Country Gents

The Vanished Land: Disappearing Dynasties of Victoria’s Western District
by Richard Zachariah
Wakefield, 2017, 316 pages, $34.95

Narrapumelap: A Pastoral History
by Jennifer F. O’Donnell
Published by the author (available from the Royal Historical Society of Victoria), 2018, 141 pages, $30

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Local histories used to begin by saying that the XYZ Aboriginal people first inhabited the district. They then disappeared from the story, and pioneering white pastoralists and then councils and dignitaries became the story. Nowadays the author tells us tearfully that the XYZ people were dispossessed, and hints at white pioneer responsibility for this. There might be a brief lecture about other people forgetting or being silently guilty. The writer then proceeds with the main, white story.

Both these otherwise good books about south-western Victoria, officially and proudly known as the Western District, have these modern token mentions of the Aborigines. They should have done better, even if with only an extra page or two. There is quite a lot of readily available information about the indigenous people there, especially the Gunditjmara, who have certainly not disappeared, but the writers seem unaware of it, even in their disappointingly thin bibliographies.

Richard Zachariah says: “The squatters dispossessed the Indigenous peoples of an area bigger than England in just six years after 1836. It was a land grab of enormous scale …” No. The Western District is about half the size of England. Dispossess and land grab are fuzzy words. The Aboriginal population of Victoria when white settlement arrived in 1835 is estimated at 10,000, so that of the Western District would have been perhaps 3000 and in 1843 the white settler population would not have been much higher. The colonial assumption was that there was abundant land for all. The law provided equal rights for the Aborigines.

And it is not just the Aborigines. Like many other writers, and perhaps most people, these authors seem ill at ease with the foundation years before about 1850. It is partly the relative scarcity of written records, but also the strangeness of a land where Aborigines, convicts and newcomers alike were all unsure of what to make of this suddenly burgeoning new, alien society, all but townless and trackless; it seems to bamboozle writers too.

At first the squatters had only grazing licences with “run” boundaries vague and customary. After 1847 they had leases over public land, with defined terms and boundaries, the Aborigines retaining “hunting and roaming” rights. Western District leases were similar in size to those elsewhere. Zachariah is as vague as anybody else in guessing what happened to the Aborigines.

The alleged “grab” came a generation later, when the Western District squatters were better than most Victorian squatters at beating off the selection rush of the 1860s and 1870s by converting much of their vast leases—usually something like 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares)—into freehold. A “small man” could have got by on a few hundred acres.

The early squatters had lucked into some of the best grazing land on earth, an immense grassy plain with just the right weather and volcanic soil. They also included some very skilled livestock breeders. These advantages gave them the financial strength, along with steely proprietorial ambition and often ruthlessness, to rort the rules. Zachariah touches briefly on this.

Richard Zachariah is better than many of his contemporaries, but still struggles with this period. It contrasts with, later, some fine, resonating prose about the past hundred years or so. He all but ignores the “cross-Straiters” from Van Diemen’s Land who pioneered grazing in these parts around 1838, bringing with them superior sheep and ex-convict workers, as well as sometimes convict ancestry of their own. Instead he concentrates on the Scots, who others have estimated at about 35 per cent of the pioneer early squatters there—about twice their proportion in the overall overseas-born population of early Australia, but not the majority he suggests.

Zachariah is not the first to strive for colour by exaggerating ethnicity. He throws in an overdone jumble of Scottish clichés: stern Calvinism, Highland clearances, fleeing oppressive, or even “British” landlords. Even the Border wars of centuries earlier send them scuttling to the Antipodes.

This is all a small part of the book, but important because it is so common and easily parroted by others, including the media, yet it is about the distinctive beginning days of our society. An ABC presenter, in an interview with Zachariah, quickly drew the conclusion that the landlords cleared them out of Scotland, so they then cleared out the Aborigines.

The main Highland Clearances occurred before most Scots began arriving in the 1840s. Most of the squatters were from established, middling farming families in the Lowlands, often buying embryo stations from Van Diemenslanders, who had been more often behind the fairly limited conflict with the indigenous people. Often these Scots had home capital behind them, allowing a flying start.

Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, like some of my forebears, often poor or very poor, were more likely to come as assisted immigrants, sponsored by employers to provide station workers and supplement the ex-convicts. Like most emigrants, they came for economic and personal opportunity and space, not fleeing anybody. Some a generation later became selectors, beginning their own farms.

Zachariah seems to love the place. He came to the Western District in 1953, aged eight, when his father was appointed principal of the Hamilton and Western District College. This was the time of the wool boom of the Korean War period, which made many already rich graziers very rich, and a squatter might carry the sheep dogs in his Rolls Royce. The book’s title refers to the decline since the boom, with estates broken up, more absentee, overseas, hobbyist or corporate new owners, more tree plantations and cropping.

Zachariah acknowledges the inequalities, the social cachet, cliquiness and snobbishness, the grand bluestone mansions (some now decaying) and sometimes slightly plummy accents, the intermarriages with Toorak, the Melbourne Club, the black-tie dinners of not so long ago. But he also presents them as people, nice and less so, good or not so good farmers, punching above their weight in the Liberal (not National) Party, good or not so good community contributors.

Much of his book is based on interviews with the landholders themselves, and their memories, and with those who worked with or for them or came after them. It is a promising formula for future local history. It can be real country yarning. You can almost smell the sheep dung and hay, the road dust and gum leaves.

Jennifer O’Donnell is also scrappy about the Aborigines, but quotes a figure of 645 of them living in the Western District in 1863 and brief references to them living in the district or “employed on pastoral stations”.

She has a fine eye for detail, though less of Zachariah’s flair. Narrapumelap: A Pastoral History, is a study of one estate, on the Hopkins River midway between Ballarat and Hamilton. The name, from the local language, means a string of muddy water holes.

The founder appears to be John Dickson Wyselaskie, who took it up in 1841. Wyselaskie was born in Scotland, but his father may have been Polish. With “access to capital”, he emigrated in 1836, at nineteen, to join an uncle’s business in Van Diemen’s Land, and crossed the Strait in the rush of 1838 to seek grazing land for the firm. Unlike some contemporaries, “convict contamination” did not bother him. He belonged to a squatter group who organised to bring across emancipated convicts as badly needed station workers; to them anti-convict prejudice was “claptrap”.

At the peak, Wyselaskie leased 40,000 acres. Playing the rorting game, he beat off serious selectors to keep about 25,000 acres as freehold. O’Donnell names some of the “dummy” selectors he used to lock up his run. A cut in his domain of less than half was hardly a cut at all, since freehold allowed much more development.

He married at forty-four the adopted Hobart-born daughter of the local Wickliffe publican. They had no children. Wyselaskie had started in a slab hut, but in the 1870s they built the stately, ornately towered Narrapumelap bluestone homestead, with stained-glass windows, fifteen rooms, a long avenue of trees and a garden designed by Ferdinand von Mueller. They also had a St Kilda town house, a grand Victorian mansion on The Esplanade. Wyselaskie died in 1883, then and earlier a munificent benefactor, especially to the University of Melbourne.

The new owner was Gerald Buckley, then twenty-seven, Toorak-born son of Mars Buckley, the Irish founder of Buckley & Nunn, the Melbourne department store (now David Jones). He lived lavishly as a “country squire” there until he died, also childless, in 1935. The property was gradually subdivided. Buckley was also a generous benefactor (but led the district with non-union shearers in the 1890s).

Jennifer O’Donnell specialises in historic house history, and much of the book is about the homestead, which was abandoned, vandalised and crumbled into decrepitude. The present owner, Kevin McIntyre, has restored it in recent decades, with help from the National Trust and others. There are lots of good coloured photographs.