Shadows of the Western District

The fortunes of Phillip and George Russell are closely tied to the Clyde Company. Russell’s Bridge is so named because the Russell’s had a bridge constructed over the Moorabool River to provide access to the Clyde Company’s flour mill established on the river during the 1850s. George Russell had first come to this location in 1836, after having arrived at Point Phillip from Van Diemen’s Land earlier that year. His older brother, Phillip Russell, was a shareholding partner in the Clyde Company. He was also a prominent pastoralist in the Bothwell district of the Tasmanian Midlands. The other investors in the Clyde Company were Captain Patrick Wood, also a pastoralist in Tasmania, and several wealthy gentlemen in Scotland. The Russell family eventually became one of Victoria’s foremost squatter families.

After arriving in Hobart from Scotland in the 1820s, Phillip Russell was able to secure a land grant. The Tasmanian consortium of Wood and Russell gradually expanded its land holdings and increased the number of sheep in its flocks. By 1835, the year John Batman went to Port Phillip on behalf of the Port Phillip Association, Wood and Russell were ready to follow in their wake. The Clyde Company was the great corporate rival to the Association and its successor Derwent Company.

The management of the Clyde Company and the Derwent Company at Port Phillip, although commercial rivals, were thrust together in many ways in the decade after Batman’s arrival. For example, in early 1836, George Russell, designated by the partners as the Clyde Company’s manager of operations at Point Phillip, first crossed Bass Strait on the “Caledonia”. David Fisher, the Derwent Company’s manager at Geelong, was also aboard this vessel. The men would cross paths many times in subsequent years. James Lowndes knew both these gentlemen by sight but would not have mixed with them socially.

Squatters from Van Diemen’s Land arrived at Port Phillip in ever increasing numbers throughout 1836. Some were aligned with the Port Phillip Association but many were not. Men such as the Manifold brothers, the Sutherland brothers, and William Roadknight and his son, headed family operations hoping to lay claim to land close to Geelong while it was still available.

By late 1836, the country along the Barwon and Moorabool River valleys in the vicinity of Geelong was “taken up”. Both the Clyde Company and the Derwent Company were involved in establishing stations, as well as an increasing number of smaller independent operators. From 1837, attention was directed to securing more distant parts of the Barwon Valley, as well as frontier country along the Leigh River and its several tributaries.

The Leigh merges with the Barwon near Inverleigh and runs north from there more or less parallel to the Moorabool River but further to the west. The upper reaches of the Leigh catchment originate to the south of Mount Buninyong. The water of the valleys was essential for both squatters and First Nations peoples. By 1838, a few squatters were already on the Hopkins River and its major tributary, the Mount Emu Creek, well beyond the Leigh and far to the west of Geelong. Squatters were in a rush to secure country before other squatters claimed it.

Within months of commencing operations at Port Phillip, thousands of sheep were transferred to Port Phillip by the Clyde Company. Operations were backed by the substantial capital made available to the firm by the Scottish partners in the venture. The initial head station for Company operations at Port Phillip was along the Moorabool River valley, several kilometers to the north of what would later become known as Russells Bridge. Indeed the original British name for this location was the Clyde Valley.

The Clyde Company’s operations in Tasmania was based out of Bothwell. Phillip and George Russell were both central figures in the Company’s expansion to Port Phillip. Phillip was mainly occupied on operations in Van Diemen’s Land, while younger brother George was tasked with establishing the business on the mainland. Phillip Russell was a financial partner in the company. Most of the other shareholders never set foot in Australia. George Russell was still quite a young man in 1836 and was paid a stipend for his work as manager for the company. He later purchased a partnership in the firm, capitalizing on the success he made of the venture.

The major shareholders in the Clyde Company were based in Scotland, where they were enmeshed in that country’s manufacturing and banking sectors. The initial fortunes of these gentlemen were made in the Atlantic slave trade.

Phillip Russell, the older brother, was from a farming family in Scotland who at the age of twenty-four settled near Bothwell in Van Diemen’s Land on land granted to him in 1822. He arrived in Tasmania aboard the “Castle Forbes” along with Captain Patrick Wood, a former military officer with the East India Company. Captain Wood had concluded his service with the Madras Native Infantry Regiment and then spent time in America. Wood was among a number of Scottish free settlers who took up land grants near Bothwell during the early 1820s. Phillip Russell had agreed to emigrate as Captain Wood’s farm manager.

When the party of free settlers aboard the “Castle Forbes” arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1822, Patrick Wood was granted two thousand acres of land along the upper Clyde River. Several other gentlemen on the ship were awarded smaller grants in the vicinity of Wood’s grant, but Wood had the greatest amount of capital at this disposal and so was able to secure the largest grant. Captain Wood’s grant was backed by a recommendation from the British Colonial Office and enjoyed the financial support of the family firm of J & A Dennistoun. Wood was connected to the Dennistoun’s through marriage.

The financial resources of the Dennistoun family largely funded the “Castle Forbes” voyage to Tasmania and it was capital from the family that enabled Wood to be awarded his generous grant of land. Phillip Russell was of more humble means, and so was initially granted five hundred acres. In subsequent years, Phillip Russell expanded his land holdings in the district as did several others among the free settlers at Bothwell, including Captain Wood. Control over this part of the Midlands was contested for several years until the free settlers prevailed. In particular, the 1820s were a murderous period marked by many small scale conflicts with First Nations peoples.

During the 1820s and 1830s Captain Wood and Phillip Russell were among the largest landowners in the Bothwell district and operated their business in conjunction with each other. When the prospect of expanding pastoral operations to the mainland emerged in 1835, they needed an investment vehicle to underpin their move to Port Phillip. They were well aware of the plans of other gentlemen to cross Bass Strait.

Captain Wood was back in Britain in 1835 where he managed to secure additional financial backing from his Dennistoun relatives, and so the Clyde Company was founded with the support of J & A Dennistoun. This second iteration of the Clyde Company was formed with the goal of taking wool production beyond the confines of the Tasmanian Midlands. Pastoral land grants were no longer available on the island but demand for wool remained strong and a new source of family finance had become available as a result of slavery compensation payments from the British government. The Scottish partners in the scheme chose to name their enterprise the “Clyde Company” in a nod to both the major river in Scotland were the gentlemen came from and also the river in Tasmania along which their pastoral operations at Bothwell were based. Phillip Russell was included as a partner, indicating that he had done very well for himself since arriving at Hobart all those years ago.

In their pastoral operations at Bothwell, Captain Wood, Phillip Russell, and others among the Scottish settlers utilized substantial amounts of assigned convict labor. To service their needs, the free settlers on the “Castle Forbes” brought over indentured servants from Scotland, along with breeding stock, farm equipment, and the latest weapons. Captain Wood called his Bothwell property the “Dennistoun Estate” out of respect to his slave owning relatives and developed the business to where it was one of the best producers of sheep and cattle on the island.

The Dennistoun family were wealthy merchants and bankers from Glasgow and had established a trading company based on tobacco and cotton plantations in the Americas, heavily reliant on African slaves and European indentured labor. Initially starting as cotton and tobacco merchants, the firm expanded into a massive mercantile operation with branches in Liverpool, New Orleans, Le Havre, Paris, New York, and Melbourne. The Dennistouns owned plantations and enslaved people in the southern states of the U.S.A until the late 1840s. The cotton produced on these plantations and exported through New Orleans by the Dennistoun firm was produced almost exclusively by enslaved labor.

The original scion of the family, James Dennistoun, together with several partners, founded the Glasgow Bank in 1809. It was an early example of a private bank with the ability to issue currency. This institution later merged into what became the Union Bank of Scotland. The family held significant political weight. Alexander Dennistoun, son of James, served as the Member of Parliament for Dunbartonshire in the 1830s, while John, his brother, was the Member for Glasgow from 1837 to 1847. They were of the “liberal” Whig faction of British politics.

Captain Wood was one of seven shareholders in the newly formed Clyde Company. Phillip Russell was also a partner. The corporate entity of J & A Dennistoun seems to have been the major shareholder. When the second iteration of the Clyde Company was formed in the mid-1830s, it was about to embark upon its expansion to Port Phillip under the guidance of young George Russell, the ambitious younger brother of Phillip Russell.

George Russell was pivotal in establishing the Clyde Company’s head station on the Moorabool River, in what was then known as the Clyde Valley. In the 1850s, following government land sales in the 1840s, a flour mill and other major infrastructure was built on former Crown land purchased by the Company. This privately owned infrastructure included the bridge, hence the name Russell’s Bridge. The flour mill and various other structures remained under company ownership until the mid-1850s. Considerable capital was invested in these private assets.

The gold rushes greatly increased demand and the flour produced by the Clyde flour mill at Russell’s Bridge was highly sought after on the Ballarat goldfields. Before the advent of the railways, flour and other produce needed to be carted to Ballarat by teams of bullocks. It is likely that James Lowndes Junior was involved in this haulage, as indicated in the obituary of his son, James Lowndes the third.

A range of ancillary business was developed in the vicinity of Russell’s Bridge. The Clyde Hotel was established close to the hamlet in 1854 on land purchased by George Russell. This posh premises was a step up from the sly grog “coffee” tents and other clandestine shanties that dotted the landscape.

When George Russell eventually built his own mansion on the Leigh River in the heart of the Western District, he called it Golfhill, which was a nod to the family on whose capital his empire was built. James Dennistoun, slaver and founder of the Dennistoun firm, had purchased an estate in Glasgow called Goufhill, later known as Golfhill, in 1802.

According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, James Dennistoun had wide interests in banking and textile manufacturing, including in cotton produced on American slave plantations, commodities which were mainly exported through the firms offices in New Orleans. James Dennistoun held significant commercial interests in other slave-trading locations as well, including sugar plantations in Guyana. His son, Alexander Dennistoun received compensation in 1837 for the release of twenty-five slaves from a plantation in the Bahamas, possibly the property of his wife, Eleanor Thomson, whose family originally lived in the Bahamas and which was also involved in the slave plantation business.

As part of the group of elite merchants known as the “Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy,” the Dennistoun family reinvested the profits from their slave-based commercial enterprise into Scottish industries and into extensive landed estates in Scotland, laundering the funds through the banks they founded. James Dennistoun also held shares in other prominent West India merchant houses, such as the firm of “Buchanan, Steven and Co.,” which specialized in trading Caribbean sugar and other plantation produced commodities.

Scottish merchants operated through a system where they imported raw sugar from Caribbean planters and sold it in British markets. They earned commissions on these sales and often supplied the plantations with equipment and provisions in return. The wealth generated from this trade was reinvested, partly through the banks founded by the gentlemen involved. One such bank was the Glasgow Bank. This institution was founded 1809 by James Dennistoun of Golfhill along with James Ewing of Strathleven. James Ewing founded the Glasgow firm of “Messrs Ewing & Co.” The Ewing corporation was also involved in slave plantations in the Caribbean and in the general West India commodities trade produced on the plantations there. Like the Dennistoun’s, the investment vehicle of the Ewing family subsequently invested in the squatting business of the Western District. The prominent squatter William Yuille was an agent backed by money derived from this investment house.

Such financial institutions provided the capital necessary for Scotland’s transition into an early industrial powerhouse, linked to a global network of business under the British Empire. While the reach of this capital was global, a proportion of it made its way to Australia and was used to financially underpin the pastoral activity of the Clyde Company in both Tasmania and Western Victoria, as well as the operation of other squatter enterprises as well. It was ultimately the production of wool which was of value to the shareholders.

In Tasmania, Captain Patrick Wood named his property at Bothwell the “Dennistoun Estate” in a nod to his Dennistoun family connections. Captain Wood was the younger brother of both John and Walter Wood. John Wood married Elizabeth Dennistoun in 1807. Walter Wood married her sister, Mary, in 1812. Elizabeth and Mary Dennistoun were the sisters of Alexander and John Dennistoun, the gentlemen at the head of the family business by that stage. Patrick Wood was thus the Dennistoun firm’s representative agent for Australia, and deeply involved in the Dennistoun family’s expansion of its business interests in Australia, which were mainly concentrated in wool production. It was the Bigge Report which opened the way to the expansion of such commercial activity in this country, and Patrick Wood came to Tasmania in the immediate wake of this change to government policy, as an agent  for its implementation.

In 1829 Captain Patrick Wood named his son John Dennistoun Wood, the child having been born at Dennistoun in Tasmania. At the age of eleven, John was sent to England to complete his education. At twenty-two he was called to the Bar after having completed his training in the law. John Dennistoun Wood came to Victoria in 1853 and entered practice before the Supreme Court. Four years later he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, and during the next six years he held the office of Solicitor-General, Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in three successive Victorian governments. His rise is clearly an example of how prestige in Australia was built on the systematic exploitation of others across generations.

In Australia, as was the case with the American colonies, a subaltern labor force was imported to underpin the production of the desired commodity. Wool was sent to Scotland and England to supply the factories there, just as America cotton, sugar and tobacco produced on plantations there was sent to Europe for subsequent manufacturing. It is hardly surprising that the Dennistoun family company, along with a number of other such investment houses, would expand its investments to include the production of Australian wool. This wool was destined for British woolen mills, in which the family also had a stake, effectively creating a degree of vertical integration in the business.

The Crown was the indispensable linchpin holding the parts together. A legally enforceable regulatory and governance framework was indispensable to imperial business. The British banking and financial system, which men of the Dennistoun family were involved in developing, ensured that capital could be mobilised to underpin commercial endeavour. Financial institutions needed to function so that credit could be accessed and debts honored, in an environment where commercial finance could be managed in a way that was legally enforceable. There were substantial risks involved, but the security and legal apparatus of the British state was available to buffer the hazards. Lawyers, bankers, financiers, military officers and administrators all found a niche in the system. This framework of imperial law and order is another reason why the genocide in southeast Australia can be viewed as a state-sponsored affair. Many of the British agents involved in the ethnic cleansing which occurred were embedded in the state regime, in many different guises.

The racial killings known as the Black War continued in the Bothwell district throughout the 1820s and into the early 1830s. In a little burial ground on Captain Wood’s Dennistoun Estate cemetery is a tombstone inscription. It reads as follows: “Here lie Mary wife of Richard Daniells, and her two children, who were murdered by blacks at the Den in the year 1831.” By 1832, the First Nations people of the Clyde River country had been virtually eliminated from the Bothwell district.

George Augustus Robinson, when still a Christian missionary preaching his message of conciliation, passed through Bothwell in 1832 with the few remaining members of the Big River and Oyster Bay clans on their way to an unwitting incarceration on Flinders Island. Perversely, as they were leaving the district, the Aboriginal men danced a last corroboree in front of the Castle Hotel in Bothwell. It is doubtful they knew that death was in store for them at the Wybalenna Mission.

In 1835 the inhabitants of Bothwell presented George Augustus Robinson with a lovely silver cup made in Hobert in gratitude for removing the last few remaining east coast Aboriginal people. Championed by Robinson, the process known as “Conciliation” had triumphed. The inscription on the cup reads: “From the Inhabitants of the District of Bothwell in testimony of their acknowledgement of the benefit the Colony has derived from the successful conciliation of the Aborigines of the Island effected by him.” The bequest of the silver cup was a finely wrought token of gratitude conveyed to Robinson by the free settlers in acknowledgement of Robinson’s outstanding services to that settler community.

The agency of such Scottish free settlers in the early years of Van Diemen’s Land outweighs their overall number. The planters were mostly from the Scottish lowlands, generally from areas around Edinburgh and Glasgow. Many departed Scotland from the Port of Leith in the 1820s and as free settlers most had access to capital through extensive family networks. Scottish settlers in Van Diemen’s Land were successful in expanding their land holdings. They were awarded additional grants and purchased land from less redoubtable settlers. They were educated, and highly entrepreneurial and capitalist in their outlook, and were generally Presbyterian in their religion. They also tended to hold themselves above and apart from others of less elevated degree. The social and business networks they established in Tasmania were pivotal to the expansion of wool production into the Western District.

George Russell, the youngest of the Russell brothers, was just a teenager when he arrived in Tasmania in 1830. George learnt the pastoral business from an early age. He was initially assigned to assist in managing pastoral properties established at Bothwell by his bother Phillip Russell and Captain Wood. Over coming decades, he was the mainstay of the Clyde Company’s operations in the Western District.

A panoply of bothers, half-brothers and various cousins were also involved in the Russell family’s pastoral activities in both Tasmania and Victoria. In the Western District they were representatives of the class so slavishly honored in civic commemorations and social functions. When local worthies in their fancy robes got up to address the crowds, the preeminence of this set was noted with a nod in that direction.

The plantation of Port Phillip was different to that of Tasmania in several ways. Unlike in Bothwell and Cambell Town, where Crown grants of freehold land were issued to the planters by the administration, squatters in Port Phillip needed to move onto unsecured land and hold it through occupation. From 1837, a rudimentary legal regime governed this process. Squatters had to pay a modest fee to the New South Wales government for a pastoral license, which required them to stock their runs and establish station infrastructure on land leased from the Crown.

Additionally, whereas in Tasmania assigned convicts were allocated to the free settlers by the government, at Port Phillip the subaltern labor had to be hired from wherever it could be obtained. In the Western District this source of labor was initially mostly emancipist men and women brought over from the island. Some laboring men were also brought down from New South Wales. Before long, a system of assisted immigration from Britain and Ireland was made available to ensure that the plantation of the Western District could proceed.

Recognizing an opportunity that might not last, those involved with the Clyde Company decided to follow the first movers to Port Phillip. People they knew, such as Joseph Gellibrand, John Batman, and John Wedge, had been to the mainland as part of the Association. There was a general excitement in Tasmania among the pastoralists at the prospect of getting in at the ground floor. George Russell was a logical choice to be the point man for the Clyde Company at Port Phillip. He was a capable and energetic young man in his mid-twenties, proven as a manager of pastoral operations in Tasmania, and related by family to some of the partners. He was unmarried at the time. The shareholders recognized the limited window of opportunity to secure good country and they needed someone like George to advance their commercial prospects.

The Clyde Company eventually held property throughout the Western District, including large areas around Cressy and Derinallum, as well as land along the Leigh River. For the duration of its existence, Scottish finance channeled through J & A Dennistoun backed the company, which existed as a corporate entity until 1857. The management books of the company, published as the Clyde Company Papers, have been preserved and provide a valuable primary source regarding the early squatting system in Victoria, and mainly document the enterprise of the remarkable George Russell. These documents were published by the Oxford University Press in 1941, edited by Philip Brown.

In the twenty-two years of the Clyde Company’s existence, the First Nations populations on the runs of the company declined precipitously, almost to the point of eradication. Similar marked declines occurred on most pastoral estates in the Western District. Station runs were based on the availability of permanent water and grassland vegetation, resources upon which clanspeople also depended. The record shows that traditional Aboriginal land-use and ceremonial regimes were not compatible with European pastoralism.

All the territory taken by squatters was occupied by clanspeople. While the structural framework underpinning the usurpation of First Peoples is complex, the absence of clanspeople in the landscape within two decades is undeniable. This absence is the best evidence of genocide. People do not just disappear, and while squatters and others could nearly always point to a few Aboriginal people remaining in their districts, either working as servants on the stations or camping on the margins of townships, this hides the reality of the general and widespread destruction of people and culture.

When George Russell initially went to Port Phillip in March 1836, he crossed with a herd of sheep from Captain Wood’s flocks. Embarking on a scouting expedition over the next two weeks, George and some of the party walked almost two hundred miles, finally reaching the Leigh River. Upon seeing the Leigh Valley, George decided this was where he wanted to settle, but he was frustrated that rival squatters had already established claims to good runs on the lower Leigh near where it converged with the Barwon. He was concerned not to intrude onto lands claimed by members of the Derwent Company.

Notwithstanding the attractiveness of the Leigh Valley, the Clyde Company first established its headstation along the Moorabool River, near the present-day hamlet of Maude, located just above Russell’s Bridge. This section of the river was known as the Clyde Valley, due to the company’s presence. Lower down the river were runs already established by the Manifold brothers and other Van Diemen’s Land squatters, such as the Sutherland brothers. Gentlemen of the Derwent Company such as the Learmonth brothers and Charles Swanston and his son-in-law were also active in the area.

After a brief visit to Van Diemen’s Land to acquire more sheep and shepherds from Bothwell, George Russell returned in late 1836 to direct operations and to prepare for the move to the Leigh Valley. By late 1837, George Russell managed to establish an outstation on the Leigh, directly above the runs claimed by his commercial rivals.

The Company’s first huts along the Leigh were constructed near what would later become the town of Shelford, close to the homestation site Russell had identified on his initial visit to the Leigh the previous year. At the time, this was frontier country. George Russell succeeded in securing his initial outstation on the Leigh by 1838, after a brief period of violent confrontation. It is known that several Aboriginal clanspeople were killed near George Russell’s station on the Leigh around this time, though details are sparse.

In early 1838, George Russell wrote to Police Magistrate Foster Fyans, reporting that in December 1837 his men and huts on the Leigh River had been attacked by “200 natives,” who had reportedly stolen all the intruders possessions. Russell stated that his servants had been forced to defend themselves, resulting in the deaths of at least two Aboriginal men. According to the shepherds, they fired their weapons in self-defense. In George Russell’s company papers there is a note regarding the incident, as follows: “Captain Fyans took the names of the men, and reported the affair to the Government. He afterwards visited the station, but nothing further was done in the matter.” What became of the alleged two hundred clanspeople is unclear. There was no sign of such large groups on the Leigh in subsequent years.

One factor that may have convinced George Russell and other squatters to move further west was the prospect of government land surveys planned for the areas closest to Geelong. When the Parishes of Gheringhap and Barrabool were surveyed in 1839, Crown Land was alienated as freehold. Men affiliated with the Derwent Company purchased most of the best blocks. The Clyde Company thereafter concentrated on acquiring extensive runs in more remote parts of the Western District, on Crown Land that could be leased at little cost.

When the Lowndes family eventually moved to their small farm at Russell’s Bridge around 1874, it had been more than thirty-five years since the Clyde Company established its initial station in the Clyde Valley. The Russell family retained some land in the Clyde Valley for many years. George purchased a number of strategic blocks when further Crown land was surveyed and sold in the mid-1840s. This freehold property was leveraged via the construction of valuable industrial and commercial infrastructure. In the mid-1850s, a large flour mill was established at Russell’s Bridge, for example. The Clyde Flour Mill was about a kilometer upstream from the farm of James Lowndes, although by the time James took occupation of the farm, the Russell family no longer owned the mill.

George Russell’s station on the Leigh River near Shelford become the famous Golfhill Estate. This was where George eventually built his substantial bluestone mansion, which he called Golf Hill after the Dennistoun family estate in Glasgow. George became a financial partner in the Clyde Company in 1842, after accumulating sufficient capital to buy a share. His share was a sixth of the total.

The Clyde Company was dissolved in 1857-58. Its sales showed a final return of £258,000 for £78,000 invested. George then leveraged his considerable finances to buy as freehold the central part of the Golfhill run. His initial freehold property was 8,500 acres in extent, which he gradually enlarged to 28,000 acres of freehold. This was about two-fifths of the former leasehold run. In the 1860s he systematically used dummy buyers to get around the government’s regulations concerning the limits on alienated Crown land that any one person was supposed to buy. In this way, the conversion of Cown land to freehold property enabled some squatters to own vast swathes of the Western District, even though this was clearly not what was hoped for by the populace when the leasehold runs were broken up for sale.

George Russell died at Golf Hill in 1888, bequeathing the property to his only son, who managed it with the help of his younger sister, Janet. After the death of her less than competent unmarried brother, Janet, along with her husband John Biddlecombe, took over the estate. They restored its fortunes and became noted philanthropists. Janet Biddlecombe eventually sponsored the publication of the Clyde Company’s papers.

The firm of J & A Dennistoun was involved in squatting in the Western District for many years after George Russell first came to Port Phillip in 1836. The Geelong Advertiser of 26 April 1848 published a list of the pastoralists who had applied for pastoral leases earlier that year. Included in the list were applications in the name of J & A Dennistoun, for leases on the “Hopkins Hill” and “Greenhills” pastoral runs. Hopkins Hill was located in the Southwest, adjacent to the Mount Shadwell run, while Greenhills was centered around Toolern Vale, near Melton, with outstations in the Southwest.

J & A Dennistoun had interests in many other squatter runs in the Western District, apart from its major shareholdings in the Clyde Company. For example, Philip Russell and his cousin Robert Simson took over Carngham Station in 1843. Carngham was a run of some 30,000 acres. It was first taken up in 1839 by James Dennistoun Baillie and Thomas Baillie at a time when a clan of the Wadawurrung Nation were the owners of the land.

In the great wool crash of the early 1840s, the Baillie brothers went bust and so Russell and Simson took Carngham over as part of the significant restructure of pastoral leaseholds in the Western District. Philip Russell became the sole owner of Carngham in 1853, at a time when he was still a partner in J & A Dennistoun. Over the following years Phillip extended the homestead to forty-five rooms. Five generations of Russell’s lived on Carngham up until the property was sold in 1988.

Notwithstanding the losses incurred in the crash of 1842, the younger of the Baillie brothers, Thomas Baillie, eventually became one of Australia’s foremost squatters. He hailed from an aristocratic branch of the Dennistoun and Baillie families. His grandfather was William Baillie, Lord Polkemmet, a prominent Scottish judge and a Grand Master of the Royal Order of Scotland. Thomas Baillie’s father, the first baronet of Polkemmet, married Mary Lyon Dennistoun in 1815 in Edinburgh. Her merchant family had investments in the trans-Atlantic slave economy.

Thomas Baille’s adventures in squatting are remarkable. James and Thomas Baillie arrived at Hobart in December 1838 when Thomas was still a teenager. The brothers obtained sheep in Tasmania and then travelled to the mainland with a party of fellow squatters, arriving at Geelong in early 1839. Their party included Kenneth Kirkland and his wife Katherine. The group stayed in Geelong with David Fisher for some weeks, and after trekking through the Western District, they eventually went beyond the country already claimed by earlier squatters to the runs that had been scouted out for them by their advance party late in the previous year. Violence had already occurred on the runs but the settlers and the traditional owners managed to coexist for a time.

The Baillies took on 30,000 acres of country located to the south of Lake Burrumbeet, a run which they called Carngham for whatever reason. The Baillie brothers and their servants then worked to secure the run. At the same time, Kenneth Kirkland took up Trawalla, and his bothers-in-law, Robert and James Hamilton, took up the Mount Emu Creek run. They were all neighbours and relied upon each other for company and support. Long standing Scottish connections predated the arrival of these families in Australia. Robert and James Hamilton were relatives of James and Thomas Baillie. In Scotland, the Kirklands and the Hamiltons had been merchants involved in the sugar trade, with the usual commercial interests in the Americas.

Katherine Kirkland, Kenneth Kirkland’s wife, was the sister of the two Hamilton brothers. Katherine Kirkland is well known for her few years in the Western District. She wrote “Life in the Bush” in 1845 when back in England. This account of her adventures in the colony is valuable for the rare female perspectives she provides. Katherine describes the difficult relationships and frustrations the gentlefolk had to endure in the company of the unruly servants they relied upon, and she also gives equally frank assessments of the many Aboriginal people she encountered. Good help is hard to find.

Her brother, Robert Hamilton, provides an interesting epilogue to her account published as “Life in the Bush.” His narrative, while quite coy with the details, provides the masculine counter story to his sister’s tale. He alludes to conflict with Aboriginal people that perhaps his sister was not made aware of, or chose to ignore.

Unlike Kenneth and Katherine Kirkland, who returned to Britian, and unlike his brother James who died early, Thomas Baille persisted in the squatting business. After the crisis of the great crash of the early 1840s, he obtained further funds from his Scottish family and in 1846 in partnership with Robert Hamilton he took up Polkemmet station in the Wimmera, named after the Baillie family estate in Scotland. When he died in 1889, Thomas Baillie was living in Toorak and he left a huge personal estate which included a vast property in the Riverina of New South Wales called Benerembah, as well as Polkemmet in the Wimmera.

In addition to Carngham, another of the runs in which the firm J & A. Dennistoun held an interest was the Hopkin’s Hill estate. Initially taken up in the late 1830s by the Clyde Company, the Scottish consortium of investors in which J & A. Dennistoun was a major shareholder, the Hopkin’s Hill estate was a vast run on prime pastoral country centred on the hamlet of Chatsworth, to the north of Caramut and south of Wickliffe, located along the Hopkins River. The Hopkins Hill estate exemplifies how squatter operations could function almost like franchises. Loyal young men of talent and determination were contracted to run the remote stations with the backing of a corporate entity, and after a period demonstrating trustworthiness and reliability, the young men would earn their share in the enterprise.

The financial structure of these privately held corporate entities was often somewhat opaque. From the late 1840s until the mid-1850s, the lease on Hopkins Hill was held under the name of J & A Dennistoun. Later, the lease became associated with John Moffatt, a faithful employee of the Clyde Company who had worked on several runs in the Southwest. Remarkably, Moffatt managed to purchase this extensive property in the mid-1850s, presumably at a reasonable price, on land where he had previously worked in a relatively modest capacity. It seems likely he served partly as a proxy for undisclosed private interests.

In the late 1850s, John Moffatt constructed Chatsworth House at a cost of approximately £20,000. Many observers believed that such a lavish investment would lead to financial ruin. However, Moffatt clearly had significant backing and soon prospered financially. He served in the Victorian Parliament as a member for Villiers and Heytesbury from November 1864 to December 1865. Moffatt imported horses with some of the finest bloodlines in the colony. Horse racing and breeding were popular pursuits among the squatters, where they competed against each other on the racetrack, an activity commonly known as the sport of kings. Not only did they breed horses, but they also bred among themselves, since this allowed them to maintain wealth and preserve their good bloodlines within family networks.

John Moffat’s greatest triumph was hosting Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and son of Queen Victoria, when the young Duke visited Australia in 1867. Having good connections was vital in the world of squatter pastoralism. A detailed account of the visit was published in the Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers of 4 February 1868. This magazine was published by David Syme, the Scottish free settler who also published the Age newspaper. The report is significant for its portrayal of elite squatter society in the Western District, and for its depressing caricature of Aboriginal people. It also describes a tawdry royal kangaroo hunt.

Prior to the establishment of the Hopkin’s Hill run in the late 1830s, the area was the traditional land of its Aboriginal clans, now gone. By the 1860s, when the British royal retinue visited, the remaining Indigenous people were reduced to sideshow attractions, at times depicted almost as the pets of prominent gentlemen.

The entire visit of Prince Alfred to Australia was marred by mishap, with sectarian tensions evident between empire loyalists and Irish republicans. Alfred’s visit saw rioting and unruly mobs at several public events. A number of people died in the chaos of the royal visit, including several children in Bendigo. An assassination of the prince was attempted in Brisbane by an addled Irishman. When the prince visited Melbourne the sectarian tensions in the colony emerged to the fore.

Prince Alfred was a brother in the Freemasonry strongly embedded within the squatter class of the Western District. One incident during his visit to Melbourne is described by the National Museum of Australia as follows: “At an event in Melbourne, the Protestant community hall was decorated with an image showing William of Orange, the 17th-century English King, defeating Catholic armies at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. Given the tension between Catholics and Protestants in Australia this was a provocative gesture. Crowds of Irish Catholics gathered outside the hall, singing republican Irish songs and throwing stones. As the group was beginning to disperse the windows of the hall opened and shots were fired into the mob. A Catholic boy was killed, and a riot ensued.”

Several forebears in this family history worked for squatters. James Lowndes Senior and James Junior were hired in Van Diemen’s Land to work for squatters in the Geelong District. Thomas Jones, Lionel’s paternal great grandfather, worked for a time on vessels bound for Portland Bay operated by the Henty family. Thomas then worked in the Southwest as a bullock driver and small farmer from the late 1840s, partly employed by the prominent squatters based around Woolsthorpe.

Generations of our forebears worked on such properties. Samuel Jones, Thomas Jones’s only surviving son, worked on stations in southern New South Wales for many years. Samuel is Lionel’s grandfather. On Patricia’s side, her forebears worked as agricultural laborers for William Rutledge, a proprietor with an agricultural estate southeast of Tower Hill. Strictly speaking Rutledge was not a squatter, as he was a proprietor engaged in agriculture and trade rather than pastoralism, but socially and politically he was very much of that class. Many working people of the Southwest have a similar background of employment laboring on property linked to the large landowners.