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| James Dawson in old age. |
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| Photographer and date unknown. Image contributed by Camperdown Historical Museum. |
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| A traditional landowner of Victoria's Western District, known as Henry Dawson, photographed in 1868. What was this man's relationship with James Dawson? |
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| Detail from an albumen silver carte-de-visite by J. Harvey contributed by the Ritchie Collection of photographs of Western District Aboriginal people, State Library of Victoria. |
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At first sight, a Scottish squatter might seem an unlikely champion of Aboriginal interests. But James Dawson was no ordinary squatter.
In May 1840 Dawson, his wife and their nephew arrived in Melbourne, a town so new it was simply called 'the Settlement'. He tried dairy farming in the Yarra valley for a time but moved to broader pastures in the Port Fairy district in 1844. For the next 22 years Dawson was in partnership in a cattle and sheep station, Kangatong, some 10 miles east of Macarthur. In 1866 he left the district and settled for a while near Melbourne, but later moved back to the Camperdown area, where he became Local Guardian of the Aborigines in 1876.
Dawson and his daughter Isabella shared a deep interest in Aboriginal civilisation. They used their years at Kangatong to study the languages and cultures of the indigenous peoples of the volcanic plains, and in 1881 Dawson published Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia. Dawson wrote the book while living near Camperdown, where he was still visited by his informants from Kangatong and gained further information from the local Djargurd wurrung people.
The book shows the breadth of Dawson's intelligence, imagination and humanist interest in indigenous cultures. He expressed the same spirit in defending Aboriginal interests against government officials, politicians, his fellow squatters and others, a crusade that he kept up until his death in 1900 at the age of 94.
Dawson the activist
James Dawson was critical of the Victorian government's policies towards the colony's indigenous inhabitants. In the late 1860s, those who had survived the dispossession of the previous decades were placed on reserves, where they were supposed to be christianised and 'civilised', and taught to farm and manage stock. The reality was quite different. In 1876 Dawson wrote a letter to the editor of the Melbourne Argus exposing the situation at the two main reserves in the Western District, Framlingham and Lake Condah, where residents were expected to work hard at grubbing trees, digging, and ditching, from one year's end to the other, for the magnificent recompense of a suit of clothes (minus hat, boots and stockings), a little tobacco, and his food, which is scant enough, and not overburdened with butcher's meat'.
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| Isabella Dawson (right) with Aboriginal informants. |
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| Photoghrapher unknown, Image contributed by Camperdown Historical Museum. |
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Dawson outlined his own ideas to a Royal Commission in 1887. He suggested that the reserves should be places of 'retreat', where people could live without necessarily being requiring to work. Those who could do pastoral work for wages should be encouraged to do so. Young men, women and children should be educated and apprenticed to respectable settlers, while older people who did not want to move to the reserves should be left in their homelands, supervised only by some kind person.
Such was the case for a small group of elderly Djargurd wurrung who had stayed in Camperdown, refusing to follow other clan members to the Framlingham reserve. In his role as Local Guardian, Dawson became friends with these people and tended to their welfare, grieving as their numbers dwindled. Then, in 1882, Dawson returned from a trip home to Scotland to find that the last survivor, Wombeetch Puyuun, known to the Europeans as Camperdown George, had died and was buried in boggy ground outside the Camperdown cemetery.
Dawson appealed for public support to finance a memorial in the cemetery proper, but very few supported him. So, basically at his own expense, Dawson had a granite obelisk erected and carried his old friend's remains in his arms to be reburied at its foot. The obelisk still stands in Camperdown cemetery today. Its two dates - 1840 and 1883 - mark the mere 43 years it took, after countless millennia of Aboriginal history, for white settlement to displace the Djargurd wurrung from the Camperdown area.
Six years later, we find Dawson and John Murray, one of the few parliamentary supporters of Aboriginal interests, opposing a plan to hand over the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve for a new agricultural college and experimental farm. Murray raised the matter in parliament and Dawson assisted by writing letters and organising a petition to the Victorian Chief Secretary, Alfred Deakin. The petition was signed by the Framlingham residents, and by 500 Europeans from the Western District. After visiting Framlingham, Deakin decided that the residents should be allowed to retain 500 or 600 acres of the reserve. The planned agricultural college never came into existence. It is significant that in 1980 the people of Framlingham claimed land rights over the country taken from them in 1889.
Further reading: Jan Critchett, Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris,Melbourne University Press, 1998.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Graeme Kinross-Smith for ITF.
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