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History Australia

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‘Friendly’ and ‘hostile’ Aboriginal clans: the searchfor Gellibrand and Hesse

Thomas Rogers

To cite this article: Thomas Rogers (2016) ‘Friendly’ and ‘hostile’ Aboriginal clans: the search forGellibrand and Hesse, History Australia, 13:2, 275-285

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2016.1186002

Published online: 13 Jul 2016.

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

‘Friendly’ and ‘hostile’ Aboriginal clans: the search forGellibrand and Hesse

Thomas Rogers

University of Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACTJoseph Gellibrand and George Hesse were two prominent Hobartlawyers and prospective settlers of the Port Phillip District who wentmissing somewhere west of Geelong in 1837. This article examinesthe largest of several search parties that set out to find the men. Ananalysis of this search party provides insights into how early freesettlers of Port Phillip categorised the Aboriginal peoples of theDistrict, and how they understood their own role in the District. Inaddition, by considering how local Aboriginal clans might have uti-lised this search party for their own political ends, this article offersa deeper understanding of the specific relationships between freesettlers and Aboriginal people on the Port Phillip frontier.

This article has been peer reviewed.

KEYWORDSFrontier violence; Gellibrandand Hesse; Port PhillipDistrict; settler-Aboriginalrelations; settler colonialism

In March 1837, two Hobart barristers arrived at Point Henry, the port of the very newsettlement of Geelong. Their names were Joseph Tice Gellibrand and George BrooksLegrew Hesse. Travelling on horseback westward from Geelong along the BarwonRiver, the two lawyers became lost. Prior incidents did not bode well for the men. Theyear before, Gellibrand had suffered heatstroke and very nearly died of thirst on a trekfrom Western Port to the settlement on the Yarra.1 On that occasion, he and thegroup with whom he had been travelling had shown a total lack of bush skills. In1837, after the lawyers had gone missing, Doctor Alexander Thomson of Geelong hadtold Gellibrand’s friend Charles Swanston that ‘Gellibrand is the worst bushman Iknow’.2 Thomson probably regretted that those words found their way into aVandiemonian newspaper, as the bodies of Gellibrand and Hesse were never found.

Over the following year, five search parties set out to find the two lost lawyers,none returning with any conclusive evidence to solve the mystery.3 The third, and larg-est, of these search parties is the focus of this article. This search party was involved inan incident near Lake Colac that left two local Kolakgnat people dead. The leader ofthis search party, Joseph Naylor, authored a report of its activities on the frontier thatoffers insights into how the free settlers of the Port Phillip District understood the

CONTACT Thomas Rogers tjrogers3010@gmail.com1See his own account of it: Joseph Gellibrand, ‘Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip in 1836’, in Thomas Bride, Lettersfrom Victorian Pioneers (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1969. New edition by C. E. Sayers), 8–13.2Colonial Times, 11 April 1837, 7.3Michael Cannon ed. Historical Records of Victoria 2a, 271–2. Henceforth HRV.� 2016 Australian Historical Association

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presence of local Aboriginal people in the region.4 The actions he described highlightsettler tactics of dispossession, and his rhetoric demonstrates how he hid the searchparty’s own role in the violent events. An examination of this search party raises anumber of key issues of the early settlement of Port Phillip. On a local level, their storypresents a case of armed settler raiding tactics and shows the rhetorical deployment ofsettler types of Aboriginal peoples. It also hints at ways in which Aboriginal peoplemight have used settlers to their own advantage in local political contexts. It will beseen that besides presenting the Aboriginal members of the search party as beinguncontrollably violent, Naylor’s report also relied on two types of Aboriginal people:‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ Aborigines.

The story of Gellibrand and Hesse features in many histories of Port Phillip, albeitusually only briefly. The loss of the two respected gentlemen is generally representedin histories as a personal tragedy, a blow to the early settlement, a dead end on theroad to the successful settlement of Victoria, or a combination of all three.5 When it istold in any detail, the story of the search for Gellibrand and Hesse has been used toillustrate the escalating conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people on the PortPhillip frontier.6 In some accounts, the idea that the men were murdered at all hasbeen questioned. As noted above, Gellibrand had demonstrated his poor bush skills theyear before, so it is possible that the two men simply died of exposure.7 Beyond tryingto determine what happened, historians have also shown how the search parties look-ing for the two lawyers made the grassy plains west of Geelong known to settlers, andwere the harbingers of European pastoral settlement there.8

Academic histories of Indigenous–settler relations around Australia began to appearin the 1960s. At first, these works sought to establish the facts of British invasion andthe dispossession of Indigenous people. These histories stressed the fact that the settlershad taken the land by force.9 In these histories, though, there was a danger of present-ing frontier violence as the only aspect of dispossession, and Indigenous people as pas-sive victims.10 To counter this tendency, historians also began to present the different

4‘Port Phillip District’, for this article, can be understood as the present state of Victoria.5See, for example, Rex Harcourt, Southern Invasion, Northern Conquest (Melbourne: Golden Point Press, 2001), 129(‘cruel turn of fate’ for the District), 132 (on the personal loss). See also the reminiscences of a member of the firstsearch party, George Lloyd, who saw the loss of the two men as a loss to Victoria: George Thomas Lloyd, Thirty-ThreeYears in Tasmania and Victoria (London: Houlston and Wright, 1862), 491. The early historian of Victoria Henry Turnersaw the loss as a blow to the early settlement: H. G. Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: HeritagePublications, 1973 [1904]), vol. 1, 163. Jan Critchett notes that their probable murder [caused] only a temporary halt inthe westward spread of settlers: see Jan Critchett, ‘A Distant Field of Murder’ (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,1990), 22.6See Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder, 47; A. G. L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District (Melbourne: MelbourneUniversity Press, 1996), 113; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 73–4; Bruce Pascoe,Convincing Ground (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 51; James Boyce, 1835 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), 60,89.7See Turner, Colony of Victoria, vol. 1, 163; Harcourt, Southern Invasion, 131; Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 70–72.8Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 39; Alastair Campbell, John Batmanand the Aborigines (Malmsbury: Kibble Books, c. 1987), 202.9See, for example, Peter Corris, Aborigines and Europeans in Western Victoria (Canberra: Australian Institute ofAboriginal Studies, 1968); C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Melbourne: Pelican Books, 1972); MichaelChristie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979); David Carment, ‘The WillsMassacre of 1861: Aboriginal–European conflict on the colonial Australian frontier’, Journal of Australian Studies, 4, 6(1980): 49–55; Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1982); Critchett, A DistantField of Murder.10See Tom Lawson, The Last Man (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 10.

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ways that the frontier had operated in different parts of Australia. The violence thathad been a key focus of the first histories gave way to studies of Indigenous employ-ment, reserves and missions, and forms of co-existence, coercion, and resistance otherthan outright violence.11 Recent studies have considered how Aboriginal peoples andsettlers understood the coming of the British Empire to the country. These studiesshow how Aboriginal groups sought to adapt to the British settlers, and how settlersjustified their exploitation of the land.12

Building on all of these ideas, this article identifies the settler categories of friendlyand hostile Aboriginal clans, and considers to what ends these terms were deployed. Itpresents a consideration of the search for the men, which has generally not been anobject of study.13 I am not interested in presenting a Whiggish history that tracks thematerial progress of the Port Phillip District up to the Separation of 1851, when itbecame Victoria.14 In that formulation, the loss of the two prominent settlers is a stum-bling block on the road to successful settlement. But the search for Gellibrand and Hesseshould not be dismissed so quickly. The disappearance of the men is not a dead end inthe story of settlement in Port Phillip; in an evidentiary sense, it is the very thing thatallows us to tell that story. The records produced immediately after the event includenewspaper reports and articles, and letters to and from Police Magistrate WilliamLonsdale, the highest-ranking British authority in the Port Phillip District at thistime.15 The event was also recounted in later settler accounts and memoirs. The histor-ical records that were produced, published, and preserved up to the present offer aunique glimpse of the early settlement. It is these sources that show the ideas and rhet-oric of the early settlers, which allotted specific roles to British gentlemen andAboriginal warriors.

The ill-fated journey

In 1835, Gellibrand was a key member of a group of Vandiemonians who aimed topurchase Indigenous land across Bass Strait in the Port Phillip District. These men,known as the Port Phillip Association, had their representative John Batman sign atreaty with eight Kulin headmen somewhere in the vicinity of Merri Creek in 1835.This treaty, a copy of which is on display in the dome of the State Library of Victoria,was probably written by Joseph Gellibrand.16 It was quickly declared invalid by

11See Beverley Blaskett, ‘The Aboriginal response to white settlement in the Port Phillip District’ (unpublished MAthesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1979); Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia:University of Queensland Press, 1981); Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Henry Reynolds,With the White People (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1990); Diane Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk (Canberra: AboriginalHistory Inc., 1998), Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982).12See, for example, Broome, Aboriginal Victorians; Robert Kenny, ‘Tricks or treats? A case for Kulin knowing in Batman’streaty’, History Australia 5, 2 (2008): 38.1–38.14; Bain Attwood, Possession (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009);Boyce, 1835.13Critchett gives a brief description of Naylor’s search party to illustrate the Indigenous territorial boundaries thatsettlers were sometimes violently brought into contact with: Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder, 47. Pascoe suggeststhat Naylor’s party armed the Barrabool men who went with them (see below for more on this), but he is moreinterested in fleshing out Gellibrand’s motives than his fate; see Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 51, 70–72.14See Shaw’s characterisation of his work as ‘old-fashioned narrative history’ in ‘Introduction’, Shaw, A History of thePort Phillip District, xv.15Lonsdale would remain the highest-ranking representative of the Sydney government in Port Phillip until the arrivalof Superintendent Charles La Trobe in 1839.16Attwood, Possession, 17.

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New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke, but settlers continued to sail across fromVan Diemen’s Land with sheep to take up land.17 Because of the influx of settlers,Bourke gave it the approval of the Sydney government in 1836 and decided to visit thesettlement on the Yarra River in early 1837.18 It was right at this point that Gellibrandand Hesse began their fateful journey, taking with them as a guide a stockman namedAkers.19

The plan of their journey was to visit another prominent Port Phillip Associationmember, Captain Swanston, whose station was on the Leigh River. Somehow, the triomissed the junction of the Leigh and Barwon, where they should have turned north.They continued for some time along the Barwon, until their guide insisted that theystop and turn back. Gellibrand would not hear of this, and the guide returned alone toGeelong. When he got back to his station, a search party for the two men was organ-ised, as it was now clear that they had become lost.20

Had Gellibrand taken Akers’ advice to turn back, the two lawyers probably wouldhave survived. Whether Akers was an emancipist, assigned servant, or free emigrant, asa stockman his station in society was far beneath that of the two Hobart lawyers. Hislow station is confirmed by the newspapers, which gave him no first name, and spelthis last name variously.21 It was perhaps the difference in station between the gentle-men and stockman that caused Gellibrand to ignore his advice.

The search

After two parties of concerned local free settlers had failed to find any trace of the twomen, the third and largest search party was formed by two free settlers fromVan Diemen’s Land.22 These two men, Anglican clergyman Joseph Beazley Naylorand his friend Charles Octavius Parsons, had business and family ties to Gellibrandand Hesse, and appear to have been deputed by the barristers’ families in Hobart tolead a search party.23 The party they organised once in Melbourne was comprised ofNaylor, Parsons, nine other white men, and two Aboriginal men who were to act asguides.24

17Proclamation of Governor Richard Bourke, 26 August 1835, accessed 17 July 2013, http://foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-42.html (accessed 17 July 2013).18Bourke named Hobson’s Bay, Melbourne, and Williamstown on 9 March 1837. See HRV 1, 117–118.19It is unclear what Akers’ first name was. George Lloyd, who spoke with the stockman and accompanied him on thefirst search party, remembered his name as Robert Acres; see Lloyd, Thirty-Three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, 484. InHRV 2a, 271, the editor lists the stockman’s name as William Akers. Perhaps this is because a record exists for aWilliam Akers, charged with furiously riding and abusing his master’s horse in Geelong, who might (or might not)have been the same man; see Geelong Court Register, 24 December 1839, in HRV 1, 492.20Harcourt, Southern Invasion, 131; Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, vol. 1, 160.21For example, the Colonial Times, 18 April 1838, 4, quoting the Launceston Advertiser, called him Aikers and Aiker inthe same article. Other newspapers simply did not name him.22Cannon ed., ‘The Disappearance of Gellibrand and Hesse’, in HRV 2a, 271.23Naylor was not a member of the Port Phillip Association, but he held one of their allotments in partnership withAssociation member W. G. Sams. Writing to a business partner, Gellibrand called Naylor ‘Our Dear & mutual friend’;see J. T. Gellibrand to J. Ball, 19 February 1836, MS 10258, State Library of Victoria, http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/portphillip/0/0/1/tdoc/pp0011-002-0.shtml (accessed 26 June 2013). Charles Parsons was married to the cousin ofGellibrand’s wife; see Nancy Parsons, ‘Parsons, Charles Octavius (1799–1863)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parsons-charles-octavius-2540/text3453 (accessed 22 November 2012).24The group is described in Naylor’s report of the search that appeared in the True Colonist, 19 May 1837, 568.

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When this group got to Geelong on 18 April 1837, they were informed by anAboriginal man that the two lawyers had been murdered near Lake Colac by localAboriginal people.25 Naylor’s party set out for Lake Colac, and when they arrived therethey were joined by a party of Wathaurong men, known to the whites as ‘Barraboolnatives’, who were armed and outfitted for war. In the reed beds on the banks of LakeColac, this Wathaurong war party captured a Colac man named Tanapia and, threat-ening him with death, extracted a confession to the murders of Gellibrand and Hesse.This man was a member of the Kolakgnat clan of the Gulidjan language group, whosecountry centred around Lake Colac.26 These people appear to have been longtime ene-mies of the Wathaurong – in other words, of the men in the war party that accompa-nied Naylor’s search party.27 Naylor later claimed that Tanapia admitted that hispeople had killed the lawyers, speared their horses, and thrown the men’s bodies intothe lake. At this, the Wathaurong war party killed Tanapia and also a Colac woman,possibly Tanapia’s daughter. The two Aboriginal guides, the Wathaurong party, andNaylor’s search party then left Lake Colac to return to Geelong.

The killings of Tanapia and the woman, and Naylor’s desire to distance his searchparty from these events, were the driving force behind the types of Indigenous peoplethat he deployed. It would not do for the Reverend Naylor, as a minister, to be sweptup in a murder scandal. Added to this, however, was a wider current of contemporaryconcern about the impact of British imperialism. As Alan Lester and others havepointed out, 1837 was at the peak of a period of humanitarian concern for theIndigenous peoples of Britain’s empire, and a time when questions about the good ofBritish colonialism for Indigenous peoples were being asked in London.28 It was theyear in which the Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes(British settlements) was published.29 This concern was put into concrete action thenext year, in 1838, when seven white men were hanged for the murder of Aboriginalpeople at the infamous Myall Creek Massacre – an outcome that only occurred after are-trial was ordered by New South Wales officials.30 In such a climate of concern, theReverend Naylor had to distance himself and the white men in his search party fromthe murder of Tanapia and his daughter. It was this necessity that shaped the typesthat appeared in his report.

Naylor had the report of the search party published in a Hobart newspaper, theTrue Colonist, in March 1837. In the report, the distinction between the white mem-bers of the search party and the black members was made clear. The two guideswere described as ‘two of the most intelligent natives they could find’.31 These two‘intelligent natives’ were presumed to be the ones who invited the Wathaurong warparty to join the search party. The arrival of the Wathaurong war party was carefully

25True Colonist, 19 May 1837, 568.26Ian Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1800–1900 (Melbourne: Department of Geography and EnvironmentalScience, 1990), 220–35.27Ibid., 222.28Alan Lester, ‘British settler discourse and the circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 54 (Autumn, 2002): 26.See also Boyce, 1835, 38.29Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British settlements), Report of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes(British settlements) (London: published for the Aborigines Protection Society by William Ball, 1837).30Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, 36.31True Colonist, 19 May 1837, 568.

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reported, so as to minimise the culpability of the search party. Naylor wrote that thesearch party ‘was suddenly overtaken by a body of natives, fully armed, and preparedfor war’.32 The report stated that the war party was accompanying the searchers,‘according to a custom common among savages to retaliate upon the hostile tribe, bytaking two lives for the life of the murdered white men’. In this way, the report pre-sented Naylor and the white men of the search party as concerned friends ofGellibrand and Hesse, while it was to the ‘savages’ that the baser aim of revenge wasimputed.

This was important, because it set the stage for the rest of the report. Naylor usedthe notion that only ‘savages’ would seek revenge to distance himself and his partyrhetorically from the murders. Regarding the captured Colac man Tanapia, the reportwas explicit about the manner of his death. Members of the Wathaurong war partykilled a woman, and then, rushing over to Tanapia, they ‘dashed five or six spears intohis body, and then exultingly shouted out their cry of victory’.33 The weapon is signifi-cant here. Having gone on his own search for answers to the mystery later in the year,the Wathaurong-speaking ex-convict William Buckley learnt that the Aboriginal searchparty members had been armed with muskets by Parsons and Naylor, and thatTanapia had been shot by them.34 If true, Buckley’s memoir underlines a key aspect ofthe type of so-called ‘savages’. The spear was presented as a savage weapon; if Tanapiawas shot with a musket supplied by Naylor, that suggested that Naylor was complicitin the killing. By reporting Tanapia’s death as a spearing, Naylor distanced himself,and all the white men in the search party, from the killing. Later testimony suggestednot only that guns had been used to kill Tanapia, but that Naylor had actually helpedto organise the ambush itself. When the Chief Protector of Aborigines, GeorgeAugustus Robinson, visited the area in 1841, he heard from a stockman who had beena member of the search party that the Wathaurong war party had been engaged byNaylor, and armed by the search party.35

The possibility of Naylor engaging the war party is only half the story, however, asit obscures any agency on the part of the members of that war party. As we do notknow their identities, nor the identities of the two Aboriginal men who accompaniedthe search party, any consideration of the war party’s aims must be speculative.Nonetheless, events of the year before might shed some light on the actions of theWathaurong war party. In July 1836, Vandiemonian gentleman Charles Franks and hisshepherd had been murdered by Aboriginal people near Mount Cottrell, northwest ofMelbourne.36 Other squatters in the region who knew Franks responded with startlingbrutality, leading a revenge raid on the local Wathaurong people. Although PoliceMagistrate Lonsdale could find no evidence to charge the members of this raid with

32Ibid.33Ibid.34John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley (Hobart: Archibald MacDougall, 1852), 133–134.35George Augustus Robinson, Journal, 15 June 1841, in Ian Clark ed. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson,(Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998), 2, 267.36Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District, 113. On this incident, see: Thomas Rogers, ‘The Killing of Charles Franksand the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts’, Victorian Historical Journal 87, no. 1 (2016).

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murder, the revenge raid has been estimated to have killed at least 10 Wathaurongpeople.37

This raid might have influenced future Wathaurong interaction with settlers in oneof two ways. It might have demonstrated the violence that settlers were willing toresort to against any Aboriginal people in the wake of settler deaths, and causedWathaurong decision makers to blame others, traditional enemies perhaps, for anyfuture settler deaths. Alternatively, the sight of the coordinated settler response toFranks’ death might have illustrated the possibility of an alliance that could be used bythe Wathaurong to their advantage. Speculation in this vein, though unprovable, is inline with recent historical arguments about early colonial history. Robert Kenny hasargued that the Kulin signatories of Batman’s treaty can be understood as menattempting to maintain some control over the interaction of British settlers and theirown people.38 In the same way that Kulin signatories attempted a diplomatic meetingwith John Batman, the decision of the Wathaurong war party to accompany Naylorcan be seen as a military meeting.

Richard Broome has argued that Billibellary, the Wurundjeri clan ngurungaeta(headman) at the time that Melbourne was established, held a ‘radical hope’ that hispeople the Woiwurrung – whose land the British were rapidly turning into the town ofMelbourne – could maintain their ways alongside the newcomers.39 The Wathaurongwar party might also have felt this way. Like their eastern neighbours the Woiwurrung,they were faced with a rapidly growing settler town – Geelong – on their land. Thedecision to join with Naylor and company might well have been part of their responseto settler incursion onto their land: not outright resistance, but a maintaining of theold ways within the new reality. Referring to the land around Perth in the early SwanRiver colony, Bob Reece has argued that the European presence was ‘an important newvariable in Aboriginal inter-group relations’ – the same could be said of the landaround Geelong.40 Perhaps the story of the respectable Vandiemonian search partyaccompanied by unnamed black trackers would be more accurately portrayed as thatof the Wathaurong war party that took advantage of a number of well-armed camp-followers to pursue its own political and military ends. There is no way to be certainwhat the motivations of the Barrabool men were, but there is evidence that membersof the Wathaurong and Gulidjan language groups might have been in a state of con-flict in the 1830s.

The squatter George Thomas Lloyd, who lived at Buninyong in the 1830s and hadcontact with both groups, remembered a particular Wathaurong elder who woulddescribe past battles between his people and the ‘bungilcarney colagians’ (enemyGulidjan) for his audience with much vehemence.41 When Chief Protector of

37Lonsdale’s investigation was thwarted by the frontier code of silence. For the sworn statements he took frommembers of the raids, according to which shots were fired but no one hurt, see HRV 2a, 43–50. The VDL ColonialSecretary John Montagu ‘feared that there can be little or no doubt that ten of the tribe of Port Phillip natives werekilled’; see Montagu to NSW Colonial Secretary, 18 August 1836, in HRV 2a, 41–2.38Kenny, ‘Tricks or Treats?’, 38.7.39Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 4th ed., 2010), 80. Some of the ways in whichBillibellary and other members of the Kulin interacted with the British are detailed in Isabel Ellender and PeterChristiansen, People of the Merri Merri (Melbourne: Merri Creek Management Committee, 2001).40Bob Reece, ‘Inventing Aborigines’, Aboriginal History 11, (1987): 14.41Lloyd, Thirty-Three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, 466.

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Aborigines George Augustus Robinson visited the area in 1840, he wrote in his journalthat the two groups were ‘at enmity’.42 The relationship between the two groups wasnot simple enmity, though, as they and other groups in the area intermarried.43 Infact, historical geographer Ian Clark found that most of the recorded conflicts betweenthe Wathaurong and Gulidjan were disputes about marriage arrangements.44 It istempting to speculate that the ambush and murders of Tanapia and the woman mighthave been related to such a dispute. In any case, the murders do fit into a recordedpattern of conflict between the two groups.

Returning to Naylor’s report, in addition to distinguishing between the white search-ers and the Aboriginal searchers, there were two recurring types that were used to dis-tinguish between the Aboriginal people Naylor encountered: that of ‘friendly’ and‘hostile’ Aborigines. Throughout the report, the two guides and the war party weredescribed as ‘friendly natives’; the Colac people, on the other hand, were called ‘hostilenatives’. This is despite the fact that, even according to the report, the raid in whichTanapia and his daughter were killed was an ambush carried out by Naylor’s searchparty. Once again, the distinction between the two was used both to justify the deathsof Tanapia and the woman, and to remove blame from Naylor and Parsons. The ‘hos-tile natives’ could be understood as harbouring hostility towards either the settlersearchers or the ‘friendly’ Wathaurong party. As a result, the categories further obscureany attempts to understand Aboriginal agency in the events. It is clear, however, thatthe terms deliberately obscured the agency of Naylor and the settler searchers in themurders.

There were serious problems with the story of Naylor and Parsons that appeared inthe report, many of which were raised by the True Colonist’s rival newspaper, theColonial Times. The Colonial Times opined that Naylor and Parsons had gone insearch of the bodies with ‘an insufficient party’, because they had failed to bring homethe bodies of Gellibrand and Hesse.45 In the estimation of the Colonial Times, not onlyhad the search party proven nothing about the fate of the two lost lawyers, it had alsorelied on suspect information. The idea that ‘a friendly native, at Geelong’ had toldNaylor and Parsons that the gentlemen had been killed by the Kolakgnat was suspect.The Colonial Times believed that the result of the search party – the death of Tanapiaand his daughter – proved that the Wathaurong and the Colac people were enemies.Essentially, the Colonial Times suggested that Naylor and Parsons had been duped intojoining in a war party against a traditional enemy. The editor of the Colonial Timesused the term ‘murderous tribe’ in inverted commas, in order to cast doubt on theclaim that Tanapia was the murderer. However, the Times was quite happy to use theterm ‘friendly natives’ in the same way as the True Colonist, without the inverted com-mas. In this way, both newspapers accepted this type.

Police Magistrate William Lonsdale also found Naylor’s report dubious. He wrote tothe Colonial Secretary in Sydney to report the outcome of the search, but moreimportantly, to regret the murders of Tanapia and his daughter. These people,

42George Augustus Robinson, Journal, 7 March 1840, in Clark ed. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 1, 187.43Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1800–1900, 275.44Ibid., 222.45Colonial Times, 23 May 1837, 5. Original emphasis.

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Lonsdale felt, were most likely ‘unconnected with the transaction for which they suf-fered’.46 Interestingly, Lonsdale did not think that Naylor’s men had been involvedin the killings, which means that he accepted the types presented in the report. Hedifferentiated between British customs and Aboriginal ones in much the same wayas Naylor. He felt that the attacked tribe would associate ‘the white people’ withtheir enemies, which ‘will keep alive a spirit of ill-feeling and distrust, and identifyour customs with theirs of revenge and retaliation’.47 The two newspapers had div-ided the Aboriginal people to the west of Melbourne into those who were ‘friendly’and those who were not, but the regret expressed by Lonsdale suggests a thirdoption: that of uncontacted Aboriginal peoples. Lonsdale’s regret at the actions ofthe search party stemmed from the fact that the Kolakgnat people would now prob-ably be hostile to settlers, having associated them with their enemies, the Barrabool.It stemmed from the path not taken – a path that would have seen the Kolakgnateither left alone, or ‘brought in’ to the government mission rather than turned intoenemies.

The idea of a dichotomy between friendly and hostile natives, with no room inbetween, was not invented by Joseph Naylor in his report.48 His report, however, doesshow the pattern that would define the relations between settlers and Aboriginal peo-ples in the later 1830s and early 1840s. For example, the first Police Magistrate atGeelong, Foster Fyans, arrived there later in 1837. He immediately began to divide theAboriginal people he met into friendly and hostile categories, and treated those hethought hostile as military enemies. When he arrived, he had provisions to distributeto the Wathaurong, including food, blankets, and iron tomahawks. These were theusual items to distribute, but Fyans, considering the Wathaurong potential enemies,refused to distribute the tomahawks, instead throwing them into the MooraboolRiver.49 This was not simple fear of all Aboriginal people however, because Fyansemployed Aboriginal troopers. It was rather that, for Fyans, there was no middleground between troopers and enemies. In Naylor’s rhetoric, too, there was no middleground between the enemy that Tanapia’s people represented and the friends repre-sented by the Wathaurong war party.

Conclusions

The two lost lawyers in the bush have had their names etched into the landscape.Queenscliff’s main street is Hesse Street; Gellibrand Street runs parallel to it. A MountGellibrand and a Mount Hesse were named by the gentlemen’s grieving friends in thesettlement.50 Their names haunt the west coast of Port Phillip Bay, and so do theirbones. Uncertainty surrounded their disappearance, so much so that it took a court in

46Lonsdale to NSW Col. Sec. E. Deas Thomson, 3 May 1837, in HRV 2a, 279.47Ibid., 279.48Similarities can be seen in the way government authorities counted Aboriginal people during this time. See TiffanyShellam’s discussion of Western Australia’s enumeration of Aboriginal people in Shellam, ‘‘‘Our Natives’’ and ‘‘WildBlacks’’: Enumeration as a statistical dimension of sovereignty in colonial Western Australia’, Journal of Colonialism andColonial History 13, no. 3 (2012): 1–19.49Foster Fyans to Charles La Trobe, on or after 22 August 1853, in Bride, Letters, 180.50William Westgarth, Australia Felix (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1848), 170.

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Hobart three years to agree to release Gellibrand’s considerable estate to his wife andfamily.51 Some years later, an article in the Port Phillip Herald reported that JohnAllan, a settler on the Hopkins River, had been shown the grave of a white man by anAboriginal man, and believed it to be Gellibrand’s.52 Yet in 1904, the historian ofVictoria Henry Turner could write of the numerous skulls that had been found andsent back to Van Diemen’s Land ‘for identification by some dental irregularity’, allwithout a conclusive result.53

Bringing the story of the search for Gellibrand and Hesse to the forefront, as thisarticle has done, reveals the value of revisiting the Port Phillip colonial archive. Farfrom being merely a hiccup on the road to successful settlement, the loss of the lawyerscaused records to be created that illustrate the way Aboriginal people were representedby free settlers. These records show that the loss of the two respected men was a keypolitical and cultural moment in the early settlement of the Port Phillip District, onethat allows us an insight into free settler imaginings of their own role in the District. Italso reveals how they imagined and represented their relationships with the differentIndigenous groups with whom they came into contact. Naylor and Parsons used thedichotomy of friendly and hostile Aboriginal people to justify the deaths of a ‘hostile’man and woman. Naylor also differentiated the settlers in the search party from the‘friendly’ Aboriginal war party so that this violence could be blamed on Indigenouscustom.

The close study of this search party uncovers aspects of the settler-Indigenousencounter in Port Phillip. A consideration of the evidentiary traces of Aboriginalagency at the clan level offers new avenues for uncovering how local Aboriginal peoplecooperated with British newcomers to gain an advantage in the pre-existing Indigenouspolitical context. It also demonstrates how Europeans such as Naylor and Parsonsattempted to take advantage of existing clan enmities to obfuscate their own role inthe violence that their search party caused at Lake Colac. Accounts that suggest thatthis violence was caused by guns provided to the Wathaurong men, alongside theadmission by Naylor himself that the raid was an ambush, show that, despite all pre-tences and protestations, the search party was in all probability the originator of themurder of two Kolakgnat people. Close scrutiny of the search, therefore, sheds light onthe complexity of frontier violence as it occurred in Port Phillip.

Acknowledgements

This article was developed from a paper I presented at the Australian Historical Association’sannual conference at Wollongong in July 2013, which was selected for mentoring under theAHA-Copyright Agency mentoring scheme. I would like to thank my mentor AssociateProfessor Penelope Edmonds for her thoughtful comments and corrections to the first draft,which greatly improved the resulting article.

51Turner, Colony of Victoria, vol. 1, 162. Also Harcourt, Southern Invasion, 132.52Port Phillip Herald, 12 July 1844, quoted in The Courier (Hobart), 9 August 1844, 2.53Turner, Colony of Victoria, vol. 1, 163.

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

About the author

Dr Thomas Rogers is a casual tutor and lecturer in the School of Historical and PhilosophicalStudies, University of Melbourne. His research interests include the early colonial history ofAustralia, frontier conflict, Indigenous history, and political and social history.

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