The Shadows of the Gentlemen

In late 1837 Captain Foster Fyans established a police camp in a paddock where the Moorabool River merges with the Barwon. The police camp was where the Moorabool River could be forded at its lowest reach, hence the name Fyans’ Ford. Crossing here gave the Europeans access to the country immediately west of Geelong on the track to the Leigh River. The ridges of the Barrabool Hills rises above the Barwon Valley, on its southern side.

In the year prior to Fyans arrival, squatters from Van Diemen’s Land had established several stations along the Barwon River Valley. Stations were also on the lower reaches of the Moorabool River above Fyans’ Ford. William Roadknight was on the Barwon just west of Fyans’ Ford and the stations of Peter Manifold and George Russell were along the Moorabool and there were quite a few others as well. Governor Bourke had visited some of these stations when he visited Geelong in March 1837, and likely knew he would need to appoint a police magistrate in the near future.

The Moorabool is a much smaller stream than the Barwon. There were several relatively easy fords across the Moorabool, whereas the Barwon was much more difficult to cross with sheep. To the west lay the valley of the Leigh River, which was in the process of being taken up, although much of this catchment was still considered unsecured country at the very edge of the limits of settlement.

Both Fyans and Governor Bourke were Protestant Irishmen from the vicinity of Dublin and both joined the British Army at an early age. The Governor was evidently impressed by Fyans’ leadership abilities in remote and difficult conditions. In 1835, Bourke made Fyans commandant of the convict settlement at Moreton Bay, the site of present day Brisbane. The penal colony there was a place of secondary punishment for re-offending convicts. Earlier, while serving on Norfolk Island in the early 1830s, Fyans gained a reputation for “firmness”, or “cruelty”, depending on ones’ perspective. A prisoners’ mutiny on the island was very harshly put down under Fyans’ leadership. The Captain acted bravely in the face of the rebellion but was very severe in his reprisals. Prior to coming to New South Wales with his regiment Fyans had served in Spain and India.

In 1837, Foster Fyans’ army regiment left Sydney for India, but he stayed behind. After selling his military officer’s commission for a decent sum, Fyans pondered his future and where he might best acquire land now that he had enough capital to establish himself as a landowner. It was evident that Fyans was keen to remain in Australia for an extended time.

In September 1837, squatters in the Port Phillip District petitioned the New South Wales government for protection against Aboriginal raids on their sheep and shepherds. One recorded incident occurred in June 1837 when William Yuille dispersed a camp of Aboriginal people with gunfire after his Murgheboluc station on the Barwon River near Inverleigh was ransacked. When he was eighteen, Yuille sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, arriving in 1836. He arrived at Point Henry from Van Diemen’s Land in February 1837 with several thousand sheep. Yuille was from the Glasgow area, where he was apprenticed for three years in the West India House of Messrs Ewing & Co., a corporation which operated slave plantations in the Caribbean.

According to the Legacies of British Slavery database, the owner of the company, James Ewing, “was a plantation owner and slave holder in Jamaica, receiving considerable compensation under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 in both his position as slave holder as well as an assignee and creditor of other plantation owners”. Ewing enjoyed much success as a merchant in the West Indies trade during the 1820s, and young William Yuille likely had his character formed through his association with this firm.

It seems reasonable to presume that the William Yuille was an agent working for Glasgow commercial interests, which from 1836 had money to invest in the Australian wool industry. Partly as a result of Yuille’s problems with “the blacks” on the Barwon, in 1838 he moved his homestation to Ballarat, centered around a swamp later known as Lake Wendouree. He was purportedly the first man to squat at Ballarat. In 1840 he took a working holiday to New Zealand where he acquired more land and fought the Maoris in the British organised violence there. He returned to Melbourne and became a highly respected figure in business, as a grazier at Rockbank, and as a breeder of fine horses.

In response to the frontier violence and demands from the squatters for protection, Governor Burke appointed Captain Foster Fyans to Geelong as its first civilian Police Magistrate. The Governor had the previous year appointed Captain William Lonsdale as Police Magistrate at Melbourne. Taken together, the appointment of these two diligent and determined military officers as police magistrates greatly boosted the government’s security presence at Port Phillip.

As Police Magistrate, Foster Fyans was tasked with maintaining security throughout the Western District. One of Fyans’ first duties was to distribute tomahawks, clothes and blankets to the Barrabool people. Around two hundred and seventy-five clanspeople gathered at Fyans’ camp. Fyans refused to give the men tomahawks, and instead had the axes thrown into the river. When it became evident there were insufficient blankets to go round, the Barrabool people became agitated. Fyans armed himself with a shotgun and ordered his constables to load their firearms. Fortunately, William Buckley was able to defuse the situation and no blood was shed on this occasion.

Police Magistrates on the frontier were tasked with protecting Aboriginal people as well as defending the property rights of squatters and the lives of their workers. These aims were in contradiction. Though Fyans initially seemed sympathetic to the plight of Aboriginal people, over time his general attitude towards them shifted. His sympathies increasingly aligned with the interests of the squatters, as evidenced in his correspondence and by his actions.

As might be expected, the arrival of Captain Fyans and his constables failed to curb frontier violence. In December 1837, George Russell’s Clyde Company property at Inverleigh was attacked by a large group of Aboriginal men. Russell’s official notification of this violence reports that his employees shoot dead two of the attacking clanspeople in self defence. These incidents were reported to Fyans but he did little about it. Other violence doubtless went unreported.

Foster Fyans was responsible for maintaining law and order from Geelong to Portland. In 1839, he demonstrated considerable fortitude by leading a small detachment of men overland between these two settlements, becoming the first party of Europeans to traverse the length and breadth of the Western District.

Following the formation of several Border Police units in New South Wales, Captain Fyans took command of a similar unit of approximately twelve mounted troopers. This paramilitary force was based at barracks in South Geelong and the troopers were equipped with cavalry-style uniforms and armed with modern pistols and carbines.

Foster Fyans was the face of British law and order on the Western District frontier for more than a decade, first as Police Magistrate and later as Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Portland Bay District. In both roles, he was the official in charge of maintaining law and order. His tenure in these roles, spanning from late 1837 to the early 1850s, coincided with the period of greatest frontier violence and dispossession. For much of this period, the frontier was an arena of conflict, involving fights between small groups of combatants spread over wide areas.

During Captain Foster Fyans’ numerous and extensive journeys across the frontier districts, he often stayed overnight at pastoral stations, where the squatters provided him with accommodation. He developed close friendships with many of the most prominent squatters. Early on in his tenure in the Western District, Fyans fulfilled his dreams of becoming a pastoralist by taking up his own run near Colac.

Foster Fyans also secured a substantial estate in Geelong along the Barwon River. After spending eighteen months living in a tent at Fyans’ Ford, he moved to his substantial new allotment on the river, which was named Balliang, and built a fine house there. He occupied this property for the remainder of his life, never returning to Ireland. Fyans also purchased several town blocks in Geelong and Melbourne at early public auctions and became a wealthy man.

Foster Fyans maintained a reputation in Geelong civic society as a generally firm, honest, and mostly impartial officer of the Crown. He could be harsh and uncompromising in his assessments, often irritating some of the squatters, but they could not intimidate him. He was very class-conscious, and he certainly favored those squatters he considered true gentlemen according to British imperial standards.

While he deemed some squatters as unfit to be considered gentlemen, he nevertheless issued pastoral licenses to most applicants who met the bare requirements. As a mature and experienced officer when appointed to the role, Foster Fyans was considerably older than the mostly young squatters he dealt with, which gave Fyans an advantage he exploited on occasion. He gained the reputation of being the government’s hard man on the frontier, with a gruff military demeanor that the mostly young upstarts could not take lightly. He famously described some squatters as no more than “jumped up shop-boys,” in reference to their origins in retail trade. It is clear from his correspondence that he divided squatters into those he considered true gentlemen and the rest who were not.

Foster Fyans made a clear distinction between the “gentlemen in the country” and the people of the working and serving class. Like many officials in Port Phillip, Fyans made disparaging and denigrating comments regarding the underclass. For example, in 1839 after making his first visit to Portland, he wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney with following comments on the working people he found there: “I conclude they are a bad lot of ruffians – and quite independent … every fellow appears the Master and no doubt numerous bad and improper acts have been committed and hid from us – I have spoken to many of the men here – almost without receiving a civil reply – to them we are all on a par – equality is the order of the day …”. Fyans was not a fan of either equality or democracy.

Shortly after Foster Fyans was appointed as Commissioner of Crown Lands, his evolving attitude to Aboriginal people is revealed in his correspondence with Superintendent Charles La Trobe. The Superintendent was Fyans’ superior and the man in charge of the Port Phillip District overall. In 1840, Fyan’s wrote a letter to La Trobe where, when referring to the investigation and capture of Aboriginal men for trial, he wrote the following well-reported commentary: “It is a difficult thing to apprehend natives, with great risk of life on both sides. On the Grange, and many parts of the country, it would be impossible to take them; and in my opinion, the only plan to bring them to a fit and proper state is to insist on the gentlemen in the country to protect their property, and to deal with such useless savages on the spot.”

Foster Fyans was expressing his frustration over the release by the courts of certain Aboriginal men who had been apprehended at considerable risk to his police force, only to commit further crimes against Europeans. His letters to La Trobe, and letters he wrote to other men, frequently disparaged First Nations people, highlighting his belief that most were irredeemably “wild” and of inherently bad character.

In this assessment, he was not expressing opinions which were particularly unusual in the colony, but nevertheless, as a senior government official tasked with maintaining peaceful relations on the frontier, he might have been expected to maintain greater impartiality. His correspondence reveals that Fyans, like many British officials, divided Aboriginal people into good and bad “blacks.” From his correspondence to La Trobe and others, it might be concluded that he only advocated the meting out of summary justice to “bad blacks.”

Captain Fyans’ letters also reveal his contempt for the work of Charles Sievwright, the Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Western District. Initially based alongside Foster Fyans’ police camp at Fyans’ Ford, Charles Sievwright later moved his Protectorate station to Terang and finally to Mount Rouse, progressively venturing deeper into the Western District. Sievwright had upset many squatters simply for doing his job.

Assistant Protector Sievwright was tasked with affording protection to Aboriginal people in their interactions with the squatters and their men on the stations. Fyans thought Sievwright was interfering in the process of meting out British justice to Aboriginal men who had committed crimes. He considered that under Sievwright’s direction the Protectorate’s ill-considered actions in the name of Aboriginal protection were only exacerbating the situation and worsening the violence. To some extent this assessment may have had some basis in fact, but ultimately it was the squatters’ presence, and the government’s regulatory and security regime, which was the root cause of the conflict on the frontier.

In Fyans’ now notorious letter to La Trobe, the “gentlemen in the country” at “the Grange” referred to the squatters of the Hamilton area. The Grange was a large pastoral run with its head station near the present-day town of Hamilton. It was at the center of a vast district where considerable frontier violence occurred. The Grange Burn is a small stream that flows year-round, in all but the worst drought years. It eventually merges with the Wannon River south of Wannon Falls. Several squatter stations were in the Hamilton district by 1838, the most prominent being that of the Wedge brothers at the station known as the Grange. In 1839 when Fyans first visited the Grange, there were thirty-six Europeans residing there, including one woman. Very few of these people were considered in any way respectable by Foster Fyans, apart from the squatters.

The Grange famously had a naval swivel gun mounted strategically at the homestation. Swivel guns fired a concoction of musket balls, scrap metal, nails, and stones. These weapons were, effectively, large and devastating shotguns. They were used on ships for close-quarters combat and anti-personnel defense. A single gunner could easily aim and fire the weapon in any direction to sweep enemy decks or repel massed attackers.

The author attended a boys secondary school in Hamilton in the 1970s. His classmates were mostly sons of farmers who owned properties in the Wimmera, the Mallee, and the Western District. Occasionally boys would discuss what they had heard concerning the frontier violence. Even though these events had happened a very long time ago, the boys of the author’s group felt some connection to what happened in those days.

Wedge

Upon arriving in Van Diemen’s Land from England in 1824, John Helder Wedge received a grant of fifteen hundred acres at Evandale, near Launceston. He worked as a surveyor as well as a pastoralist. His neighbours in northern Tasmania were John Batman and Anthony Cottrell, both of whom were also members of the Port Phillip Association.

John Wedge first arrived in Port Phillip in August 1835, several months after Batman first entered the Bay aboard the “Rebecca”. Batman had arrived in May and the famous “treaty” was signed in June, quite preposterously.

Anthony Cottrell, Wedge’s friend and neighbor, also owned land at Evandale and was appointed Chief Constable of Launceston before coming to Port Phillip in 1836. Anthony Cottrell was an established colonist, having been in Tasmania since 1824, arriving when he was just eighteen. He was involved in the Black War on the island. A history of Evendale available online states that Cottrell “was raided by the blacks several times, and does not seem to have had an idle minute, helping his friend John Batman catch them, as well as chasing bushrangers when necessary.”

In late 1835 John Wedge drew his now famous map for the Port Phillip Association, showing the distribution of the various runs at Port Phillip allocated to the Association’s fifteen members. The run allocated to Wedge stretched along the lower Werribee River down to the western shores of Port Phillip Bay. The map, first published in 1836 and widely circulated, remains a foundational document of our state’s history. At the western edge of the Wedge map the Leigh River is clearly shown and named as a tributary of the Barwon, even at that very early stage of the British incursion.

Wedge was a keen and competent explorer and journeyed along the Barwon River for quite some distance, guided by William Buckly. It seems very doubtful that Wedge got as far as the Leigh, and so it is a mystery as to how he was able to include it on his map. Perhaps it was based on information provided by Buckly. Wedge did however “discover” the junction of the Barwon and Moorabool Rivers where Fyans set up his police camp two years later.

In August 1835 Wedge made the first written description of the plains of the Western District west of Geelong. Looking out from the hills above the Barwon, with the river’s junction with the Moorabool below him, Wedge wrote: “we came to the river BARWOUNE, a steep declivity taking us down to the river. This bank, or hill, if it may be so called, is, I imagine, about 200 ft. high, and from the point of which I was almost lost in astonishment at the vast extent of grassy planes through the west and north west that opened up upon me, extending much further, as Buckley informed me, then the eye could reach (especially in a westerly direction), and I think I do not overrate the distance in saying that I could see 40 miles ahead of me”. This was the country that James Lowndes and family came to in 1846, a decade after Wedge first spied it from the hill overlooking what is now the aptly named Queen’s Park.

The Association’s basecamp was initially located at Indented Head and from there Wedge extensively explored the Bellarine Peninsula. From Indented Head he travelled overland to the top of Port Phillip Bay and in early September went up the Yarra River at least as far as present day Melbourne. John Fawkner’s party from Launceston was already there, ironically considered by Wedge as trespassers on Association land.

John Wedge and his brother Edward began living at Werribee from 1836, having brought hundreds of sheep over from Van Diemen’s Land. During that year, John made a simple but elegant sketch of the first crude homestead hut on the Werribee run. He also made several other drawings of early European camps at Port Phillip, mostly showing tents and huts in the bush. Much later, John Wedge’s station on the lower Werribee River was sold to the Scottish pastoralist Thomas Chirnside, who went on to develop the Werribee Park Mansion there. Werribee Park was just one of many squatter properties the Chirnside family eventually came to own throughout the Western District.

In 1838, two years after taking up the family’s first run at Werribee, Edward Wedge’s adult sons established the Grange run in very remote and unsecured country, far to the west of the Leigh River. In this remote region, squatters from Geelong met with the squatters coming up from Portland. The government’s new licensing regime had given official sanction to such daring enterprise. The Grange run’s home station was just east of the present town of Hamilton, on the Grange Burn. Charles, Richard and Henry Wedge stocked the Grange run from late 1838. The brothers were in a financial partnership with their father Edward and their uncle John Helder Wedge.

By the end of 1840, the Wedge family had vacated the Grange, partly due to ongoing hostility from First Nations people. The Wedge brothers relocated to West Gippsland, where they occupied several extensive runs. However, while at the Grange, the Wedge brothers, together with other free settlers and their servants, made several punitive forays against Aboriginal clanspeople, partly in reprisal for the death of Patrick Codd, who was an overseer for the Wedge brothers. An indeterminate number of Aboriginal people were killed in these raids.

John Wedge visited England from 1839 until 1843. While there he was able to lobby British officials on his family’s behalf. He maintained that the Wedge family had acted correctly in its dealings with the Aborigines, as they were called. The Wedge boys were the victims of savage violence and public slander, according to Uncle John. In England, Wedge wrote a series of long letters to the Colonial Office urging them to adopt his scheme to civilize the Aborigines. He warned John Russell, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that “taking possession of their country” without offering compensation would result in “murderous depredations,” and indeed his letters were soon filled with reports of bloodshed, including of the violence in the vicinity of the Grange where his nephews’ overseer had been killed.

However, as far as John Wedge was concerned, responsibility for violence always resided elsewhere. His letters to the British government were also filled with repeated attempts to have the Port Phillip Association’s colonizing services and its claims to land around the bay recognised. This was an attempt to obtain London’s backing for financial compensation for the Association’s shareholders, to the benefit of the Wedge family who were partners in the scheme. Officials in Sydney and Melbourne were well aware of Wedge’s lobbying in England and his letter writing to the Colonial Office. They felt they needed to tread carefully in their response to London’s inquiries concerning the situation at Port Phillip.

In the end, most of the members of the Port Phillip Association sold their shares to Charles Swanston by 1838, and it was Swanston and one or two others of the Derwent Company who subsequently received some small compensation in 1839 arising from the disallowance of the Association’s claim to over 600,000 acres of land at Port Phillip. The total claim was based on the deeds “negotiated” by John Batman with local Aboriginal leaders. These claims were never legally recognised by the New South Wales colonial government and Governor Richard Bourke issued a proclamation in August 1835 declaring the treaties void, as the land was considered the property of the British Crown and thus could not be alienated in this way via negotiation with Aboriginal parties.

The land obsessions of Wedge and the other British free settlers were matters regarding which the Aboriginal people did not have any great insight. Shortly after his arrival at Port Phillip, Wedge wrote to James Simpson, yet another partner in the Port Phillip Association, to have him write to inform the British authorities of the “progress” made in “civilizing” the Aborigines at Port Phillip. Wedge wanted this done as it “would tell well in strengthening our claim for confirmation of the land.” In short, John Helder Wedge was not a passive witness to some tragedy that befell the Aboriginal people of Tasmania and Victoria. Rather, he was an active agent of their dispossession, in both locations. To quote Rebe Taylor, who authored an article concerning Wedge for the Meanjin journal, Wedge and other Port Phillip Association members had learned the “doublespeak of humanitarian governance.”

It has recently emerged that John Wedge was in the habit of abducting and “saving” Aboriginal children. These young people were kept and displayed somewhat like family pets, and were cared for in order to “civilize” them and show them off to friends as interesting curios of colonial life. Gentlemen in Tasmania and at Port Phillip were fond of this behavior. John Batman kept Aboriginal children as did Lieutenant- Governor John Franklin, George Arthur’s successor, among others.

In later life, John Helder Wedge became a parliamentarian in the Tasmanian Legislative Council and was a minister in the government of Thomas Gregson.

Captain Dana

In 1841, Captain William Lonsdale, the recently retired Police Magistrate at Melbourne, took over the lease of the Grange run. He was mainly an absentee leaseholder, employing managers and overseers. The countryside surrounding the Grange and the neighbouring runs remained unsecured until the arrival of Captain Fyans’ Border Police troopers. This force was closely followed into the field by the recently reconstituted Native Police Corp, led by Henry Dana. Superintendent Charles La Trobe sent Commissioner Foster Fyans and his Border Police to the Grange on two separate occasions prior to resorting to a deployment of the Native Police.

In situations where the country was swamp or stony rises, the Border Police Corp was not as effective as the Native Police Corp in tracking down and dealing with the “perpetrators” of “outrages.” At first, the intermittent campaigns of the Border Police concentrated on territory in the vicinity of the Grange. Then the focus shifted to the south, to stations in the vicinity of the Eumeralla River. After several campaigns of conflict and intimidation, the Southwest was finally secured. Nevertheless, vengeful ad hoc hunting parties of squatters and servants continued to traverse the country here and there, until the squatters felt they were completely free to carry out their pastoral business unmolested by theuseless savages.

Captain Henry Dana, Commander of the Native Police Corp, and a personal friend of Superintendent Charles La Trobe, was in charge of perhaps the most effective armed force in the field. In 1842, in what was a turning point in the conflict in the Southwest, Dana’s force took decisive action against the remaining resistant clanspeople.

In the wake of the para-military campaigns of 1842, conflict decreased substantially, although some violence continued for several more years. Henry Dana’s own remote run, Nangeela, on the Glenelg River, was to the north of the stations on the Wannon. Henry Dana took up Nangeela in 1840 with a partner. Dana was generally busy elsewhere.

The Native Police were instrumental in driving groups of clanspeople from their land and sending them far across country. At the height of the conflict, various disparate Aboriginal groups were herded to the reserve at Mount Rouse, then known as the Protectorate Station. Established from February 1842, Assistant Protector of Aborigines Charles Sievwright was based at this station. It was hoped that in return for food the Aborigines would learn useful agricultural skills and that they would adopt Christian religious observance and other “civilized” behaviour. Needless to say, these attempts failed.

Sievwright was based at Lake Terang for twelve months prior to moving to Mount Rouse, despite the protests of the squatters around Terang. He only moved after Robinson ordered him to relocate to Mount Rouse. Sievwright arrived at the station there in February 1842, accompanied by over two hundred Aboriginal people from the south. There had already been violence between the disparate clans sheltering at the Terang station. Further disputes soon arose at Mount Rouse regarding the distribution of food and other rations. Forcing people from different clans to live together on country belonging to yet another group was a recipe for conflict. Groups who were less than friendly towards each other in the best of times were forced into uncomfortable proximity with predictable results, especially given the great stress all were enduring by then.

The result of European intrusion into the heart of the Western District was catastrophic. In 1844 Henry Dana, still serving as Commander of the Native Police, noted that: “The Natives are diseased to a frightful extent all over this part of the Country and they are dying very fast. I have seen numbers in the last stage of suffering, unable to move. A few seasons as fatal to them as this has been, and they will cease to exist in the Country”.

Henry Dana and Superintendent Charles La Trobe got on very well. They were good mates. On La Trobe’s visits to the Southwest, he spent days riding across country with Henry Dana. In his later correspondence, La Trobe reminisces fondly of the times he spent with Dana on their expeditions, riding together over the vast volcanic plains of the Portland Bay District. Though perhaps not of the same fine family background as La Trobe, Dana was a gentleman from a British military family and had spent a few years in Van Diemen’s Land gaining experience before coming to Port Phillip.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes Henry Dana as someone who “rendered valuable services to the squatters and to the administration as the main force representing the authority of the crown land commissioners and the early goldfields commissioners.” The Dictionary of Biography entry on Henry Dana then comments that “By 1852 the native police corps had outlived the objects of its organization.”

Pastoral stations were often traded among the gentlemen of the colony, much like other commodities, even though they were the basis of production. Official roles in government were intertwined with the business of squatting. In particular, there was a close relationship between British law enforcement and the pastoral industry. Looking back in hindsight, the conflict of interest in the Australian countryside at that time is obvious. Fyans Street, Dana Street, and Lonsdale Street remind us of some of the gentlemen, but the disparate and conflicted roles they played in our history remain uninterrogated for the most part.

In the early years before 1842, the only police stations in the Port Phillip District were in Melbourne, Geelong, Portland, and at the Grange. These posts were initially commanded by police magistrates who were also squatters on the frontier. In addition to William Lonsdale and Foster Fyans, both of whom held pastoral leases, the first Police Magistrate for Portland, James Blair, and the first Police Magistrate for the Grange, Acheson French, also held squatter leaseholds. James Blair, appointed Portland’s first police magistrate in 1840, took over Clunie station, while Acheson French, appointed to the Grange in 1841, held Monivae station for some years.

This blurring of roles was a significant conflict of interest in terms of Aboriginal protection. Officials had privileged access to insider information relating to the security of runs and which runs might be available at what price. These arrangements also meant that subaltern working people on the runs had no recourse to justice when disputes arose with the “owners.”

La Trobe

It was Superintendent Charles La Trobe who ordered Foster Fyans and Henry Dana into the field to lead the pacification campaigns in the more remote parts of the Western District. Charles La Trobe is generally commemorated in Melbourne as an enlightened administrator who brought a civilised demeanor to his role, but he was not above wielding force in the pursuit of imperial interests, and indeed it was part of his job.

Prior to Victoria’s separation from New South Wales in 1851, Charles La Trobe reported directly to the Governor of New South Wales. In the first part of La Trobe’s administration this was Sir George Gipps. He was governor for eight years, between 1838 and 1846. George Gipps was from a wealthy family. His maternal grandfather had an interest in a slave plantation in Jamaica and was a slave owner. Gipps was educated at The King’s School, Canterbury, and at the Royal Military Academy.

Charles La Trobe and Foster Fyans maintained a professional and largely cordial relationship with each other. Fyans was appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for Portland Bay in May 1840 with the support of Superintendent La Trobe. The new district of Portland Bay, covering a vast area from Geelong to Portland, was formed partly to accommodate the wishes of Fyans, who reported directly to La Trobe.

During his tenure under La Trobe, Commissioner Fyans led his Border Police troopers in numerous campaigns, and Fyans was personally engaged in several skirmishes with clanspeople in various parts of the Western District. Fyans was undoubtedly a brave man and a dutiful public servant. He travelled a great deal throughout the Western District with his mounted police detachment, and made multiple visits to the Grange, Portland and Port Fairy. La Trobe came to rely on Foster Fyans in his task of securing the frontier.

When Charles La Trobe visited the Grange in 1841 and noted the extent of frontier violence, he ordered Foster Fyans and the Border Police to the district. This first foray was not particularly successful, for a number of reasons. Violence and brutality continued, and so in April 1842, La Trobe ordered Foster Fyans back the Southwest with the entire contingent of fourteen Border Police troopers. They were more successful this time in that they were able to kill a number of resistance leaders and capture some others.

In September 1842, La Trobe again ordered Fyans back to the Southwest region, again with all the Border Police troopers that could be mustered. However, this time they were supported by the additional force of ten Native Police troopers under the command of Captain Dana. This combined campaign in the Eumeralla district was the most decisive in subduing resistance. The enemy stronghold of Budj Bim was attacked, resulting in a decisive victory.

The stony and swampy country of the Eumeralla district was well suited to guerilla warfare. Europeans on horses could not easily travel through such country, but Aboriginal police troopers could track and hunt their Indigenous opponents on foot. It was Charles La Trobe who ordered the deployment of para-military forces. While La Trobe may have regretted the violence, he was probably relieved that the worst seemed to be over by the end of 1842.

In what has come to be known as the Eumeralla War, several battles occurred in the vicinity of the Eumeralla River and its tributary the Darlot Creek, near present-day Macarther. This country is well to the south of the Grange and on the way to Port Fairy, which was at the time soon to be called Belfast. The taking of sheep from squatter runs and attacks on shepherds’ huts, and the maiming of hundreds of valuable sheep in raids, seems to have been a form of economic warfare waged by the clanspeople. This “wanton” destruction of stock by the Indigenous resisters infuriated the squatters, perhaps more so than the deaths of shepherds.

La Trobe was not immune to the political pressure coming from the squatters of the Southwest, who wrote open letters of complaint to the conservative newspapers of the towns. Most newspapers, such as the aptly named “Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate,” saw it as their remit to support squatting interests. La Trobe pushed back where he could against the squatters, not the least because he was well aware of the social and political currents in London. Nevertheless, La Trobe’s actions show that he was determined to permanently suppress conflict on the remote frontier by sending in the troops. The year 1843 marked the turning point in terms of Aboriginal resistance in the Southwest. The sustained mounted police presence, the effectiveness of the Native Police as a counter-insurgency force, and the devastating effects of dislocation, disease, and guns had taken their toll.

Charles Sievwright remains a controversial character, and the Aboriginal Protectorate Station of Sievwright remains mired in controversy. Several academics have examined Sievwright’s legacy. Notably, they seem to have come to quite different conclusions about the character of the man. Unsurprisingly, he was clearly traumatized by his experience in the Southwest. It is also clear that most squatters did not like Sievwright or his work, and their attitudes are well recorded in the newspapers of the day, and in the correspondence they wrote to the government and to each other.

The Aboriginal Protectorate, the Border Police, the Native Police, and the government’s Commissioners and Magistrates were all extensions of the British state. While at times these agents of the Crown reflect the various competing interests of the free settlers, these agents of state are also the foundations on which subsequent British authority was built. Australia is the successor state to the colonial regime and there has been no great rupture in governance such as occurred in other places where revolutionary agitation and violence was the order of the day.

What happened in the Western District was clearly a form of colonial warfare, fought in many small battles spread over a large and relatively lightly populated area. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra has been reluctant to confront the reality of frontier warfare carried out by the British state in the colonial period. The reticence on the part of the War Memorial is perhaps understandable. They point out that only one of the combating parties was a state actor and claim that this was not warfare in the conventional sense.

Some Aboriginal men worked with the British as paramilitary police and so should the War Memorial commemorate these men in preference to the resistors? The Native Police Corps was a mounted unit where Aboriginal men could gain access to guns, uniforms, horses and participate in warfare. The men involved were attracted by the spoils of war, similar to many others throughout history now considered heroes. Aboriginal men who served overseas in subsequent wars are recognized.

The Native Police Corps in the Port Phillip District was the precursor of the Native Police Corps of New South Wales and Queensland, whose history has recently been detailed in David Marr’s book, “Killing for Country.” In the Port Phillip District, the Native Police operated throughout the 1840s. Similar policies of co-opting “natives” were followed by British and other colonial powers in earlier colonial conflicts, in various parts of the world. Indeed, the military units of the British East India Company was based on such a model, and Indigenous forces were widely used in North America by the French as well as the British.

However, the greatest problem for the War Memorial in this matter is not so much how to represent First Nations peoples. The problem for the War Memorial is that unlike some other wars there is nothing to celebrate, nothing to commemorate, nothing much to make sense of other than blatant human greed and a naked hunger for land. There is a difficulty in how to represent the various divisions among the “white” people of the country with regard their disparate family links to this past. Do Australians agree on what happened between ourselves at that time? There is an understandable desire to obfuscate these concerns. Violence on Australian soil is not easy to commemorate in comparison to the wars we fought overseas. We are not one nation and never have been.

Can it be expected that the War Memorial will portray the European underclass caught up in frontier conflict with due decency and respect? The servants and laborers were primarily concerned with their own survival in a harsh and demanding situation not of their own making.

For the free settlers, Fyans represented the power and authority of the Crown. The squatters may not have liked Fyans, but they relied upon Fyans to defend their security interests when they themselves found the situation too difficult. How will the War Memorial honor him?

In 2023 a new biography of Foster Fyans was published, called “Frontier Magistrate: The Enigmatic Foster Fyans” written by John Cary. This fine book may be of interest to those wishing to learn more about the eccentric man at the heart of state power in the Western District during the first two decades of its European story.