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| That moment when two cultures meet ... |
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| Digital composite by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996, created from a traditional Kulin design copied under supervision; a detail from Batman's Treaty; and a water colour contributed by Geelong Heritage Centre. |
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| Lt John Murray's ship, the Lady Nelson, at anchor in Hobsons Bay, 1802. |
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| Etching by F.A. Sleap, published in the Illustrated Australian News, August 1, 1888. Contributed by La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Those moments when cultures meet, those first contacts between people who see the world through radically different eyes, who tell radically different stories, are, by their very nature, prone to multiple misunderstandings, even mutual incomprehension.
No-one knows for certain when the indigenous peoples of this plain first saw pale-skinned strangers arriving from the sea. Portuguese sailors may have landed on the southern shores of this great 'terra incognita' in the seventeenth century, although no firm evidence survives of such encounters. Or the first contacts might have been with pirates or other undocumented sea voyagers. Certainly by the late eighteenth century, whalers and sealers were active around Bass Strait, and some had most certainly made landfall on the southern coast of what is now Victoria.
In many cases, the first contact indigenous peoples had with these men was extraordinarily brutal. At Portland, for example, the local Kilcarer Gundidji were massacred by whalers at a place called the Convincing Ground. Women and children were kidnapped from coastal clans and used as slave labour in the sealing camps, and/or suffered from sexually transmitted and other diseases spread by the sealers. Inestimable numbers of Aboriginal women, children and men died in these early 'first contact' days, from European diseases to which they had no resistance.
From 1802 onwards, Europeans left written records of their encounters with the traditional owners of the plain. The first published account was by Matthew Flinders, Commander of the Investigator, in his book, A Voyage To Terra Australis. In his first contact with Aboriginal people near Indented Head, on 30 April 1802, Flinders was cautious, making friendly gestures without exposing his party to attack. He naturally assumed that he was dealing with people who had never seen Europeans before, and was surprised when they made it obvious that they knew about the use of firearms. Little did he know that Lieutenant John Murray had spent several weeks in the area aboard the Lady Nelson less than three months before.
The next recorded contact was much more than a casual visit. In 1803 the convict William Buckley escaped from a short-lived penal settlement at Sorrento, on the eastern shore of Port Phillip Bay, and made his own first contact with Aboriginal people. He was taken in by the Watha wurrung clans of the Kulin nation near what is now Geelong and lived with them for thirty-two years.
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| Colonial engraving entitled 'Australian aborigines. War.' |
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| Wood engraving by Samual Calvert (1828-1913) published in the Illustrated Melbourne Post, May 27, 1867. Contributed by La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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One of the best-documented 'first contacts' occurred in 1835 between a delegation of traditional landowners and the land speculator John Batman, who later claimed that the traditional owners had 'sold' him about 600,000 acres of territory, stretching from north of what is now Melbourne to the Bellarine Peninsula. Not long after Batman's party arrived, William Buckley came out of hiding. For two years he acted as an interpreter between the Watha wurrung and the Europeans. Then, sensing conflict in the offing, he fled to Tasmania.
By that time, the news of Batman's venture had triggered a land rush. For the indigenous peoples of the inland, 'first contact' often meant the arrival of armed parties of Europeans driving sheep and cattle before them, intent on taking over the land. European 'squatters' competed for the most arable country, and rapidly displaced the original landowners. As squatter Niel Black observed, this process was often extremely violent.
What are your stories about first contacts between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples on Victoria's basalt plain, or other plains across the planet?
Copyright Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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