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| One side of the frontier conflict precipitated on Victoria's basalt plain when 'Squatters' began claiming Aboriginal land for sheep and cattle runs in the nineteenth century. |
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| Digital composite created by Csaba Szamosy, 1996, for Imagine The Future Inc, from photographs contributed by Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, Parks Victoria, and the Wood and Hood Collecitons, State Libary of Victoria. |
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| Bullock wagon loaded with bales of wool on an unsealed street in Geelong, which, for many years, was the wool capital of Australia. Note the new bank constructed from basalt, or bluestone, quarried from the plain. |
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| Photographer and date unknown. Image contributed by the Geelong Heritage Centre. |
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British colonisers were quick to introduce sheep and cattle to Victoria's basalt plain from the early nineteenth century ... and so began the degradation of the grasslands, wetlands and woodlands that had sustained the indigenous peoples for millennia.
The emergence of the pastoral industry was also associated with the often-violent destruction of many aspects of the cultures of the first peoples. Some of the early 'squatters' considered the traditional owners as little more than vermin to be shot or poisoned at will, while others made every effort to engage with Aboriginal peoples in more enlightened ways.
Sheep and cattle were the basis of a new kind of economy, which provided wool for the textile mills of northern England, and meat, tallow and other raw materials for the growing settlements of what was still the colony of New South Wales. Mansions such as Werribee Park and Barwon Park proclaim the great wealth that was reaped from the grasslands in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, but few of those great dynasties remain intact today. Many of the largest homesteads are now tourist attractions, and the land holdings that supported them have been subdivided into smaller agricultural blocks or hobby farms.
Today the pastoral industries, especially the wool industry, are in decline, and rural communities are having to re-invent their local economies in what is now a more globalised, more competitive post-colonial world. Everywhere across the plain people of all ages and backgrounds are working together to protect the few remaining grassland remnants on private and public land, and to rehabilitate and revegetate country that has been degraded by past pastoral and agricultural practices.
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| Merino sheep behind a post and rail fence at Werribee Park. Note the eucalypts killed by ringbarking on the far left, and the already cleared paddock on the right. |
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| Photographer and date unknown. Image contributed by the Hood Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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What are your stories about the pastoral industry on Victoria's basalt plain?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay for ITF.
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