While it is not clear what financial backing the Lindsay and Carmichael families had when establishing the Union and Quamby runs at Woolsthorpe, the financial links that Neil Black had can easily be ascertained. Neil Black held the Glenormiston run at Noorat from 1840, and shortly afterwards acquired an adjoining station called The Sisters, an even larger run closer to Woolsthorpe. These almost adjacent properties lay between the Mount Emu Creek and the Hopkins River. The Glenormiston run was close to Noorat while Black’s The Sisters run and the Ballangeich run of Captain John Eddington was associated with the hamlet of Ellerslie.
Captain Eddington of the Ballangeich run was formerly of the 1st Royal Scots Regiment, just as his father had been. On 25 December 1802 at a very early age his name was entered for a commission in the Royal Scots by the Duke of Kent, a friend of his father. Eddington Junior was deaf due to a cannon bursting in India, at a time where he was serving the Crown there.
Maggie Black has written extensively about her forebear Neil Black in her book “Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glenormiston 1839‑1880”, published in 2016. There is a condensed version of this material freely available on the website of C J La Trobe Society. The journal of the Society published this article in Vol. 17, March 2018.
Unlike the situation with many of the early squatters, Neil Black’s papers, journals and correspondence have survived, and there is considerable correspondence between Black and his principal partners. Neil Black had the benefit of capital derived from a financial syndicate formed in Britian in the mid-1830s specifically for investment in Australian pastoralism. The venture was called Neil Black & Company. Neil Black was initially a minor shareholder but he was selected to lead the Australian side of the operation as he was considered to have the skills to perform this task. He was young and ambitious and was up for a risky venture in the colonies.
Black was tasked by his backers to take up a pastoral run of his own choosing. He was then to proceed to develop the run on his own initiative. The objective was to produce wool for shipment to British textile mills, which made sense given that his corporate partners were already invested in this industry. The principal shareholders in Neil Black & Company were Thomas Steuart Gladstone and Alexander Struthers Finlay.
At the time when he left Scotland for Australia, Neil Black was of limited means, but he had demonstrated to his commercial partners an ability to manage highland estates in ways they thought might prove transferable to Australia. Neil Black was a Gaelic speaker and a loyal Unionist, and he had a number of Gaelic speaking servants from Scotland with him, including several women married to shepherds.
Slave compensation money and the profits of the Trans-Atlantic slave plantation economy played a role in the financing of Neil Black & Company. One of the principal shareholders, Thomas Steuart Gladstone, was from a family of Liverpool merchants that had profited greatly from slavery. The Gladstone family received substantial financial compensation for the loss of their slave property in the West Indies. Thomas Steuart Gladstone’s father was Robert Gladstone and his uncle was John Gladstone. These brothers were some of the largest British slave owners, with multiple estates in Jamaica and Guyana. John Gladstone was the head of the family business but Robert was also very much involved in this business prior to his death in 1835.
The extent of the Gladstone’s involvement in slavery was such that after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the Gladstone’s received the largest of all compensation payments. The Slave Compensation Act of 1837 was the legislative mechanism whereby slave owners were paid compensation. Some of the money paid to the Gladstone family was invested in Neil Black and Company, and Mr. Black duly arrived in Port Phillip in 1839 to commence operations in the Western District.
Dr Nick Draper of University College London has written that the Gladstone family’s property in the West Indies was the engine for the family’s wealth between the 1820s and the 1830s. “In a period when slavery was supposed to be in decline, John Gladstone invested very heavily in the slave economy. He earned very high returns on his assets.” According to Dr Draper, John Gladstone and family owned, or had mortgages over, 2,508 African slaves and were paid £105,781 in compensation after slavery in was abolished. The majority of these slaves were on plantation estates in Guyana. In total about 480,000 Africans were transported to the British Colony of Guyana, an astonishing number and more than twice the number of convicts transported to Australia.
After the abolition of slavery, John Gladstone expelled the majority of the former slaves from his plantations. To fill the gap in the workforce he sourced large numbers of indentured servants from India. This was done by false promises. His agents promised them good jobs, schools and medical attention. However, upon arrival they were not paid wages until their “debts” had been repaid. They worked under conditions that resembled slavery in everything but name.
Other plantation owners also followed this practice. Nigel Westmaas, professor in Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, has reported that “Almost 238,000 Indians came to Guyana, and by 1911 Indians outnumbered the Africans. It was a horrific system, with six-year indentureship with terrible conditions, denials of return passages – but it was not on the scale of slavery.” This was small comfort for those exploited in this way. The enforced migration of people trafficked across continents completely changed local demographics in Gyana, and the political and social consequences persist until today.
John Gladstone was an absentee landlord who never visited his estates in the Caribbean but he became fabulously rich from the proceeds of slavery. One of his sons, William Ewart Gladstone, became British Prime Minister for twelve years, spread over four terms from 1868 to 1894. William’s nephew, Thomas Steuart Gladstone, was Neil Black’s business partner. Neil Black’s letters to Thomas Steuart Gladstone show that Gladstone family money bankrolled Neil Black in the Western District.
Although the Gladstone family’s origins were Scottish, the family’s trading company was based in Liverpool. A significant portion of the total trade passing through Liverpool at this time was associated with commodities produced by slaves, mostly held captive on plantations in the Americas. Much of Liverpool’s historic wealth came from slavery. As reported by National Museums Liverpool, “From about 1750 until 1807, between a third and a half of Liverpool’s trade was with Africa and the Caribbean. Virtually all the leading inhabitants of the town, including the Mayors, Town Councillors and MPs, invested in the slave trade and profited from it.”
In the period in which Thomas Steuart Gladstone partnered with Neil Black, he operated as an international merchant in the firm of Gladstone and Sergeantson. Robert and John Gladstone had mercantile interests in both the West Indies and the East Indies, but Thomas Steuart Gladstone had commercial interests in South American Guano, Australian wool, and general trade with Asia.
Thousands of pounds were invested in Neil Black’s squatting enterprise at Terang. The first run was taken up at Glenormiston from 1840. From 1844 further funds were made available for Neil Black to take over “The Sisters”, which bordered Glenormiston to the west. Black was instructed to pay cash for everything, which is an indication of the level of funding that was available to him. This funding allowed him to take advantage of the depressed market conditions of the early 1840s to expand his holdings at a time when some of his neighbours went bust.
Neil Black was renowned for his meanness and parsimony. He took advantage of the “Highland and Island Emigration Society” scheme to import Scottish Highlanders to work on his company estates, and reportedly paid them the lowest rate possible and disparaged their abilities. After some time on his lonely run he found a young wife from an appropriate Scottish family and built a fine mansion for his new wife and their children. Perhaps his most socially prestigious moment came in 1867 when he hosted Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, at his Glenormiston property. This son of Queen Victoria was accorded an extra special kangaroo hunt on Glenormiston for the entertainment of the prince and his retinue.
Alongside Thomas Steuart Gladstone, the other major shareholder in Neil Black & Company was Alexander Finlay. He was associated through his father, Kirkman Finlay, with the firm of James Finlay & Co., one of Britain’s leading merchant and textile manufacturing firms. This company also relied upon profits derived from Transatlantic slavery and from its trading interests in British India. The patriarch, Kirkman Finlay was one of the leading merchants, bankers, and manufacturer in Glasgow. Kirkman Finlay was also Lord Provost of Glasgow and a Member of Parliament. From his profits he was able to rebuild Castle Toward in Argyllshire on a grand scale. The relationship between the Gladstone and Finlay families was of long standing and John Gladstone and Kirkman Finlay were political allies and business associates.
Alexander Finlay, like his father Kirkman, also became a prominent British politician. Finlay’s cousin Mary was the mother of John and Alexander Dennistoun, the merchants and politicians who were the chief financiers of the Clyde Company of Bothwell in Van Diemen’s Land. The Dennistoun family had a considerable interest in the Trans-Atlantic slave economy over many decades. In the 1840s, several of the largest squatter runs in Western Victoria were held in the name of the Dennistoun family. It is evident that considerable investments in the squatter runs of the Western District derived from capital derived from a network of allied gentlemen.
Many of the gentlemen involved in these networks were associated through lodge membership. As David Harrison outlines in his book “The Transformation of Freemasonry”, the slave trade in Liverpool reached its peak during the late eighteenth century, with many Liverpool merchants and businessmen taking part in what they saw as just another legitimate business, namely making a profit from slavery.
Freemasonry was popular among merchants during the closing decades of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Liverpool became the dominant port in the trans-Atlantic trade and the port’s lodges provided networking opportunities for merchants and businessmen. Although membership records were secret, it is known that one of John Gladstone’s sons, Robertson, became a Freemason in Liverpool in 1833. The networking aspect of Freemasonry for young businessmen working within the busy port of Liverpool was important during this period. Freemasonry offered social connections for young businessmen, many of whose fathers were lodge members.
It should be noted that not all freemasons were supporters of the slave trade and quite a few were noted Abolitionists.
Neil Black’s business partner, Alexander Finlay, had two sons, Campbell Finlay and Alexander Junior. Alexander Finlay Junior married Nora Robinson, the daughter of Sir Hercules Robinson, then Governor of New South Wales. This was one of the most celebrated weddings of colonial Australia in the nineteenth century and its reporting reveals much that is illustrative of class relations in Australian colonial society. Alexander Finlay and Nora took over the Glenormiston run in the late 1870s from Campbell Finlay, Alexander’s bother. The Finlay’s appear to have been largely absentee landlords although still involved in the financial aspects of the business.
The dissolution of the business partnership of Neil Black and Co. in 1867 came after most of the Glenormiston and The Sisters runs had been converted to freehold title. Like other squatters, freehold title was partly acquired through the extensive use of dummy buyers. Employing dummy bidders was part of a deliberate effort to subvert the Victorian Government’s attempts to break up squatter runs for closer settlement.
The transfer of the homestead block at Glenormiston to the Finlay family has an interesting backstory. When Neil Black and Co. was wound up in 1867, the land holdings were divided into three lots, ascertained as being of equal value. The three partners, Black, Finlay and Gladstone, drew lots to determine who would get which lot. Neil Black very much hoped that he would draw the lot which included the homestead. If not, he expected that the other partners would swap the homestead lot for the one Neil Black had drawn. Gladstone clearly indicated that he would do this. In the event, it was Finlay who drew the lot with the homestead on it but he did not agree to a swap and so Neil Black had to vacate the homestead he had built. In time he recovered from this setback and two of his sons continued the pastoral business. A third son drowned tragically at sea while on a voyage to Britain.
An insight into the strategic and security environment in which squatters operated in the Southwest in the early 1840s is found in an often quoted journal entry of Neil Black. Upon meeting up with a group of squatters in Geelong in 1839, Neil Black wrote the following entry: “The best way [to procure a run] is to go outside [the already settled district] and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means.”
This observation was written prior to Neil Black’s taking over the leasehold at Glenormiston. When Frederick Taylor took up that run it was known as Strathdownie, and Taylor was there as the agent for George McKillop, a man in business partnership with Charles Swanston and the Derwent Company. Like Swanston, McKillop was a merchant with ties to the East India Company and it is likely that it was McKillop who had connected Swanston with George Mercer, the main financial shareholder in the Derwent Company, along with Thomas Learmonth.
It was apparent to Black that violence was the habitual approach to addressing the “Aboriginal problem”. Many young squatters taking up runs in the Southwest saw this solution as the method best adopted, for it would remove the problem from the country in perpetuity.
Neil Black resolved not to be party to such murder, at least not directly. Instead, he decided to take over an existing run which was already pacified, and largely already cleansed of its Aboriginal inhabitants. Neil Black became one of the most prominent and successful squatters in the Southwest. He was also an influential conservative politician and a well-regarded church benefactor.
Neil Black renamed his station to Glenormiston once he took over the pastoral lease. The notorious Frederick Taylor had not long previously carried out a massacre of dozens of Djargurd Wurrung clanspeople, on this very run Neil Black had taken over. This gruesome event, known as the Murdering Gully Massacre, has been much commented upon over the years.
The massacre led by Frederick Taylor took place in 1839 and the fact that Neil Black opportunistically took over this run in 1840 does not reflect well on him, despite his professed moral scruples. Neil Black was not the only gentleman who took advantage of the bloody work done by earlier leaseholders. The occupation of runs that had recently been violently cleared of Aboriginal people and then destroy evidence of their occupation is revealing of the culture shared by the squatters.
Frederick Taylor was an agent of Charles Swanston and acted as the Derwent Company’s manager at Geelong prior to David Fisher’s arrival there. Like Swanston, Taylor had a connection to the British Military in India and to the East India Company. In particular, Taylor had a close connection to the Loughnan brothers, formerly of the British Army.
Swanston was the primary financial director of the Derwent Company, in which Swanston was a partner alongside the merchant capitalists George Mercer and Thomas Learmonth. These three gentlemen did not set foot in the Western District and left the establishment of business on the ground to their sons, nephews and sons-in-law. The frontier was no place for old men and in any case as youths they had already had their own share of imperial and entrepreneurial adventuring. In particular, Charles Swanston had led an active life in earlier days as a military servant of the Empire.
In 1839 Frederick Taylor and his party travelled from Geelong into the Western District as far as the west bank of the Mount Emu Creek, near the modern day town of Terang. The Derwent Company and its associated gentlemen was already on this part of the frontier. By 1840, Captain James Webster, another man with East India Company connections, was operating out of the nearby Mount Shadwell run at Mortlake. His men were deemed by George Augustus Robinson as being the most brutal and depraved of all the men hired by the squatters. Webster had taken over from James Anderson, who had managed the run for the Derwent Company from late 1838.
Also travelling from Geelong at this time were the Manifold brothers, and the Taylor and the Manifold parties were sometimes visible to each other as they headed west for the same purpose of pegging out frontier country. Taylor and Manifold were on runs shortly prior to the arrival of Peter McArthur and Nicholas Cole, who took up neighbouring runs.
In 1839 Frederick Taylor with two associates led a group of several shepherds in their employ in an attack on a camp of sleeping Djargurd Wurrung clanspeople, firing upon and killing around thirty-five men, women and children. After the massacre, the bodies were dumped in the local waterhole and later burnt. Several Aboriginal men were able to escape the violence, and later told consistent individual accounts to Charles Sievwright, the Assistant Protector of Aborigines, and to several Wesleyan church missionaries associated with the Buntingdale mission near Colac.
These few survivors sought protection at the mission, which was known as a place of sanctuary. It is largely through the efforts of the missionaries Reverend Benjamin Hurst and Francis Tuckfield, as well as the work of Assistant Aboriginal Protector, Charles Sievwright, and also the Chief Protector, George Augustus Robinson, that we know so much about this particular massacre. Both Sievwright and Robinson believed that such violence was not an isolated incident but was indicative of a pattern of violence in the Western District.
Sievwright did not have any doubts about the veracity of the accounts, since he was convinced that this was not a one-off occurrence. The fact that sleeping women and children and men were killed in this way shocked at least some of the small number of Europeans then in the district. There was some attempt to sanction Taylor, which is why there is more known about this incident than others. Thanks to the testimony of several Aboriginal survivors, supported by Assistant Protector Sievwright and the two missionaries, men of sufficient standing whose official depositions were difficult to ignore, a rare investigation was launched by the authorities.
Taylor, learning of the investigation, soon left the district and was not convicted for any crime, either for what happened at Glenormiston or for other killing parties he was said to have led. After Tayler disappeared from the run, Neil Black took it over. In his journal he admitted that the local Aboriginal clans were largely pacified as a consequence of such violence. In 1840 he wrote: “The blacks have been very troublesome on it [Glenormiston] and I believe they have been cruelly dealt with. The late superintendent [Taylor] ran off from a fear that he would be apprehended and tried for murdering the natives. The poor creatures are terror stricken and will be easily managed. … It is the opinion of Blackie [the station overseer] that about 35 – 40 natives have been despatched on this establishment and that there is only two men left alive of the tribe. He is certain we will never be troubled with any of them on this run.”
Interestingly, in the wake of this massacre, the European community eventually stopped referring to the watercourse as Taylor’s Creek and instead the name Mount Emu Creek was adopted. Regardless, the massacre effectively destroyed the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan. Through intimidation, Neil Black kept the few surviving clanspeople away from his runs and pulled down any Aboriginal dwellings he found. Some neighbouring squatters allowed Aboriginal survivors to remain on their runs, provided they worked in some capacity or another. These Aboriginal workers and servants were sometimes referred to as tame or civilized blacks as distinct from “wild blacks.”
Neil Black was elected to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1859 as the member for Western Province, a seat he held continuously until his death. He was a staunch defender of loyal Protestant interests of the Orange and Unionist kind. He vigorously asserted the squatters’ notion of landed entitlement. As the Australian Dictionary of Biography asserts, Neil Black was “Shrewd, self-righteous, and hardworking he was typical of many Scottish squatters of the time. He never ceased to denounce sloth and shiftlessness in others. He believed that the headlong progress of democracy would finally lead to anarchy and communism. He contributed generously but unostentatiously to the Presbyterian Church.”
According to the Dictionary of Biography, Neil Black was a member of what was called “the extreme section of the ‘No Surrender’ party in that body.” The “No Surrender” slogan derives from the 1689 Siege of Derry during the Williamite War in Ireland. The term “No Surrender” is the slogan of Unionist hardliners, now also associated with some Scottish soccer fans affiliated with certain largely sectarian clubs.ed with certain largely sectarian clubs.
John Muston: the failed squatter
Not all squatters had access to substantial amounts of imperial capital. In some cases, capital was obtained through family networks of more modest extent. In many cases the capital available from within a family was inadequate to the task. It was costly to establish, maintain and defend a run, especially if you did not know what you were doing. Many squatters failed at the task, whether through lack of the necessary skills or through exhaustion in the face of physical and emotional distress. Losses due to Aboriginal “depredations,” to drought and to livestock disease also took a toll. Many men lacked the resources to survive when the inevitable downturn in the economy hit or the climate turned against them. A good example of this is provided by the case of John Muston.
There is a wonderful book written in 2017 by Robert Wuchatsch that outlines John Muston’s story of misadventure in the Western District, called “John Muston: Draper, Squatter, Speculator in Colonial Australia”. Muston lived for a time in locations that appear as significant places in this family history. For a time, Muston took up a squatter run on the Barwon River just west of Fyansford. When John Muston camped at this spot in 1837, it was just a decade prior to when the Lowndes family came to live there. Muston’s initial camp was on William Roadknight’s run on the Barwon River at Ceres, a location first known to Europeans as Roadknight’s Marsh and subsequently as Ceres Bridge.
William Roadknight first crossed from Van Diemen’s Land in 1836 and eventually took up several runs in the Geelong region. John Muston camped at Roadknight’s Marsh prior to taking up his own run further along the river. According to Robert Wuchatsch, William Roadknight likely had an affair with John Muston’s wife. When this liaison was discovered by Muston, the affair precipitated a bitter falling out between the two men.
Following his falling out with Roadknight, in 1839 John Muston took up a more extensive run at Caramut. This run in the Southwest was originally known as the Muston’s Creek run. Caramut is the next hamlet up the road from Woolsthorpe, to the north of Koroit. Aunt Biddy and her husband Tony O’Loughlin lived at Caramut for many years. Uncle Tony was a soldier-settler on land which had been part of the run called Minjah. This run was substantially subdivided for soldier settlement after the Second World War. Muston’s Creek runs through Caramut and the road to Tony and Biddy’s farm crossed the Muston and Lubra Creeks. One day in the mid-1960s, when the author was travelling in the ute with Uncle Tony, he pointed to the creek close to the road and said that there had been a terrible massacre of Aboriginal men, women and children there. He was referring to an event that had happened over one hundred years earlier.
The events surrounding the Lubra Creek massacre of February 1842 were widely reported in the newspapers of the day, so perhaps this is how Tony knew about this particular incident. Uncle Tony is buried out of town in the lonely grassland cemetery that sits on a small rise overlooking the shallow Lubra Creek valley. This is a mostly forgotten cemetery, set in a pastoral landscape of gently rolling plains with scarcely a human dwelling to be seen. In 2024, the Lubra Creek was renamed, owing to the offensive nature of the term “lubra” and the violence which occurred there. The new name is Thanampool Thookay Creek and means “Women and Children Creek” in the Maar language.
What is clear from John Muston’s letters is that Muston’s foray into squatter pastoralism was funded almost entirely by money borrowed from immediate family members. The main benefactor was just a moderately successful cloth merchant in England, married to Muston’s sister. By the mid-1840s, John Muston was eventually declared insolvent, and so he lost a portion of his family’s money. All contact between Muston and his family in England seems to have ceased after that point.
There were a number of reasons why John Muston failed. These include the downturn in the price of wool in England in 1841, the scabby disease that infected his sheep, the absconding of his servants, the attacks by Aboriginal clanspeople on his sheep and shepherds, and his ongoing personal marital problems. However Muston’s letters show that he believed it was a lack of adequate capital that chiefly brought him undone.
John Muston accepted that the amount of capital which his family could provide to support his squatter endeavors through the inevitable hard times was insufficient for the purpose, and he lamented his own lack of the deep pockets that allowed some of his squatter neighbours and competitors to continue in the business come what may. Other squatters in the Southwest managed to survive due to their connections to financial houses and capital markets located in British cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. It is also true that many of his rivals had greater aptitude and fortitude for the task.
In a letter to his brother-in-law, Joseph James, who was his chief financial backer, Muston bemoans, “I have a hard struggle to fight, it requires a capitalist to be engaged in sheep farming, and what is the case here [with me]? Why there is hardly a settler but has a capitalist at his back who has interest to some extent in the sheep. Some of the capitalists are in India, many in Edinboro and other parts of Scotland, many in England, some in V.D. Land. Without such arrangements it must be all up hill work with the settler and unless you are willing to make some such [arrangement] with me, God knows.” John Muston “went bust” a short time after he wrote this mournful letter in 1840.
It is clear from his letters that John Muston did not doubt for a moment that as an English gentleman he was in every way entitled to go beyond the settled districts of the new colony, to occupy a run of prime grazing country and seek his fortune on a vast estate without regard for the rights of the Indigenous people. He would have considered it completely ridiculous that he owed anything to First Nations people.
He describes the Port Phillip country in a letter to his sister as “beautiful and magnificent,” something “we could not have done it better if we had made it ourselves” and “the finest sheep country in the world, one verdant carpet of millions and millions of unoccupied acres boundless around you.” Of the Indigenous people he describes them as “Blacks” who “eat their enemies,” who “never show mercy to enemies, never kill in fair fight but steal on one another while asleep, cruelty and cowardice as usual inseparable” and who “occasionally fall before the pieces [weapons] of the Europeans in affrays, but the country is so rapidly settling they become everyday more insignificant.” He notes that their food “is abundant, a tuber of very pleasing taste and large size abounding everywhere called murnong.” Muston seems unaware or unconcerned that the fields of murnong were in the process of being destroyed by the feet and teeth of his animals.
The conviction among Europeans of all classes that the Indigenous people of the Western District “eat their enemies” seems to have been something that greatly concentrated the minds of Europeans. A deep seated conviction regarding the purported savage nature of Aboriginal people was a determining factor in European thinking. When a squatter or overseer discovered that his sheep were driven off and found cruelly maimed, a hunting party was invariably organised to chase down any clanspeople that could be found. The rhetoric of many European men on the frontier makes much use of the word “savages.” The corresponding rhetoric of Aboriginal people regarding Europeans may not have been dissimilar. There was a great deal of ill feeling across the board.
John Muston could be a compelling writer. The majority of the servants on the frontier did not write and so there is less in the archive about what they thought. Nevertheless, not all servants were illiterate. There are quite a few letters from servants that have survived. There is one such letter included in Wuchatsch’s book on John Muston. This letter was written home by a young English hutkeeper who Muston employed on his Caramut run.
The young man, John George Hunter, was responsible for supporting two shepherds who had to spend all day from dawn to dusk out alone and exposed in the open countryside. One of Muston’s shepherds had recently been speared and there were regular occurrences when sheep had been driven off. Many of the “stolen” sheep were subsequently wantonly killed, in a form of economic warfare designed to force the pastoralists to leave the country.
John Hunter’s letter describes the perilous and harsh conditions of employment on the frontier. He was working for Muston, a sullen and often-absent boss. The letter describes the loneliness of the writer’s life and his intention of chucking it in at the first opportunity. At the end of his letter to his mother, Hunter writes: “This country life suits me not at all, it is lonely and disagreeable for I dare not move 100 yards away from my hut in the day or night without my gun for fear of blacks …”. Somehow this letter survives, preserved by Hunter’s family.
War has its own logic. Men kill in order that they are not killed. Sometimes they kill because their prestige is enhanced by doing so. Rather than focus on why men kill, which seems obvious enough, the focus should be on why these European men were there in the first place. In John Muston’s individual case, the answer lies in his thirst for land and the profits and prestige land could generate. From his letters, it seems Muston wished to return home to England an affluent and self-made gentleman of leisure. In this he was disappointed.
One of the letters John Muston wrote to his sister provides a remarkable first-hand account of transferring sheep by boat from Tasmania to Port Phillip, and then herding the sheep to the Barwon River. Much of the actual work was undertaken by unnamed servants of convict background Muston had hired in Van Diemen’s Land. On some of the big runs, scores of men would be employed to perform the shepherding, washing, and shearing of sheep. The demand for labor fluctuated greatly depending on the season and so many of these working men had to seek subsidiary employment, working as carters, timber splitters and in other trades.
Several forebears in this family history worked for the squatters. James Lowndes and James Junior were hired in Van Diemen’s Land to work for squatters in the Geelong District. Thomas Jones, Lionel’s paternal great grandfather, worked for a time on vessels bound for Portland Bay operated by the Henty brothers. From the late 1840s Thomas worked in the Southwest as a bullock driver and tenant farmer. He was likely employed by squatters to the north of Port Fairy. Thomas’s son, Samuel Jones, was employed on squatter stations in southern New South Wales for many years.
On Patricia’s side, her forebears worked as agricultural laborers for William Rutledge, owner of Farnham Park Estate at Tower Hill. Strictly speaking Rutledge was not a squatter, as he was engaged in agriculture and trade rather than pastoralism, but socially and politically he was very much of that class. Members of subsequent generations of Patricia’s forebears worked for squatter families in the Western District. For example, Aunt Mary and her husband Merve Neild worked for the Weatherly’s at Blythvale for a time. Biddy and Tony’s farm was carved out of the Minjah run.
Aunt Mary recalls that at Blythvale there were in total six houses for the laborers and managers working on the property. This was in addition to the beautiful homestead built in 1860 for the squatter John Ritchie. Blythvale is just north of Streatham and some of the structures on the property may have been built as early as the 1840s.
William Weatherly was already a very wealthy man in 1900 when he purchased “Blythvale”, a property of more than 27,000 acres. Some parts of Blythvale were subdivided in 1915 for Soldier Settlement while some other property in the Southwest has remained with the Weatherly family. Descendants of William Weatherly have owned Woolongoon near Mortlake for several generations.
It is interesting that so many of the squatters were Presbyterians from Scotland. David Fisher and George Russell were staunch adherents of this faith, as was Neil Black and William Lindsay, among others. Many of these men contributed to the building of Presbyterian churches and some were instrumental in the founding of elite private schools such as Geelong College. Their religious belief seems to have functioned as a kind of ideological asset. Some devoutly believed that God was on their side.
Alexander J Campbell, minister of St George’s Presbyterian Church, Geelong, wrote in 1862 that the “white man” had a God-given right to cultivate the earth and to graze his animals. Reverend Campbell wrote as follows: “If the aborigines make no use either of the grass-covered surface or of the fertile soil, I think we are … entitled to put our sheep on one, and our ploughs into the other.” While acknowledging that Aboriginal people had been “poisoned, shot down, demoralized, and slain by drink and loathsome disease,” Reverend Campbell accepted as an inevitable premise that “the white man’s progress involves the black man’s disappearance.” The above quotes are from Barbara Dawson’s, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” published by the Australian National University Press in 2014.
Alexander J Campbell was not just any random Presbyterian minister. He was instrumental in founding Geelong College, where many of the children of squatters were educated. The Geelong College website acknowledges the importance of Reverend Campbell. A quote from the official website of the Geelong College informs readers that “Rev. Campbell, Presbyterian minister, was one of the founders and chairman of many of the meetings of the first Geelong College Committee between 1861 and 1864. His active involvement in the foundation of the School was of immense importance.” Such influential institutions were modelled on British counterparts, and functioned as extensions of state power. The children of the elite were educated in such schools, which were important for social networking and marriage making.
Today, the College’s website exhorts the community to “recognise the site of The Geelong College as a place of learning, community and engagement for thousands of years by the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We respectfully take our place as stewards of this site, respectfully acknowledging all those who have gone before us.” This is a nice effort to elide culpability. The college acknowledges the Wadawurrung, but does not mention the genocide that occurred, and the subtext remains that the outcome of such Christian intrusion somehow excuses the consequences, however regrettable.
Masters and Servants in the Western District
Prior to being appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for Gippsland, Captain Charles Tyers was employed as Crown Surveyor for the Port Phillip District. In 1839 Tyers visited Portland on an official surveying visit to demark the boundary between the Port Phillip District and the new colony of South Australia. In December 1839 while he was at Portland a crude census of the European population was undertaken.
Captain Tyers’ census of the Portland district reads as follows: “Mr. and Mrs. Henty and two children, Miss Pail (sister of Mrs. Henty), two female servants, 1 boy, eleven farming and stock men, Mr. Byass (surgeon), Mrs. Byass and child, Mr. and Mrs. Cook, 1 female servant and 1 male servant, Mr. Archdale, 2 farming and stockmen, Mr. G. Winter, man servant, Mr. Brown, 4 whaling boatmen, Mr. Henty’s whalers (4) at the Wannon, shoemaker arrived by “Pyramus,” Mr. Frank Henty and six men, Mr. & Mrs. John Henty at sheep station, 1 female servant, 1 male servant, 43 shepherds, shearers and laborers, Mr S. Winter at sheep station, Mr. T. Winter, six shepherds and laborers, Messrs. Wedge, Codd and Murphy, and thirty men at Mr. Wedge’s station, during the whaling season the Messrs. Henty have six boats of whalers, 2 children and 1 female (76 persons), three ships, each 4 boats and men (102 persons), one schooner with three boats (241 persons).-Total 338. “
From this tally, it is very clear that the number of ladies and gentlemen is very small in comparison to the servants and workers. The aforementioned Henty brothers, the Winter brothers, and Mr. Wedge were all prominent early squatters in the far Southwest. These gentlemen were the proprietors of enterprises involving hundreds of laborers and servants, as well as many head of sheep and a substantial number of whaling boats and trading vessels.
It is only the gentlefolk who are mentioned by name in the census so it is easy to overlook just how many working men and women accompanied this elite few. A majority of the unnamed working people had been transported as convicts. Some were still under sentence and most were at Portland assigned to their gentlemen masters. The workers remain largely unnoticed in this standard histography, written off as an embarrassing underclass.
Government officials in Sydney were worried that the security of pastoral regions of the Port Phillip District would be endangered by the presence of too many convicts and ex-convicts, acting beyond control. Captain Fyans noted in his correspondence that the emancipist men often showed insufficient deference to gentlemen.
Maintaining control over the lower class was one reason Sir Richard Bourke, the Governor of New South Wales, was persuaded in 1836 to authorise the legitimacy of the Port Phillip settlement. For the authorities it was imperative that proper social relations between master and servant be maintained through British law and order. It was deemed that the New South Wales government should take greater control and manage the flow of emancipists from Van Diemen’s Land.
Squatting in its early phase was physically demanding work. Most squatters started out as unmarried young men and initially lived in rough huts in proximity to servants. Once the young squatters married, they usually established better quality housing for their family. Marriage to women from within a family network or to the sisters of fellow squatters was a means of keeping property and finances tightly held. Family life and proper housing was a privilege which eluded many of the working class.
In the late 1830s, scores of European men were living in huts along the beaches south of Tower Hill, in proximity to many Aboriginal people. Oddly, along the coast between Port Fairy and Warrnambool there seems to have been few reports of violence.
It is clear that there were hundreds of Peek Wurrong clanspeople living along the Southwest coastline in 1840, living in several clans, but exactly what happened to account for the precipitous drop in numbers is far from clear. From the mid-1840s, Aboriginal people camped on the fringes of Belfast, frequenting the streets and beaches of the settlement during the day.
Some of the Europeans viewed Aboriginal people as objects of pity given their distressed condition, particularly those Aboriginal women suffering disease, desertion and destitution. As the town grew in size, some newly arrived Europeans expressed their distaste at having to live in proximity to poorly controlled ill-dressed people living in humpies at the edge of town and wandering the streets by day.
Aboriginal people did begin to adopt European styles of dress. There was great pressure on surviving Aboriginal people to assimilate European cultural values and to adopt the language of the colonisers. The tone of the reporting in the press regarding “the blacks” reflects the hostility and racism of Europeans towards them.
Aboriginal people and Europeans had been living in proximity to each other for well over a decade prior to Thomas Jones’s arrival in the mid-1840s. By the 1850s, surviving Peek Wurrong men and women lived on the margins of towns and at specific camps in the district. Vilification and abuse continued across the board and for most Europeans, the inter-racial violence and conflict was just background to their day-to-day lives. Life would have centered on one’s survival, which was not easy or assured for many people.
From the earliest days of contact, relations between some of the Europeans and some First Nations people became intimately intertwined. Not all interaction was violent, but contact was very destructive for First Nations society. The abuse of women and the abuse of alcohol has a long legacy across the board. The matter of sexual relations between black people and white people is a fraught subject and is a fertile ground for racists and denialists. There has been a tendency since the earliest days of European settlement to blame convict and ex-convict men for all bad things that happened. However, European men behaving badly is just as likely to emanate from the upper level of society as from any other.
There are many documented murders of First Nations people in the early 1840s in districts not far from Koroit. For example, in 1841, Dr James Kilgour organised a number of punitive expeditions which resulted in the killing of Aboriginal people, allegedly in response to the killing of livestock on his Tarrone Station. In the author’s childhood stories circulated of how Aboriginal people were given poisoned flour. At Tarrone it is documented that poisoned flour was given to clanspeople, killing nine people and crippling at least six others.
Tarrone is not far from Koroit and the author can remember going there as a child with the family for a kangaroo drive. This involved numbers of people on horseback and in vehicles beating around the vast paddocks in pursuit of mobs of kangaroos, for sport essentially. Some of these animals got caught in fences and were killed. The author can remember one old citizen jocularly saying to his mate that this was fun, although not as much fun as “we” had in the old days. He was clearly referring to hunting parties that hunted Aborigines in previous days. Overtly racist comments such as this, of which there were many, made the author feel uncomfortable but nothing was said.
The Lubra Creek murders occurred on 24 February 1842 on a leasehold held by Thomas Osbrey and Sidney Smith at Caramut. Robert Wuchatsch writes in his book on John Muston, as follows, “Late at night, eight white men rode up to a group of Aborigines camped on the Lubra Creek, dismounted and opened fire on them.” Three women, one of whom was pregnant, and a child were shot dead. Another woman died later of wounds. Two male survivors managed to get to the Aboriginal Protectorate Station at Mount Rouse to report the murders.
Because the victims were sleeping women and children, and the attack on these sleeping people was officially shown to be unprovoked, the murders were condemned by the government authorities in far off Melbourne. Several leading local squatters were pressured by senior officials to support condemnation of the murders. Some local newspapers, reflecting the views of many squatters, disputed the lack of provocation. They blamed the “reprisal” on the assistant Protector of Aborigines, Charles Sievwright, for supporting the Aboriginal people in their struggles.
Three of the men involved in the carnage, Richard Hill, Joseph Betts and John Beswick, were tried the following year at the Supreme Court in Melbourne but were quickly found not guilty by the jury. This incident occurred on the run recently vacated by John Muston. The location is overlooked by Caramut Cemetery where Uncle Tony O’Loughlin is buried, close to where Biddy and Tony had their farm. The graveyard in this lonely cemetery is a place of quiet contemplation and reflection.
It was announced in 2024 that the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation had worked with the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and Moyne Shire Council to rename the Lubra Creek, which is a name considered offensive and derogatory to Aboriginal women. The new name is Thanampool Thookay Creek and means “Women and Children Creek”. In a statement released in April 2024, the corporation said a child and four women named Connyer, Natgoncher, Wenigoniber and Wooigouing were massacred while sleeping at the site by Europeans on 24 February 1842. The corporation’s statement listed the perpetrators as John Beswicke, Joseph Betts, Arthur D Boursiquot, Richard Guinness Hill, Charles Smith and Robert Whitehead.
This last mentioned person, Robert Whitehead, was the squatter at nearby Goodwood Station on Spring Creek, to the south of Caramut. As the lease holder, he would have been in charge of the attacking party. Prior to his death, Robert Whitehead divided the Goodwood property among his sons. One of his sons, Robert Junior, was one of the first students at Melbourne Grammar School, which opened in 1858. In the 1870s Robert Junior built a fine bluestone homestead on the station and when he retired from squatting he lived at impressive properties in Melbourne and Warrnambool.
Robert Whitehead Senior is buried at Tower Hill cemetery. William Rutledge is also buried in this cemetery, as are a majority of the author’s forebears. A guide to the Tower Hill Cemetery, published in 2004 by the Koroit and District Historical Society, has the following entry on Robert Whitehead: “from Saddleworth, Yorkshire, England, arrived in Sydney in 1839 aboard the ‘Lord William Bentnick’. In 1840 he took out a lease on ‘Goodwood’ near Caramut on Spring Creek. He bought and sold many properties and on his death was described as an old and prosperous settler. His descendants still farm part of this original lease.”
The ongoing presence of descendants of old families in the Southwest complicates things for local history writers, many of whom are connected to local historical societies. These institutions operate as cultural gatekeepers to some extent, and the depth of knowledge held by the leading lights of these societies is very impressive. Nevertheless, the date of 1840 in the above quotation should perhaps have alerted the person who wrote this entry on Whitehead pause for thought. It should have been clear enough what was happening at Caramut in 1840. The acts of violent dispossession should take precedence over any subsequent outcome.
It is understandable that these are sensitive issues and in small communities people have little choice but to interact with each other. One might well ask whose family would emerge untarnished from close scrutiny. Nevertheless, a more well-rounded and historically accurate representation of our history should be possible.
Arrival stories are the starting point for many histories. The Bible is in many ways an arrival story. What happened in the Southwest is not glorious. We should avoid the temptation to depict this history romantically.
