Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (8 page)

‘They called me Murrangurk,’ he told the fascinated men, ‘which I afterwards learnt was the name of a man formerly belonging to their tribe.’

Yes, as a
ngamadjid
,
one returned from the spirit world to which their dead had departed, he had to be cared for, and he soon became part of their tribe, learning their language, customs and ways, taking two wives and fathering one daughter. In return, he regaled them with grand stories about the English people across the seas, the way they lived, the ships they possessed, the guns they fired and so on.

The newcomers listened,
stupefied
.
What were the chances that a man could have survived and prospered for that long among a people whose ways and language were so foreign to his own?

The men had an answer that would subsequently become part of Australian folklore: Buckley’s and none.

For all that, in the coming weeks and months, Buckley proved more than useful as a translator, managing to explain, to the chiefs most particularly, ‘the consequences which might arise from any aggression on their part’.

———

In the meantime, when Governor Bourke of New South Wales – which had Port Phillip Bay on its southern borders – found out about this so-called ‘treaty’, he was appalled. Despite Batman’s claim that he was ‘the greatest landowner in the world’, Bourke knew he was no such thing. For, as he declared on 6 August 1835, the land, as Crown land, belonged to King William IV of the United Kingdom and could not be sold and redistributed. The very
notion
of negotiating with the natives implied that they had some claim to it, which was outrageous. Batman and his people were nothing less than trespassers. Though Bourke was quick to declare the agreement null and void, by this time it was too late. Batman had merely been at the prow of other settlers and, within months of the natives’ marks being put on the parchment, they had been hunted well away from their traditional lands and the new settlers had taken root and begun to grow.

One of these was a man by the name of John Pascoe Fawkner, who, after starting life as the son of a convict, had gone on to marry a convict, and then effectively became one himself! For his back was marked by the 500 lashes he had received for having tried to help seven convicts escape – a prelude to being sentenced to three years in gaol himself for committing some atrocious Robberies and Depredations’.

But that was all behind him now. Like many who had come to this settlement on the edge of the wilderness, he was determined to make a fresh start and, after arriving in the Port Phillip District on Friday, 16 October 1835, he wrote in his diary that evening: ‘Warped up to the Basin, landed 2 cows, 2 calves and the 2 horses.’

Yes, in some ways Fawkner and his fellow colonists were far better provided for, and prepared than, the first European arrivals three decades earlier. But even then their hold on this new settlement was so precarious that disaster was only narrowly averted when, on two occasions, ‘Derrimut’ – the headman of the Boonwurrung people – used William Buckley’s translating skills to warn Fawkner of an intended forthcoming attack by ‘up-country tribes’, allowing the whites just enough time to arm and defend themselves.

‘The Blacks we learnt intended to murder us for our goods,’ Fawkner wrote in his diary on 28 October. A further entry on 13 December 1835 was more detailed:

‘[Derrimut] came this day and told us that the natives intended to rush down upon us and plunder our goods and murder us,
we cl
eaned our pieces and prepared for them . . . I and two others chased the Blacks away some distance.’

Curiously, Buckley – with his loyalties apparently torn – also mentioned to Fawkner that ‘if he had his will he would spear [Derrimut] for giving the information’, though he at least appeared to have faithfully passed on the warnings.

However close-run those near-disasters had been, with yet more arrivals security improved and the process of colonisation, once begun, could not be stopped. In fact, so arable was the land, so vast the possibilities for settlers like Batman and Fawkner, that within a year the place where the treaty had been signed was unrecognisable, as the trees had been cut down, crops planted and rough kinds of huts constructed. For the first part of this process the key interpreter used by Batman and others remained William Buckley, who had received a pardon from George Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Buckley did not last long, however. Feeling that he was now distrusted by both the blacks and the whites, he drifted to Van Diemen’s Land to begin the next phase of his life.

Melbourne, however – for that is what ‘Batmania’ had been renamed by Governor Bourke (in honour of British Prime Minister William Lamb, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne), after going through other incarnations as Bearbrass, Bareport, Bareheep, Barehurp and Bareberp – continued to grow, which was fortunate as this was just in time to begin to soak up the population overflow from Sydney Town.

‘This colony,’ Governor Bourke proudly reported to Whitehall in October 1836, ‘is like a healthy Child outgrowing its Clothes. We have to let out a tuck every month.’

To help maintain government control of this newly established settlement, Bourke first sent a police superintendent from Sydney down only a few months after Batman and his first settlers had arrived. When the settlement continued to grow, all of it with free settlers only – no convicts – by the end of September 1836 he had sent 30 Redcoats of the 4th King’s Own Regiment to build their own base.

And just as many were pouring into the new settlement, so, too, were others pouring into adjoining regions.

In early 1838, six intrepid colonists in the company of an Aboriginal guide had left Corio Bay – known to the Aboriginals as
Jilong
,
while the land beside it became known to the settlers as Geelong – on the south-western shores of the far larger Port Phillip Bay.

Having come from Van Diemen’s Land, they had found that all the best land within 25 miles of the coast had already been claimed, and so were obliged to journey farther afield, over hills, through valleys, around swamps and across many arid plains. Just four days and 50 miles later, they ascended the heavily wooded slopes of a small mount subsequently named Mt Buninyong – from the local Aboriginal word
bunning
for knee, and
yowang
,
hill, thus ‘hill like a knee’ – and gazed with wonder to the north-west. ‘An ocean of forest with island hills, was all around them, but not a speck visible that spoke to them of civilisation.’

Within that ocean of forest they could also see huge swathes of grassy lands, some of it contained in a wide valley, nestled among the hills, which looked particularly promising. And beyond that still, they could see the as-yet-unnamed, far-distant Grampian ranges and Pyrenees. Some very limited exploration was possible, and yet, running out of supplies, they were soon enough obliged to make their famished way back to the big smoke.

Nevertheless, from January 1838 on, the first settlers migrated in the general direction of the promising country that had been spotted. Two Scots settlers, Henry Anderson and William Cross Yuille, just 19 years old, drove their flocks forward into that particular grassy valley to settle. The kangaroos didn’t really bother bounding away, so placid was this invasion, while the emus barely blinked.

In short order, William Yuille began to cut down many of the scattered wattle and gum trees and build his home by the banks of a stream he called Yarrowee Creek. All around were many other creeks, gullies, patches of forest and grassy slopes. ‘A pastoral quiet reigned everywhere.’

Yuille decided to call his run Ballaarat, after the Wathaurong people’s notion of
balla
arat
– a great place to lean on your elbow. And within that run there was no more beautiful or picturesque resting place than a particular waterhole surrounded by wattles at the juncture of the Yarrowee and Gong Gong creeks, at the foot of a curiously elongated, dome-like hill, where the grass around always remained green, no matter how deep the drought, how long the summer, how rare the rains.

No sooner had these pioneers opened up the land than hundreds, then thousands, then millions of sheep and thousands of cattle began to flow into the central highlands’ felicitous rolling grass country. It was the very area that the explorer Major Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell had first seen in 1836 when, upon reaching the junction of the Murray and Loddon rivers, he became so enchanted by the area and its pastoral possibilities that he called it Australia Felix.

True, this was all Crown land, with all that lay upon it and beneath it belonging to His Majesty William IV, but the 1836 legislation passed by His Majesty’s representative in Australia, the New South Wales Government, had already determined what they could do. So long as the squatters did not settle within three miles of each other – in practice giving each squatter about 6000 acres – and paid an annually renewed lease of £10 per annum to the government, they were allowed to ‘squat’ upon that land and have grazing rights. If there were any disputes, it was for the Commissioner of Crown lands – the official in formal charge of all of His Majesty’s sovereign territory – to regulate it.

———

By 1839 the Port Phillip settlement and its surrounding regions were thriving to the point that, with no fewer than 5000 settlers, the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, felt that it needed a full-time administrator, and this person proved to be a Londoner by the name of Charles Joseph La Trobe. An imposing man at six feet tall, he arrived on the last day of September that year, with his Swiss wife, their two-year-old daughter, Agnes, two servants and a prefabricated cottage that had first been put together in England before being dismantled, transported 10,000-odd miles and then reconstructed in Melbourne. Settling into that small, two-room cottage on a corner of the Government Paddock – an estate he soon renamed
Jolimont
–
he was not long in getting to work. As one whose father had been a peripatetic missionary (Charles himself had considered entering the Church), and who, as an adult, had travelled through both North and South America as a tutor to the troubled young Swiss-based Frenchman Count Albert de Pourtales, Charles La Trobe was nothing if not used to adapting to different climes, and he did well from the first in this benign pastoral outpost of the British Empire.

And yet, just as La Trobe accommodated his growing family by adding rooms onto his cottage – with a kitchen, library and servants’ quarters constructed by local builders, even as they built stables out the back – so too had he taken over a colony whose settlers were already spilling into adjoining regions.

From the beginning, however, he was eager for this colony to be a place where far more than mere wealth was accumulated, as he noted in his first speech in Melbourne:

‘It is not by individual aggrandisement, by the possession of numerous flocks or herds, or by costly acres, that the people shall secure for the country enduring prosperity and happiness, but by the acquisition and maintenance of sound religious and moral institutions without which no country can become truly great.’

Though La Trobe set out from the first to build such institutions, the numbers of people who continued to arrive, seeking numerous flocks, herds, costly acres and all the rest, continued to swell . . .

There were soon so many squatters and the Port Phillip District was becoming so important that only six years after Batman had arrived, the Legislative Council of New South Wales was expanded so that six of 36 members could represent the southern settlement. Of course, you had to be a very wealthy landowner to be such a representative, because no person of even moderate means could afford the time and expense of travelling regularly to Sydney – only to be outvoted 30-six on most matters that would advantage Sydney as opposed to Port Phillip and its environs – but it was a start. The whole area was continuing to strengthen as the population grew and the land became ever more valuable.

As to the squatters around Yarrowee, they continued to prosper as their sheep grew fat. Only shortly after settlement, one of those squatters, Henry Anderson, was walking on his run with a friend when he picked up a small piece of quartz and noticed it had a curious, gleaming streak in it.

‘This is gold,’ he announced to his companion.

‘Tut-tut, man,’ his friend replied. ‘Golden nonsense!’

Feeling a fool, but not knowing the half of it, Anderson immediately threw the stone at a nearby donkey.

And, yes, there were occasionally problems from the devastated Aboriginal tribes that had been all but wiped out by this invasion into their territory, but the natives were neither numerous enough nor powerful enough for the settlers to worry about too much. Perhaps worst of all, from only a short time after the white invasion, their dispossession was aided by the newly formed body of the Native Police Corps, Aboriginal men – a ‘Satanic Battalion of Black Guards’ – whose specific role was to move the ‘uncivilised’ natives off their land.

———

Much further to the north of the Port Phillip District, in 1839, a Polish immigrant, Paul Strzelecki, found traces of gold not far from Lithgow, west of Sydney. Five years later the Very Reverend William Braithwaite Clarke – a man of both God and geology – was chipping away at a rock face near Hartley in the Blue Mountains when he found particles of gold gleaming back at him –
gleaming
– in the bright sunshine. Over the next three years he widened his range of fossicking and soon formed the opinion that the whole region would be found ‘abundantly rich in gold’.

Finally, he was ready. He had the evidence – a bag of samples – and journeyed to see his friend Governor George Gipps at the vice-regal country residence in Parramatta Park, an English manor in the classic style set in gracious gardens.