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| The bay at Portland in the 1880s. |
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| Photographer unknown. Image from the Views of Western Victoria Album, University of Melbourne Archives. |
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| Cutting up a beach whale in the nineteenth century. |
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| Wood engraving published in The Australasian Sketcher, May 10, 1879. Imagine from the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Named after the Duke of Portland by James Grant, who surveyed the western coast of Victoria in 1800, Portland became the most important port on the south-west coast of Victoria.
It was also the main point of entry for the pastoral invasion of the western end of the Victorian volcanic plain. And 'invasion' is the appropriate word.
From Portland's beginning as a whaling station in 1829, relations between the Europeans and the country's traditional owners were tense and often violent. By the shore at Portland is a spot known as the 'Convincing Ground', where it seems likely that almost all of the local Kilcarer gundidj clan were massacred by whalers, possibly in 1833 or 1834, after a dispute over ownership of a beached whale.
The scope of the conflict widened when squatters began making their way into the hinterland. In May 1841, when George Augustus Robinson visited Portland, he found that even 'respectable' Europeans - including the local Police Magistrate - spoke openly of exterminating the 'natives'. Portland was a white settlement, shunned by the remaining Kilcarer gundidj and nearby Dhauwurd wurrung clans, who had removed themselves to Mount Clay.
In 1851 the squatter James Robertson reflected on the epidemic of violence:
I have on four different occasions, when they committed murders, gone out with others in search of them, and I now thank God I never fell in with them . . . There are now but two settlers in the Portland District that I know who have been severe on the natives, and they are doing little good. It seems strange none have done any good who were murderers of these poor creatures - either man or master. I will here change the subject, for it is too painful to dwell on, and I cannot see the way it could be avoided, for no law could have protected these poor people from such men as we had to do with at that time.
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| Print entitled 'Henty's House at Portland in 1836'. The Henty family were some of the earliest British settlers at Portland. |
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| Wood engraving published in a supplement to the Illustrated Australian News, August 1, 1888, by David Syme and Co, Melbourne. Image contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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