Daniel Bowman was the first of the Bowmans to arrive in the Southwest. He came to Portland as an assisted emigrant in 1855 aboard the “Constant” and was around eighteen years of age when he arrived. He hailed from Portglenone in County Antrim in the north of Ireland. As was usual with assisted immigrants, Daniel was required to work for a sponsoring employer for a certain period after arrival. He worked for John Cust for a period of several months. John Cust was a landowner with a farm close to Woodford on the Merri River, to the north of Warrnambool.
The arrival of Daniel Bowman in 1855 is matched by the arrival of Bridget Dwyer, the young woman he married. Bridget likely arrived at Tower Hill sometime in the mid-1850s after having been aboard an immigrant ship which arrived at Portland. It is unclear which one of the several young women named Bridget Dwyer on the lists of assisted emigrants to Portland was the Bridget who eventually married Daniel.
Before she married Daniel Bowman, Bridget Dwyer had wed Charles Binstead, an Englishman she married at Belfast in early 1857. In late 1857 Bridget gave birth to Elizabeth Binstead, their only child. They were living at Tower Hill when the child was babtised there.
Tragically, Charles Binstead died in a work accident at Burrell’s Flat, Yangary in 1859. Bridget married Daniel Bowman in 1860. Daniel and Bridget raised a large family. Elizabeth Binstead was the eldest child of the family. Elizabeth was always known as Eliza within the Bowman family.
James Bowman, Daniel’s younger brother, emigrated from Portglenone as a very young man in 1865 to join his older brother. James lived with Daniel and Bridget and their children at Southern Cross. Eliza Binstead was still a girl when James arrived.
James Bowman and Eliza Binstead would marry in 1877 when she was twenty and he was thirty. Somewhat confusingly, Daniel Bowman was then Eliza’s brother-in-law as well as her stepfather. It was common enough for two siblings of one family to marry two siblings of another, but it was unusual for two brothers to marry a mother and daughter.
James Bowman and Eliza had numerous children. In all, the children of Daniel and Bridgid and James and Eliza numbered some twenty-two individuals and just three of these children died during infancy. Many of the surviving children married and had families of their own. Being a descendant of the Bowman family at Southern Cross is not an exclusive club.
Adding to the confusion, the Christian names of the various children of Daniel and James are sometimes the same. For the sake of completeness, the names of Daniel and Bridget’s children are as follows: Archibald, James, William, Daniel, John, Patrick, Margaret, David, Charlotte and Edward. The names of James and Eliza’s children are as follows: Archibald (1), Bridget, James (1), Anne, Daniel, Francis, William, Margaret, Archibald (2), Rose, Mary and James (2).
Margaret Bowman, the mother of Biddy, Mary and Patricia Reilly, is the seventh child of James and Eliza Bowman. Grandma Margaret married Joseph Kelly in 1909 and then married Charles Reilly in 1922.
Eliza Binstead, Grandma Margaret’s mother, was born at Tower Hill in 1857. Eliza is the first of Patricia’s forebears to be born here. She was buried at Tower Hill Cemetery when eighty four, after living within sight of Tower Hill the entirety of her long life.
Aunt Biddy told the author that her Granny Eliza still lived in the Bowman’s weatherboard house when Biddy was a girl. The Bowman family owned several acres of land down a track off the Southern Cross Road. The property was opposite Rehill where the Reilly’s lived and there is a disused quarry there now. Yangary Creek was downhill from the Bowman house.
James Bowman died in 1912 and Daniel Bowman died in 1921. Bridget predeceased both of them, having died at Southern Cross in 1902.
Eliza lived until 1941. At the time of Eliza’s death Aunt Biddy was eighteen and Mary was sixteen, whereas Patricia was just nine years of age when Eliza died. Both Aunt Biddy and Aunt Mary had clear memories of their Granny Eliza.
Aunt Biddy described her Granny Eliza as being Australian, rather than Irish. Biddy was referring to Eliza’s Australian character when compared to the Irish character of her other older relatives at Southern Cross. Granny Eliza’s mother, Bridget, was Irish born as were Daniel and James Bowman and many people at Southern Cross certainly had an Irish heritage.
When Aunt Biddy was a child in the 1920s and 1930s, Granny Eliza was already elderly. She lived in the Bowman home at Southern Cross with her youngest son Jim, his wife Violet, and their many children. Through the Bowman line, Aunts Biddy and Mary and Patricia could claim to be related to many people around Koroit. Quite a few of the Bowman’s married locally and had families.
Margaret Bowman was born in 1889 in Southern Cross. The Bowman house was located in Yangery Parish. Charles Reilly’s Rehill farm, situated on the other side of the Southern Cross road, was in Koroit Parish. This rural area is generally known as Southern Cross. Just down the hill to the south is Illowa. To the east is Yangery. Rising to the southwest is Tower Hill. The Koroit township is due west of Southern Cross, several kilometers away.
Aunt Biddy was a stickler for cleanliness and proprietary. When the author asked her what she remembered of the Bowman house across the road from Rehill, she described it as being pretty rough. Granny Eliza lived with Jim Bowman, her youngest son, his wife Violet and their children. Grandma Margarat was raised in this household. There were only four rooms in a small weatherboard house and children had to share beds. Biddy said the floor of the kitchen at the back of the dwelling was hard packed dirt. There was no running water, just some tanks and a well. The children ran around without shoes and were often in strife. Electricity was not connected to Southern Cross at that time.
Grandma Margaret’s brother, Jim Bowman, was a laboring man who used his bicycle to get around. Aunt Biddy implied that there was a drinking problem in the Bowman household but left it unclear who she was referring to in particular. Although the surrounding farm block was quite small, the family had a productive vegetable garden and some animals for milk and eggs.
Aunt Biddy mentioned the contrast between the Bowman house and her own home at the Reilly farmhouse. Rehill had basic indoor plumbing and the house was always neat and tidy. Charles Reilly managed the Rehill farm well and the family had a good income derived from the land. In the 1930s and 1940s Charles had sufficient money to send his three daughters to boarding school at Saint Ann’s in Warrnambool.
Daniel and James Bowman
Daniel Bowman arrived at Portland in 1855 aboard the “Constant”. The passenger arrival ledger for this voyage records his occupation as “agricultural labourer”. He was barely nineteen years of age. Daniel was assigned to the service of Mr John Cust to work for a period on Cust’s farm on the Merri River close to Woodford. John Cust farmed this land with his brother Robert. The Cust brothers were Ulster Protestant free immigrants whose family farmed land in Antrim close to where Daniel grew up in Portglenone. After completing this service for the Cust brothers, Daniel was free to find employment where he could. By 1860 Daniel was in Yarpturk, a rural Parish just north of Southern Cross and close to Woodford.
Options for Irish agricultural laborers mostly entailed working for one of the larger landholders associated with the Special Surveys or alternatively working for a middle-sized farmer who had purchased farmland after the various government surveys of parishes in the late 1840s. This process of surveying the land into farm sized blocks created titles that were available for purchase as freehold, which is exactly what the Cust brothers did. Most of those who held land were Protestants, just as was usually the case where Daniel was from in Ulster. Freehold land could then be leased or sub-leased through a variety of arrangements, some peculiar to Ireland and the Southwest such as what was known as the con-acre system of leasing.
The conacre system was a traditional seasonal land rental practice unique to Ireland and to colonial places where the Irish predominated. Landowners let small patches of agricultural land for a single growing season to allow near landless laborers to grow crops like potatoes or corn, or to graze livestock, without granting any formal or enforceable legal rights of tenancy. Con-acre tenancy did not confer any legal possession or long-term security of tenure to the laborer and discouraged long-term land improvements because the marginal farmers on con-acre leasing arrangements lacked long-term certainty beyond the current growing season.
The Irish were from a legal point of view considered British subjects of Her Majesty. Under the Acts of Union of 1800, Ireland was merged into the United Kingdom. From that point, Irish Catholics were legally British subjects of the Crown. This legal situation regarding the Irish applied to the Australian colonies as well.
From the mid-1840s, some farm owners in the Southwest were Catholics and there was no legal impediment to Catholics buying land at auction or through private sale. The inequalities in society had more to do with the entrenched economic power differential inherited from the situation in Ireland rather than with legal restrictions on land ownership.
The area south of the Yarpturk Creek, which flows into the Merri River at Woodford, was one of the first locations farmed by Europeans, commencing in the early 1840s. In the very early 1840s, Captain Alexander Campbell enclosed a paddock to the south of Woodford which he defended forcibly from Aboriginal raids on crops of potatoes. Violence may have been more extensive than what was reported at the time, but because not much is known about such matters in this particular place, any current commentary is primarily in the realm of conjecture. From the late-1840s, following the government’s first land sales in the area, William Rutledge purchased much of the land west of Woodford and at one stage he considered developing a private town in this location.
John Cust is one of two hundred and four individuals memorialized on the “Honour Board of the Pioneers of Warrnambool and District”, alongside his younger brother Robert Cust. The Honour Board was created in 1907 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Warrnambool’s foundation in 1847. It is owned by the Warrnambool City Council but is in the custodianship of the Warrnambool and District Historical Society and the Warrnambool Family History Group.
The Cust brothers were born and raised in County Antrim, the same county Daniel Bowman hailed from and the Cust family farmland in Ireland was close to Portglenone where Daniel grew up. The Cust boys arrived in the Southwest in 1849. When in 1855 Daniel Bowman departed Antrim bound for Portland, Robert Cust was back in Ireland looking for a wife. It is possible that Robert was involved in arranging the sponsorship for an assisted passage which saw Daniel Bowman assigned to work on the Cust farm at Woodford. According to the biography compiled by the Warrnambool Historical Society, John Cust was a gentleman farmer in the Southwest and associated with the local landowning elite. He later served on the Warrnambool Shire council and was a local worthy of the day.
In 1873 John Cust defeated William Anderson for election as a Warrnambool Shire Councilor for the South Riding, with Cust getting 392 votes to Anderson’s 328 votes. The “Rosemount” estate of William Anderson was perhaps the largest and most valuable landholding in Yarpturk Parish. Over many years, Anderson was an influential politician and societal figure in the district. He was a devout Presbyterian from Scotland who first settled at Launceston and then transferred to the Southwest in 1844. William Anderson purchased “Rosemount” in 1854, just prior to Daniel Bowman’s arrival from Ireland.
It is not known where Daniel worked after he left the Cust property, but he likely worked in Yarpturk on the farmland of one of the larger local landowners, such as William Anderson. The Anderson property was in walking distance of the Cust farm.
When Daniel Bowman married Bridget Binstead in 1860 he was living in Yarpturk Parish, indicating that he had likely moved from the Cust property, which was in a different parish. Bridget was then a young widow. Her first husband, Charles Binstead, died in a work related accident the previous year.
When Bridget married Daniel Bowman, she already had Elizabeth Binstead in tow. Elizabeth was the only child of Bridget’s short marriage to Charles Binstead. Elizabeth was born at Tower Hill in 1857 and is Patricia’s maternal grandmother.
Not much is known of Charles Binstead. He married Bridget Dwyer at Tower Hill in February 1857 and Elizabeth was born in December that year. When Charles Binstead died in an accident in May 1859, he left Bridget as a widow with a toddler. The death certificate for Charles Binstead provides a few further snippets of information about him. At his death, Charles is listed as being twenty-seven. According to his marriage certificate of 1857, at the time of his marriage he was twenty-eight. There thus seems to be some discrepancy in the information concerning Charles Binstead’s actual age, a matter that is not unusual for the times. Charles Binstead’s death certificate notes that his wife was Bridget Dwyer. Eliza, aged seventeen months, was the sole child of the marriage.
According to his death certificate, Charles Binstead was originally from Sussex in England and his father was Peter Binstead. Much of the death certificate is barely legible, including the cause of death. The place of death is listed as Burrell’s Flat, which is just north of Southern Cross and close to both Yangery and Yarpturk. Charles is buried in an unmarked grave at Tower Hill Cemetery, then recently opened.
Charles Binstead had been in the colony for nine years prior to his death, according to the certificate. This likely indicates that Charles arrived in Victoria around 1850. The data is somewhat ambiguous, as Victoria became a separate colony from New South Wales in 1851, so it is unclear which colony is being referred to. Nevertheless, it would seem Charles had been in Australia for some years before Bridget Dwyer arrived at Tower Hill.
Bridget Dwyer was one of thousands of young women who left Limerick in the wake of the famine. Conditions in that county remained dire for years, well after the worst period of hunger, but by the mid-1850s things had improved slightly. This allowed more people to emigrate to distant Australia.
It has been noted by Helen Doyle and others that Southwest Ireland, and particularly the districts centered on East Clare, West Tipperary, and Northwest Limerick, was the location that saw more emigrants depart for a new life at Tower Hill than any other. It was a region greatly impacted by the famine and by the social dislocations of its aftermath. Even before the famine there had been a degree of social unrest in this area.
Bridget likely arrived in the Southwest in the mid-1850s, although the details are unclear. It is clear from her marriage certificate and from her daughter’s birth certificate that she was at Belfast and Tower Hill by around 1856. It is possible that she was the only one of her family on her voyage out, but it is also possible she travelled with others she knew from home.
Bridget married Charles Binstead in Belfast in February 1857. Her marriage certificate states that she was born in County Limerick, Ireland, to William Dwyer and Margaret (nee Glavin). Given that she was said to have been nineteen when she married, this would mean she was born sometime around 1839. In this case, she would have been around nine years of age at the height of the famine. The population of County Limerick dropped by twenty-one per cent during the 1840s and continued to decline until 1900 as a result of continued emigration. Biddy Dwyer would likely have seen first-hand the horrors of the hunger in County Limerick when she was growing up.
A Victorian Government website allows visitors to search the online database of assisted passengers to Victoria. Bridget Dwyer is not an uncommon name in the assisted passenger lists of the 1850s. It is difficult to be certain which of these women is the Bridget Dwyer that is Patricia’s forebear. A couple of possibilities stick out, however. One is a record relating to a certain Biddy Dwyer who arrived in Portland in September 1855 aboard the “Cairngorm”. She was eighteen, living in County Cork prior to departure, could not write, and was assigned for a period of six months service to Daniel Molan of Tower Hill.
It is well known that Daniel Molan was living at Tower Hill at the time, part of an Irish immigrant family who had arrived in the district years earlier. The Molans were one of the first Irish Catholic families with land of their own. Daniel also leased land that was part of the Farnham Survey, directly south of Dairytown and the Tower Hill Cemetery.
The “Cairngorm” brought more emigrants to the Tower Hill district than any other immigrant ship. She arrived at Portland in 1855 carrying three hundred and seventy-two passengers, largely from the midland counties of Ireland. Many of the emigrants on the “Cairngorm” were subsequently onward shipped to Port Fairy.
However she arrived in the district, it is likely that Bridget stayed at Tower Hill where there was a community of people of similar background to hers. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrived at Portland and Port Fairy were assigned to people who had some connection to them in Ireland. Government assisted immigration schemes were used to sponsor the travel of friends, associates and relatives. There were agents employed specifically to facilitate this mass movement of people.
The marriage certificate of Bridget and Charles Binstead states that both were living in Tower Hill, Port Fairy, when they married. The marriage service was conducted at the Catholic Chapel, Belfast. There is the possibility that the documentation was actually referring to the chapel and schoolroom on Rocks Road at Tower Hill rather than the church in the town of Port Fairy itself. At that time, the Tower Hill community was part of the area of the Belfast Roads Board.
On the marriage certificate Bridget gives her age as nineteen and Charles is recorded as being twenty-eight. He is described as a laborer and she as a servant. Charles signed the certificate in a neat hand while Bridget signed with her X mark. There are no definite arrival records for either of them. Nor is it known how Charles Binstead and Bridget Dwyer met each other, although it is likely that Charles and Bridget met in the wider Tower Hill district, as this is where both were living when they married.
There were many emancipated men in the Southwest in the 1840s and 1850s but there is no evidence that Charles Binstead was one of them. Nevertheless, Charles may have lived in another colony before coming to southwest Victoria. He may have been a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840 but convicts were still being sent to Tasmania until the early 1850s. His background prior to his marriage is not at all certain.
Port Fairy Parish baptism records indicate that Bridget gave birth to Elizabeth Binstead on 11 December 1857. The transcript of the baptism certificate is registered by Saint Patrick’s Church at Port Fairy. The transcript lists a Charles Benstead as the father and Bridget Dwyer as the mother. It is significant that John Madden was the sponsor at the baptism. This is likely the John Madden who succeeded his father as the schoolteacher at the Tower Hill Catholic School on Rocks Road at Tower Hill. This school also functioned as the local Catholic Chapel, a common arrangement in early immigrant communities. In 1860 John succeeded his father as head teacher at the schoolhouse when he was just eighteen.
John Madden became a prominent figure in the Irish community at Tower Hill. He founded the Tower Hill Football Club in 1872 and was later elected as the Member for Belfast in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. If John was the sponsor at the baptism service for Elizabeth Binstead in December 1857 then he would have been a teenager. He was born in Hobart in December 1842. His parents, Stephen and Margaret, arrived in Tasmania in early 1842 and married soon after they landed. John Madden, their son, was a very talented and charismatic young man.
Stephen and Margaret Madden moved to Port Fairy in 1850. Stephen was an educated person who worked as a clerk and as a schoolteacher. Margaret assisted him in the schoolhouse. It is possible that John, their talented son, assisted his parents at the Tower Hill chapel and schoolhouse from an early age. Few of the newly arrived Irish immigrants at Tower Hill were well educated and John evidently stood out in this regard. The baptism certificate notes that Bridget and Charles Binstead were living at Tower Hill when baby Elizabeth was baptised on 20 December 1857, nine days after her birth. Her baptism signalled her arrival as a member of the Catholic community. There is no actual government issued birth certificate for her. This is not particularly unusual at Tower Hill in this period. The Church may well have been considered a more worthy authority than the colonial state by some immigrants.
The year after Charles Binstead died, Bridget married Daniel Bowman. She was thus not a widow for long. Daniel Bowman was living in the vicinity of Yarpturk and Southern Cross in 1860. Bridget was living in the same general area at Tower Hill. Charles Binstead’s death the previous year was at Burrell’s Flat, Yarpturk and the informants were from Yangery. These locations are all very close to each other.
Bridget Dwyer/Binstead would have been around twenty-one years of age in 1860. Daniel was himself still young, being just twenty-three in 1860. He likely felt he needed a wife and hoped he had the means to support her. Daniel Bowman and Bridget may have met at mass, at a funeral, or some other event that brought people together. Like others in the district, he would have known of the accident that killed Charles Binstead and of the widow and the child that were left bereaved. Granny Eliza, Bridget’s daughter from her earlier marriage to Charles Binstead, was less than three years of age when her mother married Daniel Bowman.
Bridget’s marriage to Daniel Bowman in 1860 was held at the Roman Catholic School House in Warrnambool. Eliza was from then raised in her stepfather Daniel Bowman’s household. The first three of Daniel and Bridget’s subsequent children were born in Yarpturk. The next seven children are all listed as being born in Yangery. They had eleven children in all, including Eliza.
In 1877, when nineteen years of age, Eliza Binstead married James Bowman, the younger brother of Daniel. Given that Eliza and James Bowman went on to have many children of their own, it is no wonder that numerous people in the Koroit district can claim to be related to the Bowmans, descendants of either Daniel and Bridget or James and Eliza Bowman.
James Bowman emigrated to Australia in 1865 aboard the “Sam Carne”, likely encouraged by his brother Daniel who had been in Southwest Victoria for a decade. Daniel may well have paid for James’s passage out to Australia, as this was common practice in chain migration. Many migrants supported other family members to come to Australia. A remittance scheme was introduced in 1856 which allowed existing residents of Victoria to remit money home to pay the cost of a relative’s passage to the colony. Remittances between family members already in Australia and relatives in Ireland and Britain were an important feature of nineteenth century life for many people.
James was born in Portglenone, Antrim, in 1847, and would have been eighteen when he arrived. Daniel, born in Portglenone in 1837, was ten years older than James. Portglenone is in Ulster in the north of Ireland. It has a Protestant majority population, a legacy of the seventeenth century Ulster Plantations, but there is a sizable Catholic minority in the town. Many settlers from the Protestant community of Antrim came to the Southwest, including the Cust bothers who sponsored Daniel Bowman’s assisted passage in 1855 and who farmed on the river at Woodford.
Daniel and James’s parents were Archibald Bowman and Charlotte Courtney. These are not typically Irish names and it is possible that some of their forebears came from Scotland or northern England at the time of the plantations. The Bowman family were from the Catholic minority community and it is possible that religious or national tensions played a part in Daniel’s decision to leave Portglenone, although it may well be that Daniel Bowman was motivated primarily by the opportunity to seek a better economic life elsewhere. The economic downturn in Ireland in the early 1850s after the great famine may have been enough reason to leave.
Daniel may simply have been made an offer of employment by the Cust family or some other potential Australian employer on terms he was willing to accept. He was young and unmarried and he may have considered that he had little to lose by going on an adventure to Australia. Given that he was born in 1837, he would have experienced the famine at first hand. Ulster was not the worst hit province in Ireland. Nevertheless, between 1845 and 1851 Ulster’s population fell by 340,000 people, a drop of 15.7%. The loss in Antrim was close to the province average with rates of around 15%. This can be compared with 19.9% for Ireland as a whole, according to the BBC. The greatest losses of population in Ulster was in the south of the province. Fermanagh, which borders Cavan, lost almost 30% of its inhabitants.
Ulster landlords reacted to the famine in various ways. At the height of the famine, the third Lord Londonderry, the largest landowner in County Down, and one of the ten richest men in the United Kingdom, rejected rent reductions for tenants and was criticized for his total lack of empathy for the starving. In 1847 he and his wife gave only thirty pounds to the local relief committee but spent £15,000 renovating Mount Stewart, their Irish home. The family’s vast inherited wealth came largely from their service in the East India Company and from ownership of English coal mines.
Lord Londonderry did not just lack empathy for his Irish tenants, he seems to have lacked empathy generally. In opposing the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, he insisted on his right to use child labour in his English mines, arguing that his mines ideally needed to employ boys from eight to fourteen years of age due to their small stature, which was just the thing for working in confined spaces, or so he argued. As for his Irish tenants during the famine, he argued that their suffering was due to their laziness. Class seems to have been a factor in people’s thinking just as much as sectarian affiliation.
The class and sectarian divisions of Britain and Ireland, and of Ulster in particular, were transferred to the Southwest in many ways. Each of the three major Christian denominations of Britain and Ireland, namely Catholic, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, were present in the Southwest in sizable proportions. Each confessional group had a distinct identity and each was present to some degree across the entire district. There were rich and poor in all groups, although a higher proportion of Catholics were poor, once again a reflection of the social situation at “home”.
The Bowman brothers had a sister, Margaret, who remained in Portglenone. The siblings kept in touch by occasional letter sent via the British postal service. Margaret married a certain Mr. Carpenter in Antrim. Notably, when James Bowman died in 1912, he stipulated that one hundred pounds should be left to Margaret, who reportedly had little money of her own by that time. This correspondence between Victoria and Ireland indicated that the Bowman siblings had the ability to read and write. They likely had attended a government “national” school in Antrim at some stage during their childhoods. From 1831, just prior to Daniel Bowman’s birth, a system of primary education commenced in Ireland. A National Board of Education for Ireland was set up and a state system of primary education was established.
In Victoria, from the mid-1850s, a somewhat similar system of state education, based to some degree on the Irish model, was commenced by the colonial government of Victoria.
Bowman family connections between Southern Cross in Australia and Antrim in Ireland were reinforced by two visits that James made to Ireland many decades after arriving in the Southwest. In 1906, on the last of these trips back to Ireland, James was accompanied by his brother Daniel. The fact that James and Daniel could afford the return journey indicates that they enjoyed a certain level of disposable income in their new land, despite not being considered wealthy.
The will James Bowman left in 1912 records that he left his nine acres of land to one of his sons. While this might not seem much land by today’s standards, such small-acreage farms were common in the Koroit district. Small holdings supported many large families, whose members worked collectively to greater or lesser extent. Livelihoods were supplemented by income derived from seasonal work and sometimes though the farming of land leased through con-acre or other rental arrangements.
James died in 1912 and Daniel died in 1921 and both are buried in Tower Hill Cemetery. They lie in separate plots and each is buried alongside his wife. Bridget shares a plot with Daniel and Eliza is buried with James. The graves are some thirty meters apart. Bridget was the first to be buried, having died at Southern Cross in 1902.
James Bowman came to Southern Cross in 1865 as a teenager. At that time Eliza was still a child. His older brother Daniel had been in the district for a decade. James married Eliza a dozen years after his arrival.
Following their marriage in 1877 Eliza and James Bowman had many children of their own. Margaret Bowman, Particia’s mother, was born in Southern Cross in 1889. She was just one of several daughters. In 1908 when she was nineteen Margaret Bowman married Joseph Kelly, a local Southern Cross man.
According to informants with a long history at Southern Cross, Joseph Kelly’s forebears originally worked on a medium sized farm at Southern Cross called “Glencush”. This farm had originally been purchased by Galbraith Moore in the mid-1840s after completion of the first government survey of the parish. Galbraith Moore was the head of an Protestant family and perhaps the property was named after Glencosh, a rural location outside Strabane, County Tyrone, Ulster. That district was settled by Protestants in the Ulster Plantations of the 1600s. It is likely that in the 1850s the original members of the Kelly family at Southern Cross were laborers or tenants on Glencush Farm. In later decades they farmed a part of the original property, after the Moore family had moved on to other parts of the country.
During their childhoods, Margaret Bowman and Joseph Kelly were near neighbours at Southern Cross. They were both locally born children of families of Irish Catholic heritage working in agriculture. The Kelly surname is the second most common surname in Ireland, just behind Murphy, and the name is now widely distributed across the Southwest of Victoria. There have been numerous Kelly families in the Tower Hill district, originating from various parts of Ireland.
Within a few years after Margaret and Joseph Kelly’s marriage at Southern Cross the couple had several children to support. In 1912 the family moved to Yambuk where Joseph had found work as a farm manager on the property of Mr James O’Brien, a well-known stock auctioneer in the Port Fairy district. James O’Brien had recently purchased part of the former Yambuk Estate, originally a squatter run. The house the Kelly family lived in was the old farm manager’s residence and it was occupied by the Kelly family as part of the terms of Joseph’s employment. Joseph grew pasture on the property and turned it into chaff for sale in Melbourne.
District newspapers of May 1916 carry a report of the fire which engulfed the old wooden house where Margaret and Joseph Kelly and their five children lived on the Yambuk property of Mr James O’Brien.
The Warrnambool Standard has the following report from 18 May 1916: “- Residence burnt down – On Saturday evening a large wooden residence, on Mr. James O’Brien’s property (formerly Suter’s), Yambuk, was totally destroyed by fire. Mr. and Mrs. J. Kelly and their family of five children occupied the house, and Saturday evening the children were playing in one room, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly and Mr. Dalton being engaged in conversation in another room. The fire started at the back of the buildings, which were old, and before it was noticed had a good hold of the residence. In an hour’s time (from 7 till 8 o’clock) the whole structure was completely destroyed. The family lost everything, including their clothes, only a few kitchen utensils being saved. Some difficulty was experienced in getting at the children, the men having to stretch through flames to reach them. The house was insured, but there was no insurance on the contents. The greatest sympathy is shown to the family.”
The Port Fairy Gazette of 22 May 1916 reports that there was an attempt to raise funds for the family. The report is as follows: “The residents of Yambuk have promptly and generously subscribed £70 towards the relief of Mr and Mrs Joseph Kelly, Yambuk, who lost everything in the recent fire. Messrs D. Carroll, E. Watts and F. Moutray initiated the movement last Monday, at the saleyards, and these collectors did not meet with a single refusal. At a public meeting on Wednesday night, the prompt action taken by the collectors was heartily endorsed.”
Joseph Kelly was laid-off by James O’Brien in 1918 after O’Brien evidently decided to get out of the chaff making side of his farming business. By early 1918, Margaret and Joseph Kelly had returned to Southern Cross with their family.
Unfortunately, Joseph Kelly caught pneumonia following his playing in a rain-sodden early spring football match. He died in October 1918 after a short illness aged just thirty-seven. Given the date, it has been suggested by Kelly family informants that Joseph’s condition may have been exacerbated by an early case of the influenza that was shortly to ravage the district. It has also been suggested that Margaret and Joseph may have fallen into financial difficulty prior to Joseph’s death. This debt may have been a factor in why the authorities decided to remove the children from Margaret’s care following Joseph Kelly’s untimely demise.
Joseph’s death was reported in the Port Fairy Gazette of 21 October 1918 as follows: “- Mr Joseph Kelly – The whole Yambuk community were deeply grieved to learn on Sunday morning of the death of Mr Joseph Kelly, which occurred at the Warrnambool hospital, the previous evening (October 12th). Mr Kelly, who lived in Koroit, had been ailing only a short time and was removed to the hospital, where he was found to be suffering from a severe attack of pneumonia. Under skillful treatment, the patient rallied, and his friends were hopeful of his ultimate recovery, but complications set in, and Mr Kelly passed away as above stated. Mr Kelly was a native of Illowa and was engaged in agricultural pursuits in the Tower Hill district for some time. About six years ago he took up his residence in Yambuk, having been appointed farm manager to Mr J. M. O’Brien on the Yambuk estate. Under Mr Kelly’s management a large area of hay was grown, which was converted into chaff and despatched to the Metropolis, giving employment to a number of hands. This year, Mr O’Brien deciding to give up farming and selling off the plant, Mr Kelly had to seek other occupation and removed to Koroit, where he was immediately employed by a firm of carriers, and remained with them until seized with his fatal illness. Coming to Yambuk a comparative stranger, Mr Kelly, by his genial manner and kindly good nature, soon established himself a prime favorite amongst all classes, and after a short time was looked upon not as a stranger but as one of the people themselves. The remains were removed to the Koroit Catholic church on Monday morning where a Requiem Mass was said for the repose of his soul. The edifice was crowded, a great many Yambuk people being present to pay their last tribute. The funeral left afterwards for the Tower Hill cemetery, where the interment took place, the cortege being a very lengthy and representative one. Mr Kelly, who was only 37 years of age, leaves a wife and family of 5 small children to mourn the loss, not only of their breadwinner, but a kind and devoted husband and father. The sympathy of all is extended to Mrs Kelly and her little ones in their sore affliction.”
With her children still young and her husband recently deceased, Margaret apparently had no means of financially supporting the family and was likely in debt. In March 1919, prior to moving to Melbourne for work, she sold the furniture and effects from her rented house in Southern Cross. The authorities removed Margaret’s children from her care and she moved to Melbourne to work as a maidservant. The Bowman and Kelly families evidently could not prevent the authorities from removing her five children. The girls, Maggie and Annie, spent time at Nazareth House Catholic Girls Orphanage in Ballarat. The boys, Jim, Jack and Joe, were at Saint Joseph’s Boys Orphanage.
In recent times, numerous survivors have given testimony about the abuse suffered by children under the care of clergy at Saint Joseph’s Boy’s Home and Nazareth House in Ballarat. Testimony regarding institutional abuse in Ballarat’s Catholic orphanages can be found in the “Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care”, the Victorian Government’s inquiry into the handling of historic child abuse. Further information regarding events at the orphanages is included in the “Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.”
It was only following the marriage of Grandma Margaret to Charles Reilly in 1922 that Margaret was able to reclaim her children. While it would certainly have been a very regimented life, there is no information from family members regarding the experiences of any of the Kelly children while they were living at the orphanages.
Portland and the Emigrants
It is very moving searching through the lists of people transported to Portland in the mid-1850s, those men, women and children who arrived here through the assisted immigration programs. Thousands of people from the south of Ireland are listed here. Many of the names on the lists are absolutely familiar to anyone who has lived around Tower Hill. The same names have passed down through the generations. School photos from Saint Brigid’s Crossley and Saint Patrick’s Koroit show faces associated with these names.
The majority of the Irish emigrants who came to Tower Hill first landed at Portland and then many of them were transferred to Port Fairy by coastal trading vessels. Upon arrival, immigrants were housed and processed in immigration reception centres at Portland and Port Fairy. The immigrants were connected with their sponsoring employers or hooked up with other employers in need of labor. Some met their relatives and friends who had arrived earlier. Some immigrants disembarked at Geelong and came to the Southwest from that town.
A significant number of Patricia and Lionel’s forebears came here on the immigrant ships that arrived at Portland during the 1850s. Around thirty-eight ships carrying immigrants came to Portland between the years 1851 and 1858. The imperial maritime infrastructure of population transfer was instrumental to the passage of these migrants. Once arrived, the immigrants worked as servants and laborers to the better off at Belfast, Tower Hill and other places. In certain ways, these emigrants were taken from the old world by design and planted in the new world.
Many immigrants were forwarded from Portland to Port Fairy on coastal steamers. A number of vessels regularly plied the route between Portland, Port Fairy and Warrnambool during the 1850s. One such vessel was the “Champion”. She was an iron hulled steamship that transported goods and passengers going between Melbourne and the southwest ports of Warrnambool, Portland, and Port Fairy. In August 1857, the Champion was tragically lost in a collision with the “Lady Bird”, another regular steamer on the route, resulting in significant loss of life. The “Champion” often sailed in the opposite direction to the “Lady Bird” on alternate days. Somehow, the steamers managed to collide with each other off Cape Otway, disrupting coastal shipping for a significant period.
This disruption may have been the reason at least one of the immigrant ships landed directly at Port Fairy rather than Portland. The “Chance” departed Liverpool in June and arrived in Port Fairy in September 1857. The collision involving the “Champion” and the “Lady Bird” had occurred the previous month.
Three hundred and seventy-three assisted immigrants came aboard the “Chance”. Of these, one hundred and seventy-six were Irish immigrants, one hundred and eight were English immigrants and eighty-seven were Scottish. There were one hundred and eleven unmarried women and seventy-seven children aboard the ship, as well as sixty-five married couples.
Most Australians with Irish heritage will find forebears who came to the colonies as assisted passengers, arriving under schemes organised and administered by the British government. Over the course of the nineteenth century, 12 % of the Irish who came to Australia arrived as transported convicts, many of whom did not marry. It was primarily through assisted migration that working class Irish people arrived in this country. In earlier centuries, the Crown had planted Ireland with English and Scottish families and so the British had a track record in terms of the mass transfer of population for economic and political gain.
In the same decades, many other people were being transported to other British colonies such as the provinces of Canada and the Cape Colony of southern Africa. Britain took control of the Cape Colony in 1806. Many of the immigrants to the Cape in the mid-1800s were poor unemployed workers or former soldiers and the government assisted them to settle in the colony in an attempt to strengthen the eastern frontier against neighbouring indigenous Xhosa peoples, and to provide a boost to the English-speaking populations of South Africa in an attempt to outnumber the Dutch Boer settlers. Such systematic colonisation schemes were a feature of the British Empire, designed to plant communities in ways beneficial to the Crown.
The Land and Emigration Commission was a British government agency established in 1840 to oversee land sales to finance organized assisted migration schemes to various parts of the British Empire. Through the agency of the Commission, hundreds of thousands of emigrants were removed to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. The British government’s Land and Emigration Commissioners were the high officials who organised the assisted passage of immigrants to the Australian colonies.
The Commissioners of the Land and Emigration Commission with responsibilities for Ireland tried to ensure that only those from laboring classes and within certain age limits were selected. From the moment the emigrants left Ireland until they reached Australia their welfare was the responsibility of the Commissioners. On arrival at Australian ports the local immigration authorities took over matters and processed the immigrants during their first days in the colony. Immigrants received some level of government assistance until their first employment.
Laborers and female domestic servants made up the bulk of the emigrants. For much of the colonial period the number of assisted immigrants to Australia exceeded the numbers of those who paid their own way. In Sydney between 1838 and 1870 assisted migrants were three quarters of all immigrant arrivals. Most of those who arrived at Portland aboard the thirty-eight immigrant ships were so called “government” immigrants.
Colonial immigration authorities in Australia recorded the immigrant’s name, age, occupation, religion, and county of origin upon arrival. This was in contrast to the situation in Britain and Ireland where the British authorities seem to have had little interest in recording any information concerning those who were about to leave. These people would not be coming back and it was clearly a case of “out of sight, out of mind”.
Many of the Irish who arrived at Portland in the 1850s had lived through the famine and must surely have witnessed harrowing scenes. During the actual famine years most Irish emigration was to America or to Britain rather than to distant Australia. This likely meant that those who arrived in the Southwest in the 1850s were not the poorest of the poor, who were mostly dead or had already departed for America. The immigrants that came to Portland and Geelong were amongst the poorest of those who survived the famine years in Ireland.
The great famine impacted Irish society in different ways. Not all classes were affected equally. Many tenants on small parcels of land were made destitute. If they survived, great numbers were forced to emigrate. Throughout the famine years, a large amount of grain was exported through Irish ports. This food could have been diverted to feed the starving but survival of the poor in Ireland was not what was most desired. Some of the larger Irish farmers supported the decision to keep the Irish ports open during the famine and benefitted from the defence of free markets come what may. The “Great Silence” is the term used to describe the sublimated trauma that sat quietly in the hearts of survivors.
James Bonwick wrote a book describing his travels through the Western District in 1857. Bonwick used the word “planted” to describe the organised and systematic mass migration he saw there. He writes the following: “Mr. Atkinson was a legal gentleman residing at Sydney, acting as agent for wealthy parties at home. … Mr. Atkinson lost no time in locating parties upon his land. A port was selected, and the name of his native town, BELFAST, was given to the place. Desiring to surround himself with the finest peasantry in the world, and unable to get the genuine article from home, he sought for his Irish friends in the neighbourhood of Sydney. Procuring a shipload of adventurers, with a due share of wives and families, he planted them upon his estate, then a vast forest of enormous Gum trees, and provided them with seed, etc., and means of maintenance till crops could grow. Leases were granted at one and a half and two bushels of wheat to the acre rent, and in terms of fourteen, twenty-one, and thirty-one years, or, oddly enough, for a period until the youngest child of the family should be of age. Wherever practicable, these leases have been bought up by the owner …”. [author’s emphasis]
While on his travels through the Western District, James Bonwick passed through the Tower Hill district in the year Granny Eliza was born. Bonwick writes: “Tower Hill district is essentially a farming one. Immense crops are raised, though the land is chiefly leasehold portions of Rutledge’s Survey. Some portions of the Tower Hill bank have been sold lately. The settlers appear to be either Irish or Scotch, there being few English. There is no township, though a road-side inn is erected for the convenience of travellers …”.
James Bonwick goes on to make some observations about the Farnham Survey, as follows: “Only two Surveys were made in the country districts before the regulation was changed, the two now to be described. The Messrs. Rutledge, from Sydney, obtained a noble selection. Their Survey was a partnership of five parties originally. Gradually the whole came into Mr. William Rutledge’s hand; the last share of a thousand acres cost ten pounds an acre. Leases were originally granted for fourteen years, and are now lapsing. The rent was generally one and a half or two bushels of wheat per acre, though one pound is now required. Mr. Rutledge is spoken of as a kind and considerate landlord. He furnished his tenants with seed, rations, and implements, and has since made the fortunes of many. The land is of wonderful quality and depth. Part is low and even swampy. This is being reclaimed by drains at vast expense; the sides of a drain expose a surface of five and six feet of black soil. Farnham survey is partly covered with the ash from Tower Hill.”
Bonwick alludes to the possible corrupt practices used to obtain the two surveys. He is careful in what he says about officials and large landholders. He writes: “It was about the year 1840 that the system of Special Surveys prevailed. A regulation was issued from the Colonial Office, granting permission for capitalists to purchase a block of five thousand acres, selected in any part of New South Wales, of which this colony then formed a province, and for which no competition at auction should be allowed, but payment made at the rate of twenty shillings an acre. The Melbourne settlers were considerably shocked at such favor, especially when some of the Specials arriving from London cast their eyes upon land immediately contiguous to the town. Only two Surveys were made in the country districts before the regulation was changed …”.
The Europeans who arrived in Australia in the nineteenth century were not all the same and they came for a variety of reasons. Many found themselves in Australia through force of circumstance, driven by factors largely outside their control. Those who arrived in Australia should not be lumped together in a single category. Many were not free settlers, rather they were the colonised subjects of the most powerful and extensive empire the world had seen.
Immigrants were taken to the Southwest as part of a project to expand the empire and to provide labor to British investors and proprietors. For the most part they were not wanted at home and were in quite a vulnerable position. This was not a safe place and they came from a place that was not safe. Once in the new colony, they were the seeds of a new realm on this continent.
Yambuk and Annie Baxter
Throughout the history of the Western District, the legacy of squatter pastoralism has long intersected with the day-to-day life of the district’s European inhabitants. For example, Grandma Margaret and Joseph Kelly’s association with the Yambuk Estate follows in the wake of this estate’s early squatter history. Without squatters such as Andrew Baxter, George Duncan Mercer and Andrew Vernon Suter there would have been no Yambuk Estate in the Southwest to employ Joseph Kelly. The Kelly family would not have been at Yambuk if it were not for the squatters. The question is how we should regard the contribution of the squatters.
The squatters were a class of people who worked within a cohesive commercial network integrated with the British state. The landholding elite operated as a network of networks. Its operation was at once inclusive and exclusive. Participation in the pastoral business required access to capital for investment and it was based upon a shared set of values and ideological principles. Not all those in the business personally pegged out claims and defended territory from Aboriginal pushback. Such activity belonged to an early stage of the enterprise and soon such exertion was no longer required. What was required was access to restricted knowledge, the sharing of insider information based on privileged understandings, and the competitive participation in a game with rather opaque rules played on an uneven playing field. These conditions were brought to the Western District from Britain and other parts of the Empire.
The Yambuk Estate began as a squatter run taken up in 1843 on behalf of Lieutenant Andrew Baxter. Annie Baxter, the well-known diarist, was the wife of Lieutenant Baxter at the time, although the marriage did not last. The Baxter run consisted of fifteen and a half square miles of reasonably good pastoral country. The lower reaches of the Eumeralla River ran through the Baxter’s station, merging with the Shaw River at Lake Yambuk. For much of the 1840s, the catchment of the Eumeralla swamps and waterways was the scene of considerable conflict between Aboriginal clansmen and Europeans.
By the standards of the 1840s Yambuk was considered a relatively small station, located to the south of the major Eumeralla runs. When Andrew Baxter took up the Yambuk lease in 1843, the neighbouring runs were the Aringa run of John Ritchie, the Dunmore run of Charles Hamilton Macknight, and the Squattlesea Mere run of Thomas Browne (alias Rolf Boldrewood). The Harton Hills run of William Carmichael adjoined Dunmore.
Andrew and Annie Baxter married in England in 1834 and then immediately moved to Van Diemen’s Land where Andrew Baxter had been posted with his regiment. After several years in Tasmania, Baxter was posted to Sydney. After being stationed at the Port Macquarie convict settlement for about two months Baxter resigned his commission and by 1839 the couple had settled in the nearby Macleay River district. The Baxter’s took up land outside of Kempsey and established a homestead. They sold this property and moved to Yambuk, although by this stage the marriage “was in name only”. The couple travelled overland from New South Wales to take up their run.
Annie Baxter kept a diary for much of her life and she continued to write her diary while living at the Yambuk property during the 1840s. Her journal documents early squatter life and provides vivid accounts of both peaceful interactions and violent clashes between Aboriginal clanspeople and Europeans in the district. By 1851, the Yambuk run had passed into other hands. The new proprietors were are also well connected to the wider squatter networks of the Western District.
In 1873, Annie Baxter’s “Memories of the past, by a lady in Australia” was published. Much later, in 1992, “A face in the glass: the journal and life of Annie Baxter Dawbin”, edited and written by Lucy Frost, was published. Both works provide a rare glimpse into the experience of a gentlewomen on the frontier at a time of considerable conflict and transformation. Andrew and Annie Baxter, particularly Annie, also feature prominently in Rolf Boldrewood’s “Old Melbourne Memories”, first published in 1885.
In 1984, Jan Critchett wrote “A Closer Look at Cultural Contact: Some Evidence From ‘Yambuk’, Western Victoria”, published in a volume of the “Aboriginal History” journal. Critchett offers a fascinating interpretation of the diaries in this article.
Jan Critchett contends that in the Yambuk area guerilla warfare reached its height in the early 1840s, some two years prior to the Baxter’s arrival at the run. Guerilla warfare was then maintained at a lower level for several years following the Baxter’s arrival. Yambuk is on the lower reaches of the Eumeralla River. To the north of Yambuk around the Macarthur district, further up the river, was the country at the epicenter of the conflict that has become known as the Eumeralla Wars. In the first half of the 1840s, attacks by hostile clansmen on sheep and station workers living and working in the bush in this district were so constant that the clashes with Europeans was widely described as warfare. The response meted out by the squatters and the government’s troopers was brutal.
The Native Police Corps was used effectively to combat the hostile clansmen of the Eumeralla district. This strategy foreshadowed the subsequent use of Native Police in other parts of Australia. The broken and stoney country and swamps of Budj Bim were the base from which Aboriginal raids were launched. Horses could not traverse the stony country and it was this restriction on European movement that gave the clansmen an advantage. To counter this rare advantage, the dismounted troopers of the Native Police Corps were employed to pursue the clansmen on foot through the stony rises around Budj Bim. On the more open plains to the south, mounted Europeans would ride out in search of clansmen to hunt down where they could better catch up with them.
Annie Baxter’s diaries show that Aboriginal resistance, which peaked in 1842, had begun again in 1845 and continued till 1847. She provides information on the duration and frequency of resistance, on the importance of individual resistance leaders, and of the retaliation of Europeans. As an educated gentlewoman, she was able to write down her thoughts. Most other women on the frontier had neither the time nor the skills for this pastime.
Jan Critchett, in her article published in Aboriginal History, Volume Eight, makes the following observation: “What the diaries make abundantly clear is the closeness of the lives of black and white in the pioneering years, the inter-connectedness of their lives yet the very great distance between the two groups of people. Annie has Aborigines living close by, meets Aborigines while out horse riding, hunts for Aborigines responsible for outrages, has a trusted Aboriginal in her home, cares for and buries a sick, abandoned Aboriginal woman. Aborigines are a part of her day-to-day life. The cause of her personal unhappiness is her husband’s spending a night with a lubra.” Andrew Baxter seems a most unpleasant gentleman and Annie left him in 1849.
In 1854, the Yambuk Estate was purchased by Andrew Vernon Suter. He was the son of Captain Andrew Suter, a former British officer in India. Andrew Vernon Suter came to the Port Philip District in 1845 and joined his uncle , George Duncan Mercer, at George Mercer’s Leigh Station. Andrew Vernon Suter’s mother was Eliza Ann Mercer, the sister of George Mercer. George Duncan Mercer was also a former British officer in India. He had formerly served with the Bengal Native Infantry. By 1845 George was an important financier and squatter in the Western District.
George Duncan Mercer initially came to Van Diemen’s Land in 1838 to assist with his father’s pastoral investments in Tasmania and at Port Phillip. Andrew Vernon Suter, George Mercer’s nephew, first served an apprenticeship in pastoralism with his Uncle George and then he commenced as a squatter in his own right. He owned several runs, including Yambuk.
The Mercer/Suter family thus have the familiar squatter-class background of being Scottish gentry with a long involvement as officers with the British military in India. They had mercantile and banking experience gleaned from commercial and professional life in India and Britain, and subsequently in Australia.
At Port Phillip, the Mercers were involved in financing both the Port Phillip Association and the Derwent Company, both of which were corporate entities behind many of the earliest squatter enterprises. The Mercers were related to and associated with the well-known Learmonth family of similar background. These families had been Nabobs in India, having made fortunes there. The Mercer family’s involvement with Australia started in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s with banking and pastoralism.
The successful squatters were not a random group of disparate individuals. They were a cohesive class of people from similar backgrounds, with close connections to government and the professions. They had privileged access to the imperial financial system which they helped to run. In the squatting districts of Australia, they aspired to be an elite class of their own. They operated as a set of interconnected family cartels doing business with each other across the continent and to Britain and other parts of the empire. A number of gentlemen of the Mercer family were squatters in the Western District. Others in the Mercer family network were based in Britain, attending to the financial side of the family’s corporate interests.
For the servants and laborers of the Western District, relations with squatters could be ambivalent. Members of the working class did not generally have positive things to say about the squatters and other proprietors. This did not matter much in polite society. Nevertheless, a counter narrative to the dominant story promulgated by the elite could be found in odd places.
Some eighty years after the squatters first arrived in the district, and in the year that Joseph Kelly died at the end of the First World War, the “Port Fairy Gazette” published an article that refers to the historic violence which occurred in the hinterlands of Belfast. The “Banner of Belfast” had earlier merged with the “Belfast Gazette” and the “Portland and Warrnambool Advertiser” to form the “Port Fairy Gazette”. The “Banner of Belfast” was published from 1855 to 1876 by the redoubtable and acerbic Michael O’Reilly, an Irish-Australian editor who courted controversy due to his strong opinions and criticisms of squatting and the elite of the district. This often placed him at odds with local authorities and prominent local public and business figures.
The language used in the following article is the language of the time, some of the wording clearly no longer acceptable in the current era. Nevertheless, the attitudes and opinions expressed are revealing. Published by the Port Fairy Gazette on 4 April 1918, the report is as follows: “- A Vanished Race – In view of the visit of the Aborigines Board this week to Framlingham and Condah, some interesting stories might be told of the aborigines which abounded in large numbers round Port Fairy up to the fifties. The Port Fairy tribe (or “Peek Whurrong”—kelp lip) was once a most numerous body, whose territory (according to Mr James Dawson, author of “Australian Aborigines”) extended “along the sea coast from the mouth of the Hopkins river to nearly half way between Port Fairy and Portland, thence to Dunmore, Tarrone Swamp, Kirkstall, Koroit, Woodford, Allansford, Framlingham and down the Hopkins river to the sea.” On the present common, about Killarney, was a favorite camping ground, and thereabout frequent tribal battles were witnessed by the early whalers and residents of the pioneering times. The last pitched battle took place in 1854, just beyond Mahony’s farm, and some fierce fighting was then indulged in, and witnessed by quite a number of white folks without interference. On the sand hummocks in that vicinity, hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed during the past twenty years, the winds off the ocean disturbing the scanty covering of the native graves. Occasionally skulls have been picked up with waddy-marks plainly indicated; one, indeed (which was for a long time in possession of a local resident, but afterwards coveted and taken away by a captain of one of the steamers trading to Port Fairy), having a hole about the size of a florin knocked clean out on the crown of the head.
Corroborees were of frequent occurrence, and the weird appearance of the lime-ribbed, half-nude natives dancing and contorting, to the dismal intonations of the voice, and the slapping of a kind of drum by the lubras, was as diabolical as can be conceived. The last corroboree in this neighborhood took place at Yambuk, when a gathering of the remnants of the Port Fairy tribe was summoned in September, 1859. It culminated in a drunken orgie and a free fight.
The early settlers had some trouble with the blacks, and the slaughter of a few occasionally was thought lightly of by numbers of the land owners. I have heard some of the old blacks talk of the brutal treatment some of their fellows were subjected to, one very intelligent man telling me of how his mother was shot down, and he, as a picinniny, frightened to move from the scrub to which he had escaped for fear of similar fate. This was in a mission of revenge by the whites for the loss of a bullock which had been killed by the natives—as he said. The little value placed upon the lives of the blackfellows can be judged by an incident which occurred very near Port Fairy, the principal being a Scotchman, well-known in the early days. He had a native working for him as shepherd, and, missing some sheep, he was determined to keep watch. He caught a black fellow red-handed killing one of his animals, his own native being privy to the theft. He called out to them, and, without compunction, shot one dead, remarking to the second man, in reply to his declaration of innocence, whilst loading his rifle, “Wait a wee, me cullen; I’ll ha’e ye baith,” and, without further ado, despatched the second.
No wonder the blacks evinced dislike to the whites when such treatment was extended to them. For years, several fine specimens of aboriginals dwelt about the town in mia mias built near the race-course; and in the Blackwoods; and old residents will well remember Johnny Kell, Sou’wester, Billy Wallaby, a noted thief (whom I once saw climb the jail wall and escape, to hide himself in the rocks at Boarding School Bay, only to be re-captured); Jimmy Cain, and George Green; whilst the mimicry of Jimmy Hyde and Billy Youl drew many a “tixpenna” from the knots of people who were daily amused by their imitations of the peculiarities of prominent residents. Messrs W. Rutledge, Michael O’Reilly, C. H. Macknight and Horace Flower, were especially caricatured by these natural-born pantomimists, often to the amusement and the exaction of the coins wanted from the parties themselves.
The murder by George Green of his lubra, in 1860, caused a great stir amongst the blacks, and the white population demanded his punishment; but George, an athletic fellow of six feet or more, escaped from the hands of the law, and was allowed to remain hidden until the affair blew over. He was a long time away from this colony, having migrated to New South Wales, and became insane, but, a few years ago he returned, and was resident at Framlingham Aboriginal Station, but under another name, I believe.
Today there are but few of the descendants of the Port Fairy tribe remaining, and retribution will assuredly await the early authors of their too speedy decimation. The hummocks from Boarding School Bay to the high hills near the target, give evidence of that locality being a favorite native camping ground; for the hundreds of tons of shells heaped up on the hills, and the stone-ovens which, until recently, were to be seen in the valleys between, betoken the presence there in time past of hordes of native feasters. Even in the early days of the whites, it was no uncommon thing to see the lubras fishing among the rocks for crays and mutton fish, and the success of their labors was an occasion of envy to the boys and lads who would be trying their luck with indifferent results.
A Mrs Dunlop endeavored to befriend the natives, and established a home on Griffiths Island, where up to 1853 she resided, and had a number of blacks living with her. She tried to educate them, but with indifferent success, and vacated the two-storied mansion under Saddle Hill, disappointed and poorer. The lady was of an adventurous character, and her whaleboat voyages, even as far as Portland rowed by six natives, were of frequent incidence.”
The article quoted above was written long after the events in question and without reference to reliable sources. Academic historians are reluctant to accept reports such as this as useful in shedding light on the frontier situation of the 1840s and 1850s. The article can be dismissed as merely conveying unreliable local oral history. Nevertheless, it is significant that in 1918 the well regarded newspaper of the district unambiguously asserted that great violence had been perpetrated against First Nations people.
Squatter violence was identified as perhaps the main cause in explaining why Aboriginal people had “vanished” from the district. It is clearly stated in the article that the violence in the early days was led by the “land owners,” in other words by the squatters. The warning that “retribution will assuredly await the early authors of their too speedy decimation” reveals that many in the community in 1918 considered that what had happened to “the blacks” was not right and would be divinely punished. There is even a portrayal of a Scottish landowner killing a “native.” The Scotsman had an Aboriginal servant who he shot without compunction.
The article also refers to the tragic black on black violence of the time, many examples of which are well attested. The man called “Sou’wester” in the article was a local Aboriginal man known to have fought with the squatters and their workers against clansmen from other groups.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the cultural memory of historic violence was part and parcel of life for many people living in the Southwest, and it continued to be so for many years, at least until the 1960s. There was no great secret surrounding this local history. Something of what had happened was passed onto people across generations in such articles and in transient conversations at home.
It would be odd if something so significant as genocide was not talked about among descendants of families that had long lived in the area. The “why weren’t we told” of the twenty-first century still seems somewhat incredible to the author. What did people think had happened? Why would it have been different to that which had happened in other places?
James Bonwick ascribes the blame for the genocide to the actions of the British Crown, where it rightly belongs. Bonwick, writing in the book of his trip through the Western District in 1857, reports on the conflicts of the Eumeralla War, based on what he had heard from locals. Bonwick was writing some fifteen years after the incidents in question but he believes the accounts to be basically accurate. A section of the text, published in 1858, is as follows: “The party, who, though few in number, mustered in rifles and pistols about fifty shots, secured as guide to the Stones a half civilized native, and were lucky enough to fall upon a stray wild Blackfellow, who indicated the entrance into the fastnesses, and the route of the marauders. Camping for the night without fire within a mile or two of their unsuspecting victims, they resolved to make an onslaught upon them at the early dawn. Rough travelling delayed the march, and when they broke cover the poor creatures were taking their morning meal. Without a word of warning, the bullets of destruction were poured in among them. Some fell at the first discharge, others snatched up their children and tried to fly, and some warriors turned round in desperation and seized their spears to defend their families. But all resistance was in vain. The christians were too quick and too formidably armed for their heathen antagonists. Mothers, husbands, babes lay about the stones shrieking in maddening pain, moaning in dying struggle, or still in the sleep of death. More than thirty are said to have been thus laid low.” These events allegedly occurred just to the north of Yambuk, further up the Eumeralla River.
Although a respectable middle-class gentleman of the day, by today’s standards Bonwick’s second-hand account is inadmissible as evidence in a serious academic work. Nevertheless, the language is revealing. At the end of his book, James Bonwick has the following to say: “Poor Aborigine! who knows thee or cares for thee! Thy day of doom is fixed, the era of thy race is nearly closed; but the doom was not thundered from the gate of Heaven, and the duration was not limited by the fiat of the Eternal. From the first planting of the British ensign within the border, we may date the extinction of the natives.” The familiar theme of a doomed race, soon to disappear from the earth, is present in Bonwick’s coda on the Indigenous people of the Western District. The district is doted with memorials to “the last of their tribe”.
Shadows of the Western District 