Eumeralla Wars

The Eumeralla Wars were the violent encounters between European settlers and Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in the Western District area of south west Victoria.[1]

Eumeralla Wars
Date1840s - 1860s
Location
Deen Maar, south-west Victoria
Result European occupation of the district
Belligerents
European settlers, Native Police Gunditjmara people
Commanders and leaders
George Augustus Robinson
Henry EP Dana and Sergeant Samuel Windridge		 Jupiter
Cocknose
Partpoaermin, alias Cold Morning
Koort Kirrup
Strength
Unknown Unknown
Casualties and losses
80 settlers dead
over 3000 sheep taken		 up to 6,500 dead

The conflict is named after stations on the Eumeralla River between Port Fairy and Portland where much of the conflict was located.

The conflict is considered to be a significant part of the Australian frontier wars.

Coastal Gunditjmara people came into contact with European whalers in the first decades of the 19th century.[2]

The conflict mostly consisted of guerrilla tactics against sheep and property by Aboriginal men. The Aboriginal groups in Victoria concentrated on economic warfare, killing tens of thousands of sheep. Large numbers of British settlers arrived in Victoria during the 1840s, and rapidly outnumbered the Indigenous population. Mass killings and massacres of Indigenous people, including women and children, were carried out by whalers, settlers, station workers, and the Native Police Corps.[3]

The wars lasted about 20 years, and conflict was so violent that the Native Police Corps were deployed from Melbourne to assist. Many Aboriginal people were killed, with casualties in the thousands based on an estimated 7,000 inhabitants pre-contact to just 442.[4]

The remains of people involved in the conflict are at the Deen Maar Indigenous Protected Area.[5]

The Convincing Ground Massacre
Main article: Convincing Ground massacre

The Convincing Ground Massacre (1833 or 1834) was a dispute between whalers and the Kilcarer gundidj clan over the ownership of a beached whale. The conflict turned violent, and the whalers shot between 60 and 200 people, leaving only two members of the clan alive. A 'convincing ground' is a term of the time for a sporting match. The massacre was recorded in the diary of Edward Henty, first permanent settler in the Port Phillip district who began whaling and sheep farming in the area in late 1834.

At this time, settling on the land was not yet legal, but in 1836 the new Port Phillip District was declared as part of the Colony of New South Wales, to cover settlement in Melbourne and Portland.

Ongoing conflicts

In 1837 settlers in the Portland Bay District appealed to Governor Bourke for protection from attacks by Aborigines.[6] In 1838 a group of 82 settlers threatened to declare a 'black war' if authorities did not give them further protection.[7] Along with other conflicts in areas outside Melbourne, this led to the creation of the Native Police Corps. During this period the Murdering Gully massacre took place (1839, with 35-40 Aboriginal people killed), and another massacre reported at a track called Waterloo Lane.[8]

Escalation (1841-42)

The contest over rights was reported by Edward Henty and Police Magistrate James Blair in a meeting with George Augustus Robinson, the Protector of Aborigines in 1841. Robinson visited the area to speak to squatters (white landholders) in 1841, and to the Gunditjmara people in 1842.

In 1842, white inhabitants from the Port Fairy area wrote a letter to then superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe requesting support from Melbourne for the damage to people and property in the area. The superintendent responded:

The destruction of European pro-perty, and even the occasional sacrifice of life, by the hands of the savage tribes among whom you live, if unprovoked and unrevenged, may justly claim sympathy and pity. But the feeling of abhorrence which one act of savage retaliation or cruelty on your part will rouse, must weaken, if not altogether obliterate every other, in the minds of most men ; and I regret to state, that I have before me a state-ment in a form which I dare not discredit, showing that such acts are perpetrated among you.[9]

La Trobe describes the nighttime 'murder of no fewer than three defenceless aboriginal women and a child in their sleeping-place'.[9]

The letter included the settler's complaints of conflicts in that 'principally occurred' in February and March 1842.

Alleged damages caused by Indigenous People around the Eumeralla River Feb-March 1842
Name of complainant Settlers killed Settlers injured Animals taken Weapons taken Other items
Mr. Ritchie 1 100 sheep 1 2 huts cleared
Mr. Campbell 200 sheep 10 tons of potatoes
Messrs. Kilsom and Bernard 2 5 horses; with 7 cows and 40 calves killed
Mr. Loughnan 600 sheep taken, 130 recovered 2 2 huts cleared
Messrs. Bolden 1 10 cows and 40 calves killed
Mr. Whitehead 2 1 flock of sheep, mostly recovered
Mr. Muston 1 200 sheep
Mr. Burchet Shepherd fired at
Mr. Cox 1 2 horses, flock of sheep
Mr. Hunter 1 flock of sheep huts robbed
Messrs. Hutcheson and Kid 1
Messrs. Carmichael and Jamieson 1 horse
Messrs. Kemp 30 sheep
Mr Farie 50 sheep
Captain Webster 1 350 sheep
Mr. Black 50 sheep
Mr. Thompson 1 260 sheep
Mr. Gill 300 sheep
Mr. Cameron 700 sheep, mostly recovered
Mr. Bromfield 1 180 sheep station robbed
Mr. Faloye 1 'very valuable bull', some calves
Dr. Martin 6 cows, 3 bullocks, 20 calves
Dr. Woolley 1 Cattle driven off
Mr. Aylman 200 ewes and lambs
Mr. Barnet 450 ewes and lambs

The attack that La Trobe described is the most famous massacre of the period, Lubra Creek (24 February 1842), in which three women (one of whom was pregnant) and a child were shot, and another woman died later of wounds.[3] Because the victims included women and children, and the attack was unprovoked--the group were not found with sheep nor western clothing, and the families were asleep at the time--the massacre was widely condemned. Unusually, three of the men involved in the attack were tried at the Supreme Court in Melbourne. There is therefore extensive documentation and evidence of this massacre, although the men were found not guilty by the jury.[3]

Clashes with Native Police (1843)

In 1843, the Native Police were brought in from Melbourne to take part in fighting against other Aboriginal people which included attacks upon the Gunditjmara and Jardwadjali at the Crawford River, Mt Eckersley, Victoria Range and at Mt Zero. Henry EP Dana was the commander of the Native Police Corps and encouraged the police to shoot rather than make arrests. Under the white Sergeant Windridge[10] the Corps were engaged in a number of violent and fatal engagements.[11]

In 1843, a skirmish broke out between the Corps and local Aboriginal people with a large number of stolen sheep. The fight continued all night. During the fight, information came that Basset the owner of the sheep had been murdered and 200 sheep had gone. 8 or 9 Aboriginal men were shot.[12]

19 October 1843, Mr Lockhart's dray had been attacked and robbed, in the attempt to recover the stolen items and arrest some of the men responsible resulted in 2 local Aboriginal men being killed.[13]

Another search during this tour of duty led to more deaths. One of the troopers was recorded by Assistant Protector William Thomas as claiming 17 Aboriginal men had been killed, though this number was later disputed. [14][15]

It was about this time that T.A. Browne settled at the property he called Squattesmere.[16] T.A. Browne became a popular author, writing as Rolf Boldrewood, and wrote a chapter about the Eumeralla war in his book Old Melbourne Memories (1896).[17]

Before I arrived and took up my abode on the border of the great Eumeralla mere, there had been divers quarrels between the old race and the new. Whether the stockmen and shepherds were to blame—as is always said—or whether it was simply the ordinary savage desire for the tempting goods and chattels of the white man, cannot be accurately stated. Anyhow, cattle and sheep had been lifted and speared; blacks had been shot, as a matter of course; then, equally so, hut-keepers, shepherds, and stockmen had been done to death.[18]

Later conflict

Settlers went on 'hunting parties', for example 13 hunting parties described by the writer and diarist Annie Baxter of Yambuk in 1845-1847.[19]

Gunditjmara Elder Aunty Iris Lovett-Gardiner from Lake Condah recalled the information passed down to her from her family who had survived:

there was massacres all over the place but they probably weren’t recorded, because they had a shooting board that they had with Aboriginal people…they went out an’ they shot ‘em an’ they come from every where to have a shoot against the Aboriginal race…an’ they shot women, kids and everything else…an’ that wasn’t…you know they wouldn’t say how many they shot, they wouldn’t put that down, because it was sport to them, it was like shooting animals…[20]

The last massacre was at Murder's Flats in the early 1850s (though see Dhauwurd Wurrung History for difficulties with this date). Another proposed final date is 1859 for the Lake Bolac massacre of 11 people.[21]

Displacement

Many Aboriginal people were displaced by the settlers, and the Victorian Government created Aboriginal reserves to house them;[22] some were moved to Lake Condah Mission after its establishment in 1867.[23][22]

Artistic representations
Port Fairy Aboriginal Massacre Monument 001

Deborah Cheetham AO wrote Eumeralla: A War Requiem for Peace based on the Eumeralla Wars. The work was performed in Port Fairy and Melbourne.

Indigenous artist Rachael Joy has created a series of paintings based on the Eumeralla Wars which she describes as 'like my Guernica' (referring to the famous painting of the horrors of war by Pablo Picasso).

A monument was unveiled in 2011 in "memory of the thousands of Aboriginal people who were massacred between 1837 and 1844 in this area of Port Fairy".

See further

References
  1. "A forgotten war, a haunted land", Sydney Morning Herald 10 August 2013 accessed 30 March 2014
  2. "Indigenous beginnings". glenelglibraries.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  3. Clark, Ian D. Scars in the Landscape: A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1995.
  4. User, Super. "Indigenous beginnings". glenelglibraries.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
  5. "Deen Maar Indigenous Protected Area", Department of the Environment accessed 30 March 2014
  6. Shaw, A.G.L. The Port Phillip District: Victoria before Separation. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996. pp.113-14
  7. Governor George Gipps to Lord Glenelg, 21 July 1839, in British Parliamentary Papers: The Colonies, Australia(vol. 6), p. 397.
  8. Waterloo Lane
  9. "THE SETTLERS AND THE BLACKS OF PORT FAIRY". Southern Australian (Adelaide, SA : 1838 - 1844). 10 June 1842. p. 4. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  10. Haydon, George Henry (1846). Five Years' Experience in Australia Felix: Comprising a Short Account of Its Early Settlement and Its Present Position, with Many Particulars Interesting to Intending Emigrants. Hamilton.
  11. "Western District Clashes - Tracking the Native Police (Public Record Office Victoria)". web.archive.org. 21 August 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  12. "Actions in the field 1843 [2] - Tracking the Native Police (Public Record Office Victoria)". web.archive.org. 18 August 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  13. "Pursuing attackers 1843 [2] - Tracking the Native Police (Public Record Office Victoria)". web.archive.org. 18 August 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  14. "Thomas on the Western District 1843 [5] - Tracking the Native Police (Public Record Office Victoria)". web.archive.org. 18 August 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  15. "Thomas and Dana 1845 [4] - Tracking the Native Police (Public Record Office Victoria)". web.archive.org. 18 August 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  16. "AN AUSTRALIAN PIONEER". Hamilton Spectator (Vic. : 1870 - 1918). 17 October 1916. p. 7. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  17. Full copy of Old Melbourne Memories at Internet Archive
  18. Rolf Boldrewood (1896), Old Melbourne memories (2d ed., rev ed.), London, New York Macmillan and Co, retrieved 29 December 2018
  19. Critchett, Jan (1984). "A Closer Look at Cultural Contact: Some Evidence from 'Yambuk', Western Victoria" (PDF). Aboriginal History. 8: 12–20. ISSN 0314-8769. Retrieved 18 March 2020. (citation details here)
  20. "Massacre Sites - Indigenous Stories about War and Invasion". Culture Victoria. Retrieved 2 August 2019.
  21. Green, M., 1966 After the Boolucburrers, Lake Bolac State School Centenary Committee, Lake Bolac, Vic.
  22. "National Heritage Places - Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape". Australian Government. Dept of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. Retrieved 18 March 2020. See also attached documents: National Heritage List Location and Boundary Map, and Government Gazette, 20 July 2004.
  23. denisbin (30 April 2015). "Lake Condah near Heywood. Remains of Aboriginal stone eel traps". Flickr. Retrieved 18 March 2020.
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