The Wild East

The Vandemonian Trail: Convicts and Bushrangers in Early Victoria
by Patrick Morgan
Connor Court, 2016, 226 pages, $29.95
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Many a good story is forgotten because even better ones come along after it. It is the same with history: important, formative periods fade from public awareness because bigger and even more important ones follow.

Patrick Morgan’s book The Vandemonian Trail is about the tumultuous early years of Gippsland, the south-eastern district of Victoria, which were soon eclipsed by the industrious farming region that followed. At times it seems like a Hollywood Wild West set, with its bushranger bad men, rough riders, horse, cattle and gold thieves and murderers, all against a spectacular mountain background.

From the early 1840s squatters moved into the upland country around Omeo and then onto the central Gippsland plain around Sale. Gold rushes in the 1850s brought diverse fortune hunters. “Port Phillip gentlemen” squatters were more on the Melbourne side. Those in Gippsland were often from New South Wales via the Monaro (south of today’s Canberra) or the Albury district, some wholly or partly of old convict background. Scots Highlanders were also prominent.

A larger, mostly humbler immigrant stream came from across Bass Strait via Port Albert, today a quiet seaside village but at that time a port for cross-Strait trading and traffic. Many of these newcomers were of recent convict background, including escapees as well as those whose sentences had expired. An especially feared contingent were from the notorious “secondary” prison on Norfolk Island who had been sent to complete their sentences in Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1855) when the Norfolk Island prison closed in 1850.

Morgan describes the panic in Melbourne at the peak of the “Vandemonian” scare and the Victorian government’s attempts to stop these would-be immigrants moving to the mainland (securing the borders!), only to have London use its power to reject the legislation.

A slightly romantic bush legend was of “Bogong Jack”, a precursor of Ned Kelly. Ned and his boys in the next generation overtook any Robin Hood-like fame Jack had. Jack led a gang of horse and cattle thieves in the mountains around Omeo. The various tales treat him sympathetically—even as a hero. In one such tale, “he escapes a pursuing policeman by crossing a mountain stream and escaping”. But, Morgan says, the evidence suggests there were two Bogong Jacks, the second of whom took over some of the mythic qualities of the first.

The legend surfaces in print in Henry Kingsley’s 1859 novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn and also in newspaper references. Kingsley’s fictional Jack was John Sampson, a university-educated Englishman prone to wild living who fled after a misdemeanour to live adventurously in the mountains and also lived with an Aboriginal tribe before settling down as a respectable farmer. Kingsley’s version does not fit with what is known, and other Jack contenders are likely to be ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, but it tallies with the fictional preoccupation of the time with class topsy-turviness in Australia and fallen but usually reclaimed gentlemen.

A more substantiated—if that is right word—rogue was Arthur Orton, son of a Cockney butcher, who emigrated to Hobart in 1852 and crossed the Strait to become a conman in Gippsland and then in the Riverina. Under the assumed name of Castro, he became the infamous Wagga butcher who impersonated the missing heir to the aristocratic Tichborne family fortune. His triumphant return home—a favourite theme of the day—was to earn Orton/Castro immense notoriety and fourteen years in jail. Morgan sees him as a fantasist.

This book points to the need for more regional histories of these early days. There are lots of big-picture histories and local histories, but neither can really capture the colourful and more distinctively Australian intricacy of the foundational period. Big histories are more about government, institutions, buildings, explorers and the imperial connection. Local histories usually give brief token treatment to the period before about 1860, after which councils, mayors, politicians, churches, schools, local newspapers and agricultural shows arrive and leave abundant records.

The earlier story is usually more difficult to piece together, but Morgan did it in his 1997 book The Settling of Gippsland, which included the local Aborigines before and after settlement, a subject general historians often avoid. While The Vandemonian Trail is more about the scallywags, he has assembled enough official records, reminiscences, newspaper articles and folklore to bring the Vandemonian Trail era alive. (One quibble though: Morgan often uses the American word rustler for livestock thieves, as well as the Australian word duffer.)

Britain transported about 35,000 convicts to Van Diemen’s Land between 1840, when transportation to New South Wales ended, and 1853, when the last convict stepped ashore in what was about to become Tasmania. It was as many as in the whole previous period of white settlement there since 1803 and too many to absorb economically. When freed, uncounted thousands seem to have emigrated to a mainland enriched by the gold rushes. They included a fair share of criminals and ruffians, the father of Ned Kelly and the forebears of many more conventionally notable Australians. Most, though, seem to have assimilated hardly noticed into the promising new society.