Purpose of the website

This site is designed to provide background material to the novel and to invite comments on both the site material and the novel. Comments can be added at the end of any section.

Historical material is used to underpin the setting of the novel and to provide some background to the novel’s characters. Anthropological material is included to expand and explain the aboriginal knowledge brought out in conversation throughout the novel. This material could not reasonably be put in the mouths of the characters.

Introduction

Although a novel, this story is about real secrets of whitefella history and blackfella knowledge. Both of these have been kept secret by the one and same motive – to begin the historical record just a little bit later than the date of history’s arrival here. That way, the scale of destruction wrought by history’s owners, and the humanity of those who suffered it, would never be known.

While this motive has never been confined to time or place, this history belongs to the late 1830s in what was to become the state of Victoria, so named after the queen of England by her subjects, who came and occupied the Antipodes.

The story adopts much the same format as the first Victorian records, that of a diary written on an outstation of Van Diemen’s Land (VDL). The first outstation was at Portland Bay, the only safe harbour on the Victorian coast; that produced the Henty diaries. Eight months later (June 1835), another VDL outstation was established by John Batman’s convict servants inside the shelter of Port Philip. That produced William Todd’s Journal.

Between these stations, 250 miles apart, lived two nations of Australians; more on this below.

The Henty diaries make the briefest mention of them, only in the first few pages, even though the station experienced plenty of contact with the Australians during the period of the diaries. Todd’s Journal, on the other hand, details extensive contact because that was its purpose – to establish that Batman did not mistreat the Aborigines, so that such a charge couldn’t be used against him, by the authorities, as reason to confiscate the land he was claiming.

This contact detail in the Journal is our only record of Victorian Aboriginal behaviour unencumbered by European influence.

The story uses much of this detail because one, the novel’s setting is on the contact frontier, two, its location is a short distance from Batman’s outstation, three, its date is only four years later, and four, the Aboriginal people involved in the novel, belong to the same people as those mentioned in the journal.

It also includes much more Aboriginal knowledge which couldn’t possibly have been written in the diaries. This knowledge comes courtesy of Australian anthropology, e.g. an Australian nation was a confederation of inter-marrying tribes sharing the same province but holding their own separate territories and sharing the same religion, laws, customs and language but speaking their own dialect of that language

Such is the context of the book, now to the secrets it seeks to expose.

To appreciate them fully we need to be mindful of what is certainly not secret about the setting of the novel. The Western District of Victoria is one of the largest laval plains on the planet and, as such, is the richest pastoral district on the continent. Within its boundaries is the longest river in Victoria (Hopkins) along with seven other slow-flowing rivers emptying into Bass Strait. The plains used to be home to numerous swamps and lakes many of which have been drained by white settlers. The region around Geelong and the Bellarine is very rich in resources with two marine and several riverine environments in close proximity.

This geography suggests much about what was present before history came but, more than anything else, it points to the most important Aboriginal unknown of all – their population at the time of white settlement. Likely it will never be known.

The whitefella secrets

1.    The extent of contact along both shores of Bass Strait from the late 18th century as the outside world discovered the riches of the place, especially seals by the tens of thousands. This extent is reflected in the same word, coined by both Aboriginal nations, for the first whites they ever saw – the word is ‘ngamateech’ which is a hybrid of ‘ngamat’ meaning “sea” and of ‘eetch’, the male suffix. So ‘ngamat-eetch’ means sea, man of, or whiteman. ‘Ngamat-eear’ is whitewoman.

2.    The role, in this contact, of Kangaroo Island as a trading port for fresh meat, skins and native women. These women were from both sides of the Strait, taken away by sealers, either captive or sold. They married ngamateech, sealers, sailors or runaway convicts and reared families. Their success, on this and other islands through Bass Strait, was one of the principal means whereby the Tasmanians survived at all.

3.    The godlessness of the conspicuously Christian settlers from VDL who, at one and the same time, were masters of convicts whom they treated much as slaves, were invaders onto someone else’s land, were squatters and were murderers.

4.    The scale of convictism in this part of Victoria with assignees still serving their terms, with musters in Geelong, and with the pursuit of absconders from the stations. In the Geelong Advertiser convict musters were called as late as January, 1844 and tickets-of-leave were posted just as they were posted in the Hobart gazette. This convictism was brought over the Strait with two vital changes in favour of the squatters; one, there was no governance from a higher authority to control the squatter’s treatment of their assignees, and two, the convicts were given guns.

5.    The major role of homosexuality in the white settlement of Australia. The evidence in the official record is very thin (there was no tick the box for homosexuality like there was for religion or read/write). Even in the convict registers only a tiny percentage of explicitly homosexual acts can be found, partly because sodomy was a capital offence. To judge the scale of homosexuality you have to read between, not the lines, but the numbers. Convicts transported to VDL numbered 54,640 men, 12,500 women. The number of transport vessels sent to VDL was 351, their crews were all male, the same for the convict guards. More than 20 regiments, all male, served in VDL.

With regard to the period and setting of the novel, 1839 in the Western District: then and there the Crown Commissioner for Lands, Gisborne conducted a census of all the stations and counted 275 men, 16 women.

6.    The abundance of guns during the earliest period of white settlement due to the British army’s switching from flintlock to percussion muskets, officially completed in 1842. Everyone in Geelong had a musket and brace, especially convicts who were a large majority of the population, they were needed to do the work of building the stations, hence the musters. There are few accounts of guns in any records except when the blacks acquire them. This fact alone gives a strong indication of their abundance.

7.    The scarcity of records about of what really happened on the plains during the period of the burgeoning industrial revolution in the home country of the settlers. Textiles were the foundations of this revolution, wool was one of them. The demand and profits in wool was a major factor in events on the Australian frontier. When such was at stake while British plebeians were taking their chances to be the lairds who they could never be at home and while they had employees whom they could treat as they wished then how did they treat the Aborigines?

The blackfella unknowns

1.    The unusually sedentary nature of Aboriginal society on the western plains evident still today in fish-traps and weirs along creeks (most sites have been deliberately destroyed), in permanent sites identified by the Victorian Archaeological Survey from the 1970s and in some remaining mound structures. These were built up over generations to provide dry ground on the laval plains which didn’t drain well. On the mounds were built camps and huts and pit ovens for overnight cooking of tubers and flesh.

2.    The cultural features of Australian society – its laws, customs, religion and how it engaged with its neighbours/foes. Its marriage laws forbade ‘toweel-yeear’ meaning ‘too close in flesh’ and forbade marrying someone from one’s own tribe. Its religion embraced resurrection and the sanctification of the son. Its customs allowed women to be given to visitors but regarded mothers-in-law as pre-eminent.

3.    The remarkable foundation myth of Eagle & Crow which utterly negates the claim (not without its merits) that the South-East Australian Aboriginal creeds, of which we have knowledge, were adapted from Christianity.

4.    The bond with country which ordained what blackfella owned. It wasn’t land, it was a duty to a spiritual estate around his home which bound him to observe ceremony and offerings to the spirits left on that estate by the ancestors. Every home had the same duty. When the estates were desecrated by whitefella then life had no meaning for blackfella and his society disintegrated almost overnight.

Now to go full circle from blackfella creeds back to the secrets on the plains

The principal blackfella creed was that the ancestors came on a foundation journey to earth to shape the country for people to live in and to deposit spirits on the country to govern the renewal of life.

This creed left blackfella with no choice but to live at sites where they ‘knew’ the ancestors had visited, in particular, sources of fresh water. This creed proved to be most lethal to its believers because the plains have more salt lakes than fresh. This geopraphical imperative concentrated Aboriginal settlement in the same places that white settlers needed to water their flocks.

These are the sites of first contact, what happened and what was destroyed at them are secrets. The book will give you some clues.