter mindset on the frontier in the 1840s. In his youth this gentleman took up a run west of Port Fairy and personally knew many of the prominent squatters of the Southwest. Written as a latter-day account, cloyingly romanticised for English audiences, it depicts actual events but tailored for the tastes of English readers of the Victorian period. It is especially valuable for its depiction of British supremacist ideology as epitomised by the free settlers.
James Bonwick’s book, “Western Victoria: Its Geography, Geology and Social Condition”, published in 1858, exhibits a similar degree of racist judgementalism and white supremacy, and is valuable for this reason. It is an interesting though cringeworthily account of a journey, heavily laden with romanticised imperial sentiment. Despite the obvious flaws, the book is sometimes very perceptive regarding social conditions in the Western District at that time.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, there emerged a literary movement which aimed at elevating the “free settlers” as the quintessential pioneers of Australia. This movement was led by a group of influential historians who, during the Victorian era, were regarded as semi-official chroniclers of colonial Australia. Their works frequently highlighted British virtues and tended to idealize the “brave pioneers,” free settler men and women who tamed the wilderness and brought civilization to the benighted. Subsequently, many family historians sought to align their own forebears with this ideological construct of the pioneering free settler.
James Bonwick was a middle-class English schoolteacher and school inspector who worked in Tasmania and Victoria from 1842. He was also a social historian of note who wrote to promote a certain ideological worldview with regard to Australia’s settlement. In the mid-1850s he was employed as the Sub-inspector of schools for the Denominational Schools Board for the Ballarat and Ararat districts. His headquarters were at Buninyong, near Ballarat. In 1857 Bonwick made a long trip through Western Victoria as part of his job inspecting rural schools. His book is a record of his long horseback ride through the Western District, and was published by Thomas Brown of Geelong in 1858.
James Bonwick makes the following observations of how the squatters of the Southwest in the late 1850s tightened their grip over land ownership at the expense of working people. He writes:
“When town lots came into the market, the same sense of self preservation, the same wish to keep off all intruders, brought the squatter forward as a purchaser. Speculators and even bona fide buyers anxious for a settlement, thought it useless to contend with the long purse of the flock master, and after a brisk struggle the latter got his own way. Under these circumstances some of our inland townships, boasting of half a dozen huts, are almost wholly in the hands of the surrounding [free] settlers, who thus enjoy their homesteads in undisturbed security, and feared no legislative enactments of assessment. For some time, this course has been adopted throughout the country, and the land has got more effectually locked than ever it was. When conversing with [free] settlers upon the subject, they have expressed to me their regret at the vast outlay of their capital, but that they saw no other way of protecting themselves, as they said, against the new town’s cry of Anti Squatterdom.”
Bonwick went on to note that: “When travelling through this western district I was amazed to find the lands being thus secured by the few holders. Of course, as the best land is always put up by the government, and [Free] Settlers buy that, they are safe to hold the use of the land [as leasehold] which is only fit for pasturage, and which forms, perhaps, five-sixths of the colony. I heard thus of men owning 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 acres. But Squatters are not fools to their interests, nor are they governed by a malignant desire to spite the people, as some would imagine. Percentage has its influence upon them, and they would rather prefer 25 per cent upon capital invested in leasing farms, than 10 per cent in retaining lands for pasturage only. But the reflecting man perceives that in the future the great bulk of the land of Victoria and New South Wales will be in the hands of a few persons, who, as lordly proprietors, may lease sections to the productive classes.”
James Bonwick is referring here to the tactics of squatters to use dummy bidders, well-placed agents, and other dubious practices to circumvent the intention of the Victorian government to make land ownership more widely available to people of more humble means. This movement for the reform of landownership commenced in the late 1850s and came to the fore through the years of the subsequent decade.
Starting from the early 1860s a series of bills were passed by the Victorian Parliament designed to break up some of the squatter properties into smaller blocks for closer settlement. Parts of the big squatter runs were divided by the government into much smaller freehold selections and these blocks were put up for public sale and the revenue generated was appropriated by the government. These so-called “Selection Acts” were resisted fiercely by the large landholders. In many instances, squatters managed to rort the system in ways which actually consolidated their power and their hold over land. Nevertheless, some modest blocks did end up in the hands of smaller farmers and so a start was made to reform land ownership, although the political fight to counter organised squatter power within Southwest society remained long and arduous, especially with regard to their tight grip over the countryside.
In his book, Bonwick also made several observations of emancipist men he met in the bush which are interesting to read. Usually these men were of Van Diemen’s Land convict background. While his attitude is condescending, he did express some sympathy towards their plight.
While the role of academic publications and historical literature is obviously important, oral traditions and popular histories should not be discounted. Some of the publications of township historical societies and of curious minded women with long standing connections to local families are extremely insightful, especially in terms of what it might have meant to have been a woman of that earlier period.
While free settlers and members of elite families have been lauded for their exploits, accounts of the experience of the underclass has tended to be limited in one way or another or has spoken in terms aligned with the standardised ideology of the ruling classes.
In Mary Bennett’s book on the history of Woolsthorpe there is an interesting poem in a naïve style written in 1908 by William Davidson. William was the Woolsthorpe correspondent for the district’s newspapers for many years. The poem concerns the passing of the Aboriginal clans from the Koroit district. The poem expresses regret for the passing of King Moopoora, the “last of the Spring Creek tribe.” This Aboriginal man was buried by his European acquaintances in the Woolsthorpe cemetery next to his brother, apparently in accord with his wishes. In the literature of the Western District there are many expressions of regret concerning the passing of the “last of the Aborigines.” The sentiment is along the lines that while the elimination of the natives was admittedly a bad business, there is nothing we can do about it now.
The last stanza of Davidson’s poem is as follows: “The Mooproahs were a peaceful tribe, they were both swift and strong, and never used a spear or club, but to redress a wrong. No marble slab adorns the spot, where King Moopoorah lies. We laid him in a shallow grave, but that caused no surprise, for “White Australia” was the cry, and is the cry today. Oh Pioneers, how dare you say, you gave the blacks fair play.” This vernacular poem from 1908 shows that people in the district at the turn of the twentieth century were very much aware of what happened and knew where responsibility lay.
It is perhaps hard now to imagine just how a few extended families came to own so much prime pastoral land in the Southwest. One feature of the district was how small hamlets emerged in the shadows of large squatter runs. Woolsthorpe developed in the vicinity of three important runs. Laboring and servant families often lived in hamlets close to pastoral homestations, where servants and laborers and tradesmen were often employed seasonally. Pattern of settlement were repeated throughout the Western District. From the late 1840s homestead blocks of six hundred and forty acres were held on freehold title while the greater part of the runs were leased from the Crown.
Union Station’s homestead block was not far from the township of Woolsthorpe and the fine house the pre-emptive block remains there until today. The first freehold allotments in the newly surveyed town of Woolsthorpe were sold in 1852. Many of the initial town blocks were purchased by the Lindsay family and by members of other squatter families such as George Bostock. The squatters often purchased the best blocks for themselves, for speculation and land banking. Some purchased blocks to bequeath to Protestant churches and denominational schools. The lives of many small farmers and tradesmen were dictated by the annual schedules prescribed by the seasonal demands of the stations.
The task of “improving” the sheep and cattle runs of the Southwest was a huge endeavor and employed many people. Native vegetation was cleared and drainage works were carried out to increase carrying capacity and to prevent flooding. In some cases the country was radically re-engineered.
In the Southwest, an excellent source of information regarding the squatter stations located immediately north of Port Fairy can be found in Peter Yule’s “From Forest, Swamp and Stones – A History of the Shire of Minhamite”. In 1870 the Shire of Minhamite was formed from the North Riding of the Shire of Belfast. Yule outines the formation and fate of the runs located north of Belfast, including Dunmore, Eumeralla West and East, Ardonachie, Squattleseamere, Harton Hills, Kangatong and Tarrone, among others. These stations were all well known to the people of Port Fairy and Koroit. To large extent the history of the Minhamite Shire is the history of these runs. The shire contained no major towns and its population was sparse and dispersed.
Hamlets such as Macarthur, Hawkesdale and Orford emerged on the fringes of stations. Then the closer settlement schemes provided an impetus to the further development of some such hamlets. Not all hamlets grew as a result of the selection acts and the soldier settlement schemes. The most successful closer settlement schemes were those where the land was more suitable to dairy farming.
The districts most affected by the carve ups of closer settlement schemes were generally those where much of the original station was still leased from the Crown and where the squatter family did not buy blocks through the system of dummy bidders and proxies. The proprietors of Union and Quamby near Woolsthorpe seem to have converted most of their leasehold to freehold by the 1860s, taking advantage of the boom in cattle prices which resulted from the goldrushes.
Squatters in the nineteenth century often cried poor, but this is belied by the fact that a fleet of manor houses arose on the vast plains, vying with each other for glory. These mansions were situated on the plains mostly according to the outlines of the original runs that were taken up in the 1840s. The grand estate houses were usually constructed close to the sites of the original houses built on the home station enclosures. From 1847, six hundred and forty acres of freehold title was made available to squatters in accord with the policy of “preemptive right”. It was on such homestead blocks that most of the finest mansions were built in the 1860s and 1870s.
Along with the construction of the mansion homestead, a fine botanic garden was often developed surrounding the homestead, often modelled on a large English park. This was done as a demonstration of exclusivity and inherited privilege. Prominent landscape artists were engaged to oversee these creations, mindful of the dictates of trends in fashion prevailing at different times. For example, the botanic garden developed at Quamby homestead for the Lindsay family was designed by William Guilfoyle, curator and director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, and his involvement in the design lent a certain cachet to the project.
An example of this mania for landscape gardening is illustrated through the recent book “Dalvui – a Western District eulogy”, which describes the establishment of the homesteads and gardens of the Neil Black family at Terang and Noorat. The book also provides a fascinating insight into the social lives of the various members of the Black family and illustrates the wealth and privilege of the squatter class, at least in comparison to the ordinary working people of the Terang district.
Some nouveau riche squatter families would inflate their pedigree to fit the purpose of establishing their moral and societal superiority above that of the common herd. Newly minted graziers paraded their class credentials to the metropolis. Tartans, coats of arms and titles were appropriated for the purpose.
When people of lesser background did achieve a measure of success there was a tendency to ape the pretentions of the upper class by modeling their own styles and pretensions on those of the supposedly elite families. Despite what he might say, many a poor farmer on a small block harbored aspirations to live in the big house and have children who entered the professions. The Catholic Irish were no more immune to this than people of other groups. We still have a fascination with landed privilege and elegant houses on big blocks.
As time progressed, the runs taken up in the 1840s netted the more successful squatter families vast wealth. Sometimes the wealth was dissipated when the founders died or moved back overseas. Estates were carved up and distributed to multiple children across generations. There was no guarantee of success in business, even for those who worked financial markets and tapped family networks. Enterprise went bust on a regular basis and capital was lost as well as accumulated.
From the 1860s there were concerted efforts to break up runs for closer settlement to provide opportunities for smaller farmers. Sometimes squatter proprietors were in competition with each other to obtain freehold land, but they also worked together to defend their collective interests. Squatters and politics have always gone together.
Eleanor Robin’s book “Swanston – Merchant Statesman” was published in 2018. It is an interesting examination of a somewhat neglected man in Australian history. Captain Swanston was a key figure in the British rush to the Port Phillip District in the decade from 1835 to 1844 and the financial systems he put in place were both innovative and ultimately doomed. Captain Swanston finally went bust in 1849. He died at sea in 1850 on his way to California and most likely never set foot in Melbourne where the main street is named in commemoration of him.
Even though Captain Charles Swanston fell into financial difficulty in the general financial crash of the mid-1840s his family remained active in pastoral investments at Port Phillip. By the late 1840s, Swanston’s commercial interests in the Western District were tied to the next generation of the family, especially to his eldest son, Charles Lambert Swanston and to Edward Willis, his son-in-law. Collectively these men controlled vast properties in the Western District, including the country which became the Nareen property. This land has a long association with powerful and well-connected gentlemen.
In 1846 Charles Lambert Swanston and Edward Willis acquired Kout Narin station near Harrow. They subsequently subdivided this station after several years of joint operation. Swanston and Willis retained the part of Kout Narin known as Koolomurt. A further section, Nareen, was carved off Koolomurt as a separate parcel in 1886 by James Graham, who had acquired Koolomurt sometime previously. Graham was a prominent merchant, grazier and parliamentarian. James Graham eventually sold Nareen sometime around the turn of the century.
The property then changed hands multiple times until purchased in 1946 by the Fraser family. They had sold their Riverina property, Balpool-Nyang, to move to Nareen. A son of the Fraser family, Malcolm Fraser, became Prime Minister in 1975. Malcom Fraser’s wife, Tamie, was a daughter of Sandford Robert Beggs and her sister was Eda Ritchie. Hugh Beggs, their brother, was for several years the chairman of the Australian Wool Corporation. Fraser’s sister-in-law, Eda Ritchie, was Victorian Liberal Party president for several years, and her husband Robin Ritchie was chairman of Geelong Grammar School. The Beggs family owned the historic Nareeb Nareeb pastoral property near Glenthompson. Hugh Beggs’ wife was Frankie Fairburn whose father, Sir David Fairbairn, was a scion of the squattocracy and a long term minister in several Liberal governments. Nareeb Nareeb station is located not far from the Blackwood station of the Ritchie family.
The descendants of the squatters have largely moved on, whereas substantial numbers of the offspring of subaltern families remain in the Southwest, many of whom are doing well for themselves while others are still struggling to get by. Most of the erstwhile elite families, including the Frasers, the Hoods and the Ritchies, are no longer present in the communities they once dominated. Ironically, many individuals of the families of the original working-class population of servants and laborers are now relatively prosperous and entrenched in the community life of the Southwest in many fields. Business, the trades, farming and sporting clubs are run by local people, many of whose forebears came to the district originally as subaltern workers.
Nevertheless we should keep in mind that at one time the most prominent squatters were the elite of their districts. They were a distinct caste, united by business and personal connections. Not all would-be squatters were successful, but for those who succeeded their families became a social and political elite. Some elite families were well integrated with the national power structures of Australia.
The Hood family at their Merrang property near Mortlake were representative of the elite of Western District society. The original founder Robert Hood took over the squatter run in 1856 and his descendants were well-connected to the prominent families of the squattocracy through multiple social, civic, and sporting ties. Four generations of the Hood family served as councillors on the Mortlake Shire.
In 1964, Robert Alexander Dunlop Hood, the grandson of the founder, wrote an account of the squatter legacy of his slice of the Southwest as part of a booklet commemorating the centenary of the Mortlake Shire. This particular Robert Hood served for more than three decades on the Mortlake Shire Council and was active in both the Australian Sheepbreeders’ Association and the Polwarth Association. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1982. His father, Robert “Alec” Hood, married Georgina Anderson, a grand-daughter of Thomas Manifold. Georgina’s sister, Ethel, was the wife of Stanley Bruce, the conservative Prime Minister of Australia. Georgina and Ethel’s uncle was Sir Walter Synnot Manifold.
Hood’s section of “History of the Shire of Mortlake” is called “Early Settlement of the Mortlake Shire”. Hood’s words are a distillation of the kind of civic messaging people of the Southwest sat through during the 1960s and 1970s. The author squirmed but listened. One can see from Hood’s words the outcome of the plantation project that was at the heart of the Western District. We can see the veneration of a caste of men, a manly set of fraternal brothers, who led the plantation of civilization in this part of the world. The prospect of economic advantage drove the Men of Yesterday in a rightful pursuit of wealth as a worthy demonstration of their moral rectitude and superior breeding.
Under the heading The Beginning, Robert Hood writes as follows: “Australia has developed with amazing speed. The remains of great civilizations can be seen in many other parts of the world, but when the white man came to Australia there was not a permanent building or a man made road on the whole continent. An occasional earthen oven mound, the outline of a bark canoe on the trunk of a red gum, a few stone axes and some delightful place names are about the only memorials left by the aborigines.
It is doubtful if a white man ever set foot in what is now the Mortlake Shire before 1839, though Major Mitchell had passed to the north and seen, and probably named, Mount Shadwell. Yet within thirty years the land had been settled and surveyed, and a Shire Council had been formed to administer local government.
The year 1838 saw the start of a great boom in the Colony, chiefly due to the arrival of large amounts of capital from England, which was lent out by newly-formed banks. These banks demanded little security, though a high rate of interest.
With this easily-obtained capital, there was a rush to take up land and the price of sheep rose to £ 3 per head. By the end of the year most of the land round Geelong was taken.
In 1839, Mr. David Fisher set out on an exploring expedition on behalf of the Derwent Company. He was accompanied by Major Mercer, George Mercer and an overseer named Thomas Anderson. They crossed the Emu Creek somewhere near the present site of Darlington and eventually emerged near the “Section” and formed Mount Shadwell Station, about two miles from the mount, near what became known as the Salt Lakes. They left Anderson in charge and the rest of the party moved on.”
The chapter continues in like vein, describing the takeover of the country by a few score of heroic men. The sentiment is that the pioneers seemingly achieved everything themselves without much help from anyone, whereas in fact this cohort of free settlers was embedded within and integral to the emerging colonial state. Obligingly, Hood provides readers with “Some Biographical Notes on a few of the Pioneers”, as well as a table of the leaseholders of the original runs.
The commitment to capital in the document is obvious. Robert Hood makes no bones about the importance of “the arrival of large amounts of capital”, a reference to slave compensation money and of re-investment of profits made in British India. Most readers would not have known to what Hood was referring. A restricted circle were privileged in what they knew, and the rest were expected to be loyal to the program.
The religious underpinning is Calvinist, the color of its social and political agenda is orange, and the ideology holds that the squatters were perfectly entitled to do what they did as the outcome was so glorious and revolutionary.
This legacy today is no longer presented in such stark terms but its ideological and commercial underpinning still washes over Australia for it remains part of our ruling culture, but now dressed in somewhat different garb to give the impression that things have evolved more than they actually have.
Not all of those who have forebears in the Western District were of this social background, nor is it fair to subsequently subsume all of us under the amorphous rubric of “settler colonizer”.
