It is perhaps ironic that the Tower Hill Natural History Centre was designed by Robin Boyd. At the time he drafted his design for the Centre, Robin Boyd was one of Australia’s leading architects and a public intellectual. In 1960 Boyd authored an influential book called “The Australian Ugliness”, which was a critique of Australian architecture and aesthetics. In 1962 he designed the Natural History Centre. In 1967 Robin Boyd presented the Boyer Lectures on the ABC. Two years later the Centre was finally completed.
It is likely Boyd was well aware that several of his forebears were squatters at the time of the dispossession of First Nations people. In common with the other famous Boyds of his generation, Robin Boyd was a direct descendant of Dr. Robert Martin, an Ulster Presbyterian free settler who took up the original Mount Sturgeon Station run at Dunkeld in 1839. This was a time of violence and warfare in the Dunkeld district. Dr. Martin’s run was on the upper reaches of the Wannon River catchment.
Dr. Robert Martin had come into money largely through his wife’s family. She was born Lucy Gear and her parents’ family were officials of the East India Company. Her grandfather, George Dominicus, was a prominent East India Company trader who in 1787 was appointed the manager and warehouse-keeper at Botolph Wharf. He retired around 1808, having made a considerable fortune, as indicated by his will. He died a very wealthy man indeed. Lucy’s mother died in 1811 at the East India Company buildings in Saltwell Street, London, near the East India Company Docks.
Dr. Robert Martin was an elite figure in early Melbourne society, with considerable capital. He was a member of the Melbourne Club and was highly regarded in good society for his moral rectitude. He was also a squatter at the time of the killings. The initial Mount Sturgeon pastoral run of 112,000 acres was taken up by Dr. Martin in 1839. He held this lease (Number 192 in the Portland Bay District) until 1859, by which time nearly all the clanspeople of the Djab Wurrung people of the Dunkeld area were dead.
On July 6, 1841, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, was informed by Robert Knowles, the manager Dr. Martin’s Mount Sturgeon Station, of a “clash” with Aboriginal clanspeople. Knowles said that he lost some cattle and went after the “blacks.” When he came upon a “blacks’ camp,” he rode into the camp and they threw spears at him and his stock keeper. Knowles was convinced the clansmen had his cattle. Robinson wrote, “This attacking the camp of the natives under the pretense of looking after stolen property is a system that ought not to be tolerated, it is provoking hostility and would not be allowed in civilised society.” The following day, Knowles told Robinson that “sometime earlier,” he had learnt that Superintendent La Trobe had intended to jail him for “killing natives.”
Robin Boyd was also a direct descendant of Sir William A’Beckett, a British barrister and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria. A’ Beckett initially arrived in New South Wales in 1837 and the following year he defended the eleven European men charged with murder in relation to the Myall Creek massacre. The murder of at least twenty-eight clanspeople occurred on the station held by Henry Dangar. A’ Beckett’s legal services were paid for by an association of landowners from the Hunter Valley and Liverpool Plains region, including Dangar. During the trial of the accused men, Henry Dangar exercised his power, wealth and influence in order to sway the outcome and William A’Beckett was party to this legal subterfuge. He and his team used highly dubious legal tactics to have the European perpetrators of the killings avoid conviction in the initial trial.
William A’ Beckett was not involved in the second trial, which did lead to some convictions, and this resulted in the subsequent executions of seven European stockmen, the only time Europeans were executed for killing Aboriginal people.
The court cases arising from the Myall Creek massacre resulted in pacts of silence becoming common practice on the part of squatters and their managers. The gentlemen of the pastoral districts wished to avoid having sufficient evidence become available for use in any future prosecutions that might arise from the killing of Aboriginal clanspeople. No gentleman was ever brought to trial for any crime against First Nations people. There were a few men of the subaltern and overseer class taken before the courts for committing acts of violence against Aboriginal people, but the great majority were subsequently acquitted.
In 1846, William A’ Beckett was appointed to the Supreme Court of New South Wales for the District of Port Phillip. When in 1851 the separate Colony of Victoria was proclaimed, he became its first Chief Justice. He was a member of the Melbourne Club and a staunch defender of squatter interests. He also opposed the popular democratic reforms prompted by the Eureka Stockade rebellion.
By the 1950s many of the descendants of Dr. Martin and Sir William A’ Beckett were some of Melbourne’s foremost liberal and progressive public intellectuals, holding prominent positions as academics and artists. They were fortunate to benefit from the privileges of inherited money and the best private education squatter derived wealth could buy. While culpability is not transmissible down the generations, characteristics such as power, wealth, opportunity, education, and social standing are inherited at least to some degree. The privilege and advantages enjoyed by members of the commercial and professional elite should be acknowledged. Conversely, the legacy of inter-generational disadvantage also runs deep.
Robin Boyd was not the only prominent individual who can claim a direct link with the leading early squatters of the Western District. Such connections are common within the elites of Melbourne and Geelong society. They represent links to families who, above all others, profited enormously from the usurpation of First Nations’ land. The genealogy of Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, the mother of Rupert Murdoch, shows multiple links to some of the most prominent squatter families in Western Victoria. This extended family network was one of several cartels that came to define the ruling elite of the Western District.
The typical elements of squatter family heritage meet in Dame Elizabeth’s forebears. There is the ancestral connection to the Scottish lowlands, to senior figures in the established Presbyterian Church, and to trade and professional societies integrated with state structures. In her family heritage there is also the quite common historic connections to the Atlantic Slave Trade and to slave Plantations in the Americas.
Considerable profits were generated by merchants and trading companies from the importation into Britain of vast quantities of sugar produced by slave labour. This money helped establish and finance the pastoral industry in Australia. Dame Elizabeth’s direct forebears have many connections to British military officers and civil administrators serving the Empire, in Australia but also in the Americas and India. Dame Elizabeth’s forebears have multiple family connections to the colonial gentry of Van Diemen’s Land’s and to the system of land grants in operation there during the 1820s.
In pointing out these connections, there is no disparagement directed at Dame Elizabeth herself, or of her family. Dame Elizabeth seems to have been a generous and kind person and the author does not know the Murdoch family, obviously. However, Dame Elizabeth is representative of a cultural legacy that has continuing relevance to our family. In Melbourne we are frequently reminded at public events that we are on stolen land, but most in the audience do not know the process by which particular bits of country was occupied and which agents were responsible.
In British society in the Georgian period, the prime social and economic relationship was that of servant and master. In our contemporary world, this class relationships based on inequality is often glossed over. To most of us, equality is a value we aspire to, and the inequality embedded in Georgian society feels foreign to many of us nowadays. By contrast, in the early nineteenth century, social inequality was seen as morally defensible and perfectly normal, reflecting what were considered natural hierarchies in the human population.
The gamut of Western District squatter runs that Dame Elizabeth is directly connected to through family relationship is truly remarkable. It is relatively easy to trace her genealogical connections within the squattocracy. Apart from the undeniable talents and drive of these free settlers, the toil of workers and servants was crucial to their endeavour, as was the removal or containment of Aboriginal people.
A famous map of the Port Phillip District produced by Alfred Kenyon in 1932, published by the Crown Lands Department, shows the pastoral runs established in Port Phillip from 1835 until 1851, the year Victoria separated from New South Wales. Depicted on the map are the pastoral runs of the early squatters, arrayed like tiles on a mosaic. The map was an important part of the research undertaken for Kenyon’s book “Pastoral Pioneers of Victoria”, written in conjunction with R.V Billis and published in 1932.
When the Portland Bay section of Kenyon’s map is examined, many of the pastoral stations closely associated with Dame Elizabeth’s forebears are clearly identified. The list of squatter runs associated with the family network includes Illimnyte (Borongarook), Irrewarra, Warion, Koortkoort Kong, Wooriwyrite, Minjah, Muston’s Creek (Barwidgee), Keilambete, Mount Koroite, Winninburn, Weatherboard, Dundas, and Jellalabad. These are just the stations with close connection. There are other pastoral stations with a more distant connection.
Eventually, members of each of the various squatter cartels married family members from each of the other major cartels. This is hardly surprising given that these individuals mostly went to the same elite private schools and were members of the same metropolitan clubs, societies and professions. It may well be that the descendants of these families are still marrying each other today.
As usual, the family-arrival narrative of Dame Elizabeth’s forebears starts with a ship’s journey to the new world, in what is an almost biblical like story. It begins in Britain in the Regency Period, moves to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s, and shifts to Port Phillip in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The author is especially indebted to genealogical research undertaken and presented on various family history websites. The work of Andrew Crocker is a useful place to start.
Interested readers can freely draw upon Mr. Crocker’s documentation, with the proviso, as he says, that the information is accurate as far as he can ascertain but of course he cannot be guaranteed to be correct in every detail. The information on Mr. Crocker’s website is accurate as far as can be discerned from the range of sources available to the author. The interpretation of Mr. Crocker’s information is the author’s alone and is not necessarily in accord with Mr. Crocker’s understanding of the situation.
Another source of information on these particular squatters can be found in publications of the Mortlake & District Historical Society, including a booklet simply called “The Squatters – Profiles of the Mortlake district’s earliest large landowners from 1839”. The same team likely wrote “Women of the Mount”, by Florence Charles and Craige Proctor, which is a great source of information on the women who lived on the Mortlake runs with their menfolk. A further booklet of note is “History of Mortlake”, published in 1964 to commemorate the centenary of the Mortlake Shire. Such publications have a particular slant with information vetted by prominent families of long standing.
The chronology associated with the arrival of Dame Elizabeth’s forebears to Australia starts in Van Diemen’s Land in 1823 when the brig “Urania” arrived from Leith, the port nearest Edinburgh. This vessel had been chartered by a commercial network to bring an extended family of Scottish free settlers to the colony. One of the leaders of this group was Hugh Murray. Hugh was accompanied by his wife and their six children, plus a blacksmith, a ploughman and female servants. This was at a time when independent free settlers were being encouraged by the British government of come to the colony, where land grants would be made available to appropriately vetted and credentialled men.
The Hugh Murray party was obviously intent on staying in the colony. For example, Hugh brought with him capital in excess of two thousand pounds in goods and cash. Several fine Saxon Merino rams were also on the “Urania” when she docked. Hugh Murray carried with him a letter of application for a land grant which was quickly validated by the colonial authorities. Murray was provided with a grant of 1760 acres of good potential farmland in the vicinity of Campbell Town, in the Midlands of Tasmania.
Hugh Murray named his new estate “Saint Leonard’s.” Prior to its being awarded to Murray, this country was unalienated Crown Land according to British law. It was on the Macquarie River on frontier country. The 1820s were the years of the Black Wars in Tasmania. Crown Land granted to the Scottish settlers was newly usurped Aboriginal territory, still contested to some extent. Violence continued in the district for a number of years until the Aboriginal people were virtually eliminated.
Accompanying Hugh Murray on the “Urania” were many of his closest relatives, one of whom was his mother. Her maiden name was Anne Young. She had been married twice, but both of her husbands were deceased by the time of the voyage. Three of Hugh Murray’s full sisters were on the vessel, together with their husbands and their children.
In addition, three children of Anne Young’s second husband, James Thomson, were also aboard the “Urania. One of these children was Anne Thomson who was just twenty when she arrived. She married William McRobie in 1832. The first child born to this couple was Anne Young McRobie.
In 1851, Anne Young McRobie married Jeremiah George Ware, a gentleman who in 1839 had taken up Koortkoort Nong and Wooriwyrite stations in the Western District at the time of frontier conflict. Anne and Jeremiah had a daughter, Anne Thomson Ware, as well as several other children. Jeremiah George Ware died unexpectedly in 1859 and did not leave a will and so his wife was left with a compromised future. (Jeremiah was in a carriage accident caused by bolting horses.)
In 1862 his widowed wife Anne married James William Manifold Aitken, the son of James Aitken and Mary Manifold. Mary was the sister of Peter, Thomas and John Manifold, prominent squatters in the Southwest, and they had money. Anne and James had several children of their own and in 1867 Anne died at Warrnambool aged just thirty-three, after being married twice and borne eleven children.
When Jeremiah George Ware died intestate, the battle over his fortune was long and expensive, with contesting parties from both within and without the families involved in acrimonious litigation.
James William Manifold Aitkin first arrived in Warrnambool in 1847 with his parents and eventually became a prominent local businessman, councilor and mayor in the Warrnambool district. He was closely related to the Bostock clan, and the business partnership of Bostock and Manifold was pivotal to the commerce of the district.
A daughter from Anne Ware’s first marriage is Anne Thomson Ware, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch’s grandmother. She was born in 1855 at the Koortkoort Nong station of her father, Jeremiah George Ware. As a scion of prominent Victorian squatters and Tasmanian pastoralists, she was related to many of the business and pastoral elite of Southwest Victoria and Tasmania. She has family links to the Bostock and Manifold clans, to the Ware and Thomson families of Terang and Derinallum, and to the Murray and Calvert families of Colac. This does not mean that she necessarily associated with all members of these families.
Anne Thomson Ware married Robert De Lancey Forth at Keilambete Station near Terang in 1877. This was the station in the Southwest taken up by John Thomson, her great uncle. Robert De Lancey Forth was the son of Captain Frederick Henry Alexander Forth and was born in Campbell Town Tasmania in 1835. Robert’s father, Captain Forth of the Scots Fusiliers, served as a British colonial administrator and as Lieutenant-Governor in the West Indies. During the period when he was in Van Diemen’s Land, Captain Forth was for a time aide-camp to Sir George Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor. This was during the Black War, and also the period of the most severe penal measures directed toward the convict population. During this time of violence and brutality Captain Forth commanded a contingent of uniformed colonial mounted police, composed of former British Army cavalrymen.
A daughter of Anne Thomson Ware and Robert De Lancey Forth was Marie Grace de Lancey Forth. She married Rupert Greene in 1900 in Warrnambool. Dame Elizabeth Murdoch was the daughter of Rupert Greene and Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, and she was born in 1909 at Pemberly in Toorak. Elisabeth Greene married Keith Murdoch in 1928 at the Scots Church in central Melbourne. One of their children was christened Rupert, presumably in memory of his grandfather. Rupert’s son, Lachlan Murdoch, has emerged as the prime victor in the succession battle surrounding the Murdoch media empire.
Anne Thomson Ware was part of an extended Ware family whose various members were among the richest squatters of the Western District. They held vast landholdings over some of the most prime pastoral country on the continent. Properties connected to the Ware family include Koortkoort Nong near Camperdown, held by Jeremiah Ware, Minjah and Barwidgee near Caramut, held by Jeremiah’s brother, Joseph Ware, and Jalalabad, near Darlington, held by Jeremiah and Joseph’s sister, Maria Ware and her husband Thomas Dowling.
Anne Thomson Ware’s stepfather, James William Manifold Aitken, was connected to the Manifold and Bostock clans, who collectively held numerous pastoral properties in the Southwest.
Jerimiah Ware, the father of Jerimiah, Joseph and Maria Ware arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1822 with his wife Mary and four children. Jeremiah Senior was an artillery expert working for the military and was appointed to head the colonial government’s munitions stores. Ware Senior also traded in general merchandise and the family initially settled in Hobart before Ware acquired Dungrove, a farming property near Bothwell in the Tasmanian Midlands. By 1838 Ware Senior had developed Dungrove into a substantial farming and grazing operation and it was in that year that his sons Jerimiah and Joseph Ware crossed with sheep to Port Phillip to take up squatting runs. By 1839 Jerimiah was holding Koortkoort Nong and Wooriwyrite, a run he had taken over from Peter McArthur.
Dame Elizabeth Murdoch’s grandmother, Anne Thomson Ware, was also closely related to the Murray and Calvert families of the Colac district, and to John Thomson of Terang. When the brig “Urania” arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1823, Anne Thomson Ware’s grandmother, Anne Thomson, was accompanied by her full brothers, as well as several of her half-siblings. One of Anne’s full brothers was John Thomson. Like Anne, John Thomson was a half-brother to Hugh Murray.
John Thomson went to the Western District in about 1837. In 1840 he formally took up a sizable run around Lake Keilambete, six kilometers north-west of Terang. These years were the time of conflict. Like other original squatters, John Thomson didn’t have to pay money for this land, apart from the nominal cost of an annual pastoral license. The clanspeople of Terang were mostly dead, disappeared or dispersed within a decade of Thomson’s arrival.
Thomson was personally involved in the dispossession of some Aboriginal people in the Terang area. He rode with hunting parties looking for hostile “blacks” who had “stolen” from the squatters or killed shepherds. One example of this is from 1840 when John Thomson instigated a hunting party comprised of himself and several other squatters including his neighbour Neil Black. Also involved in the pursuit were several of their overseers and shepherds, as well as members of the Border Police personally led by Captain Foster Fyans. This expedition rampaged through the countryside for a week in response to the killing of Thomas Hayes, a shepherd, on John Thomson’s Keilambete run. A group of eight Girai-wurrung clansmen were said to have been the perpetrators.
Prior to taking to the field, the band of squatters led by Thomson and Black had travelled to the administrative centre at Geelong to enlist the help of Commissioner Fyans and his mounted Border Police troopers. Foster Fyans, Commissioner of Crown Lands, immediately went to Terang with some of his force to assist the squatters. Fyans, as the Crown’s foremost security officer for the Portland Bay District and additionally as a man with some military experience, was the officer formally in charge of the chase.
John Cary notes in his book on Foster Fyans that “some quarry was eventually found“, near the boundary of Neil Black’s Glenormiston station. The party of Europeans, twenty-one strong, bided their time and decided to wait till dawn to attack the Aboriginal camp. “At day-break the next day the party approached their camp, and one of Thomsons’s shepherds swore that two of the three men hiding in the trees were guilty.”
Neil Black wrote an account of this incident to his business partner Thomas Gladstone, and in that letter Black states that three Aboriginal men were taken in chains as prisoners to Geelong. The Assistant Protector of Aborigines, Charles Sievwright, accused Fyans and his party of an indiscriminate attack. Jan Critchett, in her book, A Distant Field of Murder, contends that while three were taken prisoner, it is likely that others were shot at, and some perhaps wounded. A full account of the outcome of the hunt seems unlikely, and in any case it would have been wise to only report as much as would have been deemed acceptable in Melbourne or Geelong.
John Thomson built the fine Presbyterian Church and Manse at Terang, and he richly endowed the church complex for future generations. This was in the years after Thomson married his Scottish born first cousin Elizabeth Young in Colac in 1843. In 1877 he probably would have been at the wedding of his great niece Anne Thomson Ware when she married Robert De Lancey Forth at Keilambete Station. John Thomson died at Keilambete in 1890. He bequeathed large sums of money to Melbourne University for scholarships. Keilambete was where the violent hunt, cornering and capturing of clansmen occurred when the country was being taken up by Thomson and his friends in 1840.
When the arrival stories of the great families of the Western District were narrated, it was sufficient to say that there had been “some trouble with the blacks”, or to deny that any conflict of note had occurred which involved themselves.
Hugh Murray Senior built a fine house in Hobart and became a leading figure in the town’s Presbyterian community. Hugh had eventually tired of farming life at remote Campbell Town and he sold the farm in 1831 and moved to Hobart. He became a successful wine and spirit merchant. By the end of the 1830s he was helping the congregation in Hobart to raise funds for the erection of the Scots Church in Melbourne. He was also one of the first trustees of the Hobart Savings Bank, and died in Hobart in 1845, twenty-two years after this Scottish settler came to Tasmania with his extended family on the “Urania”.
Hugh’s eldest son, also called Hugh Murray, became one of the foremost squatters of the Colac area of the Western District north of the Otways. Hugh Murray, like the aforementioned John Thomson of Keilambete, was Ann Thomson Ware’s uncle. Dame Elizabeth Murdoch is the grand-daughter of Ann Thomson Ware, and so these men are in her genealogy. Additionally, Ann Thomson Ware’s grandfather was one of the original Ware siblings, a family of squatters with properties stretching from Caramut to Corangamite, and she was also connected through marriage to the Bostock and Manifold families, who were in turn connected through marriage to other prominent squatter families.
Many men were in their early twenties when they took up runs at Port Phillip in the wake of the initial incursion of 1835. Hugh Murray Junior crossed to the Port Phillip District in 1837 with a flock of sheep and some servants. He was intent on taking a run on the frontier and wished to establish a large pastoral estate there that would reflect his family’s intrinsic worth. He was both moral agent and canny businessman.
Upon his arrival at Port Phillip, Hugh Murray followed a familiar playbook common to many squatters. In 1837 he took up an interim run near Geelong. By that stage, the Aboriginal people close to Geelong were described as not generally troublesome. Murray then pushed further into unsecured country following the path of search parties that had vainly sought to find Joseph Gellibrand and George Hesse. These two foolish gentlemen had gone missing after arrogantly straying too far into Aboriginal country of the Gulidjan clans. The European search parties looking for Gellibrand and Hesse employed guides from the Wadawurrung clans of the Geelong district. The Wadawurrung were traditional enemies of the Gulidjan of the Colac district and the conflict which ensued may have contributed to the destruction of the Gulidjan, or so it has been suggested.
By 1838 Hugh Murray was established on a headstation on the southwest end of Lake Colac. This is beautiful country, well suited to pastoralism but also with the potential for agriculture. The Gulidjan people had lived in this vicinity for countless generations but this did not continue and even prior to Hugh Murray’s arrival the population had declined. The population of Gulidjan plummeted precipitously throughout the 1840s.
Hugh Murray is commemorated as Colac’s “first permanent white settler.” In this context, the term “first settler” is restricted to men of the gentleman class and does not extend to Europeans of the subaltern class, who might be anybody. The crude huts in the bush of poor and nondescript Europeans, erected with no claim to title of any sort, hardly qualified as permanent settlement in the eyes of those who wrote the narrative.
The town of Colac was officially surveyed in 1849, a decade or so after the arrival of Hugh Murray. The broad main street running the length of the town is named Murray Street, in acknowledgement of Hugh Murray’s guiding role. This naming of the most prominent streets of a town after the most prominent of the original squatters is repeated across the Western District. Streets named in honor of members of the Royal Family vied with them for this distinction. Squatters were a small subset of the population but in many respects it is not possible to clearly separate the realm of the Crown from the family interests of leading free settlers such as Hugh Murray. They were the agents of the colonial British state in their districts.
Hugh Murray’s most important run was called Borongarook, also known as Illimnyte. He was appointed magistrate at Colac in 1848 and at this time he was sometimes referred to as the “King of Colac”.
Hugh Murray’s sister was Jane Murray. Jane was born in Hobart in 1824, the year after the “Urania” arrived in the colony with her parents and older siblings. In 1849, at the Presbyterian Church in Geelong, Jane Murray married John Calvert, who had arrived in Hobart around 1830. Calvert managed Captain John Bell’s extensive “Annandale” property in the Tasmanian midlands. Calvert and Captain Bell were from Scotland and were close relatives. Calvert, Captain Bell and Hugh Murray knew each other from Van Diemen’s Land, well before setting up at Port Phillip.
Captain John Bell’s nephew, also named John Bell, arrived in Hobart in 1839 and became involved in the family business, first in Tasmania and then at Port Phillip. John Bell’s mother was the sister of John Calvert. Upon crossing to Port Phillip, John Bell worked with his uncle John Calvert to set up squatter runs in the Geelong and Colac districts. The finances and the pastoral business interests of Captain John Bell, his nephew John Bell, and those of John Calvert and his family were intertwined in various ways.
Working in partnership, the Calvert and Bell family consortium took up substantial holdings around Lake Colac and at Lake Corangamite. The Calvert and Bell runs around Colac included Irrewarra, a run initially of some 68,000 acres. This was later divided between family members into the Watch Hill and Lake Colac stations. These runs neighboured those of Hugh Murray. In line with well-established marriage patterns of the time, John Calvert married Hugh Murray’s younger sister.
The Bell and Calvert family were significant landowners in Tasmania in addition to being among the largest squatters in the wider Geelong and Colac districts. John Bell eventually built a fine mansion in Geelong called Bell Park, and John Calvert built another fine mansion in Geelong called Morongo. The mansion at Bell Park was built in 1853 and was extended in 1861. All that remains of the Bell Park mansion is this annex, now preserved as the chapel at the Grace McKellar Centre, an institution that does great service but one you might hope to avoid.
The Morongo mansion of John Calvert was eventually repurposed as the Morongo Girls’ College, associated with Geelong College. The daughters of Presbyterian squatters attended Morongo while the boys were at the College. John Calvert was a founder of Geelong College, together with other prominent squatters such as James Simson, George Hope, Dr Robert Hope, George Russell, Hugh Murray, John Lang Currie, Alexander Anderson, John Cumming, Peter McArthur, and others. James Simson, in particular, contributed greatly to the founding of the school. He was a prominent absentee squatter in the far west and was married to a daughter of Hugh Murray. James Simson took over Roseneath and Dergholm in the late 1840s in partnership with his cousin, the Rev. Charles Simson. The two runs were near Casterton.
The “Urania” was not the only vessel charted by Scottish free settlers to come to Van Diemen’s Land in the first half of the 1820s. Ships with several other settler groups arrived in Hobart in this period, some of whose passengers were also connected to Hugh Murray and family. For example, David Murray, who was the younger brother of Hugh, arrived in 1824 aboard the “Portland”. David led a party of Scottish settlers to Cambell Town to join Hugh and his extended family. As had been the case with Hugh Murray, David brought with him a letter of recommendation from the Secretary of State for the Colonies. By 1825 he had been granted one thousand acres, based on the amount of capital and equipment he had brought with him to the colony.
A further vessel, the “City of Edinburgh,” arrived in 1825. Aboard this vessel was Adam Turnbull and William Young, both first cousins of Hugh Murray, David Murray and Anne Thomson. The Turnbulls and the Youngs initially settled in the Campbell Town district alongside the Murrays to whom they were related.
Robert Young, William Young’s younger brother, was already in Tasmania when William arrived. Robert arrived earlier with Hugh Murray on the “Urania”. Robert had settled at Pisa, close to Cambell Town, but died there in 1826. William Young and his wife Rachel took over the Pisa property upon Robert’s death. By 1840, William and Rachel had nine children aged between eight and twenty-four years.
Adam Turnbull arrived on the “City of Edinburgh” with a letter from the Colonial Office in London which promised him a substantial land grant. This was quickly forthcoming and Adam Turnbull named his property “Winton” after the Scottish estate of Sir James Sandilands, a family relation whose financial backing was the source of the capital which Turnbull brought to Van Diemen’s Land.
William Young and his large family left Tasmania for Port Phillip in 1846 when William took up the lease of the Mt Koroite and Dundas stations, near Coleraine in Western Victoria, in partnership with his brother-in-law, Adam Turnbull. Margaret Young, the sister of William Young had earlier married Adam Turnbull in Edinburgh in 1824, and so the partnership of the Young and Turnbull families was based on marriage as well as business, a very common arrangement at the time.
The runs in the Western District which the Young and Turnbull consortium controlled comprised a joint holding of 36,840 acres of prime pastoral country. Adam Turnbull, while he was a financial partner in the enterprise, remained based in Tasmania and left the pastoral operations of the Victorian runs to his relatives. Turnbull was prominent in the medical and religious affairs of Tasmania and in its colonial politics.
William and Rachael Young oversaw the expansion of the family’s squatter runs in Western Victoria. They were assisted by several younger Turnbull and Young relatives who crossed from Van Diemen’s Land to join the family’s business in the Southwest. Under the corporate name of Adam Turnbull & Son, this extended-family company held the Dundas, Mount Koroite and Winnimburn stations.
The capital needed to stock, maintain and develop these vast landholdings derived from Scotland. Family members who remained in Scotland continued to be prominent in commerce and finance in Edinburgh and Glasgow. For example, a cousin of William Young, Marianne Young, married Thomas Richardson in 1842 in Edinburgh. Richardson was a very wealthy sugar merchant who had inherited the family’s sugar refining business in Glasgow. The company imported sugar from the slave plantations of the West Indies.
Commodities produced via institutionalized slavery and then subsequently transformed into industrial products was a pivotal part of the Scottish economy at that time. Many of the Scottish settlers who reached Van Dieman’s Land in the 1820s had some connection to this early source of capital. For example, the wives of Hugh and David Murray were sisters. They were grandchildren of John Cross, the well-known sugar trader, slaver, and plantation owner. Their mother Lillias Cross was the daughter of John Cross.
John Cross was a prominent West India merchant and plantation owner who part-owned the Montreuil Estate in Grenada, a plantation using slave labour. His son, William Cross, brother of Lillias, had married into the wealthy Buchanan family and eventually inherited Auchintoshan House. William Cross received slave compensation money. Some of this money likely found its way to Australia to bankroll squatters such as Hugh Murray.
A number of Scottish families of the minor gentry arrived in Australia through immigration financed from funds partly accumulated through slavery. From the mid-seventeenth century to the 1830s, an extensive network of enterprising Scottish capitalists operated within business circles reliant on slavery in the West Indies. Inter-marriage among members of this extended network was a key feature of capital accumulation and wealth preservation.
In some ways, Van Diemen’s Land seems an unlikely destination for Scottish gentle folk, given how far away the island was from Britian and considering how primitive and challenging conditions were even for relatively privileged free settlers. The answer partly lies in succession. Many of the Scottish free settlers who came to Australia may have been members of the minor gentry, but they were not those who would inherit the bulk of a family’s wealth. The bulk of the estates and businesses would go to the first-born son, through the system of primogeniture.
For example, the older brother of Hugh and David Murray, and also of Anne Thomson, was Thomas Murray, a British military officer. Captain Thomas Murray was born in1784 in Edinburgh and died of yellow fever in Jamaica at the age of forty-one in 1826. He was a Captain in the Argyllshire Highlanders Regiment at the time of his death. Earlier, in 1815, he fought as a lieutenant at the Battle of Waterloo. His role in the West Indies was to defend Britain’s slave plantation economy there. Thomas married Frances Wallace, the daughter of Professor William Wallace, scion of one of Scotland’s most elite families.
Thomas Murray was destined to inherit the bulk of the family’s fortune. Some money was set aside to assist younger siblings pursue business interests elsewhere. When younger brother Hugh migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1822, Captain Thomas Murray was still in the army and still a relatively young man. The rest of the Murray family was not to know that Thomas would die in the West Indies in 1826.
Many Scottish gentlemen who came to Australia were second or third sons and so were outside the line of succession. They dreamed of founding estates and businesses of their own. As well as Australia, many went to Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. They hoped to succeed through hard work and the trust they placed in God. Their Calvinist faith served to sustain them. Though they had access to capital from home, many were determined to be as self-sufficient as they could be.
Many of these settlers displayed undoubted courage and were prepared to take risks. Compared to others, they were well educated and well connected. In various outposts of the British Empire, they became entrenched in mercantile trade, in military service, and in the professions. To some degree, they were the backbone of the British state in the colonies.
The free settler agents of the Empire relied upon a serving class of subaltern labor, the nature of which varied from place to place within the Realm. Slavery was practiced in certain colonies. In other places convict labor was used. The use of indentured servitude of one form or another was widespread. Highland clearances provided a pool of subaltern labor to exploit. Some of the settlers to Australia were connected to those who had organised clearances for aristocratic overlords.
Part of the lure that brought free settlers to this country was the promise that assigned convict servants would be available to work for them. They were promised that a convict labor force was available to them in Van Diemen’s Land through the assignment system. Additionally, when the Murray’s and the Young’s arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s they brought out quite a few of their servants from “home”. It was understood that a controlled workforce was necessary to any planation settlement.
There is an undeniable aura of white supremist ideology in the religious and cultural orientation of some of these free settlers. While most squatters probably had no inherent desire to kill and dispossess Aboriginal people, this was the inevitable outcome of their actions. They were the trustees of the state and they believed in what they were doing. For example, well before he came to the mainland, Hugh Murray Junior was experienced in Australian conditions after more than a decade and a half in Tasmania. He knew the consequences of what happened when men went into frontier country with sheep and shepherds.
Yet men such as Jerimiah Ware, Hugh Murray and John Thomson proceeded in any case. They were the cleverest people among the Europeans. Their education and their inherited professional skills ensured that they understood the complexities of the law and the intricacies of government, business and finance. In this they were not too dissimilar to Rupert and Lachlan.
James Bonwick had this to say of Hugh Murray when Bonwick stayed at Murray’s homestead during his visit to the Colac district in 1857: “The noblest building near Colac is the extensive mansion of Hugh Murray, Esq. The contrast between the splendid residence of the successful colonist, and the rude slab hut beside the lake, in which as a struggling squatter he resided for years before, is as striking as that between the olden days of poverty and hardship, and the golden times of the present. Mr. Murray has been twenty years in the country. He has suffered much in opening up the colony of Port Phillip. His courage and enterprise removed obstacles that would have crushed the spirits of most men. As I sat at his hospitable board, and listened to his narrative of danger from wild Blacks, want of supplies, want of market, want of society, and, often, want of hope, I could not but regard him, like others of our pioneers, as a true Bush hero, and has well earned the prosperity which is gilding his evening hours, and blessing his interesting family.” This is an early example of the eulogizing of squatters, and it was part of a patten which emerged in the narratives of the metropolitan middle-class.
The actions of people embedded in squatter networks were not random deeds, undertaken in isolation from the programs of the British state. Members of this distinct class proceeded upon a gradual takeover of southeast Australia with care and deliberation, taken one step after another from place to place across generations. Certain family networks formed an Australian elite at the centre of power in this country. To question their deeds was to question the role of the Crown in the foundation of Australia.
Bostock Manifold and Company
Robert Bostock and his junior business associate John McQueen have the distinction of being the only two people to have ever been transported to Australia for slave trading. Bostock and McQueen were transported for their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in that they traded Africans from a station on the Windward Coast of Africa. In 1813 this station was raided by the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery taskforce and the enslaved people were freed. Bostock and McQueen were arrested and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they were tried and found guilty for slave trading offences under the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
Robert Bostock’s legacy in New South Wales and Tasmania was significant and from his family a network of Bostock connections was laid in the Western District. The remarkable story of Robert Bostock has been outlined by Thelma Birrell, a descendant in Australia. The story is also at the heart of a book written by Emma Christopher called “Freedom in White and Black – A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy”, published in 2018 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
When the Royal Navy raided Bostock’s slave trading station and took him for trial, some of the liberated Africans courageously testified against Bostock and McQueen in court and described some truly barbaric treatment. The pair were sentenced to transportation for a period of fourteen years. They arrived in Sydney in 1815 aboard the convict transport vessel “Indefatigable”.
Unlike most convicts transported to the penal colony, Robert Bostock’s servitude in Sydney was characterized by extreme leniency and favorable treatment, which saw him accorded privileges far in excess of most other convicts. It appears he was not assigned to a master to work on an estate, and nor was he made to work in a chain gang working on government construction projects. Rather, Bostock’s pardon was granted by His Majesty within three months of his arrival, although it was a further seven months after Bostock’s pardon was issued in London that he became aware of his good fortune.
Once the pardons were received, Bostock and McQueen were back in business as colonial merchants, and they managed to make a great deal of money in a relatively short time.
Bostock soon became a Sydney property owner and businessman of note. He contrived to marry a pretty young girl of fifteen who was freeborn in the colony, although her mother had been transported at a much earlier date. In Sydney, Bostock seems to have lived a life of relative respectability during the period of Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s tenure.
Not content with his relatively privileged situation, after several productive years in Sydney, Bostock returned to England in 1818 with the intention of having his conviction quashed. In this he was eventually successful. He obtained his legal victory in 1820 due to a technicality relating to the relevant jurisdiction of the court that had tried him in Sierra Leone and which had found him guilty. Bostock had been arrested at his trading station on the coast in a location that was just outside the borders of Sierra Leone, a British colony at the time, and this was sufficient for him to win the case and have his conviction overturned.
Once Robert Bostock became a free man without any record of criminal conviction, he applied to the Secretary of State for a certificate to settle at Van Diemen’s Land. This was granted. The certificate entitled Bostock to an initial land grant in Tasmania based on the capital he could bring to the colony. Bostock and his family arrived in Van Dieman’s Land in 1821. He initially set up as a merchant and then diversified into pastoralism. Obtaining further land grants, he eventually settled in the northern Midlands, where he built a magnificent mansion and raised his large family. He was very well-connected.
Most of Robert Bostock’s surviving sons eventually became squatters in the Southwest and his daughters married men who were engaged in this business. Eventually the offspring of Robert Bostock were connected through business and marriage to many of the most prominent squatter households of Western Victoria. Within a generation of Robert Bostock’s arrival in Australia under a cloud, his family had become pillars of the colonial state. Some of the grandchildren of Robert Bostock became prominent pastoralists in Queensland and the Northern Territory. There is even an Indigenous branch of the Bostock family that can trace its genealogy to one of Bostock’s grandchildren, to a chap who headed north onto new frontier country.
Slave trading was the Bostock family business during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is noted by Emma Christopher in her fascinating book. She writes: “His father, Captain Robert Bostock, had joined the Royal Navy as a boy and afterward had been drawn to Liverpool and the slave trade.” Robert Bostock Senior was involved in the slave trade for decades, first as a captain in command of vessels taking slaves from West African trading factories to the Americas, and then as a Liverpool based merchant. Robert Junior would follow in his father’s footsteps.
Historians are fortunate to have a trove of primary material from which to reconstruct the lives of Robert Bostock Senior and his son. In the late eighteenth century, Robert Bostock Senior wrote a considerable number of letters to his business associates detailing aspects of the slave trade and these letters have survived and now serve as an important primary source for scholars of the late eighteenth century Atlantic Trade. Additionally, the initial trial of Robert Bostock Junior in Sierra Leone in 1813 and the subsequent legal case mounted by Bostock in 1820 are of great value. This fount of material allows researchers to trace the Bostock’s involvement in the Atlantic Trade to an unusual degree.
The Slave Trade Act 1807 was a British law that made the Atlantic slave trade illegal within the British Empire, but it did not abolish slavery itself. The 1807 act prohibited the transportation of enslaved people and included penalties for those who defied it, but slavery continued in many colonies in the Americas until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Slave trading had been banned in Britain but some British men were still in the slavery business, operating illegal slave factories on the coast of West Africa, From there they traded with the captains of slaving vessels heading to Havana and other ports in the Caribbean.
Bostock’s involvement in the slave trade was substantial and quite brutal. He was co-owner of two slave factories on the African coast. When, in 1813, the factory situated on the Saint Paul River was raided by the anti-slavery patrol it led to the liberation of two hundred and thirty-tree African people, although an unknown number of others died when the slavers set fire to a compound holding some of their slaves. While the slaves were freed and thus spared being sold as chattels in the slave markets of the Americas, nearly all the liberated slaves continued to live in indentured servitude of one form or another for the rest of their lives. Liberation did not mean freedom for them.
It is doubtful that Robert Bostock ever considered that he had done anything wrong, but his arrest for slavery offences and his initial conviction and transportation to Sydney may have convinced him that there were better ways of making money at the edge of Empire.
Both Bostock and McQueen were issued pardons endorsed by Prince George, then Prince Regent, a mere three months after their arrival. This extraordinary decision was conveyed to New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie at the start of 1816. It is difficult to explain why the pardons were granted. Perhaps there was a view in some quarters which held that Bostock and McQueen had been treated harshly and inappropriately by the authorities in Sierra Leone. Slavery had, after all, been a business that was considered legitimate until recent times, and many people at the court, including the Regent, and those connected to the senior ranks of the military, had been involved in the trade, and indeed the monarchy and it inner circle continued to have interests in plantations in the Americas and was allied to a set of British plantation owners and merchants who lobbied to keep slavery alive.
While in Sydney, and after learning of his pardon, Robert Bostock married Rachel Walker in January 1816. Rachel was aged fifteen, the daughter of Elizabeth Rafferty, an emancipated convict. In her youth, Elizabeth had been convicted of treason in Dublin and sentenced to seven years transportation. She spent eighteen months in Cork harbour on a rotting hulk prior to sailing for Australia. On her voyage out to Australia in 1797 she had been selected by Captain Thomas Dennett as his concubine. The transport vessel was badly mismanaged by Captain Dennet. Several convicts were flogged to death. Some privileged sailors were allowed to “fraternize” with female convicts. Many convict men and some of the women were subjected to beatings. One hundred and thirty-four half-starved male convicts and forty-three ill-treated female convicts were eventually landed at Port Jackson.
Captain Dennett died in England in 1800, and Elizabeth Rafferty then took up with another English sea captain, Captain Robert Rhodes. Rachel, their child, married Robert Bostock in Sydney in 1816. By the time Elizabeth Rafferty married her fifteen year old daughter to Robert Bostock, she had become quite a wealthy Sydney entrepreneur.
While in the slave business on the coast of Africa, Bostock had several wives, daughters of notable men provided to him as part of deals with local chiefs. These women were left behind following his arrest and transfer to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
After the legal case in England which saw his conviction overturned, Bostock was provided with a small amount of capital as compensation for the hardships he had endured following his “wrongful” conviction and his subsequent transportation to Australia. Robert Bostock returned to Australia as a gentleman without blemish. He thought it best to set up in Van Diemen’s Land, rather than Sydney where his convict past was better known. The administration in Tasmania was just as accommodating as it had been at Sydney.
Bostock drew upon finance generated from the ending of his business partnership with John McQueen, who had continued to operate the pair’s Sydney trading enterprise while Bostock was in England. In 1820 Bostock was provided with a letter from Henry Goulburn, the Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Goulburn addressed this letter to Governor Lachlan Macquarie, his fraternal bother in the lodge. In 1821 Lieutenant Governor Sorrell allotted Robert Bostock a prize plot of land on the Hobart waterfront, where he built a fine new warehouse and store. He soon became one of the foremost merchants in the colony, and was well accepted in the polite society of the better free settlers. At that time Van Diemen’s Land was still administered from Sydney, where Macquarie was in charge.
Henry Goulburn, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, was the eldest son of Munbee Goulburn, a wealthy West Indian planter and slave owner in Jamaica. According to the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, Henry Goulburn was awarded a compensation payment in the aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. This payment was authorised with the passing of the Slave Compensation Act of 1837. Henry Goulburn’s younger brother, Frederick Goulburn, became Colonial Secretary for New South Wales in 1821, the year Robert Bostock arrived in Tasmania.
In the early 1820s, land grants in Tasmania were awarded to settlers at a rate of six hundred and forty acres for each five hundred pounds of capital brought to the colony. The 1820s were the years of the Black War in Van Diemen’s Land, but this minor conflict was no deterrent to a man with Bostock’s extensive colonial experience. In 1826 Bostock received a land grant on the South Esk River at Epping Forest, between Launceston and Campbell Town. Within a few years he had an adjoining 1,800 acres granted to him. By 1840 his “Vaucluse Estate” had expanded to about 8,000 acres. Here he had constructed one of the finest mansions in the colony and rapidly expanded his flock.
Robert Bostock and his family were assigned a substantial number of convict servants based upon the size of the Vaucluse Estate. In the midlands of Tasmania, convict workers were monopolized by a small coterie of landed gentlemen. In Tasmania, Bostock was granted a workforce without needing to wrangle African slaves, and nor did he need to fight off rivals on a malodorous coast. Very few people in Tasmania knew of Robert Bostock’s criminal past and Bostock put that unfortunate African business behind him.
It was from Vaucluse in Tasmania that the family’s extensive operations in Western Victoria began. Eventually, most of Rachel and Robert Bostok’s children established themselves as squatters and merchants in the Southwest or in Gippsland. Robert and Rachel Bostock’s daughters married men engaged in pastoralism, commerce and the public service. Carefully arranged marriages enabled members of this gentry community to maintain their wealth and status. Marriages seem as much business alliances as romantic liaisons.
The Bostocks in Victoria were related eventually to many squatter families, including to the Manifolds, the Coxs, the Connellys, the Lindsays, the Austins, and the Wares. It is worthwhile to follow some of these links as they illustrate how squatter society worked and to contrast this elite society with the situation of forebears in our family.
Michael Connolly and John Cox played prominent roles in establishing the settlement on the Moyne River at Port Fairy in the late 1830s and early 1840s. These men were related through a Bostock connection. Rachael Bostock, one of the older daughters of Robert and Rachel Bostock, married Michael Connolly in Launceston. Michael Connolly was a well-connected financier and investor in Van Diemen’s Land and was a founding shareholder in the Port Phillip Association, the business consortium which had taken vast tracts of land around Port Phillip Bay commencing from 1835. Connolly was a business partner of John Griffith, the man who established the first whaling station at Port Fairy. Through their partnership, Connolly and Griffith managed cross-strait shipping and were significantly involved in the whaling industry at Port Fairy from its earliest days.
George Bostock, the younger brother of Rachael Bostock, married Ann Cox, the sister of John Cox. From his base in northern Tasmania, John Cox established the first trading store at Port Fairy in 1839. He soon moved inland to establish his squatter runs, first at Mount Rouse and then at Mount Napier. James Cox was the father of John and Ann Cox. The mansions of Robert Bostock and James Cox were close to each on the South Esk River near Evendale in Northern Tasmania.
The Cox family could trace its origins in Australia back to the earliest days of colonial New South Wales where William Cox, John Cox’s grandfather, had been a prominent senior British military officer and a frontier landowner on a large-scale. William Cox joined the British army in 1797 and came to Australia as a lieutenant in the New South Wales Corps, known as “the Rum Corps”. Cox arrived in Australia in 1799 and was appointed the Corps’ paymaster. The “Rum Corps” became notorious for its trade in rum, its corruption, and its mutinous behaviour. In the decades following his arrival in New South Wales, William Cox was granted extensive tracts of land west of Sydney at the time of the killings there.
In the Port Phillip District, in the formative years prior to 1843, Michael Connolly was a prominent Launceston based pastoralist and merchant who was active in both Northern Tasmania and in southern Victoria. It likely made good business sense for him to marry Rachael Bostock. The families were commercially influential and heavily engaged in both trade and pastoral pursuits. Michael Connelly and Rachael moved permanently to Port Fairy from the early 1840s and lived in one of the best houses of the new own. They entertained the elite of colonial society when they visited the town, including Commissioner La Trobe. Michael Connelly died in Port Fairy in 1855 and is buried in the old cemetery, together with Rachel.
For a time, Rachael’s younger brother George Bostock lived with the Connelly’s at their Port Fairy house. George was still a youth and this was before his marriage to Ann Cox, John Cox’s sister. Working in Port Fairy gave George valuable experience in the family trade. It was also prior to Michael Connolly’s bankruptcy in the economic depression that swept Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip in 1843.
Michael Connolly traded as Connolly & Co. In March 1843, the firm of Connolly & Co went bankrupt, leaving Michael Connolly personally responsible for a huge debt of 78,000 pounds. Following the great economic depression of 1842 and 1843, capital investments in both Van Diemen’s Land and at Port Phillip were substantially restructured in complex and somewhat opaque ways.
Another Bostock daughter, Eliza Bostock, married Alexander McLean Hunter, from Scotland, who took up large tracts of land in the Gippsland and Mansfield regions of Victoria in the early 1840s. This was the time of considerable violence there and Alexander Hunter did his bit for the Empire, serving as an officer in the mounted police in Gippsland.
In all, there were four Hunter brothers prominent as early squatters in Victoria and South Australia. One of the boys, James Hunter, was an original licensee of the Eumeralla runs in the Southwest at the time of the Eumeralla wars, taking up Eumeralla in 1842. The Eumeralla runs were along the Eumeralla River near the present-day town of Macarthur. William Carmichael took over part of the Eumeralla run from James Hunter in 1843, and this part of the run became known as the Harton Hills run. The Hunter brothers were active in colonial exploitation in South Africa, Fiji, and South America, as well as Australia.
A further daughter, Margaret Bostock, married Lieutenant Francis Doveton, a British military officer. Before coming to Victoria with Margaret, Lieutenant Francis Doveton served with the British military in Van Diemen’s Land. From 1851 Doveton served as the first Gold Commissioner at Ballarat. He later transferred to the Bendigo diggings as Gold Commissioner there at the time of the civil disturbances on the central Victorian goldfields during the mid-1850s. Doveton was infamous for ordering the license hunts on the goldfields and directed a force which energetically harassed the diggers. At Doveton’s instigation, Captain Henry Dana of the Native Mounted Police was persuaded to use his native police to chase down the diggers, a measure not at all popular with the miners. Two of the main streets in Ballarat are named Dana Street and Doveton Street to commemorate these gentlemen.
Another of the sons of Robert and Rachel Bostock, Thomas Bostock, married Catherine Mackersey of “Greenhill”, at Macquarie Plains in central Tasmania. At one stage, the Mackersey family held the lease on “Kenilworth”, a large squatter property near Hamilton, in the Southwest. Following Thomas and Catherine’s marriage, they managed “Boortkoi” at Hexham in the Western District for the Manifold family. The Bostok family were closely related to the Manifolds through marriage, and so this arrangement kept management of the property within this extended family network.
Thomas and Catherine Bostock’s son, Thomas E. Bostock became Mayor of Geelong from 1905 to 1908. He was locally prominent in civic affairs. Thomas and Catherine’s daughter Jessie Bostock married Frank Austin of “Werribee Plains” near Geelong. The Austin family also held “Barwon Park” near Winchelsea. The Austin clan were a very prominent squatter family of English background. The imposing bluestone mansion of the Austin family can be seen from a road north of Winchelsea.
A close relative of the slaver Robert Bostok, Edward Robe Bostock, married Mary Mackersey. Mary was a sister of Catherine Mackersey, the woman who married Thomas Bostok. Edward Robe Bostok’s father, Charles Bostock, was a brother of Robert Bostok. Charles Bostock was an officer in the Royal Navy.
Edward Robe Bostock arrived in Australia around 1837 and purchased land at the first land sales held in Melbourne. Edward and Mary Bostok then lived at Jellalabad station at Darlington for a few years from the mid-1840s. Jellalabad was an extensive pastoral lease held by Keith Jackson King, another Bostok family member and close relative of Robert Bostock. Keith Jackson King held the lease on Jellalabad from the late 1830s, the time of the killings there. Darlington is on the Hamilton Highway, east of Mortlake and was formerly known as Elephant Crossing and then Elephant Bridge. It is near Mount Elephant, a large volcanic-cone at Derinallum. Jellalabad station stretched between Darlington and Derinallum.
Edward Robe Bostok worked for some years in the Western District in association with the Clyde Company. As discussed earlier, the Clyde Company held vast land holdings east of Derinallum, as well as in many other parts of the Western District, and it also held extensive pastoral land in Tasmania. The Clyde Company was instrumental in events leading to the displacement of First Nations people over great tracts of former frontier country in Western Victoria. It was financed through money derived from the Transatlantic slave trade. These funds were funneled through a consortium of Scottish merchants, industrialists, and financiers.
In the mid-1850s Edward Robe Bostock returned to England to act as an agent for the family’s extensive network of Australian enterprise. He never returned to Australia but he played an important role in supporting the family’s interests and in financing its network of business pursuits.
Keith Jackson King was the son of Maria Bostok, another sibling of the slaver Robert Bostock. In the 1830s, Robert Bostok wrote to his sister Maria and brother-in-law John King. He suggested they send out their son Keith, who was considered a likely lad with good prospects in the colonies. Keith Jackson King duly arrived in Tasmania in the 1830’s and was soon working in the family enterprise, first as a merchant in Launceston before crossing to Southwest Victoria to gain experience in the pastoral sector. Keith Jackson King initially worked in partnership with James Down. By 1839 the partnership of King and Down had taken up runs in association with the Clyde Company.
Keith Jackson King and James Down were the first squatters to take up the leasehold over the Jellalabad run, a leasehold which they held from 1837 till 1842. This was prime Western District grazing country. Jellalabad was a run of some 16,000 acres in the vicinity of Mount Elephant. Under the stewardship of King and Down, from 1837 to 1842, most of the clanspeople on the Jellalabad country disappeared. Their presence is barely attested in the archive.
A few Indigenous people were persuaded to work on the stations as shepherds and servants. Survival depended on this compromise, as resistance was futile and resulted in destruction. In this way, some people would remain close to traditional country. Living on the fringes of working class communities in the nearby hamlets was dangerous and in some ways, after a period of initial violence, it was often safer on the stations. Some proprietors kept a few Aboriginal people on their property to show off to their metropolitan visitors, more akin to pets than anything else.
By 1842, the Jellalabad run was in the sole hands of Keith Jackson King. Keith married Hannah Allison in 1845 and transferred the lease of Jellalabad into her name as part of a business deal. Keith Jackson King’s cousin, Edward Robe Bostock was Hannah King’s agent from 1845 until 1849 and then in 1849 Edward Robe Bostock took over Jellalabad. The entire 16,000 acres of the Jellalabad run was sold to Thomas Dowling in 1853. Thomas Dowling had married Maria Ware in Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. Maria Ware was the sister of Jeremiah George Ware, and thus a member of yet another prominent family network with vast squatting interests.
The Ware family had come as free settlers to Van Diemen’s Land in 1822, and by 1830 had established a large family estate around Bothwell at the time of the Black Wars. By 1838 the eldest son of the family, Jeremiah George Ware, had crossed over to Port Phillip in pursuit of additional pastoral country. He was joined by other family members over subsequent years, including Jerimiah’s younger brother, Joseph, in addition to Maria Ware, the sister who had married Thomas Dowling.
After crossing to Port Phillip, Jeremiah George Ware soon took over Koortkoort Nong, a large run which adjoined Jellalabad. Jeremiah and Joseph Ware came to control other vast properties in this part of the Southwest.
Minjah station, where Uncle Tony and Aunt Biddy lived as soldier settlers, was one of the stations held by the Ware family in the nineteenth century, although the Wares had moved on by the time Minjah was carved up for soldier settlement.
As mentioned, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch of Cruden Farm was a direct descendent of Jeremiah George Ware. Dame Elizabeth’s grandmother, Anne Thomson Ware, was born in 1855 at the Koortkoort Nong station of her father, Jeremiah George Ware. Jeremiah had married Ann Young McRobie in 1851. Ann Young McRobie was related to John Thomson, the squatter at Terang, and to Hugh Murray, the squatter at Colac. Koortkoort Nong station adjoined Jellalabad, which Anne Thomson Ware’s aunt held. Maria Ware held Jellalabad in conjunction with her husband, Thomas Dowling.
Following her second marriage to James William Aitkin in 1862, Anne Thomson Ware became related through marriage to the Manifold and the Bostock clans, who controlled their own networks of pastoral and commercial interests.
The point to bear in mind is that a relatively small clique of people formed an elite in their districts quite distinct from ordinary working people. These elite groups did not belong to the same society as ordinary people, even though they lived and worked in proximity with them, which was partially the case in the early period when squatter runs were being established and consolidated. As time went on the squatters separated themselves into an ever more distinct caste. They married virtually exclusively among themselves and attended their own schools and societies and acted as an elite better than the common herd. The social classes grew even further apart as the nineteenth century progressed.
The prominent colonial artist, Robert Dowling, was the brother of Thomas Dowling, the man who married Maria Ware, the sister of Jeremiah George Ware. Robert Dowling was mostly based in Tasmania, however in 1856 he visited his brother in the Western District. He painted several curious pictures of life at homesteads in the neighborhood. His picture Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station, and his picture Masters George, William, and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware, are quite revealing in their depiction of Aboriginal servants in the company of their white masters. The clear white supremacist aspects of Dowling’s paintings are creepily odd and quite disturbing.
Robert Dowling was connected through marriage to a small clique of proprietors who had managed to gain multiple runs in the Southwest. He was able to visit the homesteads of nearby runs as a family guest of the Ware family at Jellalabad. In these paintings, the Aboriginal figures are framed and depicted as “domesticated indigenes”, much as family pets might be depicted in other contexts. Readers can form their own judgement regarding these images, but to the author’s mind, the paintings are cringeworthy. The Aboriginal man known as Jamie Ware was given the name Ware as part of a new identity crafted by his white Evangelical masters. This practice of assigning Aboriginal people living on stations with the surnames of squatters was widespread, akin to the way former slaves on plantations in the southern states of America were named after their masters.
The Honorable Thomas Dowling passed away at his Melbourne townhouse in 1914. He had been a Mortlake Shire Councilor for over sixty years. He was accorded a hagiographical obituary in the Mortlake dispatch of 11 July 1914, some of which is as follows: “He was the first president of the Mortlake Shire, and for nineteen years continuously occupied the presidential chair. He remained, up to the time of his death, a representative of the Darlington riding. During the whole of his lengthy municipal career he never received opposition, which indicates the unbounded confidence and esteem in which he was held by the ratepayers of that portion of the Shire. It certainly is a unique record, and probably not approached by any living person in the Commonwealth, or perhaps in the whole world. … What a wonderful career his was. Full of hard work, and for what purpose. For the benefit of his fellow creatures. The magnificent services he has rendered to this state and the community in general can never be adequately measured. He certainly deserves the title as being the ‘grand old man’ of the Western District. Deceased’s father was a Baptist minister, the Rev Henry Dowling, and many of the striking features of this revered personage were endowed in young Dowling. In fact the son was a facsimile of the father, and his work and actions were characteristic of his worthy sire. As a parliamentary and municipal representative his addresses were always listened to with rapt attention, and they always showed a wide knowledge of the subject under discussion, and a breadth of thought. His demise will be keenly felt by his colleagues of the Mortlake Shire Council, who, when faced with a knotty problem concerning the operation of the Local Government Act never failed to seek his counsel.”
In his account of his journey through the Western District in 1857, James Bonwick describes several such “tame native” people. Near the Lake Purrumbete homestead of the Manifolds near Camperdown, Bonwick describes the following “idyllic” situation: “One scene afforded me great pleasure. When walking beside the shore of lake Purrumbete at sunset, I heard the stroke of oars, and a chorus of laughter. Looking on the lake, I saw a boat propelled by two Lubras in their blankets, while in the stern there reclined an English young lady of high respectability, who was nursing pretty Willie, the half-caste boy.” To the author’s mind at least, this is creepy and cringeworthy.
Another son of Robert and Rachel Bostock, Augustus Bostock, married Margaret Aitkin of the “Glen Esk” estate in Tasmania. Margaret Aitkin was the niece of the famous Manifold brothers, Thomas, Peter and John Manifold. Mary, Margaret’s mother, was the sister of the illustrious Manifold gentlemen. While still in Tasmania, Mary married James Aitkin, a pastoralist in Van Diemen’s Land who had squatter property in the Port Phillip District.
Following their marriage in Van Diemen’s Land, Margaret and Augustus Bostock soon moved from there to the Southwest. For a time in the 1850s they lived at Uncle Thomas Manifold’s “Grasmere” station near Warrnambool. Grassmere is just east of Woolsthorpe and not far from Koroit. Thomas Manifold had taken over Grassmere from the Bolden brothers around 1842. Margaret and Augustus Bostock then moved from Grasmere to live at Coomete homestead near Mortlake for a time. Later in life they retired in comfort to Warrnambool. Two of their daughters married into the Lindsay family of neighbouring Quamby and Union stations, the differences in religious affiliation no impediment by that stage.
Augustus Bostock kept a diary, a transcript of which is available online. It is an interesting document. Many of the elite people mentioned in this document are mentioned in the diary. Augustus Bostock seems to have been a likeable and very sociable man who knew most of the people of “good society” in the Warrnambool and Port Fairy districts. He was connected to many of the local gentry through family, business, recreational and sporting pursuits.
A further son of Robert and Rachel Bostock, Ernest Bostock, married Lucy Aitkin, also of “Glen Esk” in Tasmania. Lucy was Margaret Aitkin’s sister and thus another niece of the Manifold brothers. Ernest died near Warrnambool in 1871 at just thirty-six years of age, at his “Lipook” property near Wangoom. He was active in the family business as well as in local government. Ernest and Lucy’s daughter, also called Lucy, married John Ware, a son of Jeremiah George Ware Junior. John and Lucy Junior lived at “Weeripnong” in Warrnambool, a fine house owned by the Ware family which had once been owned by the Bostocks. A road near this house, close to the Hopkins River, is named Bostock Street. A creek south of Camperdown is called Bostock Creek.
Thomas, Peter, and John Manifold were part of perhaps the most famous pastoral dynasty of the Southwest. Thomas Manifold, the eldest son, was the first to arrive in Australia. Thomas arrived in Hobart in January 1828 with £1500 and a letter of recommendation from the Colonial Office. He was granted 1280 acres on the west bank of the Tamar River. William Manifold and his younger sons, John and Peter, together with three daughters, arrived in Launceston in 1831 to join Thomas. Disappointingly for them, land grants had by then finished. Largely thanks to the preparatory work of Thomas Manifold, the family was able to develop a small estate on the Tamar Estuary, with the help of an assigned convict workforce. William Manifold purchased ninety acres next to Thomas’s land, and on the combined properties the family built Kelso House, named after a district town in Scotland.
When news came in 1835 of the Port Phillip Association’s initial foray into the Port Phillip District, Thomas Manifold lost no time in crossing the strait to see whether there were prospects for his family on the mainland. He had made a brief visit to Port Phillip in early 1836, and immediately hurried back to Tasmania to buy ewes, lambs, and supplies. Land was there for the taking for those who acted quickly. Manifold brothers landed sheep and stores at Geelong in 1836, among the first to land sheep at Point Henry.
The Manifold brothers started squatting in the Geelong area in 1836 on the lower Moorabool River. They met New South Wales Governor Sir Richard Bourke when he visited them at their Moorabool station in 1837. Governor Bourke reassured the Manifolds that they had the support of the government. Under new regulations, the colonial administration envisaged that prospective squatters could apply for an officially issued pastoral lease, regulated through New South Wales government officials to be appointed to the Port Phillip District. By that stage, Bourke knew that London wished to expand the wool industry at Port Phillip Captain Foster Fyans was soon appointed to officiate at Geelong. The Manifolds and other squatters could set about occupying country.
After a few years on a run along the Moorabool near Geelong, Peter and John Manifold relocated west to the Camperdown district in 1839. Scouting expeditions indicated there was good country in that direction. Their shepherds drove livestock through the plains to the sought after destination. The main street of Camperdown is named after Manifolds. The main street of Woolsthorpe is named specifically after Thomas Manifold. Thomas lived in the Southwest throughout the 1840s, but he returned to England in the 1850s. He concentrated on the financial aspects of the family business, and eventually returned to Australia to live in comfort in Melbourne.
When he visited Purrumbete homestead in 1857, James Bonwick was told by the Manifolds that they had been guided on their way by “some semi-civilized natives”. The local clanspeople of Camperdown were initially unfriendly. For several months, Djargurd Wurrong clansmen engaged in running warfare with the Manifolds and their workers. James Bonwick records that the “wild Blackfellows stole their sheep and speared their shepherds”. The Manifolds, like some other squatters, eventually employed Aboriginal workers on their stations, a fact romanticised in their accounts to purport that they were a providential force sustaining the Aboriginal population of the area.
The Manifold family built a fine mansion house on the banks of Lake Purrumbete and came to dominate the Camperdown district. They were pillars of the Anglican church and were instrumental in establishing Geelong Grammar School. Peter Manifold was the most prominent member of the Hampden and Heytesbury Roads Board from 1859 and carried on this role into the Hampden Shire Council when it was formed in 1864. The Geelong suburb of Manifold Heights is named after members of the family as is the Manifold Stakes horse race at Flemington.
The youngest son of the slaver Robert Bostock was George, born in 1826 near Launceston. The family lived on their estate on the South Esk River at Epping Forest. George Bostok’s mother, Rachel, died in childbirth in 1837 when George was just eleven. As a teenager George worked for a time with his cousin Keith Jackson King, then a merchant in Launceston in partnership with James Down. In the early 1840s, George Bostock lived with his sister Rachel and brother-in-law Michael Connolly at Port Fairy. While still a young man, Geroge Bostock lived with his relatives at their “Leura” property.
Michael Connolly was involved in whaling, the pastoral industry and finance, and George Bostock learned much about commerce in these years at Port Fairy. George knew the leading squatters of the Southwest and the businessmen at Launceston. George was an astute young man and was aware of the conflicts between clanspeople and Europeans in the hinterlands of Port Fairy. The Eumeralla Wars were ongoing during the early 1840s when he was at Port Fairy.
By 1849, George Bostock held the lease over the Eumeralla West station at Macarthur. He too was now a squatter, as he had always seemed destined to become. On a visit to Tasmania, George had married Ann Cox, the sister of John Cox. Werangourt, John Cox’s main station, neighbored Eumeralla West.
John and Ann Cox’s father, James Cox, was one of Van Diemen’s Land’s wealthiest gentlemen. The Cox family mansion at Clarendon, near Launceston, was one of the finest on the island. John Cox opened his trading store on the Moyne River at Port Fairy in 1839. Cox subsequently sold the business to William Rutledge in 1843 and George Bostok worked for a time in the trading enterprise of the Rutledge company. Interestingly, Jane Cox, a sister of John and Ann Cox, married Claud Farie, the squatter who took up the Merrang run near Mount Shadwell in 1841.
In 1852, George Bostock and Ann moved from the homestead in the bush into Warrnambool, where George’s brother Augustus Bostock now lived. George went into business there with Thomas Manifold, his relative by marriage. Augustus Bostock’s wife Margaret was Thomas Manifold’s niece.
George Bostock and Thomas Manifold were partners in the first bond-store on Lady Bay, at Warrnambool, which George managed. Thomas Manifold was in England with his family for much of the 1850s. The business at Warrnambool was called “Manifold & Bostock”.
Proclaimed a port in 1852, Warrnambool was expanding rapidly and the “Manifold & Bostock” company was at the heart of the town’s economic development. The decline of Port Fairy as a port may have been precipitated by the commercial competition coming from “Manifold & Bostock”. George Bostock well understood the business model of the Rutledge company at Belfast through his earlier experience working there.
George Bostock became ill in 1858. Fearing that his death was imminent, he went to back to Tasmania to attend to business. He died there at thirty-two years of age, having lived a short but eventful life. He was a significant figure in the civic and economic life of the Warrnambool district. In 1856 he was elected to the first Council of the Warrnambool Shire and owned the Mortlake flour mill.
In 1872, one of George Bostock’s children, a son named Robert Bostock, drove a large herd of livestock to the Cooper Creek in far western Queensland. Young Robert Bostock travelled with his friend, John Conrick, whose father, Patrick Conrick, owned Rehill farm. The boys were seeking to take up squatting runs there. Patricia’s grandfather, Hugh Reilly, subsequently purchased Rehill in 1903, which was where Patricia grew up. Robert Bostock and John Conrick were in partnership with the Ware family in this venture to outback Queensland. Conrick was married to Agnes Ware.
John Conrick took up “Nappa Merrie” station and Robert Bostock took up “Innamincka” station. The process of squatter pastoralism was repeated on a new frontier with similar consequences for Aboriginal people. Young Robert Bostock relied upon funds passed on from his Bostock, Manifold and Cox family connections, as well as capital from his partnership with the Ware family.
John Conrick was the aspirational son of relatively poor Irish Catholic immigrants to Tower Hill. He wanted nothing better than to become a squatter himself and he married into the Ware family, despite misgivings on both sides of the marriage. The marriage failed, but John Conrick eventually succeeded and became a squatter of note in outback Queensland. Surviving Aboriginal people found a place living in camps attached to the stations where they worked as stockmen and in domestic service of various kinds.
John Conrick saw squatter pastoralism in Queensland as his way up in the world. He hoped a vast estate would make him feel financially secure and socially accepted. There have always been ambitious Irishmen keen to be on the winning side, come what may. Foster Fyans was originally an Irish lad from Dublin. Fyans always aspired to be a gentleman and was highly class conscious his entire life.
Many children of Victorian squatters went to Queensland to seek their fortune in new squatting ventures there. They were emulating their fathers who had crossed to Victoria from Van Diemen’s Land for the same purpose. John Edwin Bostock was the son of Edward Robe Bostock. He came to Victoria in 1874 and lived with his Manifold relatives at “Coomete”, in Southwest Victoria.
In 1877, in partnership with Walter Manifold, son of Thomas Manifold, John Edwin Bostock took up a lease on Sesbania Station in outback Queensland. Bostock managed Sesbania Station for Manifold Bostock & Company at least until 1907. The property was said to have covered 1,550 square miles and carried 195,000 merino sheep, plus two hundred and fifty horses, and produced four hundred and fifty tons of greasy wool a year.
Walter Manifold was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and the University of Melbourne and later became known as Sir Walter Synnot Manifold. He qualified as a solicitor in 1875, but never practiced. Instead he became a grazier, first owning Sesbania station in partnership with John Edwin Bostock. From 1886 he owned the Wollaston estate near Warrnambool until it was sold for soldier settlement in 1914. For many years Sir Walter was a prominent Victorian politician on the conservative side of politics. His private money built the lovely suspension bridge over the Merri River at Wollaston.
As shown by various entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, many of these “founders” at the frontier were considered fine gentlemen of enterprise, and pivotal to our national history.
Information on the Bostock family has been published in Thelma Birrell’s book “Mariners, Merchants then Pioneers”. Augustus Bostock’s diaries are very useful. He comes across as a decent man. Much can also be gleaned from a range of online sources and readers are encouraged to do their own research.
